Old Europe

Jeremy Harding

• Indictment at The Hague: The Milosevic Regime and the Crimes of the Balkan Wars by Norman Cigar and Paul Williams
  New York, 339 pp, US $24.95, July 2002, ISBN 0 8147 1626 1
• Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia by Brendan Simms
  Penguin, 464 pp, £8.99, July 2002, ISBN 0 14 028983 6
• Under Orders: War Crimes in Kosovo by Fred Abrahams
  Human Rights Watch, 593 pp, £18.00, October 2001, ISBN 1 56432 264 5
• Milosevic: A Biography by Adam LeBor
  Bloomsbury, 386 pp, £20.00, October 2002, ISBN 0 7475 6090 0

In 1992, the UN Security Council opened a dossier on breaches of humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions in the former Yugoslavia. Paragraph 5 of UNSC Resolution 771 called on all states or humanitarian organisations with knowledge of such violations to pass it on to the Security Council. These were the early days when Bosnia was high on Clinton’s list of priorities (it remained a priority for many in his first Administration long after the President had lost interest), and the US made several submissions.