Margaret Thatcher is right. The record of the European
Community on Bosnia has been an utter disaster and the British government has
played a full and dishonourable role in it.
Despite all the evidence that what we are witnessing is a
war of Serbian expansionist aggression against Bosnia, a state recognised by
the United Nations, the EC has persisted for more than a year in the fiction
that the conflict is a three-sided civil war. What Bosnia needs, in the EC's
view, is not the means to defend itself but "cantonisation" and
humanitarian aid.
The result, precisely as predicted by Tribune this time last year, has been that the Serbs have continued
unmolested to burn, kill, maim and destroy in pursuit of their dream of an
ethnically pure Greater Serbia. Some Croats have joined in the carve-up,
leaving a beleaguered rump under the control of the Bosnian government.
Meanwhile, the United Nations humanitarian relief effort,
although it has undoubtedly kept thousands of Bosnians from starving, has gone
ahead only when it has suited the Serbs to allow convoys through the parts of
Bosnia which they have seized. Worse, the UN has increasingly found itself
transporting besieged Bosnian refugees to safety, thereby becoming an agent,
albeit unwilling, of Serbian "ethnic cleansing".
In the face of all this, the British government has watched
and wrung its hands, smugly insisting that any other course of action would be
too dangerous to contemplate. Labour's response has been miserably
inadequate: Jack Cunningham, the shadow Foreign Secretary, has appeased the
appeasers, never advancing more than trifling criticisms of the government's
craven policy.
Tribune has argued
consistently that the international community should be defending Bosnia by
force of arms and that the failure to do so has been a political capitulation
to militarist expansionism unprecedented since the thirties.
Failing military intervention - which, contrary to the "wisdom"
of most British politicians, would not necessarily bog down hundreds of
thousands of troops in a “new Vietnam" - the least that the world should
have done is to allow Bosnia to buy the arms to defend itself.
Instead, a strict arms embargo "on all sides in the
conflict" has been maintained. Because Bosnia did not have the arms in the
first place, unlike the Serbs, and because it is under siege, without the
pervious borders enjoyed by Serbia, this embargo has acted in the Serbs'
favour.
To redress the balance and allow the Bosnians to exercise
their right, enshrined in international law, to self-defence, it is essential
that the embargo on arms sales to Bosnia is lifted at once.
THE HARD LEFT: washed
up with nowhere to go
Labour’s hard left meets in Sheffield his weekend to listen
to its stars and hew the cud.
It is unlikely to be a particularly upbeat occasion. The
hard left is weaker today than at any time in the decade since 23 members of
the Parliamentary Labour Party set up the Campaign Group as an alternative to
the Tribune Group in the wake of Tony Benn's unsuccessful campaign for Labour's
deputy leadership and Labour conference's decision to establish a register of
internal party pressure groups.
Mr Benn is now the only hard left representative on
Labour's National Executive Committee. In the mid-eighties, there were four or
five Campaign Group MPs on the NEC. The Campaign Group is smaller than ever
before, with few new recruits from the 1992 intake.
Ten years after the publication of its greatest policy
achievement, the 1983 Labour manifesto, the hard left has no influence to
speak of in Labour policy formulation.
It dominates no local councils, plays a leading role in only
a couple of trade unions and can command a majority of members in only a
handful of constituency Labour parties.
So what has happened to the movement that came so close to
taking the Labour Party by storm in the early eighties? Part of the story is
that the it was singled out as the "enemy within" by Neil Kinnock and
much of Its Trotskyist base was expelled.
Many in the hard left orbit in the early eighties have since
left it, either worried about their own political careers or convinced that
Labour could not win on a hard left ticket.
But it is also true that the hard left has become an
increasingly unconvincing and conservative force in Labour politics. In the
late seventies and early eighties, all the bright new creative ideas in Labour
politics, from alternative defence to worker cooperatives, were coming from
what would now be described as the hard left. Today, it seems entirely
preoccupied with defending the status quo against real or imagined attack from
the right: no to Maastricht, no to electoral reform, no to changing the Labour
Party constitution.
It is difficult to imagine a less attractive approach to
politics. If the hard left is to regain a role in Labour politics – and it
would be good for the party to have a credible far left inside it to keep it on
its toes - it has some serious thinking to do about what it is for as well as
what it is against. Whether that even begins to happen in Sheffield is another
question altogether.
