Three years, and not only was it not over, but perhaps the worst was yet to come. I spoke of the image of a young woman who committed suicide from despair. But we had already let the ethnic cleansing spread unchecked, though we had yet to discover how far the Serbs would go. Of course we could have guessed, but what we didn't know till later was that while I was writing this piece more than 7,000 men and boys were being massacred at Srebrenica. 

It's nearly three years since I first talked of Bosnia, at the time of the Barcelona Olympics, and it's all too easy to be overwhelmed with despair when looking at the situation, but like the Bosnians themselves, we have to find a way of sustaining hope. Qur'an says "We send the lightning for fear and hope", and they've certainly had the lightning storm, death camps, mass rape, life as refugees, but whatever surrounds us, life needs hope, or we end up like the young woman, finally broken, hanging from a strip of blanket in the woods outside Tuzla.

Three years! Well, we've got as far as a meeting about military options, or at least looking at possibilities, and there's more meetings to come, where alternatives will be discussed, perhaps involving the Rapid Reaction Force, to be ready in a few weeks.

The Bosnians never wanted us to fight their battles, however, they just wanted to be able to buy weapons to defend themselves. But we said that our "neutral" stance required an arms embargo to reduce the risk of bloodshed, and indeed, if two men are in a boxing ring and one's hands are tied behind his back, it does lessen the number of blows. Whatever happened to the idea of deterrence, which has kept us safe for so many years? And do the Bosnians really seem more of a threat than the people we are currently selling arms to?

From the beginning, we readily accepted the Serb definition of the Bosnian Government as "Muslim", somehow incapable of representing all faiths and ethnicities, and with that, we allowed the ethnic division of Bosnia to become a reality, and inevitably, eventually we will have to face the consequences. It's just 50 years since we overthrew the excesses of one racist, nationalist tyranny and discovered how far ethnic cleansing goes when allowed to spread unchecked.

Muhammad said "Help your brother whether he is doing wrong, or wrong is being done to him". When his companions said "How can we help him when he is the one doing wrong?", the Prophet said "Take hold of his hands and keep them from wrongdoing."