Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Reasons for Mladic’s arrest shameful
QMI Agency via Sun Media via Calgary Sun ^ | 2011-06-02 | Michael Coren

Posted on 06/02/2011 6:03:50 AM PDT by Clive

I don’t think any civilized and informed person either condemns or doubts the reason why Ratko Mladic was arrested by Serbian security forces, and handed over to an international war crimes trial in The Hague.

He is alleged to have led a force that slaughtered 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, and almost certainly did so.

He was captured because Belgrade desperately wants to become part of the European Community, and knows it has to expunge any former connection with ethnic cleansing and tribal atrocities. The chances are that many in the Serbian government knew full well where Mladic had been hiding for more than a decade, and decided this was the right time to make a public display of collective outrage.

The accused man’s supporters — and there are huge numbers of them — do not so much defend all of his actions, as argue he was on the sharp end of a grotesque war in which Serb, Croat and Bosnian Muslims killed and raped each other with a hellish gusto and regularity.

Why are the Serbs the only ones targeted, they say, and why does the west, for example, not deal with the Islamic terror groups in Kosovo, and with Serbs being pushed from their homes in that troubled region?

They have a point. Washington and Europe have been enormously selective in their morality, and some of this is likely connected to the Americans and British in particular wanting to show the Islamic world that they care for the safety and plight of the world’s Muslims.

If so, they are incredibly naive.

Various Arab leaders may talk about the suffering of their fellow Muslims, but it is in fact their fellow Muslims who they themselves treat so badly on a regular basis.

The Serbian Orthodox nationalist Mladic may well have murdered 8,000 Muslims in Bosnia, but Hafez al-Assad, the father of the current Syrian leader, killed more Muslims than that in a single day when he wanted to demonstrate his authority and dissuade his people from revolution.

Boy Assad, the weak son, has probably gone past the 1,000 mark now, as he kills innocent people who even attend a funeral for a fallen protestor.

The Jordanian government is one of the more reasonable in the Islamic world, but in 1970 it killed more than 10,000 Palestinians, and the Arab nationalist icon General Nasser gassed entire villages in Yemen. In other words, different assumptions apply in many Middle Eastern societies than apply in the salons of New York, DC, Rome, and Paris.

The arrest of a Serb warlord is irrelevant to people who have no concern for their own, let alone for others.

The other aspect of this is the double standard where a Serb is arrested, but legions of fellow Slavs just a short flight away in Moscow who ran Soviet intelligence and security services enjoy wealth and freedom. Forget Stalin and the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, look at the cruelty of the gulags, the psychiatric prisons, and the torture chambers right up till the late 1980s. Yet nobody arrested, nobody punished.

If I were a Serb, I’d feel a little angry.

As an unaligned commentator, I’m absolutely disgusted.


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Editorial; Foreign Affairs
KEYWORDS: balkans; bosnia; mladic

1 posted on 06/02/2011 6:03:51 AM PDT by Clive
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: exg; Alberta's Child; albertabound; AntiKev; backhoe; Byron_the_Aussie; Cannoneer No. 4; ...

-


2 posted on 06/02/2011 6:05:35 AM PDT by Clive
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Clive

A riddle: What do you call the slaughter of 8,000 muslim men?


3 posted on 06/02/2011 6:06:26 AM PDT by WayneS ("I hope you know this will go down on your PERMANENT record...")
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: WayneS

A good start.


4 posted on 06/02/2011 6:08:49 AM PDT by US Navy Vet (Go Packers! Go Rockies! Go Boston Bruins! See, I'm "Diverse"!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: WayneS

Pest control....


5 posted on 06/02/2011 6:16:22 AM PDT by circlecity
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: Clive
Michael Coren failed to mention that genocide of "8000 Muslim men and boys" never happened. Alleged genocide occured in July 6 and 7. Yet, it was never mentioned before August 1995, to cover up U.S.-backed ethnic cleansing of 200,000 Serbs from Croatia.

This hoax goes on for too long.

It is interesting to note that Bosnia refuses to organize census sexteen years after the war (the last one was in 1991). No wonder why.

Here is an article published in The Toronto Star, July 15, 9 days after the alleged massacre. There is no mention of "8000 Muslim men and boys" being killed because the hoax was invented later.

The Toronto Star July 16, 1995, Sunday, Sunday Second Edition Section: NEWS; Pg. A1 Length: 816 Words Headline: Fearsome Muslim warlord eludes Bosnian Serb forces Byline: Bill Schiller Toronto Star Dateline: Belgrade, Yugoslavia

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia - When Bosnian Serb commander Gen. Ratko Mladic swept triumphantly into Srebrenica last week, he not only wanted to sweep Srebrenica clean of Muslims - he wanted Nasir Oric.

In Mladic's view, the powerfully built Muslim commander had made life too difficult and too deadly for Serb communities nearby.

Even though the Serbs had Srebrenica surrounded, Oric was still mounting commando raids by night against Serb targets. Oric, as blood-thirsty a warrior as ever crossed a battlefield, escaped Srebrenica before it fell. Some believe he may be leading the Bosnian Muslim forces in the nearby enclaves of Zepa and Gorazde. Last night these forces seized armored personnel carriers and other weapons from U.N. peacekeepers in order to better protect themselves. Oric is a fearsome man, and proud of it. I met him in January, 1994, in his own home in Serb-surrounded Srebrenica. On a cold and snowy night, I sat in his living room watching a shocking video version of what might have been called Nasir Oric's Greatest Hits. There were burning houses, dead bodies, severed heads, and people fleeing. Oric grinned throughout, admiring his handiwork. "We ambushed them," he said when a number of dead Serbs appeared on the screen. The next sequence of dead bodies had been done in by explosives: "We launched those guys to the moon," he boasted. When footage of a bullet-marked ghost town appeared without any visible bodies, Oric hastened to announce: "We killed 114 Serbs there." Later there were celebrations, with singers with wobbly voices chanting his praises. These video reminiscences, apparently, were from what Muslims regard as Oric's glory days. That was before most of eastern Bosnia fell and Srebrenica became a "safe zone" with U.N. peacekeepers inside - and Serbs on the outside. Lately, however, Oric increased his hit-and-run attacks at night. And in Mladic's view, it was far too successful for a community that was supposed to be suppressed. The Serbs regard Oric, once Serb President Slobodan Milosevic's personal bodyguard, as a war criminal. But they don't want to send him to the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands. They want to track him down and kill him. The only songs they want sung of Nasir Oric are funeral dirges. But that hasn't happened. Srebrenica, surrounded by 3,000 armed Serbs as it was then, was a strange town. It held a desperate kind of life - a life in suspended animation. People talked about what they used to do, or used to be. Or about what they would do or would become once they were free again. Sleeping beneath the sheltering sky near Tuzla as Srebrenica's surviving residents did last week - after having been driven from their homes - was not in their catalogue of expectations. I remember steep streets lined with snow and, everywhere, firewood. Srebrenica, an old silver mining town, was built to hold 4,500 residents, but was then crammed with 22,500. And the overall pocket, some 14 kilometres wide by 16 kilometres long, had swelled to 46,000 in all. It had the look and feel of an overcrowded, somewhat dilapidated, ski resort town. But it was anything but. Still, people were friendly. The face of an outsider, an unexplained newcomer, came as a pleasant surprise to them and I was welcomed into their homes, served tea brewed on makeshift firewood stoves, and treated with kindness. There was, even then, some tension in the air about our Canadian peacekeepers there. But they were still doing a good job - even an excellent one - despite extraordinarily high expectations. I got into Srebrenica by convincing Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic that the time was right for a journalist to visit. None had been allowed for more than 100 days. People were wondering what was going on behind the curtain. In the end, another journalist asked to come along. He had a vehicle, and I didn't. It was a good trade-off. But what we smelled there, besides the smoke of a thousand and one cooking fires, was the slow death of hope. No one wanted to admit it was a hopeless situation. They wanted to believe that someone, something, perhaps some extraordinary act of fate, was going to save them and their town. They just didn't know what it was. And that not knowing ate away at them, just as their thinning food supplies, having been choked off by the Serbs, did. At the very end of the only real street that led all the way down into the town and became, in effect, main street, I'll always remember dozens of kids taking turns whizzing across a pool of sheer ice, their bottoms protected by worn pieces of thin cardboard. We don't use the word "glee" anymore. But that's what it was then. Glee on Main Street, Downtown Srebrenica. A bit of laughter against the cold. A bit of glee in the face of inevitable doom.

6 posted on 06/02/2011 6:53:24 AM PDT by DTA (U.S. Centcom vs. U.S. AFRICOM)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Clive
8,000....????.... probably a fake and heavily inflated number.

Balkan nations with a centuries old record of having life and death battles against Islamic aggression, have to bend over for their western european sissy counterparts, and take whatever Islam dishes out?

I don't think so, the International Court and Western Liberal Nations can go to Politically Correct Hell on their own.

7 posted on 06/02/2011 7:05:15 AM PDT by gitmogrunt
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: gitmogrunt
>>>>>>>>>>8,000....????.... probably a fake and heavily inflated number. <<<<<<<<<

This hoax was concocted three weeks after the alleged massacre to suit U.S. political agenda.

When one consults reports from July 1995, there is no mention of the massacre that allegedly was "the greatest attrocity in Europe after WWII".

The list of names contains:

The names of Bosnian Muslim army and paramilitaries KIA while retreating under fire to Tuzla, some 50 miles away.

The names of people who died of natural causes in Srebrenica before civil war started in 1992

The names of people who died of various causes between 1992 and June 1992 (before alleged genocide)

The names of people who died in other locations in Bosnia during civil war.

The names of living persons who voted in EU-controlled elections after the war.

The names of living persons living in The Netherlands, Ireland and U.S.

Srebrenica hoax is the result of Islamic Al taqqiah, liberal propensity for lying and the U.S. foreign interests.

8 posted on 06/02/2011 8:30:09 AM PDT by DTA (U.S. Centcom vs. U.S. AFRICOM)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 7 | View Replies]

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.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson