Remember Srebrenica

Our everyday hurly burly; our madcap dash from home via school run, work, supermarket, sports club, friends, hobbies; my own whirligig of political and Parliamentary life sometimes means that we lose sight of the big picture. The more fixated we are by our own circumstances, the less aware we are of the big issues.

So I took advantage of the party conference recess to join 17 or so MPs and peers from all parties on a harrowing visit to Bosnia. We were led by the Rt Hon Col Robert Stewart MP, or Colonel Bob to us all, the hero of the British presence in war-torn Bosnia in 1992/3.

The Soviet Union had collapsed; that plus the death of President Tito meant the end of the union known as Yugoslavia. What followed was chaos. Some little republics were quickly set up on their own, leaving at the heart of the Western Balkans, the hybrid State of Bosnia.

Here Bosnian Moslems, Serbian Roman Catholics and Croatian Eastern Orthodox had lived together in peace for generations. But Serbian Slobodan Milosevic saw his chance for a Greater Serbia incorporating the 33 per cent of Bosnia which had an ethnic Serbian majority. His problem were the thousands of Bosnian Muslims in the middle of it. So he set about ethnic cleansing by killing the Bosnian Muslims off in their thousands.

We visited Sarajevo; besieged for 1000 days- the longest in modern history; we explored the tunnel under the airport which was the only access in or out of the town which was being relentlessly shelled by the surrounding Serbians; we drove down ‘Sniper Alley’; we met both the young soldiers who had fought to save their city; and the victims who had lost so many sons and brothers.

Then we drove to Ahmici, where Colonel Bob had led the British force who uncovered the brutal massacre of 116 muslims, Croatian houses standing untouched. Who could not be moved by Col Bob’s tale of the young girl dead next to her parents shot through the puppy she was cradling.

But nothing could prepare us for the horror of Srebrenica. A large part of the Moslem population from the area had gathered in what the UN guaranteed as a safe haven. We had given control over to the Dutch who gave in without a fight to the butcher General Mladic. He then murdered 8373 men and boys, and deported 23,000 women and girls to concentration camps, many of them to fates too awful to recount. We met some of their mothers, paid our respects at the mass cemetery; spoke to former Muslim soldiers; visited the derelict factory where the men and women had been separated out like sheep and goats.

So if you are worried about where the next gallon of fuel is coming from; if you are fussed about whether or not to have the third jab; if you are obsessed by the potholes down your road; if you are fixated by the minutiae of politics which is so often the product of those rather annoying events the party conferences; if you are so close to the trees of your daily lives that you find it hard to see the woods, then I would just say: Remember Ahmici; Remember Srebrenica and be grateful for how fortunate we in Britain really are.

James Gray

MP for North Wiltshire

No need for drink ban

May I suggest that we do not need a ban on drinking in Queen’s Park and Broadgreen, as is being proposed by Swindon Council (SA, October 2).

There are already plenty of laws to deal with this sort of bad behaviour – laws against anti-social behaviour, being drunk and disorderly, and conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace.

What is needed is for these laws to be enforced, firmly, by the police and the courts.

Malcolm Morrison

Prospect Hill

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