By Oliver Boyle

My father is a veteran of conflicts across Afghanistan, Iraq, Northern Ireland and the former Yugoslavia. Throughout my life he has shared stories from his career of great military campaigns. At one age, these anecdotes took a turn from ‘So when the Taliban blew me up in 2007...’ or ‘This one time in a meeting with Abdul Rashid Dostum...’ to making broader and more important points. Rather than talking about what happened, knowing why these things happened was more important.

So much of the reasoning for invading these nations has been contentious. Our 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, my father saw and still remarks on as a moral conflict; the Taliban were harbouring Al Qaeda and Bin Laden, and they were persecuting, massacring and curtailing the rights of women and their dissenting population with an especially abhorrent and rigid Sunni-Islamist brand of Sharia law – at one point before the war they were also responsible for 75 per cent of global opium production – all these things were of personal importance to my father.

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Iraq was explained to me in hindsight as something we shouldn’t have gotten involved with. I remember him telling me once, ‘Tony Blair was on a roll, having just secured Good Friday, and thought he might as well jump in with George W. Bush.’ As many do, he regards Alastair Campbell as a criminal and blames, not without merit, the ‘Dodgy Dossier’ ultimately for why he had to fight in the ‘Cradle Of Civilisation’.

Northern Ireland and Former Yugoslavia were affairs which, for him, required many more chats, usually over the long drive to and from my home in Leicester to his house in Hampshire. Being dyscalculic, he never helped me with my maths, but I can’t imagine a time in my life where I haven’t had a firm grasp of the history of Ulster and Bosnia.

When put together, my father and I are perpetual ‘yappers’ with politics, history and his own ‘war stories’ filling most of the agenda. Many lessons he has taught me, and many interpretations have we both arrived at regarding the latter.

The common denominator of all the wars, conflicts and peacekeeping operations he took part in can easily be interpreted as belonging to one core social issue: sectarianism.

Defined in the Cambridge Dictionary as “very strong support for the religious or political group that you are a member of, which can cause problems between different groups”, It has been a trend at the core of all these theatres of war.

With Eastern Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, Shia Muslim Albanians, Sunni Muslim Bosniaks and Orthodox Greeks all shooting, bombing and butchering each other over race and religion throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, Kosovo and Albania; The trend as it manifests in the Former Yugoslavia is one so uniquely violent and convoluted that its product has its own name, Balkanisation..

This Balkanisation can be found in Afghanistan between not just the Sunni and Shia communities, as is typical in Islamic nations where there is a clear disparity in the size of the two demographics, but also between tribes and ethnicities, namely the majority Sunni Pashtuns – in which the Taliban broadly belong – and the minority Shia Hazaras.

Despite the narrative of the war in Iraq being shrouded by the now-dubious proposition that Saddam Hussein was in possession of WMDs, there was a sectarian element similar to that in Afghanistan, one which became more overt after the invasion.

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Though Northern Ireland is really the most important example of what I’m trying to get across. My father spent his 19th birthday patrolling the streets of West Belfast, presumably somewhere between the Catholic-Republican estate of the Falls Road and the Protestant-Loyalist estate of the Shankill Road, and was there for a similar reason he was for the others….

Two groups of people who have no real reason to hate each other did, and to an extent still do, live under a permanent state of fear while shooting, stabbing, bombing and famously ‘kneecapping’ each other, citing borders drawn before they were born, differing ways they practice the same faith, battles fought over three centuries ago and a tribal philosophy bred into them by their communities, who had been the victims of the same indoctrination themselves.

If this cultural ecosystem can manifest itself as Balkanisation in Northern Ireland and has materialised in the past, though to a continuously lesser extent, in parts of Scotland, it most certainly can in England. Or rather, it has and will.

In 2022 Hindu and Muslim communities clashed in my home city of Leicester; my friend group abruptly endured a schism on these very lines as news – both real and fake – travelled of acid attacks, stabbings and vandalism of their Mandirs and Masajid perpetrated by each other’s communities.

On Melton Road, the main venue of the civil unrest, a Jewish friend of mine effectively locked herself indoors that September over fear of being caught up in the violence. At the same time hate preachers and supposed community leaders came down to Leicester from Birmingham and London to whip up division and violence further.

I have also seen parties like Britain First take to the streets of Midland market towns in hoards, with their own crude version of Christianity while misappropriating my flag and bearing crucifixes, calling to ‘deport all Muslims’ and spouting similar vile rhetoric about Black and Brown people while claiming to be patriots.

Whether the ugly head of sectarianism and Balkanisation people like my father has spent his life fighting against has begun to rear its head in England because of immigration, socio-economic reasons, social media algorithms, or the fragmentation of traditional integration models are debates to be had – debates to be had not just with maturity and honesty but with the utmost haste.

My father knows what happens when these issues are left to sit and stew, and it’s not something we as a country should allow to happen.

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