Bell - In Harms Way: A War Reporters Story

Events pass from news into history and memories fade. In the blur of headlines and the frenzy of rolling news we regularly attach significance to things that are trivial and transitory and of no real importance at all, here today and completely forgotten tomorrow. This is especially so in an age when in politics and journalism we skim surfaces and confuse celebrities with heroes. Yet there are other events which cast long shadows and which we know, even at the time, will have a lasting impact. The war in Bosnia, which began in April 1992 and ended in December 1995, belonged in that second and more enduring category. After it was over, I chose as the location of my farewell report the Lion Cemetery in Sarajevo, a public park where the Bosnians had buried their dead because the citys main cemetery was in no mans land. Then and there, with the roll call of the victims as my witnesses, I called it the most consequential war of our time. And so it turned out to be.

This is a book about war and news and truth and the fault lines between them. The first edition was published two months before the Dayton agreement which silenced the guns. I wrote it entirely in the course of the war, concluding it by candlelight in my room in the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo: It is night-time in a war without end, and the supposedly fearless war reporter is flinching from the snipers bullets as they whip past his window. The rattle of gunfire and glare of the parachute flares over the Jewish Cemetery seemed to give the project an added urgency. What I was attempting, not by design but by necessity, was not just a conventional account of the progress of a war what we in TV news like to call the bang-bang but an explanation, driven by the circumstances, of how and why this appalling conflict began, whether it could have been avoided and why it was not stopped earlier. I was first of all trying to explain it to myself. We sleep-walked into it. How could it ever have happened? Did we really think that it was none of our business and that if we closed our eyes we could wish it away? Had we so little history that we had forgotten in which city Europes Great War began in 1914? Were ancient hatreds a sufficient alibi for hand-wringing, shoulder-shrugging and passing by on the other side? It seemed to me then, and I believe even more strongly now, that the blame did not lie exclusively with those who were doing and directing the fighting on the ground. It was spread more widely. And there are lessons still to be learned from it twenty years later.

Having been there at the time, and seen the documents provided to me by a diplomat of insight and experience, I am more than ever convinced that the charge I made in Chapter 3, of Western complicity in the war in Bosnia, was not only true and justified but understated. It was not thought through but had to do with unintended consequences. I could hardly believe that anything so cynical could have been contemplated, but sadly I had no need to be tentative. The truth itself is sometimes hard to believe.

The British in particular had a compelling case to answer. They reached an understanding with the Germans, for reasons of domestic political expediency on both sides, which lit the fuse for the war in Bosnia.

Early in December 1991 Prime Minister John Major paid a private visit to Chancellor Kohl in Bonn. With a general election imminent, he was seeking German agreement to the vital British opt-out clauses in the Maastricht Treaty. Based in Germany at the time, I waited in vain outside the Chancellors bungalow that night to discover what went on. The delegation came and went and I was none the wiser. But the Prime Minister was able, on his return, to subdue the clamorous Euro-sceptics in his party (then as now) by delivering victory on the politically toxic issue of the Maastricht Treaty. Was it Game, set and match? asked a helpful hack. The Prime Ministers spokesman gratefully agreed. Our Parliament still resounds to similar arguments.