In this week’s Desert Island Discs, the CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour speaks of her deep frustration during the darkest days of the Bosnian conflict at the West’s inability – or unwillingness – to end the bloodshed. She recalls how she even managed to rebuke former president Bill Clinton live on air over his failure to intervene in the stricken capital of Sarajevo, where Serb militias daily targeted the civilian population with shells and sniper rifles.

For those of us who covered that dreadful conflict in the Nineties, we had this awful sense that, no matter how many acts of pure evil the rival factions committed on the ground, there seemed no prospect that the conflict would ever end, or the perpetrators be brought to justice.