Colonel Bob Stewart recalls his experiences in Bosnia

Colonel Bob Stewart visited Hampton School this lunctime to deliver a fascinating talk about his time as commander of the 1st Battalion The Cheshire Regiment in Bosnia during the brutal conflict there in the early 1990s.

Sent to the Balkans with no operationals objectives or plan but to expect to take heavy casualties, it became a personal mission of Colonel Stewart to save as many lives as possible. To do so militarily was impossible - he had neither the number of troops, firepower nor remit to stop the war. Nevertheless, by cleverly using the hundred or so journalists personally accredited to him Bob was able to reveal to the world the terrible atrocities that were being perpetraited in the area. In particular he related to us the terrible story of the Ahmici massacre.

On April 22nd 1993 Colonel Stewart led his men into the village of Ahmici. He had been asked to go there by Muslim soldiers who had refused to stop fighting because, they said, Croats had massacred women and children in the settlement. To verify these claims Stewart took his men to investigate. The video clip that he showed of what he discovered was horrific. One scene in particular was particularly hard to take. First, we saw the charred remains of a man and teenage boy lying in the doorway of a house. The father and son had evidently been trying to defend their womanfolk who were hiding in the cellar of the house. As the camera went down into the cellar it was clear that the mother and young daughters had not survived but been murdered in grotesque circumstances. The clip subsequently showed Bob angrily confronting a Croat soldier in the area. It was with a sense of satisfaction that he was able to say that the man he had fronted up to had since been put behind bars for his crimes.

In conclusion Colonel Stewart left us with a very powerful thought: even if you only catch and convict one war criminal in a hundred it is better than none. To do nothing would be to leave us as accomplices, to make the perpetrators face justice is a signal that the civilised world will not stand for genocide.