What we can do is to spread the information about what is happening and when
possible, state our views, and hope that enough people care so that there will
be a groundswell of resistance.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, December 07, 2017 2:07 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Enabling Genocide
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.
