Holocaust Memorial Day

Bob Stewart Excerpts

Thursday 25th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Ind)]

I am going to talk to the House about my own personal experience of genocide: Bosnia in 1992-93. I was in Germany commanding an infantry battalion in 1992 when I rang my mother. I said, “Mum, my camp is beside this ghastly place called Bergen-Belsen. Do you know, Mum, it has rectangular mounds with signs that say, ‘Here lie 3,000 bodies.’ It’s heathland. It’s a foul place.” She said, “I know, Robert.” I said, “How would you know, Mum? You’ve never been here with me.” She said, “I went there in 1945.”

In 1945 my mother was a member of the Special Operations Executive, in something called the FANY—the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. It was the uniform they put spies into. She had gone there to try to find women who had been caught by the Germans and put into concentration camps. Seventeen SOE women had been killed—they were murdered, not executed. I asked my mother, “Why the heck haven’t you told me this before?” She had only told me that she was SOE a couple of years before that. She said, “Because I was ashamed.” I asked, “What do you mean you were ashamed? As soon as you could, you joined up, you learned to parachute and you learned to fight the Germans. You did your bit.” And she said, “You don’t understand; I was ashamed because genocide had occurred in my generation and we are all responsible.” That is what this is all about. We are all responsible for what happens in this world, and genocide happens so easily.

I did not understand what my mother was talking about until a few months later, when I went to Bosnia as the British United Nations commander. There was one hell of a lot of killing around us. I was appalled. To be honest, I went into a bit of a funk about it. I could not believe what I was seeing. I will not repeat some of the stuff that I saw, but how about crucifixions on barn doors; people scalped; people’s eyes pulled out with implements that are designed just to do that; and women in trees, because they had been raped and had then hanged themselves—they were mainly Bosnian Muslims. I was horrified, and then I felt what my mother had told me about: shame. Why had I not been able to stop this? I had soldiers and arms, and I was representing the great, mighty world forum of opinion, the United Nations. Yet near me, women, children and men were being murdered, stupidly. They were all South Slavs; they just had different religions.

Things got worse. Let me give the example of Ahmići. On 22 April 1993, the European Commission ambassador asked me to try to stop the battles, and I asked how. He said, “I’ll deal with the politics; you deal with the front- lines.” I thought, “You’ve got the good deal, mate.” Anyway, I went to the frontlines. As I went to the Bosnian Muslim frontline up on the hills, above the Lašva valley, a commander said to me, “We are not stopping this battle.” I was trying to stop the battles and bring about a ceasefire. “We are not stopping this”, the commander said, “because at Ahmići village, women, children and men are being massacred.” And I said, “No, that cannot be happening”. I did not think that could actually happen in this day and age. So I said, “Look, if I go there with my men and I discover you are wrong and I come back, will you stop fighting?” He said yes. I came off the hills and went down into the valley. I was with my platoon—about 30 men—and had four armoured vehicles. We were attacked as we drove along the valley by the jokers—Bosnian Croat special forces—but we just ignored them as their attacks bounced off.

As I went into Ahmići, the first thing I saw was the minaret, crippled and broken. It had been brought down. Then I went all the way through the village—it was a linear village about a mile long. When I took my men all the way to the top, I said to Alex Watts, my platoon commander, “Put a section on either side of the road in a sweep position. Let’s go down and find out what’s happened.” I walked down the road with my platoon commander in front of me. We started finding houses that had been destroyed. And then, at one house, the soldiers called me over and asked me to take a look. In the doorway was a man and a teenage boy. They were dead; they had been burned.

Around the back of that house, the men found a cellar. When I went in, I was hit first by the smell. Then my eyes focused and I saw what was in there—it looked like bodies. There were bones and heads—there was a head bent back, and I saw the eyes. I rushed outside and was sick. I thought, “God, how can this happen?” And I was there, with this great UN, the people who are meant to police the world, and I had failed.

I then had to make a decision. My instructions from the British Government—the Ministry of Defence; the politicians—were that I was neutral and was not to get involved; this was not my war. I was there purely to deliver aid. I thought that was appalling. The whole point of the United Nations, I thought, was to stop people dying. So I extended that role a bit. I escorted aid, but if people attacked me, I responded pretty robustly—not me, but my men. My men were great.

Do you know how we had to clear up that village? Do you know what genocide means? It means some poor devils with shovels having to clean it up—in this case they were my bandsmen, who were actually medics. Why did I choose the band to do that? It was because they were slightly older than most of my men. For some reason—I am sure that people will understand this— I felt that 18-year-olds should not be involved in clearing up bodies. I thought that a chap in his mid-20s, perhaps married, with some sort of sanity, should do it, rather than an 18-year-old lunatic—I don’t mean lunatic; I mean a boy, with all the testosterone in him. I also had girls —sorry, that is the wrong term; it’s women these days. You cannot be a girl if you are over 14, as I was told on the course I went on.

I remember this corporal in the band shovelling up the remains of a body, and saying, “Sir, this is Europe in 1993, not Europe in 1943. This is appalling.” I said, “Gosh, yes. Yes.” The next day I found a whole family—father, mother, boy and girl. The little girl, who was about seven, was holding a puppy. They were all dead. They were all in a line, where they had been shot. I said, “Oh, gosh. Pick them up. Take them to the morgue.” We did that. We took them to a morgue. It was horrific. Can you imagine what it is like for our soldiers to see that? All they see is their own family—their sisters. We took this family to the morgue, and I thought, “Well, that’s it. Done.” The next day, I went down that road again. Guess what? The family were back in front of their house. Guess what else? Wrong morgue. They were Muslims; I had taken them to the Croat morgue. I just could not believe it.

We then had the problem of what to do with the bodies. No one was going to deal with them. It was nothing to do with me—I was not meant to get involved in the war—but I had to deal with them, because of the disease, the smell. I got my Royal Engineers—lovely blokes—to dig a big pit, and we made a mass grave. We put about 100 bodies into that pit. Even then, we got it wrong—no one had taught me how to make mass graves—because we put them into the pit in plastic bags, until the International Committee of the Red Cross delegate, who happens now to be my wife, came along and said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I said, “I’m burying people.” She said, “You’re not burying them in plastic bags. That’s not how you do it, ” so she led and my men emptied the bodies out—horrendous.

That happened in Europe and, as the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) said, watch out because it happens elsewhere. This happened in Europe, and we could not understand it. When we talk about the holocaust memorial theme being fragility, I call it the fragility of decency. People’s decency can rapidly be shattered. After all, all those people I saw were normal human beings. I thought—I don’t know why—“To hell with this!”, picked up my satellite phone and rang the Security Council of the United Nations from Bosnia. I got through to the operations room and said, “The Security Council is visiting Bosnia next week. Come and see what is happening out in my area.” I didn’t think anything of it, but next week I was told, “The Security Council of the United Nations is coming to visit you.” I thought, “My God, I must be important” —of course I wasn’t. They came, and I remember saying to the Argentinian Security Council member, “Look, sir, we have to do something about this. This is genocide.” They refused to accept it as genocide for several years. I always called it genocide; it was called crimes against humanity. The definition of genocide is simple, fundamentally: trying to eliminate a group of people for being a group of people that is separate. He said, “I totally agree.”

The Security Council of the United Nations set up the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia within a month. I have given evidence in four trials at the ICTY, and I have given evidence that was difficult. My men found it difficult—your soldiers find it difficult.

If there is a theme this year, it is one that has run along the same lines forever. Genocide occurred not just in the second world war by the way; it extended back well into the ’20s and has occurred repeatedly since. Our job is to highlight the fact that it has occurred. Our job is to make sure that we shout loudly that genocide has occurred in the past, and we like to think that it will not occur in the future, but it damn well will. Let us try to lessen incidents of genocide by shouting as loudly as we can, “Never again”.