You wrote:
“And do you know of other large scale mass executions?”
How often did the Serbs have a chance? The Serb army was so lousy that it struggled mightily to take cities it surrounded.
“Because the Hague doesn’t. If anyone did, we’d be hearing the name of it over & over like we do “Srebrenica”. (Not battles with those shooting back.)”
Have you heard of more than one province in Sudan? Dafur is the only one I’ve ever heard of.
“Rapes are unfortunately a part of every war. “Systematic rapes” are not. I have yet to hear of “a Serbian Rape Battalion” and “the Serbian rape camp” stories proved to be a lie. Were Muslim women raped? Yes. Were Serb women raped? Undoubtedly, yes. Is that “genocide”? No, unless it cuts both ways and that would make Muslims “genocidal”, .”
Go ahead and declare the Bosniacs genocidal. I won’t lose sleep over that even if I think that’s a bit over the top. But in any case, no matter what the Bosniacs were or weren’t it doesn’t change what the Serbs were - genocidal. Also, rape is part of genocide - according to those shaing international law:
http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/pif01/
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990DE3D9163EF936A3575AC0A96E958260
Now, you may not like that, but this isn’t about your favorite flavor of icecream. This is about international law regarding genocide and, surprise, surprise, rape is part of it.
“Interestingly enough we NEVER hear the sad stories of Serb woman raped, even though the “systematic rape of Bosnian Serb women” were the first rape cases of to be reported to the UN — and I can’t imagine none took place after that.”
Never? I’ve heard of it so it might just be that you don’t pay attention.
“Rape is a war crime, not genocide.”
Genocide is not a war crime? Or do you mean rape is not part of genocide? Again, pay attention and follow the links above and you’ll see that that is NOT where international law is headed for better or worse.
“”Ethnic cleansing” (forcibly relocating an ethnic population against its will) may have been a hugely shocking buzzword back in 1996. But after we assisted the Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Albanians in ethnic cleansing about a half million or more Serbs from Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, its pretty much a non-starter buzzword anymore.”
Whether it shocks you or not is of no importance to me. The simple fact is that Croats and Serbs are tried for ethnic cleansing. It is considered a war crime. Don’t like it? Start a campaign against it.
“”Sometimes you have separate populations to keep them from killing each other” is more the thinking today — and Dayton, fully institutionalized that idea.”
No. Dayton was not about blowing up buildings and forcing populations without their property onto the road with only the clothes on their backs. That is one of the charges against the Croat Ante Gotovina after all.
“The Laughland point is that the use of the word “genocide” was key to writing the entire Bosnian war off as “an aggression by Serbs”, instead of seeing it for what it was — a bloody vicious, multi-sided civil war over political issues — that while it included war crimes, was not a war crime in and of itself.”
It certainly became a war crime. It was indeed a multi-sided etnically and culturally based civil war. And Serbs committed crimes in it - and so did everyone else.
“One needs to separate and examine the political issues that created this war, separately from the war crimes committed during it.”
Only if you want justice to NOT take place. The simple fact is peoples can act so poorly in a war that any justifiable motivation they had at the beginning of the war can become moot by its end.
“Because war crimes are the result of war, not the cause of it.”
You have two mistakes there. 1) Waging aggressive war in itself is considered a war crime (ala Nuremberg). 2) War crimes are NOT the result of war. They are the result of criminal behavior. To say that war crimes are caused by wars is like saying theft is caused by ownership of property.
“War can exist without war crimes, but war crimes don’t happen without war.”
And theft doesn’t exist without property ownership first, but to claim theft is caused by property ownership is nuts. Criminal behavior is the root cause of crime - ALWAYS AND EVERYWHERE. That’s why we try PEOPLE and not wars. People act criminally. Wars do not make choices.
You seem very confused. You don’t know what causes war crimes. You think they are caused by wars and not people. You are entirely unaware of FACT that international law tribunals are now increasingly accepting the notion that rape can be a war crime.
“And do you know of other large scale mass executions?”
" How often did the Serbs have a chance?"
So, in other words, you answer is "no, there was no proven pattern of a program of genocide", but you expect that your assumption of "they would have done it if they could" is a substitute for NO evidence of your claim. Ridiculous!
"Have you heard of more than one province in Sudan? Dafur is the only one I’ve ever heard of"
If I took more than a cursory look at the Sudan, I'd probably know more than Darfur. I've taken far more than "a cursory look" at the Balkans -- and no pattern.
The ICTY has become a complete joke -- ESPECIALLY TO THOSE WHO WISH TO SEE JUSTICE DONE -- a crime should be a crime regardless of who commits it, but that is not the case in practice. Based on that "criteria for genocide", virtually every and any war between nations where one national or ethnic group is killing another, can now be considered "genocide".
1) Waging aggressive war in itself is considered a war crime (ala Nuremberg).
Yes it is. And since you brought up Nuremberg, you might be interested to hear what Walter J. Rockler, one of the original Nuremburg Prosecutors had to say about it with regard to our policy in the Balkans:
As a primary source of international law, the judgment of the Nuremberg Tribunal in the 1945-1946 case of the major Nazi war criminals is plain and clear. Our leaders often invoke and praise that judgment, but obviously have not read it. The International Court declared:
"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
At Nuremberg, the United States and Britain pressed the prosecution of Nazi leaders for planning and initiating aggressive war. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the head of the American prosecution staff, asserted "that launching a war of aggression is a crime and that no political or economic situation can justify it." He also declared that "if certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us."
The United Nations Charter views aggression similarly. Articles 2(4) and (7) prohibit interventions in the domestic jurisdiction of any country and threats of force or the use of force by one state against another. The General Assembly of the UN in Resolution 2131, "Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention," reinforced the view that a forceful military intervention in any country is aggression and a crime without justification.
Putting a "NATO" label on aggressive policy and conduct does not give that conduct any sanctity.
It is clear that those laws made at Nuremberg could apply to those involved in the 1999 NATO Bombing. However it is unclear whether they could apply to the Bosnian Serbs, given that this was a civil war. This was not "one state initiating an action against another state".
2) War crimes are NOT the result of war. They are the result of criminal behavior. To say that war crimes are caused by wars is like saying theft is caused by ownership of property.
Wrong. "Crimes" are the result of "criminal actions" -- hence "war crimes" are criminal actions that take place in the context of a war. "War crimes" do not happen without "war". I am not confused, you are.
“One needs to separate and examine the political issues that created this war, separately from the war crimes committed during it.”
Only if you want justice to NOT take place. The simple fact is peoples can act so poorly in a war that any justifiable motivation they had at the beginning of the war can become moot by its end.
Wrong again. Simply deciding that a civil war that contains war crimes is automatically "a war of aggression", without examining the facts surrounding the initiation of hostilities, is "presuming guilt without an investigation or a defense". This is the same kind of methodology used for political show trials in totalitarian regimes. You can't hold up a court as some sort of "paragon of justice" and then let it behave like a court under Stalin's rule.