Two Hours from London

This documentary about the Balkans conflict takes its name from the fact it takes two hours to travel from London to the Balkans by aircraft . This sums up with what`s wrong with the documentary - It does indeed take two hours to travel that distance by aircraft but it takes considerably longer to travel there via rail link , longer still by car and far far longer by walking . Can you see the point I`m making ? A fact is a fact , a fact is correct but it doesn`t necassarily show the whole picture when other facts are omitted or ignored

And that`s the problem here where facts about the Balkans are ignored or misrepresented , one being that Slobodan Milosevic is a "Fascist " . No he`s not , and I`m not trying to stick up for him but read any book by diverse historians from Misha Glenny to Mark Almond and they all agree with one thing : Milosevic was a hardline communist opportunist who switched to a geo-nationalist agenda in order to stay in power . Croat leader of the time Franjo Tudjman was another hardline communist ( Who spent the war fighting in the communist partizans and had many members of his family murdered by the Croat Nazi ustasha ) who also played the nationalist ticket to stay in power but TWO HOURS FROM LONDON doesn`t bring this point up nor does it point out the fact that this was a three sided civil war where the Bosnians were fighting against Croats trying to build a greater Croatia and Serbs trying to build a greater Serbia . Instead we`re treated to the opinions of the director`s husband British veteran left wing politician Michael Foot offering his flawed and dodgy opinions on the conflict . Let`s not confuse opinions with fact

Two Hours from London is a brilliant, passionate polemic about the war in the former Yugoslavia. The final film by Jill Craigie, it outlines the role played by Serbian nationalism in Yugoslavia's break-up, and how the opportunism of Serbia's president Slobodan Milosevic led to the worst genocide in Europe since the end of the Second World War.

When Two Hours from London was made in the mid-1990s, the prevalent view in the west, and certainly among the media and political class in the UK, was that the wars in the former Yugoslavia were the result of ancient ethnic hatreds. What the film shows is that the predominant cause of the conflict was the drive for 'Greater Serbia'. Far from being a civil war, the war in the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina was an invasion by Serbia, which wanted to carve up large parts of Bosnia's territory for itself.

If Two Hours from London has a fault, it is that it is too lenient on Croatia and its then president Franjo Tudjman. Tudjman's own drive for 'Greater Croatia' was also the cause of great bloodshed, including the Muslim-Croat war of 1993-4 - the one part of the Bosnian conflict that could justifiably be described as a civil war. But on almost every other count, Jill Craigie's film is a superb piece of documentary.

Its views may have been controversial at the time of its release, but they are now widely accepted - not least by the United Nations, which now views the Bosnian war as an international rather than a civil conflict.