The Killing Fields of Srebrenica - Our History or Our Destiny?

Sousse, Tunisia last week

Ten days ago in Sousse, Tunisia, crowds of people rested by swimming pools and on sandy beaches enjoying the warmth of the Mediterranean sun. A man approached with a sun brolly which concealed his automatic firearm. Within an hour, 38 people - including 30 British tourists - were dead and others seriously injured. Local people, at great personal risk, cornered the gunman who was later shot dead by the police. He was, it became known, inspired by the Islamic State and its call to arms against unbelievers.

Ten years ago tomorrow, in London, hundreds of thousands of people headed for work on a warm July morning. While some took the bus, many massed into the stairwells and lifts that descended into the Undergound tunnels of the city's tube system. Among them were three men from Yorkshire wearing backpacks, like tourists heading for the airport. As their separate trains headed round the multi-coloured lines that snake beneath the British capital, they pressed the buttons that linked through wires to the packs of explosives strapped around their bodies, exploding themselves in tiny, cramped spaces. As a fourth man on the surface, disoriented when he found his designated tube station closed for repairs, boarded a bus and blew

Murder in Russell Square, London, 7 July 2005

himself up along with several passengers, 52 people met their deaths as they went around their daily work routine, with over 700 maimed and injured.

As it would be in Sousse, the four men drew their inspiration from a belief that they were acting in the name of their Muslim faith. Their deaths and their taking of lives would be rewarded in the afterlife.

Twenty years ago, today, with the blessing by the Christian priest done, the Serbian paramilitary commander signalled his men forward. For months they had surrounded the thousands of Muslim civilians and a handful of lightly armed defenders huddled into the small protected town of Srebrenica in the Bosnian valley below. A small United Nations force of largely Dutch blue helmets provided thin cover between the two groups and melted out of the way as the well-armed attackers moved on the town, their heavy armour provided by the remnants of the Yugoslav Federal Army. As the inhabitants fled into an ever smaller area around the Dutch military compound, the military observers reported that the Serbs were "ethnically cleansing" the streets and buildings that came under their control in the name of Christian civilisation.

Within five days, after the Dutch troops watched as the Serbs separated men and boys from women and put them all on separate buses to drive them off into the hills, over 8,000 unarmed Bosniac Muslim males lay dead in ditches, in fields and in mineshafts. To this day, many are unrecovered and those that are come in shattered bundles of broken bones and partial bodies.

The three scenarios may be separated by decades, by thousands of miles and by different faiths and lives. But they are intimately, fatefully connected and they each and together provide an awful warning of what may lie ahead if we let it be so.

Srebrenica was just the latest of many, many atrocities committed by the Serbian rebels led by Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, proteges of the nationalistic President of the Serbian Republic, Slobodan Milosevic. They had rebelled in 1992 against the democratically elected government of Bosnia Hercegovina and, fuelled, funded and armed by Milosevic, they set out with the declared aim of eliminating the 1,800,000 Bosnian Muslims who made up around 45% of the population of the newly independent state. Karadzic declared that, although from the same genetic stock as himself, Bosnian Muslims were to have "no further hope of survival or continued existence."  
Over three bloody years, their army of butchers killed about one in every twenty Muslims and displaced many more. Rape camps worked to impregnate captive Muslim women with Christian Serb men's children and communities that had lived peacefully alongside and with each other for several centuries were wiped out forever.

Although all this happened on the doorstep of Europe, with a few notable exceptions, European politicians stood by wringing their hands. They claimed to impose an arms embargo on the area, a chilling echo of the Spanish civil war when, as in Bosnia, a democratically elected government was only thinly armed against well-equipped rightwing militarists and embargoes served merely to stack the odds ever more in favour of the nationalists. The British Government was particularly active in opposing any intervention to stop the bloodshed - Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd was especially keen to express the need to not get involved, although he was personally very happy to get very involved in lucrative business deals with the Milosevic regime a few years later.

The Bosnia war was finally brought to an end after a short bombing campaign by US jets against the rebel Serbs' positions around besieged Sarajevo, but the damage was done. With nearly 90% of the civilian dead Muslims, the apparent willingness of Europe to stand aside while tens of thousands of "westernised, integrated" Muslims were slaughtered purely for their faith gave an abundance of fuel to the hate preachers and extremists who wanted to turn the gaps and misunderstandings between the West and Islam into a chasm of violence and division.

In this context, the appalling London bombings, on the tenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, are not excused or legitimised in any way but there is little doubt that the Bosnian bloodbath radicalised many younger Muslims and made their recruitment by the psychopaths of ISIS and al Qaeda that bit easier.

And now, another decade on and the blood flows - in Sousse, in Paris, in Aleppo, Baghdad, Raqqa, Damascus, Gaza... the list is endless. And the plans for the future? The answer to the deathly black flags and the murders amidst the ruins of Palmyra? More bombing, more weapons, more death.

The phrase that those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it is hackneyed, but never more true. But perhaps what is even more important is how history is written and what is remembered. For in so many narratives, on all sides, only snippets and single events are recalled, commemorated and alternately reviled or celebrated.

Mass burial of Srebernica dead, 2010: 1,500 bodies remain missing

Churchill said that "History will be kind to me as I am going to write it" and this has never been more so than now, when our media and commentators rarely go much beyond last week to explain the events of the day. To them, Bosnia is as obscurely distant in time and as irrelevant as the War of Jenkins Ear or the Vikings' sack of Lucca. But, as even today bodies are recovered and children born of industrial-scale rape reach adulthood, it has never been more important to understand how the prejudice and conflicts of the past are the building blocks of today. Everything is connected, as we all are, and commemoration of the past is pointless unless we learn from it so we both understand today and make a better tomorrow.

"The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice," was Mark Twain's verdict. In a world shaped by the poison pens of the Daily Mail and the narratives of the bloodthirsty, arms manufacturing elite, we must look hard, listen hard and reflect on the truth so often buried from view. And that is that what unites humanity is in fact much more than the cultures, faiths and traditions that are held up to divide us by the Presidents and Prime Ministers, by the Caliphs and Kings - by those who do not want us to question the grip they hold on our world.

For the true history is that people of all faiths and none have lived in peace for incalculably more time than they have fought with each other. Our hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares are much the same, regardless of the trappings of difference in clothes or buildings or customs or ritual. But for some it is an inconvenient truth and a dangerous one for their continued domain over the rest of us. Their watchword is our ignorance.

Srebrenica, London, Sousse. They are our history, but they do not need to be our destiny.


Previous posts on Bosnia -  "The Ghosts of Bosnia"
                                               "Indicting Mladic for Srebrenica, Sarajevo - and London"

Balkan Echoes

The Mothers of Srebrenica - the surviving relatives of the 7,000 Muslim men and boys butchered in 1995.

A Dutch Court has today ruled that the Dutch state is liable for the actions of Dutch soldiers, operating as part of the UN peacekeeping forces during the Bosnian war, who delivered some 300 Bosniac men and boys into the arms of their Serb murderers in Srebrenica back in 1995 were guilty of war crimes. The decision, taken following a case brought by the "Mothers of Srebernica", is welcome and long overdue. But it also highlights the ongoing hypocrisy and disregard of western governments towards the victims of European wide nationalist and neo-Nazi groups.

Who can forget these days back in  late June and early July1995? TV cameras covered the crowds of scared and hungry civilians crammed into the supposed safe zone; while the Dutch UN commander promised that he would not leave the terrified Muslims, mostly unarmed and surrounded by heavily weaponised Serbian paramilitaries. For months, they had been terrorised and starved until now their tormentors moved in. In the midst of this, 300 men ad several thousand women took refuge inside the UN compound itself - only to be herded out by their supposed protectors, the Dutch troops. They were assured that General Ratko Mladic himself had guaranteed their safe passage in spite of the obvious hollowness of his many, casually proffered previous promises.

Forced out of the compound in untypically decisive action by the UN in Bosnia, the three hundred joined the queues outside. Ominously, the women were separated from the men, supposedly to go to safety on different buses.

Except, as we know, the men's ones never turned up on the other side of the warring lines. Instead, 7,000 males, from teenage boys to crippled elderly men were led into the hills and then, as Christian priests blessed their executioners, they were shot and bludgeoned to death in the single worst act of genocide in Europe since the close of the Second World War. Their bodies were abused and dumped in mass graves and down old mine shafts in a clumsy attempt to put any evidence beyond the reach of any future investigators.

And, of course, the Dutch commander did not stay, instead getting as far away as possible.

The media of course was more than equivocal about the whole event - just as with Gaza now, the one sided nature of the Bosnian war, in which over 85% of casualties were Bosniac Muslims, the BBC and other western outlets suggested that the arms embargo favoured by the EU somehow "levelled the playing field" (or killing zone would have been more appropriate). In truth, given that the Serbs started with the full panoply of the well armed former Yugoslav army behind them while the Bosniacs started with a few police pistols and partisan rifles from World War 2 museums, the embargo in fact ensured ongoing Serb supremacy. This was only brought down when, finally shamed into action by the shelling of Sarajevo market, the UN finally approved the bombing of Serbian gun emplacements around besieged Sarajevo. A ceasefire and peacetalks leading to the Dayton Accords swiftly followed, but, of course, it has taken nearly twenty years for the families of the men butchered at Sarajevo to find even a smidgen of recognition of the UN's collusion with the Serb rebels.

And, as this Court finding is finally given, another tragedy with very similar traits and motives is playing itself out several hundred miles to the east of Bosnia - on the steppes of the Ukraine, the rightwing regime that came to power by overthrowing the democratically elected President has, with much western backing, more or less consolidated its hold over Russian speaking areas in the east. In spite of much hostile media coverage of Russia's attempts to protect ethnic Russians from the predations of fascist and far right vigilantes favoured by the Kiev irredentists, Putin has not overtly intervened and the Russian militias portrayed as extremists by the west have been almost completely eliminated.

But one look at who is busy fighting for the Ukraine regime immediately raises serious concerns about what is going on, and where Ukraine is headed - Scandinavian "volunteers" proclaiming that they are engaged in a race war for "the white Christian people". This statement does seem all the more odd given that most Russians are fairly white; until you reflect on Hitler's views of the Russian Slavs as what their name originally meant - an underclass, or under-race of slaves.

The Azov Unit uses the Wolfsangel banner once favoured by the Nazis.

Operating as part of the Azov militia, an outfit echoing the Serbian Arkan Tigers of the Bosnian genocide, they openly parade Nazi flags and symbols. Indeed, Nazi views are widespread among the European right - anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish, persecutors of the Roma minority, many of their proclamations make the chilling "manifesto" of Utoya murderer Anders Breivic seem like a children's book by comparison.

The West, keen to get its hands on Ukrainian shale gas (the new regime has signed a 50 year deal with western energy bosses, including the son of US Vice-President Joe Biden and a close friend of Secretary of State John Kerry, which hands over their national treasure to big foreign corporations), has happily backed all manner of misfits and extremists. The coup d'etat in the Ukraine by a mob including racists, anti-Semites and out and out neo-Nazis, some of whom are now members of the Government, highlights very much what the true focus of western interventions in states around the world are actually about. As John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN under the Bush Presidency said of the Iraq war, it was never about freedom and democracy; it is about American (Western) interests. And money.

Dangerous genies were let loose two decades ago when Britain in particular connived in the destruction of Bosnia; and as we remember the ghosts of Bosnia today, the news from the East remains as grimly unsurprising as ever as the tragic cycles of history repeat, again and again.

Chilling echoes - right-wing militia round up ethnically suspect Russians.

The Ghosts of Bosnia

Miss Sarajevo contest 1993, held by the citizens whilst under siege by Mladic's  rebel Serbs

Ratko Mladic has now been given a month to read up and prepare to respond to the charges against him, ranging from murder to genocide. As might have been expected, he fulminated against the legitimacy of the court and refused to comment on the charge sheet. Instead, the former military commander of Bosnian Serb nationalists choose to glare and gesticulate obscenely in the direction of the bereaved relatives of just some of the tens of thousands of predominantly Muslim civilians slaughtered during the war of 1992 - 1995, when Serb rebels, armed by Serbia proper, tried to secede from the Bosnia-Hercegovinan state by force and "ethnic cleansing".

With the passage of time, the West has nearly forgotten what happened - not that it did much to acknowledge the slaughter on the European Union's doorstep whilst it was going on. As blogged previously, Europe not only did nothing but, by means of an arms blockade against both sides, it ensured that the Serbs continued to have a massive inbuilt advantage, supplied as they were by the remnants of the Yugoslav Federal Army. Led by Britain, Europe repeatedly denied American pressure to intervene with UK Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd and Britain's Balkans envoy Lord David Owen (who memorably and pompously told Sarajevans,"Don't, don't don't live under this dream that the West is going to come and solve this problem. Don't dream dreams.") both utterly adamant that Sarajevo should be abandoned to its fate. (Hurd was to go on to make a large quantity of money helping the Serb Government privatise its communications industry). At best the conflict was deemed simply too confusing for western Europeans to be bothered to follow or, at worst, the Bosnian Muslims, the largest group in Bosnia, were portrayed as eastern interlopers, ready to remake Saudi Arabia in the Balkan hills, when nothing could have been further from the truth.

A few weeks ago, as Mladic was heading to the Hague, yet another mass grave was found in Bosnia. And yet again, the people in it were Muslims.

Bosnian Muslim refugees

And this is the thing: looking at the one hundred thousand people confirmed dead, the overwhelming majority were Muslim Bosniacs - especially among the civilian dead, where Muslims account for nearly 85% of deaths. And looking at a map of where mass graves have been found, they are exclusively in the territories that were under the Serb rebels' control through the war. It is hardly surprising then, that these crimes against humanity, which took place a short journey from the holiday beaches of north Italy, served to radicalise many of the younger western Muslims who ended up fighting and bombing for al-Qaeda. It does not excuse terrorism, but it certainly explains it.

By contrast, in Bosnia itself, the Arab fighters who turned up to help the Muslims were treated with suspicion and in the main were eventually asked to leave. Although Saudi development money was sent to the country after the conflict (with mosques reportedly prioritised over any other reconstruction work in spite of the plight of local people), the Muslim Bosniacs were and remain far from the zealous fundamentalists they were portrayed as by both the Serbs and elements of the western media.

Not that it should have mattered, but, in truth, most defenders of Bosnia were casually religious until the attacks on them because of their faith inevitably sharpened their identity as Muslims. For centuries, they had lived alongside ethnically-identical Catholic, Orthodox and Jewish communities, gradually intermarrying. The Communist era saw many of all backgrounds turn to agnosticism and atheism. After hosting the 1984 Winter Olympics, Sarajevo became an international city, with, for example, none of the hallmarks in women's dress of Riyadh. Even during the siege of the city by the Christian Serbs, a monstrous three-year long affair, its young people continued to hold rock concerts, film shows and beauty parades - the latter melancholically celebrated in the U2 song, "Miss Sarajevo", and which ended with the contestants poignantly parading a banner pleading to the World; "Don't let them kill us." Asked by CNN what she would do with her year as Miss Sarajevo, the winner, Inela Nogic, reflecting the reality of life in her city, replied, "I don't have any plans. I could be dead tomorrow."

Our past defines us; how we got where we are and became who we are. As with all nations, Britain likes to choose the good bits - fighting Hitler, inventing penicillin and building the first railway. But as with all nations, we have acted questionably and wrongly many, many times. Avoiding these, ignoring the lessons or closing our eyes to our national culpability do nothing to help shape a safe and secure future.

So as these shrivelled bodies are exhumed from their unmarked graves, their violent endings evident from the remains, don't turn away. Don't pretend it was nothing to do with us or that it is somehow all in the past. The xenophobia and racism that manifested itself in these hills and valleys exists still in every country in the world, ready to burst out like poisonous buds as soon as the conditions are right. If we close our eyes to the past, we end up blind to the future too.

Miss Sarajevo 1993, Inela Nogic, visiting the graves of some of the 15,000 mainly Muslim inhabitants killed in the siege - over 1,500 of them children. Sarajevans were westernised and liberal, but this still wasn't enough for fascists, nationalists and Christian zealots to accept Muslims in Europe. There are lessons for our whole troubled Continent to learn from this most sordid of episodes to leave its bloody stain on the pages of Europe's story

Indicting Mladic - for Srebrenica, Sarajevo...and London

Former Bosnian Serb army commander General Ratko Mladic has amazingly been "found" by the Serbian authorities living in a house owned by his cousin, also called "Mladic", and is now on a fast track extradition process to the International Court at The Hague to stand trial for war crimes. He is likely to have a combined trial with his old boss, former President of the rebel Republic of Srpska, Radovan Karadzic, who similarly enjoyed many years of refuge in Serbia using one of the most obvious and unconvincing disguises in history - a big beard.

We should be glad the pair have been finally brought to justice, but they are not the only culpable parties. The Bosnian civil war was a dreadful stain on European history, one which our media, leaders and publics feigned to find "too complicated" to do anything about while it was happening and then rushed for the exit of history to forget about it as soon as it was over.

Bosnia had been one of five republics which made up Yugoslavia (the Union of Slavs) - Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and the largest, Serbia (which included three autonomous areas, Kosovo, Montenegro and Vojvodena). This area, like the rest of the Balkans, has a long history of migration and conquest by competing powers from the Dark Ages onwards over the years as empires rose and fell in lands with often uncertain geographical boundaries.

The five republics of former Federal Yugoslavia

Bosnia is unusual among the former Yugoslav republics in that its largest component - about 45% of the population - is Muslim. Of the rest, about 30% are Serbian Orthodox Christians and about 20% Croatian Catholics - with tiny Romany and Jewish populations making up the balance. The Muslims, who call themselves Bosniacs, are mainly descendants of indigenous people who, when the Ottoman Turks conquered the area in the 15th century, gradually converted to Islam. Although the Muslim Turks were in their time almost uniquely tolerant of other faiths, being a Muslim was a requirement for anyone wishing to serve in the Government. Consequently, over several centuries, many converted either pragmatically or through genuine belief - contrary to western mythology, there has rarely been forced conversion in Islamic history anywhere.

The Ottoman Empire, which stretched from the Danube to the Euphrates and from Istanbul to Ethiopia at its height, was organised into different millets, self-governing communities based on religion. As a result, for several centuries, people of different faiths lived physically alongside each other, with a degree of separation, but in peace and even with some slow social integration and sharing. However, with the rise of 19th century liberalism, unscrupulous politicians in the Balkans whipped up nationalist feelings. People were encouraged and even forced to think of themselves along ethnic lines - Serb, Hellenic, Turk - rather than as Ottomans, with religious differences used to buttress the desire for national independence from the Empire.

In such a potent mix, rivalries over land and resources inevitably led to conflict. The creation of Yugoslavia in 1919 went some way to suppressing nationalism - and after 1945 under the Communist regime of Tito a balance was created between the semi-autonomous republics listed earlier and the central Federal Government. But the collapse of Communism soon unleashed ethnic tensions again.

From 1989, the President of the Serbian republic within Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic advocated the break up of Yugoslavia but with the creation in its place of a Greater Serbia taking in neighbouring lands. He and his cronies set up a process that soon led to violent attacks on non-Serbs across Yugoslavia. In Bosnia, Radovan Karadzic emerged as the spokesman of the Serb minority and in October 1991, just after a national vote overwhelmingly in favour of independence, he chillingly warned his opponents:
"In just a couple of days, Sarajevo will be gone and there will be five hundred thousand dead, in one month Muslims will be annihilated in Bosnia and Herzegovina"

With massive quantities of weapons, troops and supplies provided from the Serbian-controlled Yugoslav Federal Army and with Ratko Mladic appointed to head up its army, Karadzic established the Republic of Srpska, which he intended to unite with Serbia proper. Along with a similar breakaway territory in Croatia, the Krajina, a Greater Serbia would be fashioned from lands seized from its neighbours and, even worse, ethnically cleansed of non-Serbs.

Troika of terror: Mladic, Karadzic & Milosevic

The next three and a half years saw repeated belligerence by the Serbs, joined at times by nationalist Croats. The Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, was surrounded by Serbian paramilitaries and subjected to the longest siege in modern history. Mladic vowed to bombard the largely unarmed inhabitants "until they are on the edge of madness" and over 10,000 people, including 1.500 children, died. Elsewhere, Serbian paramilitaries moved through villages and towns, identifying and expelling or slaughtering Muslims and Croats. Rape camps were set up where tens of thousands of young Muslim women were taken and raped repeatedly by Serbians. Muslim men were incarcerated and worked, starved and tortured to death, their bodies then being tipped into old coal mines which were dynamited to hide the evidence.

Echoes of Auschwitz - Bosnian Muslims in Serbian custody

The most notorious incident came in July 1995 at the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica. In late June, the Serbs overwhelmed the lightly armed Bosniac defenders and ordered the entire population to leave. Over the next few days, men and women were separated and put onto different buses to take them to Sarajevo. But at the other end, many did not arrive and over the next few weeks it emerged than nearly 9,000 Muslim men and boys had been driven into the countryside and massacred by their captors.

Some European leaders did call for action - including French Socialist President Francois Mitterand, who at one point undertook a personally highly dangerous trip to Sarajevo to express his solidarity with its citizens. But the likes of British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd - who later went on to make a fortune out of helping Milosevic privatise Serb state telecommunications - prevailed for all too long. The Bosniacs were repeatedly implied to have a similar agenda to the Serbs, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary and in spite of the Bosniacs being in fact a relatively mixed group of people fighting for their new democracy.

Particularly in Sarajevo, thousands of ethnic Serbs and Croats joined the Bosnic Muslims in defence of their city and in 1992 the Bosnian Army included 18% Croat and 12% Serb components. Ethnic Serb General Jovan Divjak was deputy commander of the Bosniac army, while Croat General Stjepan Siber served as second deputy. Although, as happens all too often in the barbarising furnace of war, there were atrocities carried out by Bosniac individuals against Serbs, this was never a policy of the leadership. There were no acts of mass ethnic cleansing, no work camps and no rape camps in Bosniac territories.

The end of the war following American intervention and the long and troubled restoration of a still uncertain peace are other stories. But what is certain is that by late 1995 the atrocities committed by Karadzic, Mladic and their acolytes had done untold, lasting damage not just in their country but across the world. The figures speak for themselves - in the conflict, according to the International Criminal Tribunal, nearly 70% of the 100,000 dead were Muslims -over one in every thirty were killed. Among civilians, Muslims accounted for 88% of all deaths. And all this happened on Europe's doorstep, little more than two or three hours drive from Venice.

So Mladic has plenty to reflect on as he is is taken to The Hague. Sarajevo, Srebrenica and a host of other places in Bosnia were transformed by his work. Thanks to our leaders' fawning acquiescence to these thugs, London has felt the dreadful impact too, albeit comparatively lightly when set against the massive atrocities of Bosnia - the 7/7 bombers in 2005 were, like many younger Muslims, radicalised by the Bosnian war. And, unnoticed by all too many, the London bombings themselves took place on the tenth anniversary of the massacre of all these defenceless men and boys in the forests and fields around the ghost town of Srebrenica.

Milosevic died during his trial on war crime charges and now Mladic and Karadzic look likely to spend the rest of their lives in jail.Their malign influence is nearly gone, but they leave behind them a terrible, poisonous and far-reaching legacy that touches us all.

The tragedy that changed history: when President Bill Clinton saw this photograph of a young Muslim refugee who had hanged herself, he determined to over-rule repeated European opposition to his attempts to intervene. After a week of air attacks on Serb paramilitaries, three and a half years of brutal civil war came to an end.

No Flying Into Oblivion

The United Nations "No Fly Zone" has today seen rather a lot of flying by the planes and missiles of the western allies, unsurprisingly bombing Libyan Government airforce and radar installations, but more controversially bombing military columns to create a defensive cordon around the rebel held city of Benghazi and last night bombing the Government compound in Tripoli in spite of the hundreds of civilians camped around its walls. For those of us who supported, tentatively, a "No Fly Zone" when it was repeatedly called for by the rebels and after increasingly bloodthirsty threats from the regime, the instant escalation to significantly greater military involvement than a "no-fly-zone" raises grave concerns as to what the endgame is going to be. This is especially the case when the rebel faction has made clear it is not willing under any circumstances to consider a negotiated settlement, which rather suggests we might be there a very long time indeed. 

Armed intervention, unless you are a pacifist, needs always to be a very final option in a handful of cases. And yet, genuinely humanitarian interventions are few and far between. The Bosnian intervention came three years too late to save tens of thousands of innocent Bosniac civilians - 90% of them Muslims; and although the Kosovan intervention did undoubtedly prevent a repeat massacre, the wide range of targets hit in civilian areas hinted at darker motives than purely protecting civilians. By contrast, the wars more enthusiastically waged in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the secret war against Iran, have somewhat more questionable motives. Ones rooted in self-serving business interests and where humanitarian concerns, including democracy, are very far removed from the real priorities of securing profitable energy resources for our oil-addicted world.

What then of Libya? What is the motive here? Given that we gladly did business with Libya in spite of previous bloody massacres of sometimes hundreds of opponents, humanitarian concerns have not been the top of the West's agenda in this relationship for a very long time. So what is the real driver now?

Oil again seems obvious, except for the fact that Libya's dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi has pretty happily engaged with western oil companies since the great rapprochement of 2004. If anything, the oil industry would be perfectly happy for him to stay - any new regime, especially a democratic one, would be likely to disturb their modus vivendi in a country where oil extraction is about as cheap and profitable as anywhere in the world.

Our man in Tripoli

Former British Premier, Tony Blair, has come under criticism for his visit to Qaddafi back in 2004, when Libya was allowed to open up to international trade after years of sanctions. In recent weeks, Coalition politicians in Britain have been queuing up to denounce him; yet their wisdom is somewhat one of hindsight. Take a look back at their words at the time and, while some were hesitant, nearly all of them supported Blair's move:

"The potential prize of helping Libya in from the cold makes Mr Blair's risk worth taking,"- Menzies Campbell, Lib Dem Foreign spokesman, 2004

Conservative leader at the time, Michael Howard, condemned Blair's visit only because he felt it was at too high a level. He supported the overall process of re-engagement.

Infamously, current Lib Dem leader and Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, worked for p.r. firm GJW during the 1990s, when it was hired by Qaddafi to improve the Libyan regime's image.

The truth is that Qaddafi is one side of the capitalist coin that governs our world. Many on the Left have been seduced for years by his eclectic and self-serving adoption of supposedly progressive causes. Yet all the  while, he has ruled with a brutal iron fist at home and cavorted at every chance with the oil companies and international businessmen who have made him personally a very rich man indeed.

What has happened is this - Qaddafi has not been strong enough to crush the revolt quickly enough; had he suppressed the rebels in a few days then, as Bahrain is doing now, no matter how savage his retribution, after 18 months of purdah, he would have been welcomed back to his corporate family. As it is, he has taken too long to reassert himself and so has outlived his usefulness - Capital abhors a vacuum and so he must go. Hence the intervention has quickly become far more than a No Fly Zone. With the Chavez Peace Initiative ignored by the West and any and all prospects of a negotiated settlement compehensively rejected by the Libyan rebels, the agenda is clearly now one of regime change.

Strange as it may seem, but at least for the last decade, Qaddafi has been the West's creature - perhaps more obviously an untamed Frankenstein than the royals in the Gulf that Cameron gently admonishes for their civilian massacres - but our creature nevertheless. Just last year Britain sold £200 millions of "crowd control" equipment to him and the SAS trained his elite guard on surveillance techniques, while the French provided him with a wide range of military support.

That is why the West has in truth been reluctant to do what it is doing - until now. Qaddafi and Big Oil have profited very nicely from their mutual dealings. How annoying that the Libyan people have spoiled and confused things so terribly by getting in the way of this most symbiotic of relationships. They deserve better than this bastard of a twin-headed hydra that has buried itself deep in their troubled land. Sadly, whatever the outcome, just as Iraq is slipping back into dictatorship and Afghans are governed by a western-sponsored kleptocracy, it seems unlikely that they will get it.

From 2009: