Bosnian Star Trek
Sir: Although Mr P.R. Watkins vaguely dis- agrees (Letters, 24 June) with my article on British and UN attitudes to Bosnia, he does not contest the accuracy of a single factual statement in it. His comment that the com- manding officers of the Bosnian army have also been professional soldiers in the Yugoslav People's army does not alter the truth of what I wrote, which was that UN military personnel felt more instinctive camaraderie with the Bosnian Serb army.
If Mr Watkins does a little more research, he will discover that a much high- er proportion of Serb officers were former professional soldiers; their army consisted mainly of federal army units transferred in May 1992, with regular weaponry, uniforms and supplies. When British officers such as Col. Bob Stewart encountered the makeshift Bosnian army later that year, they were struck by its lack of proper uni- forms and even its failure to establish (dur- ing the first six months of operation) a proper system of ranks.
My statement that one British command- ing officer referred to the Muslims (but not the Serbs) as 'the wogs' is 'hearsay' only in the literal sense of the word: the person who told me this had heard the officer say it. Other UN personnel have told me that in their office in Sarajevo they used names taken from Star Trek: the Serbs were known as 'the Klingons' (a cussed but noble war- rior race), while the Muslims were amus- ingly referred to as 'the mutants' (defective Untermenschen with missing eyes, hands, etc.). The fact that UN military men have felt more at ease dealing with the Serb army has been observed by very many of the UN personnel, journalists, interpreters and others with whom I have spoken. If Mr Watkins never noticed this, he must be astonishingly unobservant. Could that explain, I wonder, why he was sent to Bosnia as a European Community observer?
Noel Malcolm
6A Huntingdon St, London N1
Previous page
