The New Bosnia

Brendan O'Neill writes:

Oh no, this is not good, this is not good at all: more and more Western observers are starting to describe Syria as "the new Bosnia". Which can mean only one thing. The liberal commentariat is on the hunt for a new mission, for another messy civil war that it can squeeze into a simplistic moral framework, for a new foreign field that it can transform into a soapbox from which to declare its unwavering commitment to the combat of "evil". Yes, the crusading chattering classes are determined to fill the Bosnia-shaped hole in their lives, and by God they will do everything they can to make Syria fit.

You can always tell when the Left-leaning commentariat is feeling bored with life – it starts fantasising about "new Bosnias", about horror-riddled lands overseas which require the good men and women of Hampstead, Paris and New York to highlight their plight. The discovery of "new Bosnias" never tells us much about what is actually happening in the world. After all, how could the historically specific three-year conflict that tore the former Yugoslavia apart in the early 1990s magically reappear in a different place and with different actors? History doesn't work like that. Rather, the talk of "new Bosnias" speaks to a desperate and narcissistic need for a foreign debacle that might provide these Westerners with the same sense of purpose they last felt during "the original Bosnia".

So even though there are vast differences between Bosnia 1992 and Syria 2012, hacks are starting to ask "Is Syria the new Bosnia?" The "bombardment of Homs is eerily similar to what happened in Sarajevo in 1992", says one commentator, despite the fact that numerous city sieges over the past 20 years, including Gaddafi's of Benghazi or America's of Fallujah, could be compared with Sarajevo. "In its random cruelty, the conflict in Syria starts to resemble the war in Bosnia 20 years ago", says a Reuters reporter – as if all wars, everywhere, have not always contained acts of random cruelty. The influential Washington Institute says that when trying to work out what to do about Syria, we should "draw on lessons from Bosnia in the 1990s". Others who likewise look at the world through Bosnia Goggles, hoping to spot another civil conflict that might provide the witterings of pro-intervention iPad imperialists with some gravitas, tell us there is an "air of déjà vu about these scenes [in Syria]".

Yet the only thing that Syria has in common with Bosnia – which it also shares with less fashionable modern conflicts, from Congo to Sri Lanka – is that it is bloody and complex and tragic. The real motivation behind the use of the historically illiterate "new Bosnia" tag is not accurate assessment of what is unfolding in Syria, but rather to cohere the currently crusade-less commentariat around a new foreign mission. They are desperate for a repeat of the Bosnia buzz of the early 1990s, when everyone from playwrights to pop stars to journalists-cum-warriors-against-the-Nazi-Serbs descended on Sarajevo to shed tears, swig whiskey, and pose for photos in front of tanks. It is really the self-serving moralising of the Bosnia period that is being reproduced; we are told that Syria today, just like Bosnia in the early 1990s, shows that "sitting on one's hands… is not a strategy but a substitute for one".

In short, what these Bosniaheads really see in Syria is an opportunity to repeat the grandstanding they indulged in during the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s, to demonstrate once more their own goodness by calling for "the world" to intervene on the side of "good" against "evil". They want to reduce Syria to a simple litmus test of the resolve and decency of Our Generation, just as they did the war in Bosnia. They're so vain, they think the conflict in Syria is about them.

One might bemoan the obvious pull of the Revolutionary Communist Party, what with its regular occupancy of two seats on The Moral Maze, what with Mick Hume’s Times column, and what with Brendan’s blog; one looks in vain for any such voice, either of the conservative, Tory critiques of global capitalism, military adventurism, American hegemony, and Zionism, or of the patriotic, socially conservative, utterly non-Marxist tendencies within the British Left. But, as with its battles against neo-Malthusianism and against the resurrection of the Yellow Peril, the old Living Marxism set deserves to be commended for its resistance to the dismemberment of Yugoslavia.

The state schools of Sarajevo have now banned the white-bearded figure known to Croat children as Dred Božinjak (Father Christmas), to Serb children as Božik Bata (Christmas Friend), and even, in the last 50 years, to Bosnian Muslim children as Deda Mraz (Grandfather Frost). Expect these schools, and other public institutions, to enforce Islamic dress codes, dietary laws and so forth in the very near future, if they are not already doing so. Christian, Jewish, Alawite and Druze Syria could expect a very similar fate under the Assads’ enemies; the present Syrian Government’s extensive programme for the restoration of Jewish holy sites indicates a thriving community of Jews, whatever neighbours with agenda of their own might have us believe.

The Republika Srpska will declare independence sooner rather than later, and will deserve every support when she does. The Bosnian Croats are also coming round. The West backed the wrong side in Bosnia, Europe’s first Islamist state, complete with a constitutional ban on Jews (and Gypsies) becoming President or Senators, a ban befitting a state founded by an old SS recruitment sergeant turned Wahhabi rabble-rouser. The West also backed the wrong side in Kosovo, Europe’s second Islamist state, where the Wahhabism and the Nazi nostalgia are mixed in with heroin-trafficking, with prostitution, and with the Maoism of Enver Hoxha, as well as with trafficking in human organs horrifically obtained, as some of us have been saying for years, and as everyone, or at least everyone morally and intellectually serious, finally admits. And now, we are on the cusp of backing the wrong side in Syria, as strategically vital a country as it is possible to imagine.