A clear case of right and wrong

CURRENT AFFAIRS:Ed Vulliamy's account of the Bosnian war and its aftermath shows why the conflict stirred a special anger

The War is Dead, Long Live the War – Bosnia: The Reckoning By Ed Vulliamy Bodley Head, 330pp. £20

IN HER INTRODUCTION to Requiem, her masterpiece on the Stalinist terror, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova recounts spending 17 months in prison queues in Leningrad to bring food parcels for her imprisoned son and pleading vainly for his release. One day a woman with lips blue from the cold recognised her and whispered in her ear, “Can you describe this?”, and Akhmatova replied, “Yes, I can.”

One former husband had been shot dead by the Bolsheviks in 1921; another was imprisoned many times and died in the Gulag. Now she stood for hours each day in prison queues with hundreds of her fellow citizens as the rest of the world went about oblivious, with nobody describing, or capable of describing, the extent of horror and despair. “Beyond words” is the phrase many reporters fall back on when confronted with something so terrible. Akhmatova didn’t accept this, and her dedication to using words well ensures that a description of that time lives on the best part of a century later.

The Guardian writer Ed Vulliamy has been on the same mission in relation to Bosnia for 20 years. The good journalists who find themselves covering war and terror feel they have the same responsibility as Akhmatova: to describe what they see with a precision that will make the reader experience the reality in the way that they, the reporters, are experiencing it. Many also want their efforts to move their readers to support action to end the injustice involved.

A reporter’s overseas posting rarely starts with such grand ambition. In my experience, the foreign desk realises that what is happening in some faraway place is becoming big news and decides that the paper should have its own person on the ground. You get the call, print off the most recent press cuttings and read them on the plane. Vulliamy got the call when he was in his attic apartment in Rome in June 1991. “Something strange” was happening in the Yugoslav republic of Slovenia, a moderate drive away: could he find out what it was about?

There was something special about the Bosnian war that stirred a deep and lasting anger in many reporters who covered it. It wasn’t simply the horror of the massacres; the encircling of Sarajevo for four years by murderous forces who shot and bombed its inhabitants as they tried to survive; the camps of torture and rape and murder at Trnopolje, Keraterm and Omarska; or the ethnic cleansing of entire regions, with communities murdered and driven out in the name of a crazed nationalism. What caused the anger was the reporters’ impotence. We were describing this stuff factually and graphically, yet the cavalry wasn’t coming.

When you got home you had a choice. You moved on to the next story or you stuck with it and became an angry advocate for doing the right thing in Bosnia, being a bit of a pain to people around you who had other things on their minds. Or, as Vulliamy puts it, “a bit like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, forever bending people’s ears with tales of woe”. He was in the first small group of journalists who discovered the camps and listened to the inmates, who told him of their incomprehension that their neighbours had rounded them up and were starving, torturing, raping and murdering them, often barbarically and sadistically.

In this book he describes how in fact he and his colleagues had not “discovered” the camps at all. They had been “discovered” some time previously by the western powers. In 1996 a former US diplomat told him that the Americans had known about the camps for months. Meanwhile, British diplomats and intelligence officers in Belgrade and Zagreb played up fabricated stories that the Bosnians were committing atrocities against their own people in order to provoke international intervention. For the dominant do-nothing tendency among the powers with the capacity to do something, moral equivalence was the concept they kept pushing. There were warring factions, ancient tribal hatreds, lies and propaganda on all sides, they argued. They’re all the same. Do nothing.

Some facts: there were inmates of camps and there were people who mutilated them to death. There were civilians in Sarajevo and there were soldiers drunk on plum brandy and hatred who used them for target practice and fired missiles into their markets. There were women and children who were made to sit on the bridge at Visegrad and soldiers who shot them in the stomach and watched them fall to their deaths. It was rarely easier to figure out right from wrong.

Eventually Nato intervened with enough strength to end the conflict and impose a peace. There was no UN mandate for this action, a fact that annoyed neutralists, including those in Ireland. I remember walking the streets of Sarajevo, meeting people who had emerged from their cold, windowless apartments, watching them cheer the US bombers as their ordnance smashed into the Bosnian Serb positions that had disfigured this city of makeshift cemeteries and bombed-out buildings, and cheering with them. I never expected to be celebrating US bombers, but Bosnia wasn’t a great place to retain your journalistic detachment.

Vulliamy follows the lives of those who lived through the war and tracks what they did afterwards. He reports on his postwar visits to some of those who ran the camps. Some were disturbed by what they had done; some were unrepentant. He brings us to many of those who suffered and saw their loved ones suffer and gives details of their postwar lives in London, Hertfordshire, Dublin and elsewhere. He goes back, year after year, to Omarska with survivors to commemorate what happened. He eyeballs the killers at the war-crime tribunal in The Hague. There is no postconflict resolution; instead there is what he calls post-conflict irresolution, as the Dayton peace agreement, which rewarded the ethnic cleansers by handing them Bosnian territory, continues to define the shape and nature of postwar Bosnia.

In this book Vulliamy holds to account those who took the do-nothing position during the war and their moral successors, those who say everybody was as bad as everyone else and there was therefore a moral equivalence that, even now, justifies those who chose not to see the Bosnian tragedy as one of right and wrong.

Like Akhmatova, Vulliamy can describe barbarism and suffering with merciless clarity; he did so throughout the Bosnian war and has done since. He avoided most war correspondents’ tendency to write about themselves, their adventures and their self-conferred heroic status, and about how moved they were. Vulliamy wrote about the Bosnians. At the end of the war he didn’t just head off to his next job, with his journalism awards on the mantelpiece. In this book he follows the war and its consequences and knows its lessons should not be forgotten.

Mark Brennock reported from Bosnia for The Irish Times in 1995 and 1996. He is director of public affairs at Murray Consultants