The Butcher of Srebrenica: A UN Officer Had Drinks, ‘Lefts’ Had Clean Slogans, by John Davies – 1 September 2026

The Serbian general and war criminal Ratko Mladić, the butcher of Srebrenica and too many other places to mention, died last week. It’s an opportunity for reflection, and I felt I couldn’t let it pass.

Bosnia, of which I had previously barely heard, played a big part in my life in the 1990s. I got involved with Workers Aid in 1993, and it sort of swallowed me up.

At the height of the Serbian wars on Bosnia and Kosova, this working class solidarity initiative sent about twenty convoys of aid to those countries. We started with the mining town of Tuzla, in Bosnia, whose miners had sent material support to the British miners in their great strike of 1984-85.

When Bosnia was part of Yugoslavia (until 1992), Tuzla had the highest level of inter-marriage between the three religious groups (not that religion had much sway in many former Yugoslav towns). In the final census before the break-up it had the highest percentage of citizens who identified as Yugoslav, rather than Bosnian, Serb, Croat or other nationalities.

It was the spirit of places like Tuzla that Ratko Mladić and the Serb nationalist leader Radovan Karadzic had to destroy. Mladić’s forces murdered hundreds in nearby Brcko, and threw the bodies into the river Sava. Other towns suffered similar fates, particularly in eastern Bosnia.

Tuzla, however, survived – as did its Serb Orthodox church, protected by its citizens, of all faiths.

Seeing the success of the Serb ethnic cleansers, from 1991 western governments were happy to oversee Bosnia being carved up into ethnic statelets. They drew up a series of plans to do just this, all of which failed in the face of determined Bosnian opposition.

Western complicity was evident from the beginning. For example, although the CIA knew about Serb death and rape camps in the Prijedor region, it kept shtum for more than a year.

The worst of the killing took place in 1992, when Bosnia had very little with which to defend itself – the bulk of the Yugoslav army, with its largely Serb officer corps, had gone over to Mladić.

In the face of this huge military disparity, Douglas Hurd, the old-Etonian British foreign secretary, opposed lifting the arms embargo on Bosnia – as did David Owen before him and Malcolm Rifkind afterwards. Hurd drawled that “we don’t want a level killing field”.

This was a patrician, Tory, and thoroughly laughable nod towards pacifist opposition to war in general.

It echoed the condescending drivel in the media about Balkan people being predisposed to war and fighting (rather like the Irish – remember them? – or for that matter the “fascist Ukrainans”) and of having “primitive ethnic hatreds”, the cliché of the hour.

But when people are attacked they defend themselves. And un-level killing fields are particularly bloody places.

Although the killing by Mladić’s forces continued after 1992, it did so at a slower pace, as the Bosnian defences became organised. But as we moved into 1995 everyone who had been paying attention knew that two eastern Bosnian enclaves, Srebrenica and Zepa, were vulnerable.

These contained largely Muslim populations and were a demographic anomaly for those planning ethnic division. Srebrenica’s citizens had organised its defence well, with one particular heavy gun commanding a large area.

But in 1994 they handed over these defences to the UN military force UNPROFOR, on the understanding that both Srebrenica and Zepa would become designated “Safe Areas” under UN protection. Then, in the spring of 1995, Mladić’s forces surrounded Srebrenica, the larger of the two enclaves.

In July 1995, some days before the massacre which ensued, I attended a large public meeting at Leeds University. On the top table were Tariq Ali and Alex Callinicos, a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

Tariq Ali called for the UN to intervene – it already had, catastrophically – and Callinicos pushed the SWP line of “a plague on all your houses”.

Far from calling for lifting the arms embargo, imposed at the beginning of the war – so as to allow the defenceless Bosnians to defend themselves – Callinicos argued that the Balkan working class had to pull its socks up and unite. Taking sides was out of the question.

The slogan “self-defence is no offence” was relevant, as far as the SWP was concerned, to an attack on an Asian grandmother in Bradford … but deemed out of bounds for her Muslim counterpart in Srebrenica.

The SWP – like most of the “left”, to be fair – preserved its pristine rhetoric throughout the war, a condescending neutrality maintained while watching more than a hundred thousand Bosnians murdered. All whilst mouthing vapid slogans.

And UNPROFOR, having taken over control of the military positions defending Srebrenica, handed over those same positions to Mladić’s Serb nationalists. The UNPROFOR Dutch soldiers then helped Mladić separate the men and boys, thus facilitating the murder of about 8,000 innocent civilians.

More than 30 years later, many on the “left” still feel uncomfortable talking about Bosnia and Kosova. Some – including, shamefully, Noam Chomsky – even went as far as to question the reality of what had happened.

NATO had bombed Serbia: surely, the logic went, the Serbs could not therefore be the bad guys.

I saw a similar skewed, binary logic at play in the 2010s, when “left” groups denied the crimes of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. And today, when they deny Russian atrocities in Ukraine.

Ratko Mladić was a monster. You can read first hand accounts of his chilling behaviour at Srebrenica – statements given by mothers, describing how Mladić watched and smiled reassuringly, as sixteen-year-old boys were taken away to be mowed down in a nearby field.

But Mladić was aided by the UN’s complicity, and in the case of Thomas Karremans, the Dutch UNPROFOR commander at Srebrenica, they toasted that complicity with slivovitz.

As for the British “left”, the vast majority of it kept their slogans clean.

This text was first published on People and Nature.

The Butcher of Srebrenica: A UN Officer Had Drinks, ‘Lefts’ Had Clean Slogans, by John Davies – 1 September 2026

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