People sleep peacefully in their beds only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
George Orwell
In 1992 Bosnia descended into a savage and bitter war, which by 1995 had claimed over a quarter of a million lives. The United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) was deployed to protect the delivery of humanitarian aid. It succeeded in bringing this aid to the suffering civilian population which was being ravaged by the fighting, and lives were saved as a result. But its efforts to promote a cessation of hostilities between the Bosnian factions met with only occasional and partial success.
The first British troops in Bosnia were First Battalion the Cheshire Regiment, who joined UNPROFOR in November 1992. Further armoured infantry battalions continued to form the core of the ever-growing British UN forces in central Bosnia. In 1994, the British General Sir Michael Rose took command of UNPROFOR.
As the fighting between the Bosnian Serbs and the uneasy alliance of Bosnian Muslims and Croats intensified, the risk to the UN troops increased and their influence on the warring factions decreased. By May 1995 the UNPROFOR operation was in a state of perpetual crisis, with British, European, United States and UN policies on the Bosnian war under great pressure. Three years of international efforts to end the war had come to nothing. The UN mission appeared close to failure and, it seemed, would have to withdraw. Extracting the UN troops from a civil war would have been very difficult – NATO had contingency plans to do this by intervening in Bosnia in force – but no one doubted that this would be a hazardous undertaking.
Throughout that long bloody summer, the state of affairs in Bosnia continued to deteriorate, but the strategic situation was altered by a series of successful offensives by Bosnian Croat forces in western Bosnia. At the end of August NATO responded to Serb shelling of Sarajevo market by unleashing a massive air attack on Bosnian Serb forces. The effects of these actions reinforced each other, the Serb military position in western Bosnia collapsed and a truce was negotiated. A dynamic US negotiator, Richard Holbrooke, exploited this politically, persuading the three Bosnian factions to sign a peace agreement at Dayton. Many politicians, diplomats and senior UN officials considered this to be the very last chance for peace.
On 20 December NATO began its first land operation when the Implementation Force (IFOR) took over from the UN Protection Force. The alliance was to ensure the factions complied with the military provisions of the peace agreement, and had the mandate and rules of engagement to use force to achieve this. That same day a British battlegroup moved from Sarajevo to north-west Bosnia. Two thirds of the forces allocated to the battlegroup for this mission had not yet been released from other tasks in central Bosnia. The battlegroup had a single armoured infantry company, a reconnaissance platoon and six mortars – a total of two hundred men with thirty armoured vehicles. They had no tanks or artillery. Three liaison teams, a dozen more men, completed the force: the only British troops in this part of Bosnia.
