THE DOORS of Gen Philippe Morillon's study - in an annex of the French Prime Minister's office - open onto an idyllic garden. Water gurgles in the fountain and russet leaves float down to the lawn. But Philippe Morillon is haunted by another time and place: a place called Srebrenica.
In March 1993, as commander of the UN Protection Force in Bosnia, Gen Morillon demanded that the Serbs let him into the besieged town, which no aid convoys had reached in four months. There he found 60,000 people on the verge of starvation. At night refugees silently paced the streets to keep from freezing to death.
When Gen Morillon tried to leave the enclave, Muslim women and children lay down in front of his vehicle. In a scene broadcast on television screens around the world, Gen Morillon shouted through a bullhorn from an upstairs window of the PTT building in Srebrenica. "You are now under the protection of the UN forces. I will not abandon you."
The French commander was dubbed "General Courage" and the Bosnian government gave him an honorary passport. But his liberal interpretation of orders outraged bureaucrats at UN headquarters in New York, who were thus pushed towards declaring Srebrenica a "safe area".
The general claims anyone would have acted as he did. "My mission was to come to the aid of people in danger." Gen Morillon calls the UN "a wonderful hope machine". He advocates UN military intervention in Zaire, but feels that international law must extend UN peacekeepers' right of self defence to the people and property under their protection. The international community must be ready to fight violence with violence "when the limits of the intolerable are crossed".
There is a certain bitterness in knowing that the West could have intervened effectively in Bosnia much earlier. "I needed tanks, armour, aircraft and artillery," Gen Morillon says. "When I proposed all of this to New York, they said `what are you going to do with it?' In this type of conflict you have to be respected, and to be respected, you have to be strong and not hesitate to use force."
When Srebrenica fell to the Bosnian Serbs 28 months after his promise, the French general had already completed his posting in Bosnia. Up to 8,000 residents of the enclave were massacred by Gen Ratko Mladic's forces. "I feel partly responsible," Gene Morillon says. "If I had known I was prolonging the suffering of the population, I probably wouldn't have proposed this (safe area) solution."
Gen Morillon was deeply moved, he says, to read an interview with a Srebrenica survivor who said the massacres would not have happened had he still been Unprofor commander.
At 61, Gen Morillon has now joined forces with a group of Catholic charismatics who are setting up a school to teach young people to proselytise. With the same group, he organises hot meals for homeless Parisians - if they attend Mass. Gen Morillon's biggest project, undertaken at the request of the Prime Minister, is a six-day religious festival for young people next August which will culminate in an overnight prayer vigil and a Mass for 600,000 said by Pope John Paul II.
"Christianity," says Gene Morillon, "is the only thing that brings an answer to suffering and death." He is motivated by "the choice I made long ago, to be a witness of the Gospel". He gives lectures every week and has just published a book, Words of a Soldier.
"Of course I've had doubts," he says. "In the same way that a soldier who was never afraid is careless, a Christian who never doubts is a nut."
Gen Morillon's wife of 37 years, Anne, died of cancer last January. "Everything I do today I know she would have wanted. We had decided to witness together." When he talks of his grief, the general's famous courage falters. Yes, it was hard not to blame God when his wife died. "The hardest thing was to say, `Thy will be done'. I was often separated from her when I was in the army but I hope this separation will be as short as possible. This time, the separation came from her side. In the past, I was always the one who went away."
