While the war in the former Yugoslavia was raging I often felt that we were being let down by the media, both broadcast & print. Especially at the beginning they just never seemed to give enough time or space to recap the story so far, to allow us to develop some kind of context to help us evaluate each new days events.
Obviously it is difficult, to say the least, to do this about events in a country which you do not know, a language (& therefore names) which sounds so unfamiliar, & in which you have no specifically personal or emotional interest – other than hoping & praying that peace may soon come
It was at a very late stage that there was a daily cliff-hanger about the fate of a town under siege. The constant repetition of its name made me think this was a town of some significant size – I had an idea of somewhere about the size of Stoke on Trent. There were reports of UN humanitarian convoys being attacked or turned back
So I was taken considerably aback one lunch time by a live report from inside the town. There are now about 25,000 people crammed in here, the reporter said, in a place which normally houses about 5,000
Roughly the same size as our village, and of the next one higher up in the hills
Then I also remembered my school geography which taught that the geology of parts of Yugoslavia was the same as that of the limestone parts of the Peak District
So they were talking about fighting in an area just like ours. It was not too hard to imagine – though heaven knows for what cause – that there might similarly be a civil war in which we were on the opposite side to our neighbouring village
And then I could imagine how we would feel if a large convoy of white lorries tried to pass along the main road with a cargo of aid
Whoever, in a military analysis, was the aggressor, whoever was deemed to be winning or losing, we would all be suffering, afraid for our future & our families
It wasn’t hard to imagine the gathering of furious crowds. It wasn’t even hard to imagine that I would be one of those women hurling abuse if nothing worse
And that is the problem we must face before we indulge our humanitarian instincts. Of course these are only what we should expect from good fellow humans. But we do need to be sure that we are not giving too much weight to making ourselves feel better & not enough to ensure that by blundering in we a re not making a bad situation even worse or helping it to endure for an even longer stretch of miserable time
