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Huffington Post
May 8 2012
Bosnia: Shame on Us All
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.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rebecca-tinsley/bosnia-shame-on-us-all_b_1498957.html
May 8 2012
Bosnia: Shame on Us All
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.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rebecca-tinsley/bosnia-shame-on-us-all_b_1498957.html