David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), 394 pp., $25.00.
Lord Owen is one of those many unfortunates who, in the period of terminal decline of the British Empire, was sent off to sup with devils, equipped only with an undersized spoon. His job was, as representative negotiator for "Europe", to bring peace to Bosnia. He started his performance just as news of the Serbs' death camps was breaking in 1992. The atrocities continued as Lord Owen whizzed back and forth, and he has had, on the whole, a bad press for so doing. He put his name to a plan which, in the true style of bas-empire Britain, appeased the powerful--in this case, the Serbs, who were to be given a lot of land in Vance-Owen's division of Bosnia-Herzegovina into a bewildering variety of ethnic "cantons." The plan collapsed in the spring of 1993 when, despite this generosity, the Bosnian Serbs refused the deal. Lord Owen, who had called the plan "spring-time in the Balkans", might, with dignity, have then resigned. Instead he persisted well into 1995.
In the early summer of 1995 I, along with a delegation from the Turkish Parliament, visited him. Public opinion in Turkey, which has a large Balkan-descended population, was highly indignant at the continuing massacres of Muslims in Bosnia, the connivance of British officers in them, and the insults which, by implication, British policy seemed to be directing toward secular Muslims in general. The deputies wished to find out for themselves what on earth had motivated this policy, coming as it did from a country that Turks regard as an ally. We talked to Lord Owen for two and a half hours; he endeavored to defend himself, but unfortunately the feeling afterwards among the delegation was that not a word he uttered could be believed.
