Balkan Odyssey.

• Author: Unal, Hasan

Lord Owen is one of those many unfortunates who, in the period of terminal decline of the British Empire, was sent off to sup with devils, equipped only with an undersized spoon. His job was, as representative negotiator for "Europe", to bring peace to Bosnia. He started his performance just as news of the Serbs, death camps was breaking in 1992. The atrocities continued as Lord Owen whizzed back and forth, and he has had, on the whole, a bad press for so doing. He put his name to a plan which, in the true style of bas-empire Britain, appeased the powerful -- in this case, the Serbs, who were to be given a lot of land in Vance-Owen's division of Bosnia-Herzegovina into a bewildering variety of ethnic "cantons." The plan collapsed in the spring of 1993 when, despite this generosity, the Bosnian Serbs refused the deal. Lord Owen, who had called the plan "spring-time in the Balkans," might, with dignity, have then resigned. Instead he persisted well into 1995.

In the early summer of 1995 I, along with a delegation from the Turkish Parliament, visited him. Public opinion in Turkey, which has a large Balkan-descended population, was highly indignant at the continuing massacres of Muslims in Bosnia, the connivance of British officers in them, and the insults which, by implication, British policy seemed to be directing toward secular Muslims in general. The deputies wished to find out for themselves what on earth had motivated this policy, coming as it did from a country that Turks regard as an ally. We talked to Lord Owen for two and a half hours: he endeavored to defend himself, but unfortunately the feeling afterwards among the delegation was that not a word he uttered could be believed.

Lord Owen has, of course, collected many critics, Margaret Thatcher not least among them. In order to defend his conduct over his three years as European Union negotiator he has now published his memoirs of the experience. The book, Balkan Odyssey, came out in November -- just a few weeks after the United States had decided to clip the Serbs, wings by embarking on a relatively sustained and intensive air campaign against selected Bosnian Serb targets. Though they were not directed at the Serb tanks and artillery that had been pounding Bosnian towns with impunity, or at the Serb (former JNA -- Yugoslav National Army) soldiers who were unquestionably responsible for much of the carnage, these air strikes, coming on the heels of a successful Croatian campaign in western Bosnia, were enough to force the Serbs to accept a peace deal that they had rejected in the past. David Owen criticizes "lap-top bombardiers", who had argued for this policy since the late summer of 1992, when the Serb's death camps became manifest to some degree at least. But it was these derided figures who had come up with the policy that finally stopped the slaughter.

It seems to be one of Lord Owen's characteristics that he combines remarkable intuition with remarkable lack of spine. For he himself had argued for airstrikes, early on. Perhaps that was why he was made EU negotiator: Throw responsibility at him, and he will learn sense. In writing, for instance, to Prime Minister...