Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia

"Unfinest Hour" is the first book fully to lay bare the hypocrisy and incompetence of British policy towards Bosnia. It shows how, inspired by the best of intentions, a group of British politicians and soldiers succeeded in ruining every international initiative to help the besieged Bosnian government. The sheer enormity of Britain's failure has been little understood. "Unfinest Hour"'s task is to make it emphatically clear. For in the early 1990s a weak and jaded British government thrust itself into stage-managing the world's response to the break-up of Yugoslavia. Through a mixture of arrogance and misjudgement a policy was embarked upon which denied weapons to the legitimate government in Sarajevo. This disaster was then compounded by Britain's role in the United Nations Protection Force: a force with a serious enforcement mandate, which the British above all rendered largely ineffective. Well-trained British troops were ordered to stand by as Serb militas killed and cleansed at will. As outrage followed outrage, Britain became estranged from all her principal allies, grimly pursuing to its end a course of action with neither humanity nor logic. Simms brings back to life the deeply flawed figures from that period - Hurd, Rifkind, Owen and Rose - and the self-appointed experts who connived in their policies. Driven beyond endurance by Britain's behaviour, the United States eventually intervened in 1995, swiftly breaking the militias' hold on Bosnia and in a fortnight showing the absurdity of the policy of the previous three years. This absurdity had in the meantime led to the death and displacement of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Bosnians. "Unfinest Hour" is both a brilliant polemic and an important "first draft" of history, which tackles what is still the most raw and disturbing issue in contemporary Europe.

Table of Contents:
"No intervention" - defining government policy; "the lowest common denominator" - Britain stifles America, 1991-1993; "the real stumbling block" - Britain stifles Nato, 1993-1995; "let me through, I'm a doctor" - David Owen and the mediation effort; "the men on the ground"; the hour of the experts; "emulsifying the whole affair" - parliament and the public sphere; the reckoning.

About the Author :
Brendan Simms is director of studies in history at Peterhouse and the Newton Sheehy Lecturer in International Relations at the Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge. He is the author of THE IMPACT OF NAPOLEON and many articles and reviews on the wars of the Yugoslav succession, the Third Reich, and international history.