Posted on 07/29/2008 10:32:30 AM PDT by Bokababe
The arrest of Radovan Karadzic in Serbia on Tuesday has provided yet another occasion for all the tired old propaganda about the Balkans wars to be taken out of the cupboard and given one last airing. In particular, the war is presented as one between a Serb aggressor and an innocent victim, the Bosnian Muslims, and the former is accused of practising genocide against the latter. Even if one accepts that crimes against humanity were committed during the Balkan wars, it should be obvious that both these claims are absurd.
First, the Serbs were no more the aggressors in the Bosnian civil war than Abraham Lincoln was an aggressor in the American Civil War. The Yugoslav army was in place all over Bosnia-Herzegovina because that republic was part of Yugoslavia. Bosnian Muslims (like Croats) left the army in droves and set up their own militia instead, as part of their drive for independence from Belgrade. This meant that the Yugoslav army lost its previous strongly multiethnic character and became largely Serb. It did not mean that Serb forces entered the territory of Bosnia, or even that the Serbs attacked the hapless Bosnian Muslims.
The accusation of aggression is intended to introduce by the back door an allegation which in fact has vanished from modern international criminal justice. Although the crime of waging an aggressive war was pronounced to be the supreme international crime at Nuremberg, it has been dropped from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia which will presumably try Karadzic once he is extradited to The Hague, and even the new International Criminal Court (also in The Hague) does not for the time being have jurisdiction over it.
The accusation has the effect of condemning the Bosnian Serb war effort at its very origins (in terms of ius ad bellum) independently of any condemnation for the way the war was fought (ius in bello). In fact, the Bosnian Serb war effort was no more or less legitimate than the Bosnian Muslim war effort. The Muslims wanted to secede from Yugoslavia (and were egged on to do this by the Americans and the Europeans) while the Bosnian Serbs wanted to stay in Yugoslavia. It was as simple as that.
In my view, it is not possible to adjudicate such matters using the criminal law since, as political questions, they transcend it. But the fact that the Muslims blatantly cheated by holding the vote on an independence referendum at 3 a.m. after the Bosnian Serb deputies in the Bosnian parliament had all been told to go home, and the fact that the Bosnian Muslim president, Alija Izetbegovic, remained in office throughout 1992 long after his term had expired and long after he should have handed over to a Serb, meant that the Bosnian Serbs had excellent grounds for believing that the Bosnian Muslim secession was quite simply a coup d’état.
In any case, once the Muslims had seized power in Sarajevo, the Bosnian Serbs sought not to conquer the whole republic but instead simply to fight for the secession of their territories from Muslim control. Of course atrocities were committed against civilians during this period, especially ethnic cleansing. But the same phenomenon is observed, I believe, and by definition, in every single war in which a new state is created, whether it is the creation of Pakistan in 1947 or the creation in 1974 of what later became the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. If the Muslims had the right unilaterally to secede from Yugoslavia, why should the Bosnian Serbs not have had the right unilaterally to secede from the new state of Bosnia-Herzegovina which had never before existed and a state, and to which the Bosnian Serbs had no loyalty whatever?
Second, the Bosnian Serbs are accused (and two have been convicted) of committing genocide against the Bosnian Muslims in the massacre perpetrated at Srebrenica. Let us leave aside for a moment the Serb claims that the numbers of people killed in that summer of 1995 has been artificially inflated for propaganda purposes; let us also leave aside the undoubted fact that the Bosnian Muslims were using the UN safe haven of Srebrenica as a safe haven from which to conduct constant attacks against the Serb villages surrounding the town, during which many atrocities were committed against Serb civilians. (The commander of the Muslim forces, Nasir Oric, was released by the ICTY in February.)
What is clear is that the Srebrenica massacre cannot possibly be described as genocide. Even the most ardent pro-Muslim propagandists agree that the victims of the massacre there were all men. The Bosnian Serbs claim that they were combatants (although that is certainly not an excuse for killing them) but the point is that an army bent on genocide would precisely not have singled out men for execution but would have killed women too. The Srebrenica massacre may well have been a crime against humanity but it is impossible to see how it can be categorised as genocide.
Unfortunately, there is a very clear political reason why it has been so categorised. The Muslim president of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Haris Silaijdzic, said carefully on CNN the day Karadzic was captured that Karadzic’s trial was only the beginning of the process by which justice would be done in Bosnia. He said that there were hundreds of thousands of Muslims who had been ethnically cleansed by “Karadzic and Milosevic” and that their project therefore remained in force. The clear implication of what he was saying was this: if the very existence of the Bosnian Serb republic (the autonomous region within Bosnia carved out from the republic during the civil war) is found, in a court of law, to have been had as its president a man, Karadzic, who is convicted of genocide in the process of creating it, then its status would be illegitimate and it should be abolished. The Muslims continue to claim control over the whole of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina, while the Serbs merely want the preservation of their considerable autonomy within it.
In other words, far from bringing peace to the Balkans, it is quite possible that a conviction of Karadzic for genocide will reopen the Dayton settlement and egg the Muslims on to claim control over the Serb republic too. Under such circumstances, it is inevitable that the Bosnian Serbs would try to proclaim formal secession from Bosnia, just as the Kosovo Albanians did from Serbia.
I don't know if what happened in Srebernica qualifies as genocide or not, but the writer is wrong here. Historically, one of the ways a conqueror would destroy a vanquished tribe or nation was by killing all of its men. That's what the Romans did, for example, when they conquered Carthage- they killed any men they could find, and sold the women and children into slavery.
A few thousand is far from "killing off all of its men", especially during an ongoing war. It would be a war crime, yes, but a genocide?
What a mess, the World and the US should take notes on what happened when Yugoslavia broke up, the use of ethnicity as a dividing point for politicians to gain power and control.
Since the past can’t be changed there has to be a compensation of Serbia for it’s loss of Kosovo, by giving the Serb region in Bosnia to Serbia. What kind of hypocrisy is it to grant independence to Kosovar Muslims, while denying it to Serbs in Bosnia?
Thank you for this post!!
I think he is right on that. Wow, a journalist I actually agree with. How unusual.
It isn’t what they did, many were executed and many were killed in the ongoing skirmishes as well as infighting amongst themselves. The objective was not to “exterminate” muslims, it started out as an operation to protect Serbs from Oric and his goons then wound up turning into a revenge campaign.
What the heck do you think any war is but killing off men? It's not like a lot of old ladies are of military age. Do you think US troops are shaking down old women during the war or military age men?
Many dressed in civilian clothes and blend into a crowd. You don't think the same tactics that are being used on US soldiers in Iraq were used on Serb military? Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan is all part of the Jihad. You were lied to by CNN, they didn't want you to draw this common thread so they gave them another name. AlQaeda.
Serbs and Americans are fighting the same enemy and you don't even know it....but I think you will.
Keep in mind, it was Warren Zimmerman who killed the Lisbon Agreement. It could have been avoided but good old Warren wanted to see blood for reasons far beyond the parties involved.
Well actually Abraham Lincoln was the aggressor in the War Between the States.
You wrote:
“A few thousand is far from “killing off all of its men”, especially during an ongoing war. It would be a war crime, yes, but a genocide?”
It would be considered part of a program of genocide if Srebernica seemed to be only an installment thereof. That’s what many people thought was happening. And don’t forget about the organized rapes and ethnic cleansing against non-Serbs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u49unD69Lqs&feature=related
If Ante Gotovina can be put on trial because his troops committed 150 murders and ethnically cleansed 200-250,00 Serbs out of Croatian controlled territory then how can the Serbs not be guilty or at least deserving of trials for doing those same things on a greater scale?
Look at Dafur. Everybody calls it genocide because 200-400,000 people have been killed AND BECAUSE OF THE ORGANIZED RAPES, AND ETHNIC CLEANSING.
Zimmerman may have assisted, but it was Izetbegovic who ultimately killed Lisbon
The bulk of the Muslim men that died were killed by military action as the armed column fought its way to Tuzla.
If the Muslims were really worried about genocide, they certainly wouldn’t have left their women and children to the mercy of the Bosnia Serb army!
Srebrenica was a armed camp used by the Muslims to terrorize the surrounding population!
“Genocide” is bad therefore the word is applicable to any action or opinion opposed by the left.
In a major embarrassment for the Bosnian Government, two Muslim brothers whose supposed murders were used as evidence in a highly publicized war crimes trial to condemn two Bosnian Serbs to death have been found living in a Sarajevo suburb.
Jailed Serbs' 'Victims' Found Alive, Embarrassing Bosnia (NY Times)
In a major embarrassment for the Bosnian Government, two Muslim brothers whose supposed murders were used as evidence in a highly publicized war crimes trial to condemn two Bosnian Serbs to death have been found living in a Sarajevo suburb.
Jailed Serbs' 'Victims' Found Alive, Embarrassing Bosnia (NY Times)
Operation Storm was the largest example of ethnic cleansing during the bteak-up of Yugoslavia. More specifically, subsequent to the US-trained Croation forces attack on Knin and taking most of the Krajina, this led to a reduction of the Serb populaton of approximately 12% to a mere 3%.
That's a lot of people, Vladimir.
More Croatian apologetics, its become endemic around here as of late.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.