Original subtitles

LOUDSPEAKER: You are now under the protection of the UN forces.

CLAPPING AND CHEERING

The original series of Death of Yugoslavia

was finally broadcast in the autumn of 1995.

The conflict was far from over.

The war between Serbia and Croatia had reached a stop,

but the war in Bosnia was very much still going on.

37 were killed.

The ballistics experts confirmed that the shell came from

Bosnian Serb territory.

It was just what the Americans were waiting for.

Lo and behold, the Americans came in, bombed the Serbs

to the conference table.

And the conflict was settled at a peace conference at Dayton.

This is Paul Mitchell.

And it was just the opportunity that Paul was waiting for.

Yeah, I'd spent...

..I suppose, the better part of a year and a half

going into really nasty places.

Erm, not as a war correspondent.

I mean, we certainly didn't ever film anything going bang,

certainly not on purpose, anyway.

But I think the first time we went to Sarajevo for a research trip,

we broke every single security rule that...

Well, actually, at the time, there were no security rules.

We had no hazard environment training.

Erm...

No bodyguards. We had nothing.

Fantastically, our co-producer from Austria had been a paratrooper

in the Austrian Special Forces, so he really knew what he was doing,

but none of us did, and actually,

the first time we drove in, we drove in in his soft-bodied

Fiat Panda under sniper fire.

And, erm...

Where the bullets were close enough, you could actually hear them

going over your head, which was pretty terrifying.

Fortunately, I didn't know this at the time.

It was unpleasant.

And you definitely, like it or not,

you develop a sympathy for the people that you're stuck with.

I mean, it's kind of a hazard of the business.

If you're in the city that's getting shot at and shelled

on a regular basis, you're sharing that with the people you're with.

And no matter how much emotional distance you want to

put between them, there is some sort of sympathy.

And I can definitely remember a moment in the summer of 1995,

when the UN peacekeepers had been taken hostage in Gorazde,

and there were these awful images of them handcuffed to poles

and being surrounded by Bosnian Serb soldiers.

The Canadian, Russian and Czech military observers detained

at the arms dump attacked earlier today by Nato bombers were not

the only ones taken hostage by the Serbs.

At least ten other UN officers, all of them unarmed,

are being held at gunpoint at other possible air strike targets.

And, really, the worst thing was the Srebrenica massacre.

And I definitely remember that awful, awful photograph

of a woman who hung herself in the trees, in Tuzla, after escaping.

She was one of the people who survived the massacre,

but didn't survive the aftermath herself.

And it really, really hit me hard.

So, when the whole thing finished, I was...

..happy by the idea that we could tell the final bit

of the story, cos, you know...

Films sometimes are like books, you know, you don't finish them,

you deliver them. And this is one we delivered, but it kind of was

delivered at the wrong moment.

And if you had done it over, you would have made the boundaries

between them in a different way.

It really was important to tell the story of the moment

that the Serbs overstepped the mark

and did things that were so horrific that it shocked

the international community to rushing to finish the war.

The Serbs laid on coaches for the civilians -

but when they reached Muslim territory,

only women and children emerged.

The men of Srebrenica had disappeared.

There was no refuge.

In this field alone, some 2,000 of Srebrenica's men are buried.

The peace treaty, the Dayton Accords - which were signed

at this enormous American Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio -

were agreed in November,

and then they were signed in December in Paris.

The BBC said, "Fine, we would like another programme,

"but it should come as quickly as possible. On the heels of

"this agreement, people are interested in Yugoslavia."

"So, I mean, given you took two years to make the first lot,

"can you do this one a bit quicker, please?"

So... By a bit quicker, they meant they meant a LOT quicker.

Yes.

So, you had this great idea to tell them that on 15 December

in Paris, there would be the actual signing of the Dayton Agreement,

and all the participants would be there - the Croats, the Bosnians,

and particularly the Serbs, as well as the Americans.

And so we'd go to Paris for this weekend, and do it all.

So, off we went.

Like all great ideas, of course, it never actually happened that way.

First of all, we got to Paris, and it snowed,

and then there was a transport strike, so you couldn't go anywhere

for love or money.

I remember we also were given this fantastic maroon-coloured...

..Nokia first-generation mobile phone -

which I'd never seen one before, which was quite exciting -

and came with one of our consultants, a very fantastic

Bosnian journalist named Tihomir Loza.

And Tihomir and I, on the Eurostar train, opened this thing up

and said, "How do you turn it on, and what does it do?"

And I think that's as far as we ever got with it.

We never got it to do anything,

cos none of us knew how to use a cellphone.

We had got, before we went,

a promise from the key man in the peace conference,

Richard Holbrooke, who was the sort of man who could handle Milosevic.

The nice British diplomats - like Lord Carrington, David Owen -

who had tried before, had got nowhere.

But Richard Holbrooke was as tough as Milosevic

and, you know, could stand up to him

and shout what he needed.

My favourite bit in programme six was when he says to Milosevic,

"OK, I'll talk to the Bosnian Serbs.

"But you have to promise, no history, no bullshit -

As someone who's had to listen to a lot of both of that.

When he said it, it worked.

President Milosevic has made some suggestions,

and we're going to take a quick break to caucus among ourselves.

The Americans decided to eat their words.

They would meet the Bosnian Serbs.

So, we said to Milosevic,

"Wait a minute.

"We want to set down some ground rules.

"Number one, no historical lectures, no bullshit."

You describe David Owen as a soft British Foreign Minister,

and I don't think anybody in his entire life

has called David Owen soft.

He was tough, but he had a government that absolutely...

Well, it wasn't his government.

It was the Tory government, actually, of John Major.

But they absolutely were not going to let any kind of

serious intervention happen.

Every time it came close to happening, they stuck...

they did something to stop it.

I mean, he said it all at the start of programme five.

"Don't deceive yourself that the West is going to come in

"and settle your problems for you."

Don't, don't, don't live under this dream that the West is going to

come in and sort this problem out.

Don't dream dreams.

Well, in the end, the West did come in and settled the problems -

but it took two years more.

I mean, you knew that people weren't taking it seriously.

You had Lord Carrington, who'd stopped being Foreign Minister

in 1982.

You had David Owen, who'd stopped being Foreign Minister in 1979.

And you had... But he was the Europeans' representative.

He wasn't the Americans' representative.

And that makes a big difference. Yeah.

And you had Cyrus Vance, who'd been American Secretary of State

for Jimmy Carter. They were retired people, basically.

You know, if you're taking it seriously, you have somebody

who's actually serving in a government.

And the people there weren't stupid, they knew that it wasn't going to...

That is to say, it was clear that American firepower

was behind what they were doing.

So, in the end, the Americans came in and bombed the Serbs

into submission, and that's what settled it.

And I mean, that's one place where, when you think of Ukraine today,

the same thing is true.

The Europeans' initiative isn't going to work

without the Americans behind it. No.

I mean, the other thing that was extraordinary on the ground,

I remember, you know, definitely one of my trips in the making

was there had been all these British UN soldiers

with their blue hats.

You know, they were kind of designed to be nonthreatening, essentially.

And once the bombing started, and they became the implementation force

and no longer the peacekeeping force, and they traded their

blue helmets for their green khaki military combat uniforms,

you suddenly thought, actually, they're quite scary.

And they swap like that. It was an amazing sight.

The troops on the ground marked the change

in a different way, as soldiers do.

At the base, in Bugojno, of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers,

the blue flag of the United Nations was lowered, and the blue beret

was replaced by the traditional red hackle of the Fusiliers.

And even that gave way to combat helmets this morning,

as they and their armoured vehicles lined up at Mrkonjic Grad -

a Nato, not a UN force - to head for the front line.

So, what changed the situation, I guess, the Srebrenica massacre

just was one too many atrocities, I guess you can call it,

for the international public opinion to bear.

I think some of it was also to do with pure American politics as well.

This was about the time that Bill Clinton had a few

really bad losses domestically,

and it didn't hurt to have a big victory that he was right behind,

and that was part of it.

Good evening. After nearly four years of war,

the leaders of the factions that have torn Bosnia apart

have finally agreed to a peace settlement.

It was initialled tonight after three weeks of negotiations

at an Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio.

The presidents of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia have made

a historic and heroic choice.

They have heeded the will of their people.

Whatever their ethnic group, the overwhelming majority

of Bosnia's citizens, and the citizens of Croatia

and Serbia want the same thing.

They want to stop the slaughter.

They want to put an end to the violence and war.

They want to give their children and their grandchildren

the chance to lead a normal life.

Today, thank God, the voices of those people have been heard.

It was all very quick.

And I just remember thinking, you know, so many people died

and there was so much suffering,

and, really, it took almost no time at all.

Two weeks at Dayton. Yeah.

Well, two weeks at Dayton and, what, maybe two weeks of...

..two weeks of cruise missiles, and that was about it. Yeah.

The kind of blood and soil nationalism that was burnt into

the rhetoric that went on before the shooting started in Bosnia,

and in Croatia, and that carried on right through the war,

was unbelievably ugly and scary.

And there was sort of an inevitability to the escalation.

You know, that Milosevic jumped onto that nationalist bandwagon,

and it was really, really hard for him to get off it,

and it just escalated and escalated and escalated.

The other thing that, really, I was remembering was,

you know, if you talk about the diplomacy,

the danger of falling into cliches.

I can remember, there was some American journalist or historian

wrote a book that was really influential at the time,

where they talked about the ancient ethnic hatreds of the people

in Yugoslavia, and everybody latched on to it because...

It became a very convenient thing to say, "We shouldn't get involved

"because, you know, those people are like that."

And, you know, it's that kind of othering,

you know, giving them labels.

You know, they were Muslims, or they were Serbs,

and they were just, you know, they hate each other,

and they've always hated each other,

and they always slaughtered each other.

Rubbish. Why would we get involved?

And you look where it led.

I think that's one thing the programmes prove.

Our personal story, when we got our first interview in Belgrade

with one of Milosevic's generals, General Panic,

and we had two fixers - one was a Serb and one was, well, a Muslim,

although she lived in Belgrade.

And we had to go with the Serb to meet the Serb general,

but, in fact, she was ill that day.

So, we just told Panic that the one we took with us,

we gave the name of the Serb's, because the only way he could tell

the difference between them was the name.

So, when we gave her the Serb name,

he was perfectly happy to deal with her.

And it made me see just how little difference there were between

these two people who were fighting.

It just was historical accident.

They were the same thing. Yeah.

But as a television producer,

I'd say that a lesson I hope people take away from it is,

this was a complicated conflict,

and if you give producers enough time and enough resources,

you really can unravel it and make it into something clear

that teaches people something, and that tells a very good story.