Final Submit

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A New World Order?
The British Response to Genocide in Bosnia
and Rwanda
By Eleanor Walsh

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Contents
Introduction
- 3
Chapter I
The British Media and Genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda
- 8
Chapter II
‘Britain’s Unfinest Hour Since 1938’: the British Government and Genocide in
Bosnia and Rwanda
- 17
Conclusion
- 29
Bibliography
- 32

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Introduction
In the aftermath of the Second World War, and in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust, the
international community imagined a new world order. In October 1945, representatives from
50 countries signed the United Nations Charter in San Francisco, which would unite the
signatories in an effort to ‘maintain international peace and security’.1
This then paved the
way for human rights implementations such as the Genocide Convention 1948, the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights 1948 and the Refugee Convention 1951. However, an intense
Cold War climate and a desperation to contain Soviet Union influence provided the platform
for Western foreign policies.2
Ernest Bevin assumed his role as Foreign Secretary in the late
1940s resolute on preserving British values, and told Hastings Ismay as he arrived at the
Potsdam Conference, ‘I’m not going to have Britain barged out’.3
A power-struggle mentality
was evident in the post-war era and was prioritised over other foreign issues, such as human
rights. Even the Genocide Convention was not effective in protecting minorities after 1945
from the threat of violence, and the promises put forward at the close of the Second World
War to protect those at risk appeared to have been forgotten.4
So when the Cold War came to
an end at the beginning of the 1990s, the world envisaged a new post-Cold War world order.
The United Nations Security Council would be expected to reinforce Chapter VII of the
Charter by initiating collective procedures for intervention to protect those at risk of genocide
and other crimes against humanity.5
Britain was greatly involved in the propaganda circulated
on this new vision of human rights which appeared with the end of the Cold War. In January
1992, The UN Security Council held its first summit level meeting, a meeting billed as ‘an
unprecedented recommitment…to the purposes and principles of the Charter’, which was
claimed to be a British initiative.6
However, this dissertation will argue that British foreign
policies of maintaining its national self-interest continued. Safety of troops, preservation of
1
The United Nations, ‘Charter of the United Nations and Statute of the International Court of Justice’, 24
October 1945, accessed at: https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/ctc/uncharter.pdf
2
Curtis, Mark, The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy Since 1945 (London: Zed Books Ltd, 1995),
pp. 182
3
Weiler, Peter, ‘British Labour and the Cold War: The Foreign Policy of the Labour Governments, 1945-1951’,
Journal of British Studies, vol. 26, no. 1 (1987), pp. 57
4
Mazower, Mark, No Enchanted Palace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 147
5
Benedic, Wolfgang, Human Rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina After Dayton: From Theory to Practice
(Cambridge: Kluwer Law International, 1999), pp. 95
6
Melvern, Linda, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide (London: Zed Books Ltd,
2000), pp. 74

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great power status and financial miserliness remained above international human rights in
Britain’s priorities. This will be illustrated using the cases of the Bosnian and Rwandan
genocides, where the British government failed to intervene effectively in large-scale human
rights abuses and often impeded on other states’ attempts at intervention. Britain’s inaction
was sustainable due to rhetoric within Britain relating to the religion, geography and history
of both the victims and the aggressors in the genocides.
In October 1990, a civil war broke out in Rwanda following an invasion of Rwanda
by the Royal Patriotic Front (RPF), which was made up predominantly of Tutsis who had fled
to Uganda following previous Hutu violence. In April 1994, President of Rwanda, Juvénal
Habyarimana’s plane was shot down for reasons which remain unknown. This left the
political situation in Rwanda extremely unstable and genocidal killings of Tutsis and
moderate Hutus began the following day. The United Nations Assistance Mission for
Rwanda (UNAMIR) had been present in Rwanda since October 1993, assisting the Arusha
Peace Agreement. But when genocide occurred in 1994, the United Nations showed
reluctance to take decisive action against the killings and UNAMIR’s strength was reduced
drastically. Britain was central in the negotiations leading to the UN’s failure to prevent
genocide in Rwanda. Only one year after this genocide ended, another began in the former
Yugoslavia. Within days of Bosnia declaring its independence from Yugoslavia in 1992, the
Bosnian Serbs and Croatians began competing for Bosnian territory which they hoped would
become Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia. The JNA, Yugoslavia’s army, fell apart and
became a largely Serb-dominated force. This led to the systematic ethnic cleansing and
genocide of Bosnian Muslims in Žepa and Srebrenica in 1995. Once again, the UN and the
United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) failed to protect victims of large-scale
human rights atrocities. Like Rwanda, the case of Bosnia highlights Britain’s failure to
commit to the ‘new world order’ that had been foreseen by the end of the Cold War.
The events which took place in both Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s indicate that the
global rhetoric of a new world order was illusory. Britain’s role in Bosnia is significant as
Britain held EC presidency through the most critical period of the Bosnian war (July-
December 1992) and ‘tried to secure the maximum advantages offered by this role’.7
Additionally, Britain came to be seen by many as the greatest obstacle to collective action in
7 Conversi, Daniele, ‘Moral Relativism and Equidistance in British Attitudes to the War in the Former
Yugoslavia’, Thomas Cushman and Stjepan Mestrovic (ed.), The Time We Knew: Western Responses to
Genocide in Bosnia (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 245

5
Bosnia.8
Britain’s contribution in the Rwandan conflict was equally significant as the British
government (more than any other) displayed a more troubling indifference towards the
killings, and there is a general consensus across the historiography that it was a key force of
inaction. This dissertation contends that self-interest provided the platform for foreign policy
towards both Rwanda and Bosnia at this time and therefore led to a reluctance to use forceful
action to prevent human rights abuses. Although one-sided, Brendan Simms’ Unfinest Hour
provides a ground-breaking and authoritative account of Britain’s failures to deter Serb
aggression and will be used on numerous occasions throughout the dissertation. Simms
describes Defence Secretary Malcolm Rifkind as a man of ‘formidable forensic ability’ and
Douglas Hurd as a ‘rolls-royce’ of a Foreign Secretary.9
This indicates that Britain’s inability
to protect victims in Bosnia and Rwanda was not down to mere incompetence. This
dissertation will argue that in fact it was down to inaccurate and improper media coverage of
the events throughout both genocides, which failed to rouse enough public support to push
for a military intervention. It will also argue that it was down to a priority of self-interest
above all moral concerns.
The lack of action on the part of the international community is well-known amongst
historians of the events in Bosnia and Rwanda, but much of this historiography has focused
on the failure of the UN as a whole, rather than Britain’s role in that failure. The first chapter,
discussing the British media’s response to the genocides, will use primary sources such as the
accounts of news reporters like Martin Bell and Mark Doyle, who were on the ground in
Bosnia and Rwanda when the killings took place. It will also use British newspaper reports
from the period to shed light on how the British media influenced public opinion on the
conflicts and therefore government action. Maria Todorova’s cutting-edge study of
Balkanism will be a useful source in emphasising the effects of distorted Western perceptions
on public opinion and humanitarian intervention. The second chapter, examining the role of
the British government in the Bosnian genocides will use primary sources such as
parliamentary debates, the memoirs of the key players in British decision making at this time,
and government and UN documents. Alongside Simms, Linda Melvern has been amongst the
few to conduct extensive research on the British failure to prevent genocide, focusing
particularly on Rwanda with works such as Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide,
A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide and an article written with
8 Simms, Brendan, Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2002),
pp. 5
9
Simms, Unfinest Hour, pp. 3

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Paul Williams, ‘Britannia Waived the Rules: The Major Government and the 1994 Rwanda
Genocide’. These sources have been valuable in the research undertaken to produce this
dissertation, but none answer the question of how the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides
together shed light on the importance placed on British interests, which this essay aims to do.
Further, none have analysed the relationship between the British media and government in
relation to the genocides and how this relationship may have contributed to Britain’s inaction.
The foreign policy agenda is often driven by media and public opinion. The first
chapter will discuss moral relativism, the concept of tribalism and the depiction of the
genocides as deeply rooted civil wars in the press. Todorova’s Balkanism will be applied to
perceptions of the Balkans in the West and how this contributed to public apathy towards the
killings. This view was contrasted with the belief that the Bosnian victims were fellow
Europeans and therefore more sympathy was provoked in the British public than it was in
Rwanda’s case. BBC Newsnight will be discussed, which failed to accurately cover the
events in Rwanda and instead censored much of its footage. According to reporter Martin
Bell, the failure of the media during the genocides lay in its stance of objectivity, which
prevented reporters from aligning themselves with a particular side. It will finally be argued
that the British media placed more emphasis on the refugee crisis which occurred as a
consequence of the genocide, as more humanitarian aid was provided here. The second
chapter will discuss Prime Minister John Major’s political ideology and how this helped to
form his position on the genocides. The British government were reluctant to use the term
genocide and imposed an arms embargo on Yugoslavia, leaving Bosnia incapable of
protecting itself. This actually facilitated Serbian aggression towards Bosnia. This decision
was compared to the Munich Agreement in parliament by opponents of the arms embargo.
Weight was added to this by Britain’s failure to fully implement an arms embargo on the
aggressors in the Rwandan genocide. British contribution to UNPROFOR and UNAMIR was
poor, with Britain reluctant to provide resources due to cost. Like the media, the British
government incorrectly portrayed the genocides as equal-sided civil wars. It will finally be
argued that a British national identity based on Christian principles contributed to Britain’s
unwillingness to protect Bosnian Muslim victims. This dissertation will contend that the
British media and the British government combined to form a policy of dismissal towards
genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda, prioritising national self-interest over victims of human
rights atrocities, highlighting the failure of a post-Cold War new world order.
It is still debated today what impact the media has on the decisions made in
parliament and vice versa. In regard to the Rwandan genocide, Linda Melvern has stated

7
‘there is secrecy in Government and a lack of interest in the media’, which would suggest that
if the government was more open about the realities of genocide, more interest would be
aroused in the media.10
However, the evidence shows that both are equally as influential as
each other. Throughout the genocides, references were made in parliament to the media and
public opinion. For example, one government document cites public opinion as a very
powerful source of pressure for intervention, however it goes on to reject military
intervention regardless.11
It is undoubtable though that British politicians were affected by
what was going on in the media. Douglas Hurd’s colleagues allegedly resorted to telling him
what they had seen of Rwanda on CNN that day, which Allan Thompson claims was
Britain’s main source of information.12
This is now widely known as the ‘CNN effect’ – the
belief that ‘foreign policy is reactive to news content, the key decisions are those made by
reporters, producers and editors’.13
This dissertation will not attempt to answer the question
of who influences whom, as this may not be possible. It will simply highlight that both the
media and the government in Britain worked together and influenced each other into an
agenda consisting of indifference towards the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides.
10
Melvern, A People Betrayed, pp. 230
11
Foreign and Commonwealth Office, ‘The Case Against International Military Intervention in Bosnia’, The
Former Yugoslavia: Briefing Note, October 1992, FO973/700, The National Archives
12
Dowden, Richard, ‘The Media’s Failure: A Reflection on the Rwanda Genocide’, Allan Thompson (ed.), The
Media and the Rwanda Genocide (London: Pluto Press, 2007), pp. 251
13
Robinson, Piers, The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign Policy and Intervention (Oxon: Routledge,
2005), pp. 21

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Chapter I
The British Media and Genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda
One of the greatest causes of British inaction in the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides
was the lack of accurate media coverage of the events available to the British public. Noam
Schimmel claims that ‘without offering audiences the opportunity to witness, they are
disempowered from taking action’.14
This chapter will look at the undertones of moral
relativism within British media coverage of the genocides, where the massacres were
dismissed as acceptable in the context of the particular cultures and therefore supposedly did
not require Western action. Both of the conflicts were depicted as ethnic blood feuds and civil
wars consisting of equal warring factions. Maria Todorova’s study of Balkanism suggests
that in the Western perception, the Balkans are too close to the Orient to be considered
wholly European and evidence of this can be found in newspaper reports from the period.
This was contrasted with a rhetoric which advocated the Balkans as fellow Europeans,
therefore more deserving of Britain’s help than the Rwandans. BBC Newsnight adds further
weight to the argument of this chapter, due to the disproportionate amount of research
conducted in the past on print media. Despite having full access to intelligence on the
genocide taking place in Rwanda, Newsnight chose not to cover the conflict as a genocide but
a civil war. Impartiality in journalism has been blamed for the media’s failure during the
genocides, as this meant that reporters did not identify a side at fault. Finally, the British
media were preoccupied with the refugee crisis which emerged as a consequence of the
genocide in Rwanda, as more humanitarian aid was provided here than it was where the
genocide was actually taking place. Using these arguments, this chapter will contend that the
British media contributed to a general policy of indifference towards the genocides in Bosnia
and Rwanda.
During the genocides, the British media adopted a stance which social scientists have
termed ‘moral relativism’. Shashi Motilal states that a moral relativist believes ‘there is no
single, overarching standard of morality and that what is right and what is wrong varies from
one society to another without reference to any universal moral principle’.15
The media
showed reluctance to acknowledge the true brutality of the killings and instead dismissed the
14
Schimmel, Noam, ‘An invisible genocide: how the Western media failed to report the 1994 Rwandan
genocide of the Tutsi and why’, The International Journal of Human Rights, vol. 15, no. 7 (2011), pp. 1126
15
Motilal, Shashi, ‘Moral Relativism and Human Rights’, Shashi Motilal (ed.) Applied Ethics and Human
Rights: Conceptual Analysis and Contextual Applications (London: Anthem Press, 2011), pp. 68

9
events as a display of tribalism. Scott Straus points out that the weapons used by the
perpetrators (e.g. machetes, clubs and whatever else they could improvise) and where the
massacres took place (such as churches, schools and other public building where victims had
gone to hide) marked out the violence as ‘elemental and primitive’.16
He also states that these
images along with a lack of knowledge of African history meant that witnesses jumped to the
assumption that this was a result of tribal hatred.17
In April 1994, just as the genocide had
begun in Rwanda, the Daily Mail displayed the headline ‘Is tribal conflict now the world’s
greatest threat?’, presenting an image of a Rwandan with a machete and the caption
‘Africa…where the protesters wield tribal weapons’.18
This sweeping statement suggests that
Africa is the threat, rather than the aggressors in Rwanda. This article demonstrates the lack
of importance given to human rights issues, by suggesting that Rwanda’s ‘tribal conflict’ is
only a concern of Britain’s when it becomes a threat to British national security. Labour MP,
Tony Worthington stated in the Commons in May 1994 that in the press ‘there has been a
terrible tendency to dismiss the events as just tribalism with ‘what can you expect from the
Africans?’ as the subtext. By calling this tribalism, we are, in effect, blaming all the people of
Rwanda.’19
Worthington recognises the danger of this rhetoric in the press. He argues that the
press were not identifying victims in the atrocities, as due to the Rwandans having a very
different moral compass, the massacre is acceptable and no business of the British public’s.
Adrian Gallagher has argued that genocide is so innately immoral that it discredits
moral relativism.20
However, the conflict in Rwanda was not depicted as a genocide, thereby
validating a moral relativist rhetoric. It takes the crimes which ‘shock the conscience of
human kind’ to bring the public to call for military intervention, but this was unlikely to
happen for a conflict which allegedly had no victims.21
The Observer reported in April 1994,
after the genocide had begun, that there were fears of a ‘full-scale civil war in Rwanda, where
the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi tribes have a long history of rivalry’, without any
mention of Hutu aggression.22
In the 1960s and the very beginning of the 1990s, Tutsi
16
Straus, Scott, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power and War in Rwanda (New York: Cornell University Press,
2006), pp. 18
17
Straus, The Order of Genocide, pp. 19
18
Wheatcroft, Geoffrey, ‘Is tribal conflict now the world’s greatest threat?’ Daily Mail Historical Archive, 11
April 1994, pp. 8
19
Worthington, Tony, in Hansard Parliamentary Debates (House of Commons), 24 May 1994, vol. 244
20
Gallagher, Adrian, Genocide and its Threat to Contemporary International Order (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013), pp. 78
21
Gallagher, Genocide, pp. 78
22
Milsum, Liindsey, and Huband, Mark, ‘Rwanda rebels draw close to carnage city’, ProQuest Historical
Newspapers (The Observer: London, UK), 10 April 1994

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refugee insurgents had initiated numerous attacks against the country, so on the eruption of
genocide by the Hutus on 6 April 1994, Western reporters covered the violence as a
resumption of a long lasting and intermittent civil war. Mark Doyle was a BBC journalist
from 1986, and was its East Africa correspondent between 1993 and 1994. He spent most of
the genocide in Rwanda and was often the only Western reporter in Kigali. He is therefore an
vital source of information on what was happening inside Rwanda at this time, particularly in
relation to media coverage. He confesses that he initially mistook the events as a war of equal
footing but ‘within little more than a week of the beginning of the killing […] there were
clear references to government-backed massacres of ethnic Tutsis and Hutu opponents of the
regime’.23
Doyle indicates that the British media were to some extent aware of the realities of
the genocide yet made the decision to not cover it in this light. In April, 1994 when in Kigali,
he told a BBC presenter in London, ‘there are two wars going on here[…]a shooting war and
a genocide war[…]In the shooting war, there are two conventional armies at each other, and
in the genocide war, one of those armies[…]is involved in mass killings’.24
Doyle indicates
that he himself had informed the BBC that a genocide was taking place, but this did little to
influence its media coverage.
The perpetrators and victims of the genocide in Bosnia being white and European did
not prevent the events being dismissed in the press as tribalism. There has been a consensus
in the British media that the inhabitants of the Balkans are ‘somehow genetically or
historically fated to kill one another’.25
For example, The Observer wrote in January 1995
that force would be futile in ‘such a volatile region as the Balkans’.26
This is strongly
connected to the moral relativist stance that culture decides fate, and we cannot intervene in
other cultures. Slavoj Žižek argues that the attitude of the West was that it would only be
possible to achieve peace in Bosnia if one side of the conflict was not castigated;
accountability must be equally dispersed and the West must adopt the role of mediator.27
Moral relativism in the Western reaction to the genocide manifested itself, according to
Daniele Conversi, as ‘an underlying current of public opinion that, even at the peak of
Serbian atrocities and ethnic cleansing, was determined to view all parties in the conflict as
23
Doyle, Mark, ‘Reporting the Genocide’, Allan Thompson (ed.) The Media and the Rwanda Genocide
(London: Pluto Press, 2007), pp. 145
24
Doyle, ‘Reporting the Genocide’, pp. 145
25
Davis, G. Scott, Religion and Justice in the War Over Bosnia (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 41
26
Porteons, Peter, ‘War in Bosnia cannot be ended by force’, ProQuest Historical Newspapers (The Observer:
London, UK), 8 January 1995: pp. 18
27
Žižek, Slavoj, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 17

11
‘warring factions’ engaged in a ‘civil war’’.28
Like in the case of Rwanda, the conflict in
Bosnia was depicted as victimless. It would be impossible to shake the conscience of the
public when both sides of the conflict are supposedly to blame. The Daily Mail reported in
May 1995 that ‘spring by tradition triggers the seasonal return of tribal fighting’, which
implies that violence is an inherent aspect of Balkan culture making them fundamentally
alien to the democratic West.29
This meant that a sense of grief towards the atrocities was not
provoked amongst the British population and therefore there was no public pressure for a
government intervention.
The perception of the Balkans in Western Europe has been identified by Maria
Todorova as ‘Balkanism’, a variation of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Todorova claims that it
is common knowledge that the Balkans are considered the ‘other’ of Europe, and that ‘its
inhabitants do not care to conform to the standards of behavior devised as normative by and
for the civilized world’.30
The earlier violence which took place during the Balkan wars of
1912-13 resonated widely within Europe and began to threaten the peace developments
which were taking place here.31
Balkanism such as this can also be identified in the British
response to the conflict in Bosnia in the 1990s. Benjamin Žohar argues that this allowed
reporters to present the events in a simpler format, but also created a ‘misrepresentation of
reality’.32
The press had a tendency to focus on aid to Bosnia from Islamic states such as Iran,
circulating the message that ‘fundamentalists could use the war in Bosnia to gain a foothold
in Europe’.33
Although this may have been true, it was not necessarily something that could
have been helped by the Bosnians. It was particularly poisonous as the Bosnian Serbs had
claimed that the reason for their aggression towards Bosnia was to avoid a European Islamic
state, giving the Serbs some justification for their violence. 34
By placing emphasis on the
religion of the Bosnian victims, a greater rift was created between Europe and the Balkans in
the minds of the British public. As a result, ‘the idea of western military intervention had only
minor public support’.35
It has also been argued that the public were convinced by the press
28
Conversi, ‘Moral Relativism’, pp. 245
29
Anonymous, ‘Victory in Europe and war in Bosnia’, Daily Mail Historical Archive (Daily Mail: London,
UK), 2 May 1995: pp. 8
30
Todorova, Maria, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 3
31
Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, pp. 5
32
Žohar, Benjamin, ‘Misrepresentation of the Bosnian War by Western Media’, Journal of Comparative
Research in Anthropology and Sociology, vol. 3, no. 2 (2012), pp. 98
33
Pukas, Anna, ‘Fears of a foothold for the Islamic fanatics’, Daily Mail Historical Archive (Daily Mail:
London, UK), 10 August 1992: pp. 2-3
34
Pukas, ‘Fears of a foothold’, pp. 2-3
35
Žohar, ‘Misrepresentation of the Bosnian War’, pp. 98

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that the Balkans are geographically and historically too close to the Orient to be wholly
European.36
The Balkans were considered to be an alien who threatened the ‘Western project
of modernity’; like the Rwandans they are considered to be uncivilised and morally inferior,
both the victims and the aggressors.37
They were perceived with the same suspicions as any
non-Christian state, as traditionally, Christianity has been associated with civilisation. This
representation of the Balkans as ‘the other’ allowed both the British media and the
government to neglect the massacres more easily.
These views, however, were contrasted with the opinion that those in the Balkans
were ethnically similar to the British and therefore more deserving of British help. Bridget
Robison quotes the Independent: ‘they were so like us, both the killers and the victims, good
Europeans one and all’, and argues that language such as ‘people like us’ highlights that
politicians were condemned by the media for their neglect of a fellow European country.38
This would imply that it was being a white and European state which gained the Bosnian
genocide more attention in Britain than the Rwandan genocide, though still not enough to
push for an intervention. As early as 1992, the Serbian community in the UK were accusing
the British media of displaying an anti-Serbian bias in its coverage of the crisis.39
If this is
true it would indicate that the British public did form an emotional attachment to the victims
in Bosnia based on a shared European identity. The Guardian described the suffering of
Bosnian Muslims in great detail, using rhetoric such as ‘many are suffering from malnutrition
and dehydration […] many of them haven’t eaten for at least 48 hours and they’re completely
worn out’.40
This would have provoked a good deal of empathy amongst the public as the
victims were depicted as other humans, rather than a particular ethnic group. Moreover, it
was claimed that the Bosnian Serb Commander, General Ratko Mladić, ‘strode into the east
Bosnian Muslim enclave of Srebrenica to survey his latest conquest’, indicating to Britons
that the Bosniaks were completely at the mercy of Mladić. This prompts an image painfully
reminiscent of the Nazi holocaust. A European and white identity as a platform for sympathy
36
Sells, Michael Anthony, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (California: University of
California Press, 1998), pp. 126
37
Cushman, Thomas, ‘Collective Punishment and Forgiveness: Judgements of Post-Communist National
Identities by the ‘Civilised’ West’, Stjepan G. Meštrović (ed.) Genocide After Emotion: The Postemotional
Balkan War (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 185
38
Robison, Bridget. ‘Putting Bosnia in its place: Critical Geopolitics and the Representation of Bosnia in the
British Print Media’ Geopolitics (2004), vol. 9, issue 4, pp. 378-379
39
Wybrow, Robert J, ‘British Attitudes Towards the Bosnian Situation’, Richard Sobel, Eric Shiraev, Robert
Shapiro (ed.), International Public Opinion and the Bosnia Crisis (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishing
Group, 2003), pp. 58
40
Traynor, Ian, ‘Serbs bus refugees to frontline: horror of ethnic cleansing returns’, ProQuest Historical
Newspapers (The Guardian: London, UK), 13 July 1995: pp. 1

13
towards the Bosnian victims in the media demonstrates that the British were influenced in
their response by a deeply rooted racial prejudice. The evidence presented here seems to
imply that the indifference towards the Rwandan genocide was partly down to the fact that
the victims were black. Regardless, the human rights violations were not what was being
propagated by the media, but how alike the British population was to the victims in Bosnia.
Current affairs television programme Newsnight is of particular importance. In
previous studies of the media’s role in covering the Rwandan genocide, the focus has been
disproportionately on print media, rather than news programmes such as Newsnight.41
David
Belton was in Rwanda reporting the massacres for Newsnight and on occasions the violence
became so threatening that Belton and his crew were forced to find shelter, as the Hutu
extremists became increasingly apprehensive of their presence.42
Newsnight reporters were
witnesses to the violence on the ground in Rwanda which suggests that Newsnight footage
was censored for the benefit of viewers. According to BBC reporter Tom Giles, a few months
before the genocide in Rwanda had begun, the BBC had reported a smaller massacre in
Burundi in great detail which had triggered a barrage of complaints.43
This explains why the
BBC would feel the need to censor footage shown on Newsnight. BBC correspondent Martin
Bell accused the corporation of ‘glamourising war through its refusal to show the full extent
of human suffering and destruction in war zones’.44
Giles explains that the majority of the
raw footage showing the full scale of the brutality was sent to England at the beginning of
April when the desperation to grab the world’s attention was at its greatest, however the
whole feature was cancelled and deemed ‘too graphic for British viewers’.45
It is clear, then,
that the BBC failed to accurately report the events in Rwanda by self-censoring real footage
of human rights abuses. And in doing so, gave viewers a misleading account of the events
taking place in Rwanda, which in turn led to a failure to arouse public support for a more
forceful intervention.
It has been argued that the failure of the British media to accurately report genocide
lies in its stance of objectivity. According to Howard Tumber and Marina Prentoulis,
41
Holmes, Georgina, ‘Did Newsnight Miss the Story? A Survey of How the BBC’s “Flagship Political Current
Affairs Program” Reported Genocide and War in Rwanda Between April and July 1994’ Genocide Studies and
Prevention: An International Journal, vol. 6, Issue 2, Article 7 (2011), pp. 175
42
Bartrop, Paul Robert, A Biographical Encyclopedia of Contemporary Genocide: Portraits of Evil and Good
(California: ABC – CLIO, LLC, 2012), pp. 61
43
Giles, Tom, ‘Media Failure Over Rwanda’s Genocide’, Allan Thompson (ed.) The Media and the Rwanda
Genocide (London: Pluto Press, 2007), pp. 236
44
Frean, Alexander, ‘Martin Bell accuses BBC editors of glamourising war’, NewsBank (The Times: London,
UK), 13 November 1995
45
Giles, ‘Media Failure’, pp. 236

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‘objective reporting’ is a way of reporting news to convey it ‘in a detached, impersonal way
free of value judgements’.46
However, this resulted in the conductors of the genocides being
viewed not as aggressors, but simply another side in the conflict. This ethic in war reporting
has emerged from an ideology of objectivity, which is no longer so much about aiming to tell
the truth, but forming a relationship of trust between the ‘addresser and addressee’. 47
There
is an expectation of impartiality from the audience, even if it means an inaccurate
representation. BBC war correspondent during the Bosnian conflict, Martin Bell, stated in
his memoir, In Harm’s Way: Bosnia: A War Reporter’s Story, that ‘it isn’t involvement but
indifference that makes for bad practice […] Old BBC reporting habits of distance and
detachment were early and instant casualties’.48
Bell believes that a stance of objectivity
meant that British viewers did not see an accurate portrayal of genocide, therefore were
unable to form an emotional attachment to the victims of the aggression. The Times reported
in July 1994 that ‘the mere fact that large audiences are being told about these things is
usually enough to goad governments into taking action’.49
However, when the full reality of
the massacres is being concealed from these large audiences, this is unlikely to happen. BBC
foreign correspondent Fergal Keane has expressed his own remorse at his stance of
objectivity throughout the Rwandan genocide and has stated: ‘it would be irresponsible for
the government to allow anybody to write exactly what they want. But what happens when
that argument is used to silence legitimate debate or questioning of the ruling elite? The
powerful will always find reasons to justify silencing those who threaten their power’.50
This
would suggest that the British government encouraged objectivity in the media to avoid a
public call for an intervention that was not in national interests. By promoting an unbiased
stance within the British public, the media deterred pressure for a military intervention to
prevent the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda.
Despite the genocide taking place within Rwanda, the British media became
preoccupied with the refugee crisis which occurred as a result of the political situation in
46
Tumber, Howard and Prentoulis, Marina, ‘Journalists Under Fire: Subcultures, Objectivity and Emotional
Literacy’, Daya Kishan Thussu and Des Freedman (ed.) War and the Media (London: SAGE Publications Ltd,
2003), pp. 216
47
Hartley, John; Montgomery, Martin; Brennan, Marc, Communication, Cultural and Media Studies; The Key
Concepts (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 167
48
Bell, Martin, In Harm’s Way: Bosnia: A War Reporter’s Story (London: Icon Books Ltd, 2012), pp. 138
49
Simpson, John,‘When reporters act on their conscience – Rwanda’, NewsBank (The Times: London, UK), 25
July 1994
50
Pottier, Johan: Hammond, Laura: Cramer, Christopher, ‘Navigating the Terrain of Methods and Ethics in
Conflict Research’, Pottier, Hammond and Cramer (ed.) Researching Violence in Africa: Ethical and
Methodological Challenges (Leiden: Koninklijk Brill NV, 2011), pp. 11

15
Rwanda. More foreign aid and foreign aid workers rushed to the Kivu refugee camps than
actually went to Rwanda.51
It is also much simpler to provide aid than try to actively stop a
genocide, so the lack of coverage on the genocide and wider coverage of the refugee camps
facilitated the government’s attempts to appear to be doing what they can.52
Lindsey Hilsum
argues that ‘one of the major outcomes of the imbalance in reporting of different aspects of
the story was that governments were able to hide behind a humanitarian screen’.53
Likewise,
Mel McNulty concurs that the ‘images of mass movements of ‘refugees’ in Rwanda
suggested that these were the victims, rarely that many of them were the perpetrators of
genocide (now fugitives from justice), accompanied by a terrified and intimidated ‘human
shield’ of real refugees’.54
Circulating images of the refugee crisis with Western aid workers
misled the British public into believing that Britain was involved in a humanitarian
intervention to stop the killings, rather than just to deliver aid. The Observer declared in July
1994, towards the end of three months of genocidal killings, ‘at long last, the world is moving
to the aid of Rwanda’s refugees’.55
As television news programmes often contain stories
which have relevance to the target nation, they tend to feature dramatised spectacles. The
genocide in Rwanda, along with its civil war, was a complex and multifaceted story in a
country unheard of to many Britons. The refugee crisis was at least a more palatable issue.56
It has been argued that as Rwanda was not in Britain’s sphere of interest, the refugee crisis
would quite possibly have also been ignored had it not been for ‘the dramatic media spectacle
of mass human suffering’.57
By promulgating images of the refugee crisis and Western aid to
it, not only did the British media draw attention away from the original issue in Rwanda, but
it also misled the British public into believing that the British government was doing all it
could to help. Public pressure for an intervention would be impossible as the Britons already
believed one was taking place.
51
Caplan, Gerald, ‘Rwanda: Walking the Road to Genocide’, Allan Thompson (ed.) The Media and the Rwanda
52
Hilsum, Lindsey, ‘Reporting Rwanda: The Media and the Aid Agencies’, Allan Thompson (ed.) The Media
and the Rwanda Genocide (London: Pluto Press, 2007), pp. 169
53
Hilsum, ‘Reporting Rwanda’, pp. 169
54
McNulty, Mel, ‘Media Ethnicization and the International Response to War and Genocide in Rwanda’, Tim
Allen, Jean Seaton (ed.) The Media of Conflict: War Reporting and Representations of Ethnic Violence
(London: Zed Books Ltd, 1999), pp. 270
55
Anonymous, ‘Rwanda shows aid is not enough’, ProQuest Historical Newspapers (The Observer: London,
UK), 24 July 1994: pp. 26
56
Giles, Tom, ‘Media Failure Over Rwanda’s Genocide’, Allan Thompson (ed.) The Media and the Rwanda
57
Stevenson, Nicholas, The Transformation of the Media: Globalisation, Morality and Ethics (New York:
Routledge, 2013), pp. 149

16
The British media failed to report accurately and effectively on the Bosnian and
Rwandan genocides. This meant that the British public were not fully aware of the events that
were taking place in these countries, or Britain’s true role in it, therefore no pressure was
placed on the British government to intervene. Media representation in cases like these are
extremely important, as governments use humanitarian intervention in a narcissistic bid to
create a good image of its state.58
The media are instrumental in creating this image, and by
claiming that what is moral to the West is not necessarily moral in the Balkans or Africa; by
portraying the events as tribalism; by equating aggressor and victim so that no one was to
blame; by using Western perceptions to play on the idea that the Balkans were not really part
of Europe; by censoring coverage to ensure that viewers did not see the reality of the
massacres; by taking a stance of objectivity and refusing to take sides, despite clear evidence
of Hutu and Serb aggression; and by emphasising the aid being delivered to refugee camps to
give the impression that Britain was doing all it could, the British public were manipulated
into believing that nothing more needed to be done.
58
Hammond, Philip, ‘The Media and Humanitarian Intervention’, Josef Seethaler and Matthias Karmasin (ed.)
Selling War: The Role of the Mass Media in Hostile Conflicts from World War I to the “War on Terror”’
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 255

17
Chapter II
‘Britain’s Unfinest Hour Since 1938’:59
The British Government and Genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda
This Chapter will examine the role of the British government in the Bosnian and
Rwandan genocides. Regarding the end of the Cold War, Mark Curtis claims that ‘In the
current era, British foreign policy remains consistently opposed to the grand principles – such
as promotion of human rights and economic development in the Third World – widely
assumed to be consistent with it’.60
But British responses to the massacres in Bosnia as well
as Rwanda have indicated that the British government’s apathy towards human rights
violations is evident much closer to home than the Third World. This chapter will argue that
the British government avoided intervention to prevent human rights atrocities unless it
coincided with national self-interest, therefore failing to commit to the post-Cold War ‘new
world order’. This will be argued firstly by looking at the ideologies of the key player in the
decision-making processes, John Major; the legal obligation of the Genocide Convention and
the refusal of the British government to acknowledge this; Britain’s central role in the
implementation of the arms embargo on the whole of Yugoslavia, intensifying the military
imbalance between the Bosniaks and the Bosnian Serbs; appeasement of the aggressors in the
Bosnian genocide which has been compared to the Munich Agreement of 1938; failure of the
British government to fully implement an arms embargo on Rwanda, allowing the genocidal
government continued access to weapons; reluctance of the Major government to contribute
sufficiently to the UN assistance missions despatched in both conflicts; the habit within
parliament, like in the British media, of portraying the genocides as civil wars containing
equal warring factions; and finally, a British Christian identity causing the Muslim identity of
the Bosnian victims to interfere with Britain’s desire to intervene. This chapter will use the
issues outlined to argue that the British government prioritised national interest before the
maintenance of human rights in what Brendan Simms has called ‘Britain’s unfinest hour
since 1938’.61
Further, it will identify a relationship between government and media rhetoric
towards the genocides.
59
Simms, Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia, pp. 2
60
Curtis, Mark, The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy Since 1945 (London: Zed Books Ltd, 1995),
pp. 181
61
Simms, Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia, pp. 2

18
Examining the political ideology of Britain’s first post-Cold War Prime Minister,
John Major, is a useful way of understanding his response to genocide in Bosnia and
Rwanda. Major was open about his approach to international relations, and wrote in his
autobiography: ‘of all the roles in government, the Foreign Office…was the one for which I
was least prepared’.62
But the Major government had publicly declared its commitment to the
Human Rights Charter, stating in their election manifesto for 1992 that overseas aid will be
used to promote ‘crucially – respect for human rights and the rule of law’, which he failed to
adhere to.63
Major’s failure to help to protect the victims of genocide has been attributed to
his practice of Realpolitik, the belief that ‘a nation’s foreign policy should be based upon its
interests, and not upon moral principles’.64
Therefore, Major’s commitment to global human
rights was in fact conditional on whether it was compatible with Britain’s national interests.
C.G. Schoenfeld argues that Major, as a practitioner of Realpolitik, ‘would presumably have
felt obligated to pursue these interests vigorously and at the expense of moral principles and
concerns’.65
Major aimed to stop the atrocities using diplomacy and arbitration, and insisted
on offering only superficial support for adjudication.66
Given the extent of the aggression
displayed by the Hutus and the Bosnian Serbs, it was clear to the United Nations and the
international community, including Britain, that diplomacy alone would not be effective. This
was the only way Major could adhere to his principles of maintaining national interest, whilst
appearing to contribute to international efforts to halt the killing.
The refusal of government officials in the case of Rwanda to use the term genocide,
knowing that it would result in an obligation to intervene, highlights that the UK’s
commitment to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
1948 was not genuine. UK representatives at the UN refused to use the term genocide when
negotiating Rwanda,67
and in a Cabinet meeting regarding Rwanda in July, 1994, Hurd
allegedly slammed his hand down on the table and said ‘we will not call this genocide’.68
By
62
Major, John, The Autobiography (London: HarperCollins, 1999), pp. 111
63
Conservative Party Manifesto, March 1992, accessed at: http://www.johnmajor.co.uk/page86.html,
07/04/2015
64
Schoenfeld, C.G. ‘Psychoanalytic Dimensions of the West’s Involvement in the Third Balkan War’, Stjepan
Meštrović (ed.) Genocide After Emotion: The Post-Emotional Balkan War (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 169
65
Schoenfeld, ‘Psychoanalytic Dimensions’, pp. 170
66
Forsythe, David P. Human Rights in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012),
pp. 127
67
Dallaire, Roméo, and Manocha, Kishan, ‘The Major Powers and the Genocide in Rwanda’, Ralph Henham
and Paul Behrens (ed.) The Criminal Law of Genocide: International, Comparative and Contextual Aspects
(Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007), pp. 70
68 Cameron, Hazel, Britain’s Hidden Role in the Rwandan Genocide: The Cat’s Paw (Oxon: Routledge, 2013),
pp. 105

19
July, the massacres had been taking place for three months, and Hurd had ample evidence to
suggest that it was a genocide that was taking place. Linda Melvern has argued, along with
others, that the term ‘genocide’ is most strongly associated with the holocaust, and in the
minds of the British government ‘to make a comparison is insulting to the memory of its
victims’.69
Likewise, Karen Smith argues that the use of the term ‘genocide’ ‘could be seen as
debasing the experience of the holocaust’.70
However, this implies that the British
government were not aware of the full extent of the genocide, when the evidence states
otherwise. Article II of the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide defines genocide as ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical,
racial or religious group’.71
Two days after the killings had begun, Lieutenant-General
Roméo Dallaire, Canadian commander of UNAMIR on the ground in Rwanda, sent a
telegram to the UN warning of a ‘campaign of terror, well planned, organized, deliberate,
orchestrated’ and aimed at ‘particular ethnic groups’.72
Dallaire was clearly describing to the
UN a case of ethnic cleansing and genocide, as defined by the Genocide Convention, very
early on in the crisis. As an important member of the Security Council, it is unlikely that the
British government would not have had access to this intelligence. British Ambassador for
the UN, David Hannay, feared that the Security Council might become a ‘laughing stock’ if it
labelled the events as a genocide and then failed to intervene.73
This would suggest that
Britain’s reluctance to use the word genocide lay solely in the fact that it would result in an
obligation to intervene, which was not in Britain’s interests.
In Bosnia, the efforts of the European community to ease the hostility by mid-1991
became unsuccessful and on 25 September 1991, the Security Council unanimously adopted
Resolution 713, calling on the member states to ‘implement a general and complete embargo
on all deliveries of weapons and military equipment to Yugoslavia’.74
Britain was central in
the push for an arms embargo on Yugoslavia and it became a ‘central pillar’ in British foreign
69 Melvern, A People Betrayed, pp. 4
70
Smith, Karen E, Genocide and the Europeans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 244
71
The United Nations, ‘The Genocide Convention’, 9 December 1948. Accessed at:
https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%2078/volume-78-I-1021-English.pdf
72
Khadiagala, Gilbert M, ‘Implementing the Arusha Peace Agreement on Rwanda’, Stephen John Stedman,
Donald S. Rothschild, Elizabeth M Cousens (ed.) Ending Civil Wars: The Implementation of Peace Agreements
(Colorado: Lynn Rienner Publishers, 2002), pp. 489
73
Barnett, Michael, Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda (New York: Cornell University
Press, 2003), pp. 135
74
United Nations Security Council, ‘Resolution 713’, 25 September 1991, accessed at: http://daccess-dds-
ny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/596/49/IMG/NR059649.pdf?OpenElement

20
policy in the Balkans.75
Certain members of the United Nations, particularly Britain, believed
that any more weapons being made available to the warring factions in the Balkans would
simply exacerbate the fighting and allow it to spread further. Tom Gallagher argues that
Britain did not seem to have much of an excuse for maintaining the arms embargo, but
officials in the British government saw it as the most efficient way to bring the conflict to a
halt.76
However, this had a shattering effect on Bosnia’s ability to defend itself. R. Gerald
Hughes quotes that the EC conducted ‘misguided negotiations…at which the weaker party
was urged to make concessions to the bully, instead of being helped to stand up to
intimidation’.77
There is evidence to show that the British government were aware of the
consequences this would have on the Bosnian government’s ability to defend itself. Douglas
Hogg of Britain’s Foreign Office confessed in 1992, early on in the implementation of the
embargo, that ‘the Bosnian-Serbs are already well-equipped. Further supplies from Serbia
would be unlikely to have a significant effect on their military capacity’.78
Additionally,
Labour MP, Kate Hoey seemed to be forced to point out the obvious to the Commons in
November 1992, when she stated that ‘an arms embargo when Bosnians do not have arms
and the Serbians do must mean that those who already have arms will use them to massacre
the minority of the people in Bosnia who have no arms and have not been allowed to acquire
them by the international community’.79
This indicates that other officials within parliament
were also aware of the consequences the embargo would have for the Bosnian victims. As the
British government would rather have left the Bosnian government to defend themselves
without an equal amount of arms to the Serbs than let the conflict spread indicates firstly that
protection of human rights was not a priority, but it also indicates that the British were aware
that there was more chance that they would be forced to intervene if the fighting spread
further. This adds weight to the argument that national self-interest was prioritised over
human rights abuses.
It seems odd, then, that the British government still allowed weapons to reach the
Rwandan genocidal government and ‘failed to implement all the requirements of a United
Nations arms embargo on Rwanda’, allowing Mil-Tec, a UK company, to provide weapons to
75
Hughes, R. Gerald, The Postwar Legacy of Appeasement: British Foreign Policy Since 1945 (London:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), pp. 155
76
Gallagher, Tom, The Balkans After the Cold War: From Tyranny to Tragedy (Oxon: Routledge, 2003), pp.
131
77
Hughes, The Postwar Legacy, pp. 139
78
Gallagher, The Balkans, pp. 132
79
Hoey, Kate, in Hansard Parliamentary Debates (House of Commons), 16 November 1992, vol. 214

21
extremist Hutus.80
On 17 May 1994, after recognising that a genocide was taking place in
Rwanda, the Security Council called for all member states to issue an embargo on the ‘sale or
supply of arms to Rwanda from their territories, or using their ships or aircraft’.81
In
November 1996, it became clear that Mil-Tec had brokered arms sales from Israel and
Albania to the genocidal government.82
The Independent reported in November 1996 that
fleeing Hutu perpetrators had discarded incriminating papers showing that they had been sold
£3.3million of arms by Mil-Tec even in July, three months after the arms embargo was
implemented.83
It is significant that two of the men who had been connected to Mil-Tec were
Kenyan, as it was in Nairobi that meetings of prominent military personnel and Hutus took
place and money was collected for a Hutu invasion, which would pay for the delivery of
weapons from Israel, Albania, Spain and Ukraine by Mil-Tec.84
Mil-Tec was registered in the
Isle of Man, therefore Mil-Tec officials could not be prosecuted as the UN embargo failed to
cover the Crown dependencies such as the Channel Islands.85
A Whitehall committee,
established after the Mil-Tec deals were revealed, determined a lack of any provisions in
place to ensure prompt and accurate implementation of the arms embargo on Rwanda.86
In
the case of Bosnia, Britain secured an arms embargo which set in place a military imbalance
in which the Bosnian Serbs had arms and the Bosnian Muslims did not. In Rwanda, Britain
failed to fully implement an arms embargo, allowing weapons to reach the Rwandan
government through a UK company. It can be concluded that Britain essentially assisted and
prolonged genocide in both cases. The negotiations and council meetings regarding what to
do in Rwanda and Bosnia took place away from the public eye, rather than in public as they
used to be.87
The individual policies of each member government were absolved from the
scrutiny of their populations.88
The British public were not aware of Britain’s decisions on
what to do in Rwanda and Bosnia. They were not aware of the arms embargoes, or lack of,
80
Dallaire, ‘The Major Powers’, pp. 70
81
Travis, Hannibal, ‘The International Arms Trade and the Prevention of Genocide: The Law and Practice of
Arming Genocidal Governments’, Samuel Totten (ed.) Impediments to the Prevention and Intervention of
Genocide (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers 2013), pp. 202
82
83
Boggan, Steve, ‘Bloody trade that fuels Rwanda’s war: operation insecticide’, The Independent Online, 23
November 1996, accessed at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/bloody-trade-that-fuels-rwandas-war-
1353751.html
84
Boggan, ‘Bloody trade’, 1996
85
Phythian, Mark, The Politics of British Arms Sales Since 1964: ‘to Secure Our Rightful Share’ (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 315
86
87
Melvern, Linda, ‘Missing the Story: the Media and the Rwanda Genocide’, Allan Thompson (ed.) The Media
and the Rwanda Genocide (London: Pluto Press, 2007), pp. 203
88
Melvern, ‘Missing the Story’, pp. 203

22
and therefore could not form an opinion. This explains the lack of outrage in the British
public on policy towards Bosnia and Rwanda, as even the media were unaware of the
resolutions which were being formed in secrecy.
The United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) was established in
October 1993 to assist the country in implementing the Arusha Peace Agreement, which was
signed by the Rwandan parties on 4 August. However, the Arusha Peace Agreement was not
successful in resolving the dispute and UNAMIR was established with a very strict mandate,
ill-equipped to deal with the ensuing violence. Sir David Hannay, the UK ambassador to the
United Nations, played a central role in the review of UNAMIR’s mandate on 21 April 1994
and therefore Resolution 912, which severely reduced UNAMIR’S strength in Rwanda to just
270 troops.89
And it was he who advised the Security Council that updating UNAMIR’s
mandate to include peace enforcement would be unwise as it may result in a recurrence of
what had happened in Somalia, a failed and humiliating intervention in Mogadishu which had
cost the lives of 18 American troops and between 300 and 1,000 Somalis.90
Dallaire stated in
the same telegram as mentioned above that the predicament ‘would be a good deal worse
without the presence of UNAMIR’, yet Gilbert Khadiagala points out that subsequent
negotiations at the UN headquarters was on the priority of getting UNAMIR out, and the UK
government was paramount in the these discussions.91
American lawyer and United States
Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, David Scheffer concurs that Britain supported
minimal presence of UNAMIR to protect troops on the ground.92
So although Hurd allegedly
viewed the mission in Rwanda as hopeless, it appears that the real cause of Britain’s
reluctance to contribute fully to UNAMIR lay in the desire to protect its own troops.93
It was
Ambassador Hannay who lobbied, with the approval of the U.S, for the reduction of the
protection of the victims of genocide to a small ‘skeletal’ force of 270 troops.94
The British
government prioritised the safety of armed troops over the protection of unarmed civilian
Rwandans, indicating that human rights principles outlined at the end of the Cold War were
not considered.
89
Cameron, Britain’s Hidden Role, pp. 91
90
Melvern, Linda and Williams, Paul, ‘Britannia Waived the Rules: The Major Government and the 1994
Rwanda Genocide’, African Affairs, 103 (2004), pp. 6; Cameron, Britain’s Hidden Role, pp. 91
91
Khadiagala, ‘Implementing the Arusha’, pp. 489
92
Scheffer, David, All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals (New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 56
93
Bartrop, A Biographical Encyclopedia, pp. 133
94
Piiparinen, Touko, The Transformation of UN Conflict Management: Producing Images of Genocide from
Rwanda to Darfur and Beyond (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 62

23
The UK demonstrated its indifference towards the killings once again over UNAMIR
II, supporting US efforts to ‘block and stall the deployment’ of a stronger military presence in
Rwanda, even in the midst of massacre.95
Dallaire speaks of the British military contribution
to UNAMIR in his memoir Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in
Rwanda. He claims that both the US and Britain showed indifference towards the role that
UNAMIR played in Rwanda, and was not particularly charitable when it came to finances,
insisting that their APCs could not be donated to the peacekeeping mission but leased, and for
a ‘price of $4 million, which they insisted had to be prepaid’.96
This again shows that self-
interest was prioritised in the British policy towards UNAMIR. Further, Dallaire states that:
‘The British offered fifty Bedford trucks [to Dallaire] – again for a sizable amount to
be paid upfront. The Bedford is an early Cold War-era truck which in 1994 was fit only to be
a museum relic. When I was told of this “most generous” offer, I sarcastically asked, “They
do work, don’t they?” I was answered first with silence and then: “I’ll check and get back to
you.” The British later quietly withdrew their request for payment and provided some of the
vehicles, which broke down one at a time until there were none left’.97
Dallaire’s presence in Rwanda during the conflict and his role in UNAMIR makes
him an invaluable source on what exactly the British contribution to UNAMIR was. He
suggests that the British were aware that the Bedford trucks were not in working condition,
and were not of the standard required for Dallaire to carry out his mandate. Dallaire’s
statement indicates that the British were not willing to spend too much on the mission in
Rwanda, and chose the least expensive options.
British contribution to the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in the
former Yugoslavia was more noticeable. Between 1992 and 1995, UNPROFOR was made up
of approximately 38,000 men of which Britain had contributed 3,500, and this was reinforced
after spring 1995 by 4,900 Rapid Reaction troops, which made Britain the largest contributor
to UNPROFOR.98
It was in British interests that the mission continue as to withdraw UN
troops would mean there would be no clear reason to maintain the arms embargo, as
95
96
Dallaire, Roméo, Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (London: Arrow Books,
2004), pp. 376
97
Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil, pp. 376
98
Sharp, Jane M. O. Honest Broker or Perfidious Albion?: British Policy in Former Yugoslavia (London:
Institute for Public Policy Research, 1997), pp. 17

24
peacekeepers safety would not be at risk, and there would be no reason to oppose strategic
airstrikes.99
This means that the British contribution would be limited to what lay in the
state’s self-interest and would not exceed this. UNPROFOR’s mandate was restricted to self-
defence, despite the call from the UN asking states to ‘take all necessary measures’ to ensure
the delivery of humanitarian relief. Like Britain’s allies who also had troops on the ground in
the Balkans, the British government made decisions based on what would have the safest
outcome for its troops, not on what would be the most effective in ending war. The US (who
did not contribute troops to UNPROFOR) were more inclined to choose military action.100
British Commander of UNPROFOR, General Sir Michael Rose, states in his memoir
Fighting for Peace that on one side, the US and the Muslims wanted UNPROFOR to be used
as a war-fighting force, on another side Russia and Greece supported a more pacifying
approach to the Serbs, and ‘in the middle, trying to balance the debate, stood Britain and
France, who had the largest number of troops on the ground’.101
This indicates that the
member states who had troops on the ground, including Britain, opted for the directions
which offered the most safety for their own troops. Major did refer to public opinion when
discussing these decisions, stating in a letter to David Owen in 1991 that he did not expect
‘any support in parliament or in public opinion for operations which would tie down large
numbers of British forces’.102
Yet, a Foreign and Commonwealth briefing note on Bosnia
from 1992 claims that the British population ‘believe that armed force could quickly and
easily separate the warring factions and achieve peace’ but goes on to state that Britain will
not be involved in an armed intervention anyway, as it ‘would be unlikely to stop the
fighting’.103
The British government evidently did not actually know what public opinion
wanted, but used it as a basis for their decisions regardless. So although Britain contributed
the most troops, they did not actually facilitate them in helping to end the conflict or protect
the victims in Bosnia. Whilst they used public opinion as the main excuse for this, the real
aim was to maintain the safety of their armed troops on the ground in Bosnia.
99
Hodge, Carol, Britain and the Balkans: 1991 Until the Present (Oxon: Routledge, 2006), pp. 68
100
Kaufman, Joyce P, NATO and the Former Yugoslavia: Crisis, Conflict and the Atlantic Alliance (Oxford:
Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, INC, 2002), pp. 80
101
Rose, General Sir Michael, Fighting for Peace (London: The Harvill Press, 1998), pp. 14
102
Wybrow, Robert J, ‘British Attitudes Towards the Bosnian Situation’, Richard Sobel, Eric Shiraev, Robert
Shapiro (ed.), International Public Opinion and the Bosnia Crisis (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishing
Group, 2003), pp. 61
103
Foreign and Commonwealth Office, ‘The Case Against International Military Intervention in Bosnia’, The
Former Yugoslavia: Briefing Note, October 1992, FO973/700, The National Archives

25
Britain’s policy towards the former Yugoslavia was operated mainly by Hurd and
Defence Secretary Malcolm Rifkind, and when negotiating with fellow European leaders,
Hurd was considered the leading voice opposing military intervention to protect the Bosniaks
so as not to spread the fighting further.104
Likewise, Lord Henley (Oliver Eden) told the
House of Lords on 17 December 1993 that ‘if one is providing aid, one has two choices: one
can either get the aid in with cooperation; or one can fight one’s way in. We do not believe
that the right way forward is to try to fight our way in with aid’.105
Jane Sharp points out that
‘when passive peacekeepers are maldeployed into the middle of an ongoing war, not only do
they not hasten the end of the conflict, but they encourage more offensive action from the
strongest belligerent’.106
It was clear to the British government that the aggressors were not
prepared to cooperate, yet British leaders were the most influential in preventing a more
forceful UN response to the hostility. Danish and Swedish peacekeeping troops were
allegedly much more effective in their approach; a Swedish commander threatened Serbs
with violence when they refused to let their convoys through and when a Danish troop was
asked why she had released 700 rounds against the Serbs she responded ‘that’s all I had’.107
The British government dragged their feet with UNPROFOR compared to their fellow
member states. Throughout the Bosnian wars, the British government did not once suggest
that UNPROFOR be terminated, however, they did use the presence of peacekeepers as an
excuse to reject calls for more decisive action.108
Conservative Party member David Congdon
suggested to the Commons that the government must be careful when discussing military
intervention that ‘might put our troops at risk’.109
Although they provided a large amount of
the force, they did so with no intention of putting their lives at stake.
Many have argued that religion has played a large role in the inaction of the British
government regarding the Bosnian genocide. Influential Christian groups and church leaders
opposed the lifting of the arms embargo and Michael Sells claims that ‘the position of many
church groups that the best way to stop the violence was by “tightening” the arms embargo
neglected the fact that the Serb army had enough weapons and weapons factories to last
years’.110
With Bosnia’s independence being recognised by the international community
104
Bartrop, Paul Robert, A Biographical Encyclopedia of Contemporary Genocide: Portraits of Evil and Good
(California: ABC – CLIO, LLC, 2012), pp. 132
105
Henley, Lord, in Hansard Parliamentary Debates (House of Lords), 17 December 1993, vol. 550
106
Sharp, Honest Broker, pp. 18
107
Sharp, Honest Broker, pp. 18
108
Melvern and Williams, ‘Britannia Waived the Rules’, pp. 4
109
Congdon, David, in Hansard Parliamentary Debates (House of Commons), 18 May 1993, vol. 225
110
Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, pp. 129

26
shortly before the outbreak of war in the former Yugoslavia, G. Scott David posed the
question, would ‘Europe be able to tolerate a flourishing non-Christian cultural entity?’111
This is interesting as Britain was a secular society in the 1990s, with religion playing a very
small part in the thoughts and behaviour of most British people, however Callum Brown
argues that religious conflict in the former Yugoslavia appeared to reaffirm a religious
identity in Britain.112
The religious conflict in the Balkans was seen as a result of their
Islamic identities and a lack of Christian identity. Although Britain was not a religious
country at this time, British civilisation is considered to be a result of Christian history; it is
still a factor of national identity. There was a tendency by NATO powers to use the religion
of Bosnia in an Orientalist fashion, for example diplomats often talked of the ‘Muslim-
dominated government of Bosnia-Herzegovina’,113
as though this information affected the
credibility of the leaders. Serbian propagandists, such as Miroljub Jevtic, depicted Islam as
totalitarian.114
Totalitarianism is generally associated with Stalinism and Nazism, historically
the biggest threat to Europe and resonated as such throughout the continent during the
Yugoslav wars. Davis argues that the decision to withhold arms from Bosnia for fear of the
conflict spreading was grounded solely on a fear of Islam.115
This focus on Islam has also
been seen in the British media headlines at the time of the Bosnian conflict as identified in
the first chapter, suggesting that Brown is correct and that there was a consensus between the
British media and government based on a Christian national identity. However, Brendan
Simms argues that British ‘policies were not obviously driven by Islamaphobia’ and that no
theories can explain Britain’s ‘peculiarly disastrous’ policy towards genocide in Bosnia.116
Further, if this was the case then surely more aid would have been given to Rwanda, a
predominantly Christian state, but there is no evidence to suggest that religion played a role
in Britain’s policy towards Rwanda. The evidence does however suggest that although, as
Simms states, religion was not an obvious feature of British policy towards Bosnia, there was
a pattern of anti-Islamic sentiment in British media headlines and government rhetoric. This
would imply that the new world order would apply only to desirous parts of the world, such
as Christian states.
111
Davis, Religion and Justice, pp. 43
112
Brown, Callum, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxon: Routledge, 2014), pp. 2
113
114
115
116
Simms, Unfinest Hour, pp. 3

27
There was a rhetoric towards Bosnia within the British government similar to that of
the media which can be described as Balkanist. After World War II, the Balkans seemed to
have established itself as a ‘homogenous appendix’ of the Soviet Union in the eyes of the
West.117
This manifested itself in Britain as a way of applying a judgement of the Balkans to
the victims in Bosnia. There is a historical image of an abstract East and West, barbarism and
civilisation.118
This perception of Eastern Europe continued in British rhetoric after the Cold
War. John Major described the crisis in Bosnia which was gradually beginning to emerge as a
genocide, as a result ‘of impersonal and inevitable historical forces beyond anyone’s
control’.119
This suggests that certain societies are more vulnerable to violence and genocide
than others, which comes from the assumption that Eastern Europe and the Balkans are
‘wired up’ in this way.120
This attitude is linked to media representations of the Balkans and
the belief that the Balkans are backward and uncivilised. This may go some way to
explaining the arms embargo placed on the whole of Yugoslavia, as though the whole area is
inherently primitive. Rifkind claimed that the history of the Balkans must be examined even
before the 1930s in order to explain the conflict in the 1990s, again reinforcing the concept of
‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ which were culturally determined, rather than a Serbian war of
aggression.121
According to Jean Seaton and Tim Allen, this evaluation ‘enabled the
governments of rich, industrial states to absolve themselves of responsibility for what was
happening’.122
This highlights that British human rights principles were selective of culture
and presumptions about the Balkan mentality prevented the British government from taking
more forceful action against the Serbs.
The evidence presented in this chapter indicates that the British government made
conscious decisions to avoid intervention despite ample evidence to suggest that human rights
abuses were taking place. It is well documented that international bystanders ‘set the
parameters within which the killing could be and was carried out with impunity’.123
And
Britain was heavily complicit in this, responding to atrocities in Rwanda and Bosnia with
national self-interest as a platform. By refusing to acknowledge the Genocide Convention
1948; preventing the Bosnian government from defending itself by imposing an arms
117
118
119
Levene, Mark, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: Volume 1: The Meaning of Genocide (London: I.B.
Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2005), pp. 91
120
Levene, Genocide, pp. 91
121
Gallagher, The Balkans after the Cold War, pp. 96
122
Seaton, Jean, and Allen, Tim, The Media of Conflict: War Reporting and Representations of Ethnic Violence
(London: Zed Books Ltd, 1999), pp. 2
123
Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, pp. 129

28
embargo; failing to fully implement a necessary arms embargo on extremist Hutus in
Rwanda; through reluctance to provide essential resources to UNAMIR and UNPROFOR;
calling for less troops to be deployed in both assistance missions in order to protect their own
troops; and by basing decisions on a traditional Christian and European identity which did not
involve the Bosnian victims, the British government failed to maintain its commitment to
human rights as outlined at the close of the Cold War. This chapter has also identified a
consensus between the British government and the media and patterns across both, indicating
that both institutions have combined to form a policy of indifference towards genocide in
Bosnia and Rwanda.

29
Conclusion
The Bosnian and Rwandan genocides offered a chance for Britain to demonstrate its
new focus on human rights after the Cold War. Without the threat of Soviet influence in
Europe and the Third World, Britain and other UN member states were able to turn their
focus on the maintenance of peace and human rights. However, as Mikhail Gorbachev has
suggested, Western countries were unable to view the world from a moral stance after
communism as they were ‘bound hand and foot by egoistical calculations’.124
This
dissertation has argued that national security and self-interest continued to dominate British
foreign policy in the face of genocide and ethnic cleansing. As a result, more than 500, 000
Rwandans and more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed.125
The British media and
the Major government failed to protect the victims of genocide despite its alleged
commitment to world peace and human rights at the close of the Cold War.
.The first chapter has highlighted the British media’s role in the neglect of the
genocides. Through its stance of moral relativism, the genocides were dismissed as an
example of tribalism and none of the West’s business. It was also not portrayed as a
genocide, but an ethnic war, further validating moral relativism. Likewise, the conflict in
Bosnia was depicted as a result of ethnic hatred. Balkanism has also been identified in the
British media at this time, used as an argument against intervention. This was contrasted with
the view that the Bosniaks were neighbours, fellow Europeans who required our help, which
suggests that the Rwandan’s ethnicity impeded on Britain’s desire to intervene. Coverage of
Newsnight has been significant, due to the previous focus on the print media. Newsnight
censored footage for the benefit of its viewers, giving an inaccurate representation of the
conflict in Rwanda. Reporters on the ground during the conflict attribute the media’s failure
to the position of objectivity expected of journalists, as the coverage did not identify a victim
in the conflicts. Finally, the media was preoccupied with the refugee crisis which emerged as
a result of the genocide in Rwanda, which was both simpler to cover and allowed Britain to
be portrayed in a more charitable light. This chapter has argued that these factors meant that
124 Gorbachev, Mikhail, ‘Postscript: From a New Philosophy to a New Politics’, Mikhail Gorbachev and
Daisaku Ikeda (ed.) Moral Lessons of the Twentieth Century: Gorbachev and Ikeda on Buddhism and
Communism (London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2005), pp. 146
125 Destexhe, Alain, Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (London: Pluto Press, 1995), pp. 68; Smith,
Genocide and the Europeans, pp. 108

30
the British public, without accurate media coverage, were unable to form an attachment to the
victims and therefore expressed no interest in a military intervention.
The second chapter has highlighted that the British government placed national self-
interest before human rights which resulted in the neglect of the victims of genocide. John
Major’s political ideology explains his approach to foreign policy and his commitment to
national interest. The refusal of the government to acknowledge the Genocide Convention in
discussions on the Rwandan genocide meant that there was no legal obligation to intervene.
The implementation of the arms embargo on the former Yugoslavia and the failure to fully
implement an embargo on the genocidal Rwandan government have been seen as aiding and
abetting genocide. The British government did not take the peacekeeping missions seriously
in Rwanda and Bosnia, prioritising the safety of troops over the prevention of human rights
violations, by supplying minimal resources. There is also evidence of prejudice towards the
Muslim victims in Bosnia, as can be seen in the media, and of a Christian identity in rhetoric
towards the crisis. As in the media, Balkanist attitudes within government propagated the
view that there was nothing the West could do to help an inherently volatile region such as
the Balkans.
This dissertation has therefore argued that the British media and the British
government shared a rhetoric which formed a dismissive policy towards genocide in Bosnia
and Rwanda. Many of the attitudes that have been identified in the British media towards the
Bosnian and Rwandan genocides can also be seen in British government rhetoric and foreign
policy, and vice versa. Both displayed antipathy towards the fact that the Bosnian victims
were Muslim. Both portrayed the Balkans as a homogenous, backward cultural block. Both
the media and the government were guilty of misrepresenting the conflicts as civil wars in
which both sides were evenly matched, rather than genocides. This meant that the British
population were not accurately informed of the events in Bosnia and Rwanda and therefore
did not form enough of an attachment to push for government intervention. Additionally, the
discussions in parliament and the Security Council happened away from the public eye,
therefore the British population was unaware of the policies made by the British government
behind closed doors. This affected how much pressure was placed on the government to
intervene in the crises. This confirms Melvern’s argument that ‘there is secrecy in
Government and a lack of interest in the media’, as the lack of interest was possibly a result
of the secrecy in government.126
There is no reliable evidence to suggest that one influenced
126

31
the other more. The primary sources consulted for this dissertation show that the media often
referred to government rhetoric and vice versa. But this dissertation highlights a relationship
between the two which contributed to an overall policy of indifference towards the genocides
in Bosnia and Rwanda.

32
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1353751.html

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