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Bosnia: Shame on Us All

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  • Bosnia: Shame on Us All

    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

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