Tribune leader, 21 August 1992
Labour’s silence on the crisis in Bosnia – or, rather, its
barely audible mumbling about sanctions and humanitarian aid – is, of course,
explicable. It is, after all, a terribly complex crisis and, from April until
July, Labour was stuck with a shadow Foreign Secretary whose main concern was
his impending retirement to the back benches.
Gerald Kaufman's replacement, Jack Cunningham, unfortunately
knows nothing whatever about foreign affairs and thus has to be kept in
purdah. Worse still, the second-in-command at foreign affairs, George
Robertson, is almost as clueless. He has spent most of the past decade dealing
with the minutiae of EC affairs and has shunned non-Foreign Office advice on
the break-up of Yugoslavia. To cap it all, the party has not replaced its
senior international officer, Mike Gapes, who became an MP in April.
Is this any way to run a political party that hopes to be
taken seriously, let alone one with ambitions for government office within five
years? What has happened in Bosnia in the past five months is not a "civil
war" requiring from Britain 1,800 "peace-keeping troops" to
escort food convoys: it is the most outrageous case of naked aggression in
Europe since the second world war.
The complicity of the governments of western Europe in the
Serbian land-grab, codified in the EC's cantonisation plan for Bosnia of March
18, ranks with the 1938 Munich agreement as an example of cowering before
militarist expansionism.
The Foreign Office, moreover, has been in the vanguard of
this disastrous diplomacy. Even if it were too late to intervene militarily to
repel the bloody advance the Serbian irregulars (and it is not, despite the
cosy consensus among much of the "quality" press that Bosnia should
be written off) Labour should surely be attacking the government for its
incompetence, prevarication and turpitude.
Instead, the party's spokesmen, supposedly on a
"summer offensive" against the Tories, have gone out of their way to
avoid offending the government. Since he took over from the ineffectual Mr;
Kaufman, Mr Cunningham has bravely avoided public appearances. Meanwhile, Mr
Robertson has. uttered, not a word of criticism of the EC or the Foreign Office,
opening his mouth only to express his . sense of helplessness and, unforgivably,
to back the government’s rejection of the use of armed force except in a
"peacekeeping" role - a position that guarantees Serbian hegemony in
Bosnia.
It now seems that Labour is prepared even to endorse the government's
view that a show of air-power above Iraq to aid President George- Bush's flailing
re-election campaign is a greater priority for the international community than
dealing with Bosnia (or indeed the Somali famine and civil war).
By any standards, this is a shabby performance, particularly
on the part of Mr Cunningham: Mr Robertson can at least plead that he has only
been following orders. Mr Cunningham should never have been appointed: unless
he bucks up his ideas in the next month, he will deserve to lose his job.
