Sir: Kenneth Roberts attacks Noel Mal- colm, astonishingly, for being
insufficiently well-informed about the situation in Bosnia. While I could never lay claim to a small part of Mr Malcolm's knowledge of the situation, I have visited former Yugoslavia some 12 times during the course of the war and my experience has been that Mr Malcolm is rather better informed about Bosnia than any foreign aid-worker or, indeed, journalist. But then he was familiar with Bosnia long before it became a topical subject and speaks the languages of the region, advantages which Mr Roberts may or may not enjoy.
Having spent some time with the Bosnian army during my last three visits to Bosnia, most recently a month ago, I must also take issue with Mr Roberts's sweeping assertion that Mr Malcolm would find 'that element of Bosnian youth which has been drafted at gunpoint strangely reluctant to begin dying afresh'. None of the soldiers I met was remotely anxious to die, but almost without exception they seemed to feel that the situ- ation whereby 70 per cent of the country was in the possession of Serbian forces, including many towns which had not been Serbian before the war, was unjust; this was especially the case with soldiers who had themselves been cleansed. Others talked about defending their families from a simi- lar fate. What they did say they needed was food and weapons; the latter, as The Spec- tator has consistently pointed out, was denied them as a result of the British- backed arms embargo.
Melanie McDonagh
Evening Standard Northcliffe House, Derry Street, London W8
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