The little Dutch boy only had one hole to stick his finger into, in
order to save his people. What can we do individually, when there are
thousands of holes, and violence comes pouring in all around us?
Carl Jarvis
On 11/30/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Enabling Genocide
By Chris Hedges, truthdig.com
November 29th, 2017
On July 11, 1995, I was in the office of Bosnian Prime Minister Haris
Silajdžić in the besieged city of Sarajevo. As Serb artillery shells
exploded in the streets around us, we listened to the last radio
communication from the U.N. "safe area" of Srebrenica, being overrun by
Serb
troops led by Gen. Ratko Mladić. There was no doubt among any in the room
that widespread killing of Muslims was about to begin.
"This is the result of a twisted policy of containment," Silajdžić said to
me bitterly. "The U.N. contained thousands of our tanks and artillery
pieces
and disarmed our population. And when we asked why the arms embargo against
us could not be lifted, we were told because it would endanger those
Muslims
living in the protected enclaves. This argument, after these Serb attacks,
is now gone. But it means that the U.N. has become an accomplice to
murder."
Thousands of the 42,000 Muslims in the Srebrenica enclave, ostensibly
protected by some 400 Dutch troops acting as U.N. peacekeepers, fled the
Serbs advancing on the city and congregated in terror at the Dutch base at
Potočari, three miles north of Srebrenica. Desperate pleas by the Muslim
leadership in Srebrenica to the United Nations and the North Atlantic
Treaty
Organization for air support were ignored. The Bosnian Serb army, led by
Mladić, who last week was sentenced to life in prison by the International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on charges of genocide,
crimes against humanity and other war crimes, ordered his soldiers to round
up thousands of boys and men for execution or hunted them down as they
tried
to escape to territory under the control of Bosnian Muslims. When the
slaughter was complete, more than 7,000 had been slain, the worst war crime
in Europe since World War II.
Independence movements in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a country
created at the end of World War II, began to form in the 1990s. The states
of Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia, with their
mix of Orthodox Christian Serbs, Muslim Bosniaks, Catholic Croats and
Muslim
ethnic Albanians, would all eventually sever ties with Belgrade to create
separate nations. Slovenia and Croatia declared independence first, in
1991.
When Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence in 1992, the Serbian
government in Belgrade intervened militarily on behalf of the Serb
minority.
Belgrade formed a rival Bosnian government and military, its leadership
drawn from the old Yugoslav army, or the JNA. The Bosnian Serb fighters
under the command of Mladić had access to the equipment, vehicles, arms and
heavy weaponry of the JNA. They mounted a ruthless campaign of ethnic
cleansing to drive Bosniak and Croat civilians out of Bosnia in the hope of
forming an ethnically cleansed Serb state.
The war in parts of Croatia and Bosnia was savage. The Serbs carried out
numerous mass executions of civilians and razed whole villages, often by
dynamiting or burning. The war ended in the fall of 1995 with a NATO
bombing
campaign that crippled the Serbs militarily and forced them to negotiate a
peace agreement. An estimated 100,000 people died and 2 million were
displaced in the Bosnian conflict.
Bosnia's capital, Sarajevo, along with five other Muslim-held enclaves, was
surrounded by Serb forces. Sarajevo was pounded daily with heavy artillery,
mortar rounds, Katyusha rockets and 90 mm tank rounds. Serbian snipers,
hidden in buildings in the city's Serb-held suburbs on the front lines,
routinely gunned down civilians emerging from basements to find food or
water. The Serbs set up concentration camps where Muslims were tortured,
starved and sometimes shot. They commandeered old tourist hotels where they
imprisoned Muslim and Croat girls and women and carried out daily rapes,
often executing the girls and women after a few weeks.
By the time I arrived in Sarajevo in 1995, thousands of people had been
killed, including 45 foreign journalists. The city was being hit with up to
2,000 shells a day. Four or five people were killed and at least two dozen
were wounded daily. Sarajevo was my most dangerous assignment in the two
decades I worked as a war correspondent.
There were frequent attempts by the European Union to mediate an end to the
war, but aside from a few brief cease-fires the fighting continued. At the
same time, an arms embargo enforced against the Muslims by the
international
community crippled the ability of the Muslims to defend themselves. The
U.N.
eventually established six U.N. "safe areas," including Srebrenica and
Sarajevo. U.N. peacekeepers stationed in these "safe areas" were supposed
to
protect the besieged Muslims. The peacekeepers, however, were never
numerous
enough or armed sufficiently to counter Serb attacks. By the end of the
war
all of the "safe areas" except Sarajevo had fallen to the Serbs.
Mladić, who in three years of war had overseen numerous massacres in the
Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, had announced before the
Srebrenica attack that he would make the Bosniak Muslim population of the
region "vanish completely." There was little doubt, given what he had done
in the past, about his intentions or his willingness to murder on a large
scale.
The stocky general was cynically shown on Bosnian television telling
crowds,
"No panic, please." He was shown handing a child a candy bar. "Don't be
afraid," he said to frightened men, women and children. "No one will harm
you."
But Mladić was only one actor in the cast. The genocide was enabled by
France, Britain, the United States, the United Nations and Muslim leaders
in
Sarajevo. The Western alliance and the United Nations-as in Rwanda a year
earlier when it failed to halt the slaughter of 1 million Tutsis by the
Hutu
majority-never intended to fulfill the promise to protect the surrounded
Muslims in Srebrenica.
The U.N. admitted it needed at least 6,000 troops in Srebrenica, yet
provided only a token force of 400 Dutch peacekeepers. The U.N.'s special
envoy to the Balkans, the Japanese diplomat Yasushi Akashi, and the head of
U.N. forces in the area, Gen. Bernard Janvier, blocked airstrikes that
might
have halted the Serb attack, relenting only in the final moments to make a
symbolic strike that did little more than damage a Serb tank. The Serbs,
enraged by the airstrike, took 32 Dutch peacekeepers hostage. Airstrikes
ceased after the hostages were taken, dooming Srebrenica.
The Dutch soldiers, who had no stomach to fight Mladić's soldiers without
air support, withdrew to their base. They permitted Serb soldiers to enter
the base, where thousands of terrified Muslims had sought shelter, and
round
up men and boys, most of whom were executed, as well as women and girls who
were later raped.
At the same time, the paramilitary leader in Srebrenica, Naser Oric, who
terrorized Serb villages around the enclave and was later charged with war
crimes, had left the city with other commanders before the attack. The
Muslim president of Bosnia, Alija Izetbegović, had been told by U.S.
President Bill Clinton that if Mladić carried out a massacre in Srebrenica
the U.S. would intervene to end the war. Izetbegović either saw the Muslims
in Srebrenica as part of the human sacrifice required for NATO
intervention,
which took place a few weeks later, or he naively believed that the U.N.
force would protect the enclave, highly doubtful given the U.N.'s history
of
refusing to confront the Serbs in three years of warfare. The Clinton
administration, we know now, was aware six weeks in advance of the attack
that Srebrenica was being targeted by the Serbs but did not intervene out
of
fear that it would damage ongoing peace negotiations.
Izetbegović had also carried out secret negotiations with Serb President
Slobodan Milošević to trade the U.N. "safe areas' of Goražde, Žepa and
Srebrenica, small islands of Muslims trapped in Serb-held territory and
nominally protected by the United Nations Protection Force, or Unprofor,
for
three Serb suburbs around Sarajevo. This exchange of territory was later
codified by the Dayton Peace Agreement. Izetbegović was willing, it
appears,
to give up what he knew he could not defend, despite the loss of life.
The Dutch commander in Srebrenica, Col. Ton Karremans, met Mladić on July
12
and provided 8,000 gallons of gasoline for the Serb trucks and buses that
transported boys and men to the killing fields and powered the bulldozers
that carved out the mass graves. The scale of the killings was known almost
immediately. U.S. intelligence agencies had reconnaissance satellite
photographs that showed hundreds of Muslims, blindfolded with their hands
tied behind their backs, held at gunpoint by their Serb captors near open
pits. There were later photographs of them lying dead in rows. A few days
later, photographs showed the fields covered with the freshly dug earth of
mass graves. Yet, even as the killings were taking place, the international
community did nothing.
The European Union's special envoy, Carl Bildt, met Mladić and Milošević as
the massacres were being carried out and inexplicably decided not to raise
the killing as an issue. His chief concern was the Dutch soldiers being
held
hostage. He was promised they would be released.
Mladić, like Radovan Karadžić and Milošević, is guilty of war crimes. He,
as
sentenced, should spend the rest of his life in prison. But this act of
"justice" is being used to absolve an international community and political
leadership, including Muslim leaders, who are complicit. A Dutch court in
2014 found that Dutch peacekeepers were responsible for the deaths of 300
people at Srebrenica, resolving one of several lawsuits related to the
genocide. And the Dutch government resigned in 2002 after acknowledging its
failure to protect those in Srebrenica. But the Dutch are alone in
attempting to accept some responsibility for the killings.
How is it that nearly all the diplomats, politicians, generals and U.N.
representatives who are complicit in this genocide have never been held to
account? Why were none forced to resign in disgrace? How could the U.N. and
the international community promise to protect a population facing genocide
and then refuse to defend it? How could they insist on imposing an arms
embargo on the Muslims in Bosnia as the Serbs deployed heavy weapons
against
them? How could the Dutch soldiers hand over civilians, who they had every
reason to suspect would be murdered, and then provide the gasoline used in
the trucks and buses that transported the men and boys to execution sites?
How could the Muslim leadership sacrifice thousands of its own people to
achieve the goal of NATO intervention?
The world is not bifurcated into good and evil. The United States too is
guilty for the killings at Srebrenica. The refusal to examine and accept
our
responsibility in this act of genocide means there will be more genocides,
as we see with Myanmar's assault on the Rohingya Muslims and the Saudi
campaign against Yemen. We should have learned the central lesson of the
Holocaust a long time ago: When you have the capacity to stop genocide and
you do not, you are culpable.
