Bosnia and Herzegovina

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Tuesday 21st October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise with some diffidence to follow the impassioned speech of the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown. I am sure that I speak for the whole House when I say that I would not want him to think for a moment that any of us think that he should have spoken in any way other than he did about a cause that is so engraved on his heart and a people to whom he gave a significant part of his energy and life. It is indeed tragic that we find ourselves today pretty much where we have been for a long time. It is extraordinary to me to be cast as number two in this debate when someone who has lived, worked, lived and breathed for Bosnia-Herzegovina and his friends there and saw certain things begin to emerge that have been stopped in their tracks should be followed by someone who has made one visit.

For other reasons, I have wanted to contribute to this debate, and that will come out a little later in my speech. From my one visit, which was extensive and in-depth, I drew many of the same conclusions as the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown. I stood at the Golgotha of Srebrenica, saw that massive graveyard, talked to the people crying their eyes out for memories still so raw of people they lost in that dreadful massacre and could only imagine where people are stuck and could not imagine how they get unstuck from it.

Susan Sontag put on a few performances of “Waiting for Godot” in Sarajevo in 1993. It could only be done during the daytime; nobody dared to go out at night. She reports that in the long, long pause in Samuel Beckett’s play, when Estragon and Vladimir have just been told that Mr Godot is not coming today, after all, he may come tomorrow, she, Susan Sontag, radical filmmaker and campaigner, broke down in tears in that silence. The only noise came from the streets outside: the thunderous noise of a UN armoured truck on the one side and sniper bullets on the other. This is a people who have weathered those storms and many others, too.

Because this debate was cast in the light of the recent elections, I really have made an effort to look at the statistics and data to see whether I can understand them. I am bound to say that they are taxing for a bear of little brain like me. There is the National Assembly, the federated Parliament, the Parliament of Republika Srpska, all the communes, cantons and elected officials, and so on. It is so extraordinarily complicated, and as the European Court of Human Rights has pointed out, it is cast in such a way that minorities such as Jews, Roma and Ukrainians are often excluded from the possibility of running for public office. It is a complicated issue and to hear the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, say that it is pretty much the same bunch of politicians being elected now as were there before makes me wonder why I bothered to read the results of the elections with such care. It is clear that things are cast in such a way that the populations of Bosnia are kept apart from one another. Separation is the name of the game, so it seems that any initiative that can undermine or erode those realities is to be welcomed. It is to that subject that I want to devote the core part of my speech.

I have been working for a number of years with a friend of mine who has been trying hard to bring a delegation to this country from Srebrenica. He had succeeded in forming such a group that would have men and women and be half Bosniaks and half Serbs. It is so easy to say those words, yet people from Srebrenica crossing that divide and coming together for such an experience really would be a radical achievement. It had just about been pulled off; an imam and a Serb Orthodox priest were to accompany them. Today would have been the day that they sat in this Chamber. We had arranged space for them to meet, and we hoped to have approached Members of your Lordships’ House to talk with them about how our systems and institutions worked. That has not come to pass because our immigration authorities refused to give visas to half of the group. I have said that the group was half Serb and half Bosniak and I leave it to your Lordships’ imagination to ask which of those groups was denied the visas—well, it was the Serbs.

The grounds upon which the Serbs were denied the visas are so extraordinary. It was assumed that they were coming with a hidden agenda to remain here and prey upon our welfare and other benefits. That was not the case. No effort had been made to look at the group as a group or the exercise as an exercise. A very complicated itinerary had been set up with visits to mosques, such as the Finsbury Park mosque in Islington, and the Serb Orthodox cathedral here in London. They were to end up in the conflict resolution centre in Coventry Cathedral. It was an imaginative programme; a tiny thing against the problems that the noble Lord has described. Yet this sort of thing perhaps symbolises the work that has to be done and the road that has to be travelled—and to think that it was our immigration authority which made it impossible for it to happen.

When I saw that this debate had been put down I definitely wanted to contribute to it, not because I have wise things to say but because a small initiative that might have been set against the prevailing trends, or spoken the language of hope, was thwarted in this rather jejune way. I will leave that on the table as my contribution and I thank once more the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, for his passion as well as his commitment.