Gregory R. Copley

Defense & Foreign Affairs' Strategic Policy, September, 1995

SIR HENRY Wotton lived in simpler times. He died in 1639, having uttered the immortal phrase: "An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for his country." Today, the sophists of diplomacy would argue that "truth" and "lies" are relative and that it is an ambassador's job to do whatever is necessary to project the policy of his government. There is a more holistic view which can (and generally is) taken of diplomacy which says that a diplomat must protect his government's immediate interests while at the same time maintaining his country's long-term interests, credibility and respect.

The August "mortar attack" in Trznica marketplace in Sarajevo was used by the United States as the focus for the creation of a wider war against the Bosnian Serbs; a war designed to enshrine total control over Bosnia-Herzegovina into the hands of a minority government which no longer holds a constitutional mandate from the people of that land. We said at the time (in the previous edition of this journal) that the premise for the wider war was based upon a deliberate mis-interpretation of the facts, compounded by a bullying use of diplomacy to ensure that the United Nations supported the US position.

This has now been borne out by evidence. It has now become public knowledge that British (and later French) teams of crater experts were in the Trznica market 40 minutes after the incident, and confirmed that the attacks could not have been the work of the Bosnian Serbs, but had been undertaken by the Izetbegovic forces against their own people in order to disrupt ongoing peace negotiations. So we now know that, thanks to the deliberate bombing of its own people by the Izetbegovic security forces and forceful diplomacy by the US, a wider war was created which will cause massive dislocation for generations.

We also saw, at the end of September, public acknowledgement that the Croatian offensive to "ethnically cleanse" the Krajina area of Croatia of Croatian Serbs who had been living there for centuries, had resuited in the deaths and torture of many civilians, and the forceable displacement of a quarter-million people from their homes.