Posted on 10/15/2004 4:51:32 PM PDT by Jane_N
Next July it will be ten years since the most odious crime was committed on European soil since the depravities of the German Nazis. The 1995 massacre at Srebrenica of captured Bosnian men and boys by Serb militias was an outrage which shocked the world.
Everyone wanted to know how the UN Dutch peacekeepers, who were supposed to be guarding the town as a safe haven for its citizens and the Muslims who had fled their homes in the region, could have been persuaded to abandon the helpless people they had been ordered to protect. The Dutch have grappled with this question themselves. There have been many reasons advanced for their terrible failure. Their soldiers were poorly armed and briefed. A few weeks before, Serb militiamen had taken other UN troops hostage. The Dutchmen were heavily outnumbered. Had they used force to defend the Bosnian town, they would have easily been overrun and many of the civilians might have been killed. The Serbs were promising to look after the Bosnians in the town.
They seemed so reasonable and convincing.
We still wait to hear from the mouth of the Serbian commander, Ratko Mladic, whether if the Dutch commander had stood firm, he really would have pressed home an attack against the UN soldiers.
Mladic and his political boss Radovan Karadzic are both still on the run having been indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for genocide and war crimes. They might have feared immediate reprisals for killing UN troops. In the end it was news of the Srebrenica massacre that finally strengthened the will of the international community and brought on the NATO air attacks which quickly blasted the Serbs to the peace negotiations in Dayton. That the two key Serbian instigators of Bosnia’s agony remain at large, hidden within the Serbian community remains the very greatest scandal. It has seemed that as long as they could conceal the two leading criminals, the Serbs felt themselves able to pretend that these wicked acts were not real, that somehow they had never really happened.
Well this June, Bosnian Serbs took an important step toward reality when their regional government finally admitted that the massacre had been committed by Serbs. This week they have gone a step further by publishing a report in which Serbian investigators have found that more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims fell victim to Mladic’s butchers. The final pretences about this deed of the utmost savagery have been abandoned. Serbs need no longer live the lie. Now they can grapple with the guilt of this odious crime.
There is however one more step that they must take to mitigate the horrors that were perpetrated in their name. That is to deliver up Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic for trial at The Hague.
As long as these two men avoid answering for the terrible crimes with which they are charged, all Serbs, not just those in Bosnia, will remain in the dark shadow of guilt. No civilized society can protect men who have done what they are alleged to have done.
They must be given up.
They must be given up."
Now change the wording a little and you get: "As long as these men avoid answering for the terrible crimes with which they are charged, all Arabs, not just those in Iraq, will remain in the dark shadow of guilt. No civilized society can protect men who have done what they are alleged to have done.
They must be given up."
So when do they plan on giving up Bin Laden and his terrorist supporters? When will we hear such condemnation from the Arab world towards their fellow terrorists. Hypocrisy!
Ok, whatever you say, Jane.
No Hoplite, whatever you say...you're the self proclaimed expert on everything...NOT
Yeah seriously... Yasser Arafat gets a Nobel peace prize and full EU support despite ample evidence of criminality, and Europe is alleged to be an impartial judge. Europe would give up France to the Muslims too if they thought it would make them any safer.
Hey the Dutch found some great weed, it was after 4:30, all that shooting would hurt their ears, blah, blah...bottom line: never trust a blue helmet.
And as far as me being an expert, I'm not. I just have the ability to make your so called experts look like the asses they are.
I mean, posting articles by Timothy Bancroft Hinchey on FreeRepublic? WTF are you thinking?
Sadly thoughtomator, I think you are pretty damn right (I say sadly due to the fact that I live in Europe). The Arab world has no right to condemn or make demands while they support Bin Laden et al.
And the killing of the Russian schoolchildren last month???? What were they? Chopped liver?
Really, I can't stand these people. They only care when the victim is a Moose Limb. To h*ll with them.
PLK, Dead Christians = good, Dead Muslims = bad.
Or at least some people tend to think so...
The Serbs were sending the muzzies to hell. Til Slick Willie took sides, and starting killing Christians.
Milosevic was a %(*^$#% Hero.
Free Milosevic and let him fight the war on terror/muzzies with us.
When you kill an Islamic extremist about to blow himself with a bomb or spray bullets with a machine gun, I'm all for it.
When you order the summary executions of men, women, children and elderly who happen to be Muslim and unarmed, it's called atrocity.
Srebrenica was liberated from the Bosnian Muslim's head hunting army that hid behind so called "UN safe havens" a concept never heard before in international rules of war (their is an "open city" rule that if a city does not defend itself can not be attacked - like Paris in WW2).
The UN did nothing to stop armed Muslims using the "safe haven" to stage offensive operations against the Serb positions and thus the Serbs were under zero obligation to honor the UN's "safe haven".
their = there
The report is not "collaborationist". It is the one that archduke Ashdown rejected. Read carefully!
Meanwhile, Pythag, you might want to put a disclaimer on your referenced document to the effect that it was rejected in toto back in 2002 when it was produced, and the actual RS Srebrenica Report hasn't made it into the public realm yet.
You two are quite a pair - one who's attempting to pass of bad information, and the other who can't be bothered to read that bad information before trashing it.
Classic.
Ah - the true version.
Not so bad - pyth and I are on the same wavelength - I thought is was the phoney one your side wanted.
Failure of the few hundred Dutch soldiers to protect thousands of armed Muslim Mujahedeen? Brave Muslim fighters did not need much help anyway - they were massacring Serbian kafirs in villages around Srebrenica for months and after Serbs fought back they escaped to Tuzla.
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