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| WITNESS TO WAR CRIMES |
‘Witness To War Crimes’
SIGNAL talks to Colonel (Ret’d) Colm Doyle about his experiences in Bosnia as an official for the EU as the nation descended into war, which is the subject of an accurate and grip- ping memoir which was recently published by Irish Academic Press-entitled ‘Witness To War Crimes.’
With the breakup of Yugoslavia precipitating a conflict that was unprecedented in its brutality and savagery, the horror of what was to follow, in Bosnia in particular, shocked an international community that had fallen into relative complacency since the end of the Cold War. The deployment of international mediators, observers and interlocutors into what was an obviously decaying situation led to a mixed community of media, diplomats and international officials becoming effectively trapped in the City of Sarajevo as it was encircled by Bosnian Serb forces and subjected to the longest, and most vicious siege, between April 1992 and August 1996, since the dawn of modern warfare, eclipsing the Siege of Leningrad in length by an entire year. 100,000 died in the Bosnian conflict over those four years.
Into this gathering storm, Defence Forces Colonel (Ret’d) Colm Doyle, then a Commandant, was deployed, first on secondment to the European Community Monitoring Mission (ECMM) in 1991 to the Former Yugoslavia and subsequently, as an envoy of the EU Peace mission to Bosnia, chaired by Lord Carrington. Although he served in the region for just over a year, he became an instrumental tool of the international community in trying to deal with the looming crisis; brokering ceasefires, organising evacuations and trying to bring the warring sides together to talk. Although he left in 1992, as Sarajevo was just beginning its descent into hell, Doyle’s Balkan experience did not truly draw to a close until he faced Bosnia Serb President Radovan Karadzic across the floor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY), some 18 years later.
Genesis of the book
As a book, this is a compelling and chilling read, laced with dread, as he witnesses the fraying and snapping of the bonds that had united communities in Yugoslavia, torn apart by centuries old ethnic hatreds. As a memoir, it’s an impeccably recollected and curated piece of work, which bears testament to Doyle’s meticulous documentation through his diaries and notebooks.
“The experiences of Bosnia always led me to consider that it would some day make a book. I suppose the final trigger for writing it was when I undertook a course in memoir writing, and one of the first exercises was to write a brief synopsis of what the memoir would be about. When I read mine, I was told that it simply needed to be put into a book, the story is a compelling one. I was told that it wasn’t so much on the quality of what I had written, but on the subject itself. And I think what happened in Bosnia, and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia is all to easily forgotten sometimes. Another major trigger was the involvement of Kenneth Morrison, Professor of Modern Southeast European History, de Montfort University, who had met with my friend, the BBC reporter Martin Bell. When Kenneth heard about the book he came over to meet me with the intention of helping find a publisher, then he saw the extent of the archives and committed to help me with the editing of the memoir. The book in total took about two years and I was delighted that Martin Bell launched it for me.”
What he had written for the introduction to his memoir is the foreword of the book, that it would be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth in relation to what he had seen, heard and experienced in Bosnia. In fact this commitment to
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