President Obama has just created something called the Atrocities Prevention Board. Its aim is ambitious to say the least, but it matters because it recognizes that crimes against humanity rarely come out of the blue. The warning signs were there in the case of Armenia, the Holocaust, Bosnia, Rwanda, and currently in Sudan, if the international community had chosen to notice them.
On the twentieth anniversary of the start of the Bosnian war we should feel anger and shame because 'the international order' is still ignoring those warning signs when they occur. We should also acknowledge the human consequences of the West's failure in Bosnia.
For instance, we should remember how peacekeepers stood by as Serb paramilitaries dragged Hakija Turajlic, the Bosnian vice president, ostensibly under their protection, from their Land Rover and shot him in the road like a dog.
Or how peacekeepers looked the other way while Serb accountants and teachers, in Bosnia for a weekend's adventure, looted the homes of the Bosnian families they had killed and raped, loading their vehicles with microwaves and video recorders to take back to their wives in Belgrade, like post-modern war trophies.
Give a moment's thought to the grieving widows and mothers from places less famous than Srebrenica, where 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men were systematically massacred. Or the female lawyer I interviewed who was in a concentration camp for months, raped daily by a Serb who had previously been a neighbor who had sipped beers around the barbeque with her husband.
Worthy of special mention in the hall of shame is the UK's foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, who insisted that the Serb leader, Slobodan Milosevic, was our partner in the search for peace, a man we could do business with. Hurd wanted the international community to treat Milosevic as an impartial player, even though Milosevic's speeches since 1989 had made his 'eliminationist' racial politics clear. After he left office, Hurd's company, Hawkpoint, made a tidy profit privatizing Serbian utilities for Milosevic.
There were also banal reasons for the deaths of more than 100,000 Bosnian Muslims. A Bosnian woman I met had been at school with Biljana Plavsic, the former president of the Republika Srpska, and the highest ranking Serb politician convicted in the war crimes trials. Where did the Serbian Empress's hatred come from? At school young Biljana had been deeply in love with a Muslim classmate who ungraciously dumped her.
Another Bosnian Muslim remembered a youthful Radovan Karadzic (now awaiting trial in The Hague) arriving in sophisticated Sarajevo, fresh from his village, wearing his felt boots. Karadzic never got over the sniggers, and exacted the ultimate revenge on the cosmopolitan city dwellers by besieging them with snipers and shrapnel, at a cost of 12,000 lives.
Throughout the Yugoslav wars, our leaders cynically framed Bosnia as a humanitarian disaster, like a drought that required the delivery of aid, rather than a political solution. In the words of a Sarajevo resident I met,
"Your aid convoys keep us alive so the Serbs can kill us at their leisure."
This suited the west's diplomats, who had a perfect excuse ("intervention would endanger the aid convoys") not to cast off their moral equivalence or to confront the Serb's ugly political aims.
The shame of Bosnia is also about the vanity of Western diplomats who believed Milosevic and the other Serb leaders would never lie to such important statesmen, and wouldn't dream of leading them a merry dance in endless negotiations, only to disregarding every document they signed.
Our failures did not end with the Dayton Peace Accord of 1995. Evidently, we did not learn the lessons from the deNazification of Germany after 1945. We should have required 're-education' in both Serbia and the Republika Srpska. But we feared appearing imperial: opinion polls show the Serbs continue to believe they were the victims of the war, rather than the aggressors, responsible for 90% of casualties. The current Serbian election is, fittingly, a fight between an unrepentant nationalist and a politician who wants Serbia to make itself more palatable to the European Union.
Equally, militia leaders remain in positions of power in the Republika Srpska as mayors, chief of police or other officials. Local people tell how, after the war ended, the international community funded a 'sensitization' project to teach Serb police to stop terrorizing Bosnia Muslims. Apparently the 'sensitization' caused hilarity among the police, and their chief appeared with a new BMW.
Although the president of the EU Council at time, Jacques Poos, declared "the hour of Europe had dawned," finding a common foreign policy beyond appeasement proved impossible. Hence, it was up to America to tackle the disaster in Europe's backyard. The US was absorbed in the LA riots and then OJ Simpson, but eventually Bill Clinton saw that Milosevic needed to receive an unambiguous message. With the dispatch of only 18 cruise missiles, the Balkan wars ended when the Serbs ran away, as those who had witnessed the Serb militias knew they would. Now, the EU wants to admit Serbia, despite its gangster economy, in a vain attempt to keep it out of Russia's sphere of influence.
And judging from how the international community has responded to nine years of genocide in Darfur, it seems we have learned nothing from Europe's dark Bosnian chapter. Shame on us all.
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His political calculations proved true.
I have still yet to read an article ANYWHERE on any Western portal about the actual American and Bosniak sabotage of the first peace agreement in Bosnia and how the country slid into war. It's always the same story, the majority of the population voted for independence, and then the Serbs started shooting and ethnically cleansing.
They knew that by sacrificing civilian targets, they would eventually
draw fire to illicit sympathy from the west was examined in Karadzic's
trial; he brought it into question but from the transcripts he was
also keen to move away from the claims as they were categorically
dismissed by testimony and evidence from a wide range of observers of
all backgrounds- medical staff, journalists, neighbours, UN military
observers logging each detonation. Likewise the dismissal of the other
false claim by the Serbs re the Markale market shell- apart from the
initial report where the UN was undecided in their conclusion to the
origin of the shell (revealed in Karadzic's trial to be a strategic
decision to allow peacekeepers time to prepare for repercussions when
they released the full report stating that it was highly probable that
the shell came from the Serb held position)
As to the claims that Bos Moslems were making significant assaults
from Srebrenica into the surrounding areas including the much cited
Bratunac massacre this lie has been squashed by the RDC’s findings
confirmed by Tabeau and Bijak’s reports- the figures and associated
data don’t support the claim, quite the contrary. But if a lie is
shouted enough times then it takes on a life form of its own.
God bless the U.S. for helping in the end, but the help surely came too late, as hundreds of thousands unarmed civilians had to die for the independence from evil.
Aid to Bosnia, with a multi-ethnic populatiosn was not an instant sort-out. Hindsight is a lot easier than foresight there.
NATO got there, too late for your tastes, but they got there all the same. You should be thankful for that instead of blaming the other countries for not coming quickly to your preferential side of a civil war.
In November 1963 the Greek Cypriots demanded the abolition of no less than eight of the basic articles that had been included in the 1960 agreement for the protection of the Turkish Cypriots. The Turkish Cypriots, naturally, refused to agree.
"When the Turkish Cypriots objected to the amendment of the Constitution, Makarios put his plan into effect, and the Greek Cypriot attack began in December 1963," wrote Lt. Gen. George Karayiannis of the Greek Cypriot militia ("Ethnikos Kiryx" 15.6.65). The general was referring to the notorious "Akritas" plan, which was the blueprint for the annihilation of the Turkish Cypriots and the annexation of the island to Greece.
In his memoirs, American Undersecretary of State George Ball said: "Makarios's central interest was to block off Turkish intervention so that he and his Greek Cypriots could go on happily massacring Turkish Cypriots. Obviously we would never permit that."
The fact is, however, that neither the United States, the United Kingdom, nor the United Nations, nor anyone, other than Turkey ever took effective action to prevent it.
What can you do when the Greeks had a presence there for more than 3,000 years, and they were wiped out from all of present day Turkey. It was an easy land grab for Turkey, taking a third of the island then resettling it with maindlanders.
Athens Court of Appeal dtd. March 21, 1979: The court decision reads as follows:
"The Turkish intervention in Cyprus, which was carried out in accordance with the London-Zurich agreements, was legal. Turkey had, as one of the Guarantor Powers, the right to fulfill her obligation. The true guilty ones were the Greek Officers, who organised the coup and thereby created the conditions for an intervention."
Less publicized is the role played by Western private military companies. Although few mercenaries participated directly in the fighting, they helped the young Croatian Army win battles against the more experienced Serbian Army & so put more pressure on Serbia to withdraw from Bosnia.
There’s no way to know now what might have happened if NATO ground troops were sent into Bosnia in large numbers or how Russia might have responded to a perceived invasion of their ally.
How would the Spanish accept the return of the Moors?
How about the Russians accepting the rule of the Mongols?
There's no reason for Serbs to be dominated again by someone else who was associated with so much suffering and for so long.
First of all, there were some 100,000 all together for all sides, Bosniaks had the largest share of these, something like 2/3rds.
Second, atrocities took place everywhere. You naming certain cases is truly unprofessional journalism. Such cases were common across all three ethnicities, not just Serbs comitting such crimes against the Bosniaks. I am an ethnic Serb from Northern Sarajevo suburbs, growing up on the front line of the war. Bosniak snipers overlooking our town fired at us (children, not military targets) numerous times, yet no one ever mentions this. My grandparents lived 7km away in a town controlled by Bosniaks. Their own neighbours had tried to kill them numerous times during the 3.5 years of the war. One of my aunts was killed and raped trying to escape Bosniak controlled territory.
Why don't you report on the direct American involvment in destroying the early peace agreements in Bosnia? Peace plans like Carrington-Cutileiro to which all 3 sides agreed to, but because the American ambassador to Yugoslavia at that time convinved Alija Izetbegovic to bail out. What about the Owen-Stoltenberg peace plan in 1993 once again sabotaged by the Americans?
In fact, the serbs only seriously considered and finally accepted any peace plan once they started losing territory to the croats, going within a matter of days from their high of controlling more than 50% of bosnia to about 46% and lossing territory fast.
It is a tragedy what happened to your family and your childhood, one shared by all families in Bosnia. Bosnians are untied in their suffering from such outrages more than the supposed benefits that were shamefully used to justify these outrages.
The problem with all of this is that the Bosniaks wanted the whole country, centralized and because they were the largest ethnic group, they seeked to dominate it. This stems from their belief that the whole country is theirs. The problem with this is that they were less than 45% of the population.
They rejected the first plan and properly share the country with the Serbs and Croats. Now the country is split, with Republika Srpska being almost continuous and capable of seceding. It was this greed for domination and control that got them into this war. I don't regret that we and the Croats ethnically cleansed them. It was at least better than keeping the population imprisoned like they did with my grandparents and other Serbs and Croats that stayed in their territory.
I do regret Srebrenica, but this is another story.
This "journalist" should team up with Angelina Jolie and create another Bosnian war movie based on all accounts taken from one side only. The only shame here is the total disregard for fact finding and writing an entirely biased article. Oh well, that's what happens when your 'research' consists of cramming to write any gibberish the night before.