The History of the Times

by Graham Stewart

  The Balkans were the tectonic plates where Catholic, Muslim, Orthodox, European, Slav, Ottoman and Asian rivalries rubbed against one another. During the 1990s they were also the battleground for conflicting notions of realpolitik and international justice. The multi-ethnic Bosnia was a microcosm of the varying struggles of identity, power and interdependence reflected in the so-called ‘international community’. In response, the latter had to grapple with whether to impose a solution of its own devising or whether to let nature – in its Darwinist form of war – take its course. The former could only be achieved by the threat, or use, of significant force. An alternative was to try to find ways of ameliorating the worst of the fighting that was taking place until such time as saner voices could prevail over the combatants. As early as September 1991, the UN had imposed an arms embargo on all Yugoslav republics. Sanctions against Serbia were imposed in May 1992 and made more severe the following April. Closely prescribed in its activities (which were entirely defensive), a UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) had been deployed in Croatia in early 1992 and Bosnia during the summer of 1992. The Bosnian Muslim argument for keeping the country as a single entity had an attraction to an outside community keen to set a precedent. Permitting Bosnia’s disintegration threatened the redrawing along ethnic lines of many of the other Balkan states too – Serbian Kosovo and bits of Macedonia might fight to join Albania; part of Serbia could go to Hungary. UNPROFOR had no mandate to use its own arms to ensure Bosnia was kept together but this was the principle behind the UN and EU co-sponsored Vance-Owen peace plan of January 1993. It proposed dividing Bosnia into ten semi-autonomous provinces within a new Bosnian state with weak powers. In its leading column, The Times endorsed the plan and suggested that if any of the warring parties rejected it, the UN should authorize its enforcement by ‘all available means’.15 In the event, the Vance-Owen proposals were acceptable to the Croats (who stood to make gains from it) and the Muslims but were resoundingly rejected by a referendum by the Bosnian Serbs.

  Rebuffed, Lord Owen conceded sadly that his plan had no future. Bosnia appeared to have not much of one either. The Bosnian Serbs had been besieging Sarajevo since April 1992 and had forged together their enclaves into Republika Srpska, displacing where necessary Muslims and Croats to do so. Meanwhile, the Muslims and the Croats formed their own separate Bosnian states. These three entities fought against one another, although they sometimes allied as a matter of convenience with one to better attack the other. Money and expediency as well as hate and grand strategy dictated military tactics. Serb and Croat successes appeared to doom any prospect of a single republic remaining when the dust settled. Suffering most from the UN-imposed arms blockade, the Muslims’ position became the most precarious. Unwilling to engage their pursuers directly, the UN preferred to enhance UNPROFOR’s role, creating ‘safe havens’ in Sarajevo, Gorazde, Srebrenica, Tuzla, Zepa and Bihac. It also empowered Nato with ensuring a ‘no-fly zone’ to military aircraft and using its own air power to defend, if necessary, the safe havens. There were strong voices raised against allowing ‘mission creep’. Led by the United States and the EU, the international community was reluctant to enter a bloody war in pursuit of an uncertain settlement that involved fighting one or more enemies who had a far better native grasp of the defensive possibilities of the terrain. Russia retained sympathy for the Serbs and watched even such ineffectual NATO military preparations as did take place with great suspicion. The memory of the gunshot in Sarajevo in 1914 that ricocheted into the First World War was the most powerful break on the various great powers plunging headlong into a fresh Balkan conflict.

  On 16 April 1993, Srebrenica fall to Bosnian Serb forces. As the first reports of the city’s fall appeared in The Times, Simon Jenkins delivered in his column a resounding rejection of the view articulated three days earlier by Margaret Thatcher that Britain and the UN were in danger of becoming ‘accomplices to a massacre’ unless they broke their arms embargo in order to provide the Muslims with the means to defend themselves. Jenkins thought this idea was profoundly mistaken. Arming the Muslims would merely provoke the Russians into shipping more arms to the Bosnian Serbs. Nor should the West intervene directly. On their own, NATO air strikes would not work and nor was sending in ground troops a good idea. Citing the failure of the 1982–4 peacekeeping mission to the Lebanon, Jenkins believed ground troops would only ensure NATO ended up becoming associated with anti-Serb atrocities prior to an inevitable and humiliating withdrawal. ‘Wars end when one side is beaten,’ he assured his readers. ‘The Muslims are not going to win this ghastly war. It is irresponsible for the outside world to help to prolong it, however grotesque the Serbs’ behaviour.’16 Politicians also had to consider what implications military intervention might have in boosting the Russian nationalist resurgence against Yeltsin, a point made in a letter The Times published from Professor Geoffrey Lee Williams that, ‘Crudely put, does Boris Yeltsin matter more to the West than the fate of a phantom state? Greater Serbia is now a fact. To put the vanquished Muslims before the wider interests of the West would be foolish in the extreme.’17

  Filing for The Times from within the besieged city of Sarajevo, Richard Beeston tried to report events with a similar level of detachment while privately horrified at what the ‘international community’ was failing to prevent. ‘All of us grew up in the Cold War era believing that there were rules governing how international politics was run and intervening in internal conflicts really was not on the table,’ he later recalled. Having reported from Beirut and Baghdad, Beeston was not squeamish, yet even he conceded that, ‘Bosnia was the first time I saw horrific events being perpetrated on our doorstep.’ For him, this did make matters worse and led him to question the old assumptions. ‘I used to get the flight in from Rome and within twenty minutes you would be in medieval Europe with women being raped and having their heads cut off and we were sitting by and Douglas Hurd was talking about “a level playing field.” It was just shocking and it made a huge impact to see these atrocities taking place. I hope it did not show in my writing.’

  Journalists took it in turns to cover the Bosnian war from the front line. Beeston’s initial impressions were shaped by the experience of his first trip into Sarajevo. Geography rendered it acutely vulnerable. The city was in the bottom of a valley with high mountains around it from where the Bosnian Serb forces entrenched their artillery. Beeston decided to break into the besieged city by travelling with the aid convoys bringing in flour to keep its bakeries going. The closer the trucks got, the more the shots rained down upon them. Tyres were blown, forcing the convoy to stop. Risking all to the cross-wires of a sniper, drivers leapt out to change the tyres before making it safely into Sarajevo. On his arrival, Beeston discovered a city that resembled ‘a scene from Hieronymus Bosch of old men cutting bits of wood from the trees in the park to warm their houses, snow everywhere, girls prostituting themselves to Ukrainian peacekeepers to get petrol or a couple of cans of tomatoes’. ‘When you see a culture that is so close to yours and people of similar values, it’s extraordinary to witness this sort of savagery,’ Beeston later confessed. ‘It makes you think anything is possible. You really stare into the dark pit.’ He proceeded on to the Holiday Inn where many of the world’s reporters had set up operations. The top floors had been destroyed by shellfire but the bottom lounge area still functioned as a hacks’ doss house. ‘They were a fairly colourful collection of journalists,’ he admitted.18

  While the Holiday Inn crowd traded war stories and scuttled back and forth along ‘sniper’s ally’, two other Times journalists, Tom Rhodes and Bill Frost, were filing reports from their perambulations in and around Vitez, where an UNPROFOR detachment of British troops was based. In the spring of 1993 they met Anthony Loyd, an itinerant freelancer who was trying to purge his personal demons by throwing himself into the thick of the action. They encouraged him to file some copy for The Times. So began the career of one of the most intrepid war correspondents in the paper’s history.<
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  Although it was not obvious from the long hair that gave him the look of a hippy, Anthony Loyd came from a multinational military family. Dropping out of Eton at the age of fifteen (he had hated the place and had been caught with drugs) and with little in the way of academic qualifications, he had spent five years as an officer in the Royal Green Jackets. He had seen service – although not as much of it as he believed he would have liked – in the Gulf War. Indeed, it had proved an anticlimactic end to his Army career and he had difficulty adapting to civilian life. He was treated for severe depression. The war in Yugoslavia, he later admitted, offered ‘either a metamorphosis or an exit. I wanted to reach a human extreme in order to cleanse myself of fear, and saw war as the ultimate frontier of human existence.’19 Taking a photojournalism course ‘as his passport to war’, he arrived there and immediately got as close to the action as he could. He kept a lucky charm in one of his pockets – a First World War bullet that had been pulled out of his great grandfather, the one-eyed, one-handed Adrian Carton De Wiart VC. Loyd had been taught Serbo-Croat before he arrived. He also considered that his Army training was an advantage he had over those journalists who were unfamiliar with the risks of the front line since it gave him ‘a much better understanding of war and how to deal with men pointing guns at you’.20

  Loyd’s only journalistic training was as a photographer. His dispatches were eyewitness depictions of what he saw and experienced rather than dispassionate analyses of grand political strategy. The latter task could be crafted as competently from the information technology environment of Wapping as from the vantage point of a shallow trench ducking incoming ordnance. The potential drawback with Loyd’s desire to risk all with the combatants was that of the journalist getting too close to the story, losing a sense of objectivity in consequence. Like many outsiders, he felt the nationalistic tensions had been whipped up by culpable Serb and Croat politicians disinterring the historic language of ‘Cetnik,’ ‘Ustaša’ and ‘Turk’ for their own ends. The Muslims alone appeared to be committed to a less overtly sectarian compromise. It was they who were subjected to the worst violence.21 There were moments, indeed, when Loyd too showed signs of wanting to become a combatant once more. Yet, unlike the more dispassionate reporting of those removed from the fray, there was no better means of bringing the war’s realities home to Times readers and, indeed, a wider polity beyond. In one particularly memorable dispatch, he described how the Croats had captured three Bosnian Muslim soldiers, strapped anti-tank mines to their chests, roped up their hands and sent them back across no-man’s land towards their own lines. Ominously, a wire attached to their torsos unravelled a little more with each gingerly taken step back towards their comrades. Realizing what was about to happen, the Muslim officer defending the trench ordered his men to open fire on them. His men refused to shoot their comrades. Moments later, the human bombs detonated. A month passed before their remains could be retrieved – by members of the Coldstream Guards. The Croat deputy commander from the brigade responsible rationalized the crime to Loyd: ‘It’s a dirty war. Insanity becomes normality here.’22

  Loyd was intoxicated and horrified by the mindless depravity he encountered and admitted to taking heroin as a means of escape. He was not the only one to find the tasks of depicting the conflict a bruising personal challenge. The Times and the Imperial War Museum cooperated to sponsor the Scottish-based painter, Peter Howson, as the official British war artist. Howson, who specialized in strong figurative images of the Glaswegian working and under classes in all their physical power and abject hopelessness, travelled to Bosnia in June 1993. He found the atmosphere so tense that, even with sketchpad in hand, he sometimes feared to stare at anyone and was so unnerved by what he did glimpse that he became ill and returned home early. However, he summoned up the courage to return for a second trip in December. The result was a series of powerful depictions and searing images. One large canvas, Croatian and Muslim, featured the brutal rape of a woman whose head had been thrust down a lavatory bowl. It was considered too graphic for reproduction in The Times or even to be retained by the Imperial War Museum.

  On 5 February 1994, a mortar bomb killed sixty-eight and wounded two hundred in Sarajevo’s market place. Although it remained unclear who had fired it, the Bosnian Serbs were blamed at the time. Responding to the atrocity, NATO finally decided to break the siege by air power and ordered the Bosnian Serbs to pull back their artillery or face strikes. When they refused, it was Boris Yeltsin who persuaded them to withdraw in return for the deployment of Russian peacekeeping forces in the area. Yeltsin had saved NATO from military action that could have escalated beyond the level of commitment the politicians envisaged and, into the bargain, he managed to elbow Russia’s way into the conflict zone. The Contact Group was formed, consisting of the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Russia. In particular, the United States put diplomatic pressure on Tudjman and Izetbegovic to agree to a joint Muslim-Croat province. In doing so, this at least gave them a common foe against whom to unite. The Americans also acquiesced in allowing the Muslims to receive arms shipments, in breach of the UN embargo. In July, the Contact Group published proposals to end the Bosnian war by ceding 51 per cent of its land to the Muslim – Croat federation and 49 per cent to a Bosnian Serb state. Yet, despite Slobodan Milosevic’s efforts, the Bosnian Serbs’ assembly voted against surrendering any territory they had already conquered. Thanks to the ferocity of their ‘ethnic cleansing’ they had gained control of 70 per cent of Bosnia and did not see why they should hand any of it back.

  This was to prove a costly mistake by the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic. Milosevic cut off all trade other than food and medicine from Serbia to the Republika Srpska and Yeltsin’s desire to wash his hands of such troublesome associates was only tempered by the pro-Serb popular outpourings of his fellow Russians. NATO, meanwhile, resorted to air strikes. While Sarajevo enjoyed a four-month ceasefire at the beginning of 1995, elsewhere the situation deteriorated. In May, Bosnian Serbs captured 350 UN peacekeepers protecting the ‘safe haven’ of Gorazde. Twenty of them became ‘human shields’, chained to potential NATO targets. The UN’s strategy had been ridiculed in the most open and provocative manner. While, on 31 May, President Clinton announced he was prepared to commit some ground troops in Bosnia, it was clear that his reluctance to get wholly engaged meant the numbers involved would be small and their presence temporary. The fear of ‘mission creep’ continued to play on Clinton’s mind, as it did on that of the British Government. Within days, Clinton was rowing back from his apparent commitment. The Times was unimpressed by the lack of a coherent strategy in Washington.23

  Fleet Street was virtually united in believing something must be done and that something meant supporting armed force to push the Bosnian Serbs back. Continuing to offer an alternative voice in The Times, Simon Jenkins despaired of what he believed was this collective delusion. The UN was, he argued, ‘reduced to sending troops to relieve troops, as Kitchener was sent to rescue Gordon in Khartoum’. Giving the Bosnian Serbs ‘a bloody nose’ – the minimum position upon which most British editorializing appeared to agree – would only inflame matters whereas ‘the sooner we get out, the sooner this wretched war will come to its eventual end’.24 That the situation was deteriorating was not in doubt. On 11 July, Bosnian Serb forces captured the UN-designated ‘save haven’ of Srebrenica. The four hundred Dutch peacekeepers protecting the enclave ran away when the Bosnian Serbs threatened to execute thirty-two of their captured comrades. Twenty thousand Muslim refugees fled the Bosnian Serb advance. Those who did not made a bad error. The Bosnian Serbs separated Srebrenica’s Muslims, conveying the women and children to Tuzla. The eight thousand men were murdered.

  The atrocity, the single worst war crime in post-war European history, demonstrated the abject failure of the UN mission. Even before the news of the mass murders had been received, The Times voiced its support for French calls to retake Srebrenica by force.25 Reliance on cons
tant referral to the UN had disabled attempts to respond quickly to situations on the ground. Henceforth the UN effectively ceded its military operational authority to NATO. On 23 July 1995, 1200 British troops were dispatched to keep the road open to Sarajevo and the UN’s arms embargo had long since ceased to hold back the supplies reaching the Muslims. On 5 August, the Krajina Serbs came under fierce assault from a Croat offensive (assisted by American advice). Twenty-five thousand Serbs were thrown out of their homes. As the Russians were not slow to point out, the West’s silence or even connivance with the Croats’ ethnic cleansing of the Krajina Serbs was at variance with the active measures finally taken to safeguard the Bosnian Muslims from their Serb neighbours. Bosnian Muslims also attacked in a concerted movement with the Croat offensive and, at last, the Serbs found themselves on the receiving end, and in retreat. NATO spent the first two weeks of September launching air strikes against the Bosnian Serb positions around Sarajevo. Cruise missiles disabled their communications network in western Bosnia. The Serb heavy artillery was finally withdrawn from around Sarajevo. After 1300 days, the siege was lifted.