Bosnia-Herzegovina

Lord Randall of Uxbridge Excerpts

Thursday 16th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Randall of Uxbridge (Con)]

My Lords, I highly commend my noble friend Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth for bringing this debate. It is very timely, even if it is almost the last bit of business before the Christmas Recess. I hope it will have a wider audience, because this is a crucial moment, not just for Bosnia and Herzegovina but for Europe and the wider world—and so often we ignore these things until it is too late.

It is also an absolute privilege to follow my noble friends Lady Mobarik and Lady Helic, who have so much experience—not necessarily of the best sort, I have to say. They brought passion but also great wisdom in possible solutions. I cannot say that I will be able to improve on that, but I can certainly support them in what they say. I am the weak link in this debate; my noble friend Lady Warsi and the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, will follow me.

As to my experience in the region, on my 18th birthday I was sitting in the Herzegovinian artists’ village of Počitelj along the Neretva River, about 20 miles down- river from Mostar. That was 48 years ago. I would never have thought that, 20 years after I was sitting in that idyllic landscape dotted with mosques—it was the first time I had seen mosques in Europe; I found it fascinating, exciting and exhilarating that we had such diversity in Europe—the village would be pretty much destroyed. Of course, the famous bridge in Mostar was also blown up.

I followed that by studying, at university in London and for three months in Belgrade, Serbo-Croatian language and literature. That language has now been superseded, as it has split into Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian and so forth. As my noble friend Lady Mobarik said, at that time one was aware of the rivalry, even hatred or hostility, between Serbs and Croats. I remember getting into trouble on a train going back from Belgrade through Croatia because I used the wrong word for bread. I tried to explain that I was an English student, but that was not good enough for them. But Bosnia-Herzegovina was actually a model of integration, where people lived together regardless of religious differences and everything. As my noble friend said, it was only the names that really identified to which group people belonged.

So what happened in the 1990s was appalling to me. I would not have expected that savagery and ethnic cleansing to take place there, but we know that it became—it still is—a byword for all that was bad in that conflict. I do not have to mention Srebrenica again. As has been said, it is a blot on the world’s history for that to have been repeated in Europe after the Holocaust, when everybody said, “Never again”. That is something we should be ashamed of.

I remember reading a Yugoslav author, Ivo Andrić. He wrote a short story called The Titanic Bar, in which he described how, during the war, a Jewish barkeeper who had been part of the community was eventually targeted and killed by a young nationalist, who was just showing off.

The Dayton accord resolved the bloodshed, as we have heard, but it was unfortunately just that. I feel we have to go forward. As my noble friend Lady Helic said, the state of the country is not tenable with all those different institutions, presidents and so forth. Something has to be done immediately, but we also have to look at economic help, because that would make people realise that it is worth trying to get together.

Republika Srpska seems to want more and more independence. It is nationalism that causes so much problem in the region. I believe Belgrade does not want it, but there will be people in Serbia who think this “Greater Serbia” idea is still the way forward. It is rampant in the region; nationalism is the curse of the Balkans. Today we are discussing this particular situation, to which I will return, but I point out to the Minister—although he is aware—that there are all the other questions in the Balkans, such as Serbia and Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia. North Macedonia is now being somewhat bullied by Bulgarian nationalists to rewrite its history books and deny that the Macedonian language exists. These things are going on all the time, pretty much unobserved by the West. They are all potential flashpoints which, as we know, are fanned by outside politics.

I return briefly to the works of Ivo Andrić who, by the way, was a Nobel prize winner for literature. He wrote a book called Travnik Chronicles, which is available in translation. It went back to the early 19th century, when foreign powers—France at the end of the Napoleonic period and Austria—were sending in their consuls to try to influence what was then a declining Ottoman state. The same thing goes around, except that the superpowers have changed. We know that Russia and China have said that, if sanctions are imposed on Republika Srpska, they will help out. We must not take our eye off the ball in the Balkans, particularly in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

On that first visit I made to the region all those years ago, I stood—I do not know if they are still there—in two footprints put in concrete where Gavrilo Princip was supposed to have stood when he shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand. I do not think we need that to realise that there was a flashpoint and what it led to. Ignore the Balkans at our peril, I would say.

I am deeply grateful for what the Government are doing; they have risen to it. There is more that we can do, and I shall look forward to hearing about it. This has been said before, and it will be said again, but we owe it to those countless victims of conflict in the region—not least those lying in named and still unnamed and unmarked graves in Srebrenica and elsewhere—never again to go into this spiral of conflict, ethnic cleansing and genocide. We cannot just issue hollow promises; we have to put forward concrete measures.