Ineffectual aid
Sir: Auberon Waugh is, of course, right to say that a great deal has been done to allevi- ate the suffering of Bosnians (Another voice, 5 August). What I had meant to write was that we have done virtually nothing to stop the genocide there. Perhaps genocide is too strong a word, but the slaughter of many thousands of ethnically selected civil- ians, in towns like Prijedor, Foca, Visegrad, Bijelina, Prozor and all the others, makes it hard to think of a better one. Over the last two years, I have worked for various aid agencies in and around Bosnia — for five months with Oxfam I was involved in the frustrating business of get- ting aid into the besieged eastern enclaves. Visiting Srebrenica, one was struck by the inadequacy of the purely humanitarian response. As in the other 'safe havens', the overcrowded population of the town was subjected to shelling daily, as well as to the constant fear of being overrun by their tor- mentors.
The safe havens were a good idea. They worked for the Kurds in northern Iraq and briefly for Sarajevo last year, when they were backed by a credible threat of force. In fact, when Unprofor has acted robustly it has tended to quell whoever was being fac- tious rather than drawing them into the conflict.
However, the usual policy of the UN has been to acquiesce in Serb violations of the havens and to misrepresent them as trivial or non-existent to the press corps.
Jasper Elgood
Wedgewood, The Green, Hartley Wintney, Hants
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