Now this is a real Balkanic Eruption.

We British used to take fierce criticism in the Bosniac media for our part in the international policy equivocations of the early 1990s which helped allow so much death and destruction across Bosnia.

Yet whenever President Izetbegovic tried to make this point in our private meetings I would ask him how many lives might have been saved if the Clinton Administration had come out firmly in favour of the Vance-Owen peace plan, rather than shooting at it. The US position encouraged the Bosniacs/Muslims to hold out for more, and the Bosnian Serbs to grab territory on the ground.

Result? Disaster.

Izetbegovic invariably changed the subject.