Americans For Bosnia

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [10]

2012-01-22T18:47:00.004-05:00

Chapter 4 [concluded]

Glenny meets with Slobodan Milosevic for a short interview; the results of which are so devoid of interest that he only gives a brief, one-page account of the entire incident, including the race to find a tie and pair of slacks on short notice. The general impression one gets is that Milosevic really was a sociopath; Glenny notes of his demeanor in the interview that the "most abiding feature, however, was the complete absence of anything resembling feeling or humanity in his attitude." It is also noteworthy that Milosevic was put off by Glenny's ability to speak Serbo-Croat (a true Serb nationalist would have been pleased, but "an autocrat like Milosevic, however, felt uncomfortable").

The rest of the chapter to the end is taken with a trip through the Sandzak, into Montenegro, and then up the war-ravaged Dalmatian coast to besieged Dubrovnik. There is plenty of local color and interesting detail, but the overall effect is simply a collective portrait of localized sociopolitical trauma in every nook and cranny of the old Yugoslavia.

While there is little in Glenny's account to editorialize on--he is largely a sympathetic observer with a good eye for telling detail--there is one comment which, in light of the troubling subtext of equivalency in his entire consideration of the Croatian war, might strike the reader as odd. In his explanation of how the JNA bombardment of the old town of Dubrovnik served as a symbol of how devoid of human considerations the aggressors' tactics were, he also adds that the "Croat defence forces bear a share of this responsibility" because they deliberately housed gun and light artillery positions on the old town walls, "goading the JNA into firing on them." Glenny sees this as a cynical attempt to exploit the resulting destruction for propaganda purposes.

While this is probably largely true, there are two objections one might raise. First; the JNA and their supporter reservists (many from Montenegro; Glenny does an excellent job of describing their craven and gleefully destructive conduct) were going to be shelling the city, regardless; and really, shouldn't the blame be fixed on the forces shooting at a city full of civilians, rather than at the forces of the UN-recognized government defending it? And, secondly--this line of criticism unfortunately parallels the later frequent criticisms of the Bosnian Government for playing to international opinion while their country and citizens were being subjected to extermination.

And so this chapter ends, with Glenny leaving his fellow journalists in Dubrovnik in order to hurry up towards Mostar, where tensions are near the breaking point. In the next chapter, we arrive in Bosnia.

****************************

NOTE: My next semester in graduate school begins this week; knowing that I will be much busier, and also aware that I have never honored one of the common suggestions for a really successful blog--regular and consistent posting--I have decided that beginning with this post, I will now seek to post on every Sunday; but probably only on Sunday for at least until summer. This way, I can promise a certain level of regular posting so that readers don't have to keep checking in, and at the same time as I keep this blog active and vital, I am also not over-committing myself.

So, next Sunday, January 29, I will return with a post reviewing at least the first part of Chapter 5.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [9]

2012-01-21T11:10:00.003-05:00

Chapter 4 [continued]

The next several pages of chapter 4 recount Glenny's adventures traversing the war zone in and around Croatia, negotiating his way through a variety of roadblocks manned on both sides of the front line by an unpredictable spectrum of military, paramilitary, and vigilante personnel in a variety of uniforms and non-uniforms. The abstract political and nationalist propaganda and policies from faraway Belgrade and Zagreb get filtered and reduced down to the ground level to a toxic level of fear, xenophobia, uncertainty, and raw hate. Villages are decimated, beautiful towns and cities like Vukovar are decimated, and atrocities against civilians mount with agonizing regularity.

This ground-level view of the Croatian war is clearly intended as a deliberate contrast between the realities of the war as it played out versus the rhetoric not only coming from Serbia and Croatia, but from Western observers. Most particularly, western advocates of intervention, or those who chose to place the blame primarily at the feet of the Serbian leadership.

Glenny's point here seems to be that the arguments of interventionists simply dissolve into irrelevancy upon contact with the ugly realities of the war. Throughout this chapter, there is a sense that Glenny almost considers the Croatian war to be a semi-discrete event following its own logic, rather than another theater in the larger breakdown of Yugoslavia. I don't think he would characterize his account that way, and I freely admit that I am possibly being unfair by doing so; but all the same I have a hard time squaring the more systematic analysis of the earlier chapters--in which his personal reporting was grounded in a broader consideration of the politics of the dying Yugoslav state--with this "bottom-up" approach.

It's not that Glenny has forgone larger considerations, but often his analysis of political and nationalist factors is almost entirely self-contained; for example, the fact that the JNA is an actor in this conflict, even including the involvement of heavy artillery firing into Croatia from the Vojvodina region, is noted frequently, but the possibility that this threat to Croatian sovereignty might be an important factor in the radicalization of Croats in outlying areas. That is not to excuse the vile racism of the right-wing of the HDZ (or even the clumsy, insensitive jingoism of Tudjman and the mainstream of the party), but rather to point out that Glenny rather abruptly puts the war in Croatia in an almost entirely Croatian context.

He also seems to be advocating for ethnic separation at points in this chapter; whether this is implicit in some of his logic or is something he is aware of, I am not sure. He seems rather dismissive when noting that Croats were adamant about retaining the republican borders of the country even as he never suggests a viable political solution to the "problem" of a Serb minority within that border.

I absolutely agree that the new Croatian state under the HDZ failed spectacularly to meet the challenge of having a sizable minority with memories of being the victims of genocide under the World War II fascists Croatian state. And perhaps Glenny felt strongly that he needed to provide a counterpoint to the standard Western narrative which crudely portrayed the conflict as a simply tale of endemic Serb aggression.

However, this disconnect between the larger geopolitical narrative and the village-by-village portrait of daily life turned into a mosaic of innumerable acts of brutality and senseless destruction does seem to lead Glenny towards a conditional consideration of the legitimacy of ethnic division. He quotes a Macedonian officer who had deserted from the JNA at length; his two-page transcription of this man's words conclude with this paragraph:

"Serbs and Croats in eastern Slavonia can never live together because too much blood has been spilt and the Serbs will never let go of any of this territory. As far as I could work out, the Croats had provoked a lot of the nastiness in the first place but searching for the one who started it is a waste of time. Once it had started the massacres were unstoppable. It will never end whether they have a ceasefire, peace-keeping troops or whatever. This is not a war, this is extermination."

This is not Glenny himself speaking, of course, but his description of this talk as a "[o]ne of the most revealing conversations I had during the war", and of course you don't quote an interviewee for two full pages for no reason.

Glenny is too humane to advocate for ethnic division; however, he seems to be moving towards a point of view in which it is the only reasonable way to end ethnic violence once it was unleashed.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [8]

2012-01-19T18:49:00.003-05:00

Chapter 4: July 1991-January 1992: The Twilight Zone

The first few pages of this chapter briefly describe the naive and optimistic diplomacy of the European Community. Despite some fumbling and miscalculation, the European "Troika" of diplomats were able to obtain an end to the ten-day Slovenian war; the Brioni Accord. This rather neat and uncomplicated end to the fighting (Glenny does not here discuss the possibility that the entire war was a very half-hearted, even disingenuous, effort by the Yugoslav state and Milosevic) gave the European Community (particularly Germany, according to Glenny) a false belief that "it could promote piecemeal solutions to the Yugoslav crisis--a grave error." [page 101]

The next several pages illustrate the growing violence in several regions of Croatia by focusing on one incident--the murder of Osijek Chief of Police Josip Reichl-Kir, a Croat of German-Hungarian ethnic heritage (a perfect example of the artificial nature of "nationality" in the Balkans--and everywhere else, for that matter).

Reichl-Kir was a brave, principled and far-sighted man, who worked tirelessly at great risk to maintain peace between local Croats and the embattled Serb minority. His efforts had been more or less successful; it helped that this area had not seen serious ethnic violence during World War II, although there were many Serbs and Croats who had been settled here in the post-war period by the Tito government in order to remove them from areas which had seen ethnic violence. Thus, tragically, putting some of the most traumatized and radicalized Serb and Croat communities in close proximity to each other, in a region in which the indigenous Serbs and Croats had no quarrel with each other. Glenny notes that in villages made up entirely of "natives," ethnic violence was resisted and in a few places the war never divided these mixed communities.

But, unfortunately, the virus of nationalism found plenty of fertile soil. When Reichl-Kir and other local leaders (both Serb and Croat) were killed by automatic rifle fire in his car, peace largely collapsed. Within a day, violence had broken out.

I still have some reservations about Glenny's perspective, but I will hold off on them for now. I want to pause here, in an admittedly pitiful and belated tribute to Reichl-Kir; those apologists and non-interventionists who believe that the violence in the Balkans was simply an inevitable outbreak of native bloodlust and an endemic culture of revenge and violence need to account for facts like this--in order for the demons of war to be unleashed, it was necessary for armed thugs to murder decent men like Reichl-Kir and intimidate countless other equally decent of less courageous individuals. In the fighting to come, the casualties begin to increase from a handful, to dozens, then hundreds, and then thousands. We can never let these increasing statistics cloud our view of innumerable individual crimes which constituted the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. It would necessary to murder many other decent, principled men and women in order to create the opportunity for ethnic war.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [7]

2012-01-16T16:29:00.003-05:00

Chapter 3 [concluded]

Chapter 3 concludes with a consideration of the role that Slovenia played in the final breakup of Yugoslavia; and of a portrait of the moderate Serb region of Glina, who were traumatized and radicalized by the actions of the HDZ and later by agents from the Knin SDS.

Neither of these brief accounts ring false; yet there seems to be something missing in Glenny's account. It is not incorrect to note that Slovenia's exit from Yugoslavia was in many ways hasty, that it forced Croatia to follow suit while unprepared, or that the Slovenes and Croats were backed by many European governments which didn't fully comprehend the seriousness of the situation. Yet at the same time, there seems to be very little awareness from Glenny of the fact that Slovenia was a small republic facing the very real specter of a Serb-dominated central state under Milosevic; he only mentions the economic disparities between the wealthier Alpine republic and its poorer neighbors to the south.

What seems to be in play here is that one of Glenny's strengths--he's a Serbo-Croat speaker who spent a lot of time on the ground and reported quickly--is also, if not exactly a weakness, at the very least has led him to narrow his focus just a little bit too much. For while the early part of this book demonstrated a solid grasp of recent political and economic events which fueled the crisis, in this chapter there seems to be a real disconnect between this larger context and the discrete local scenarios he describes.

In the case of the moderate Serbs around Glina; the larger story here is that the rise of nationalism and and nationalist politicians narrowed, and finally eliminated, the civic space in which is was possible to maintain a "Yugoslav" or non-ethnic identity. Ultimately, the Serbs around Glina were forced to join with the SDS because it was no longer possible to be anything but exclusively Serb.

I cannot shake the nagging feeling that Glenny is too hasty to shift the focus entirely to the heavy-handed, thuggish tactics of Tudjman's government; but at the same time Glenny had been so clear-headed in his analysis up to now it seems a bit unfair to be too quick to accuse him of downplaying the primary role of the Belgrade regime by engaging in some faux-objective 'even-handedness.'

What does seem to be clear at the conclusion of this chapter is that Glenny certainly regards the war in Croatia to have been much more of situation in which the Croatian government brought on the war just as much as the Yugoslav government did. This seems to fly in the face of his own admission that Tudjman, unlike Milosevic and the JNA, had not really prepared for war. It also raises the question--if Tudjman had been a wiser leader and the moderate wing of the HDZ had predominated, would the war in Croatia still have happened? Would it have been as brutal? And would ethnic cleansing still have entered the lexicon of the late 20th century? I am not at all convinced that the answers to any of these questions would be 'No'; and therefore, I have some serious reservations about Glenny's perspective.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [6]

2012-01-15T21:00:00.002-05:00

Chapter 3 [continued]

Next, Glenny goes to Croatia. This entire chapter is something of a morbid travelogue, in which he visits several republics as well as Kosovo on the eve of the war; his account of his stop in Zagreb is of a piece with what he has written before, including both a sadly touching meeting of a committed Yugoslav intellectuals of a variety of ethnic backgrounds, and a depressing account of the ubiquity of Croatian nationalist iconography.

But, prior to this, Glenny begins his account of the mood in Croatia on the eve of war with a discussion of the Borovo Selo incident, in which 12 Croat policemen and 3 Serb civilians were killed in an incident which many Croats considered the beginning of the war, and which Glenny decided was the result of Croat provocations. His obvious determination to make this point, at some length, is slightly troubling.

I am not arguing that he is necessarily wrong, at least on narrowly technical grounds. Not wanting to rehash his version of events at greater length than his account, I'll simply note that Borovo Selo is a town near Vukovar in Slavonia; and that responsible local authorities had worked out a fragile truce between Serbs and Croat/HDZ authorities. Central to this truce was that Croat police would not enter the area, which was controlled by Serbs.

Unfortunately, some Croatian police did come in, apparently under orders from regional HDZ leaders cynically looking to stir up more violence and create a pretext for aggression.

The problem here is that Glenny seems too quick to present this incident as some sort of balance; the paragraph which opens the section of the chapter on this incident closes with the sentences:

"Although I had always considered the HDZ a dangerous organization, I believed Milosevic to be the evil genius of the Yugoslav crisis. Borovo Selo was to instruct me in the ways of Croatian nationalism which, when activated, proved a formidable counterpart to its Serbian opponent."

This seems a little hasty a move to some implied "middle ground" in which we quickly forget that while Tudjman and the HDZ were certainly doing much to stir up genuine--and understandable--fear among Serbs, it was Milosevic who was quietly preparing the army and its proxies for real war. While the Croatian police who were captured and killed (three of whom were mutilated and probably tortured) were indeed sent to violate an armistice, the fact remains that they were operating in Croatian territory.

Glenny's account suggests the possibility that he may be so solicitous towards the Serbs in other republics that he is too quick to focus on their immediate situation at the expense of the larger context.

However, at this point in the narrative it is worth pointing out that the war hasn't started yet. The horrors of Vukovar are coming, but they haven't arrived yet. Glenny seems to protest too much in this section--up until now we have heard nothing really about him, but suddenly we learn that he, personally, has been attacked both for allegedly being too pro-Croatian and for being too pro-Serb. I have no doubt that he is telling the truth, so far as that goes. However, his decision to interrupt the narrative in order to dwell on this point at some length raises a concern or two. An author who pauses in his story to assert that he has been attacked for being too unbiased should not be surprised if at least some readers wonder why he suddenly protest so much.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [5]

2012-01-11T21:10:00.003-05:00

Chapter 3: June-July 1991: State of Independence

This chapter starts off with a trio of vignettes which serve both to illustrate the sad sense of impending doom which hung over Yugoslavia (and of which the rest of the world remained ignorant), and of the fragile beauty of daily life which was about to be desecrated by war.

First Glenny goes to Prague, for the Conference on European Confederation which he describes as "a sop to Eastern European countries." While there, he speaks with the former Croatian Deputy Prime Minister Mate Babic, who turns out to be an astute witness to Franjo Tudjman's governing style. The most interesting observation is this:

"Although he was distinctly no friend of Milosevic, Mate Babic admitted frankly that Serbia had gone further down the road to privitization than Croatia. Tudjman, he insisted, was consciously blocking Croatia's progress in this direction. Let it be remembered that according to President Tudjman, Croatia's moral superiority over Serbia lay in its fervent commitment to free-market economics."

And let it also be remembered that, according to left-wing apologists for the Milosevic regime, Yugoslavia was allegedly destroyed partly because he was courageously defending the socialism of Yugoslavia against the forces of Western neo-liberalism and their capitalist lackeys such as Tudjman.

Glenny also meets Srdja Popovic, a distinguished Serbian liberal journalist from Belgrade, who predicts that war will break out when the republics begin declaring independence.

Then he makes his way from depressing, doom-ridden Belgrade to Prishtina, where he meets Veton Surroi, who proves to be a charming observer himself. The account of this visit largely serves the purpose of allowing Glenny to deal with the subject of Kosovo on the eve of the wars which would, for a few years anyway, push this occupied colony out of sight and out of mind. Glenny does seem to "get it" in Kosovo; he regards it as being an occupied territory, and he notes that few if any Serbs from Serbia have ever been there. He realizes that the presence of the state there is one of racist occupation, and that the Albanians are the victims of oppression. He also feels genuine pity for the Kosovar Serbs, whom he realizes are pawns of the Milosevic regime, which needs them in a perpetual state of fear and insecurity in order to justify the crackdown. Glenny essentially concedes the right of self-determination of the Albanian majority and the case for independence.

Finally, he visits Macedonia, where he dwells a little on the state of the Albanian minority there and the larger issue of Albanian nationalism; he ends up in Skopje as the guest of Macedonian journalist Sasho Ordanoski. They avoid politics, meet a lot of people, and have a wonderful night. It's a lovely scene, one which makes you ache knowing of the deluge which is to come.

And it comes...

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [4]

2012-01-09T17:05:00.002-05:00

Chapter 2: Belgrade, March 1991: Dress Rehearsal--Serb Eat Serb

The first several pages of this chapter are a well-written summary of Milosevic's rise to power--the betrayal of Stambolic, the utilization of nationalist sentiment, the exploitation of Kosovo, the manipulation of the mass media and the popular masses--a story which is surely all-too familiar to regular readers.

Glenny also shows that while Milosevic was using the rising nationalist tide for leverage in his political machinations within the Yugoslav Federation, he was hardly a committed nationalist (Milosevic, it's safe to say, never believed in much of anything other than getting power and holding on to it), nor was he able to resist calls for multiparty elections. He managed to win these, but not by an overwhelming majority and even this victory was accomplished through some degree of fraud. The opposition--which was divided, and heavily dominated by nationalists, to the point where even liberal parties had to make accommodations to nationalist sentiment--led by Vuk Drashkovic of the Serbian Renewal Movement--organized a massive demonstration in Belgrade.

Glenny draws a brief sketch of the Serb/Yugoslav capital; a vibrant and cosmopolitan (if architecturally unimpressive) city being slowly swamped with ugly nationalism. This was the setting for Milosevic's sudden, draconian crackdown, in which many people were hurt, violence and vandalism were rampant, and many were arrested, including Drashkovic and many other prominent opposition figures. The fighting was intense, as these protesters were largely committed nationalists rather than liberal-minded peaceful types.

This only spread the discontent; to sum matters up, the protest spread but became more peaceful and settled as thousands of mostly students took over public spaces and for a time seemed to gain the upper hand; the police slunk away, and most of their well-articulated demands were met. One demand was not met, however--Milosevic did not step down. Rather, he stayed out of the public eye and offered up plenty of disposable sacrificial lambs to sate the demands of the public.

And then, ultimately, the opposition sputtered, gave up the streets, and went home feeling that they had won. But Milosevic was still in power; and what's more, he was able to use the mess that was Yugoslavia's constitution to his own benefit, as the man who had and would again use the legalisms of the Yugoslav Federation for his own ends bluntly announced that Serbia would no longer be bound by the Yugoslav Presidency, and that the Serbian Territorial Militias would be mobilized.

All the while, behind closed doors the alliance between the Serbian leadership and the Yugoslav Army was cemented. The last chance for peace--namely, by getting rid of Milosevic--had been squandered.

***********

I apologize if the review of this chapter seems rather perfunctory, but the events here are all pretty well known by now, as I noted already. There is also less personal color here, as Glenny was mostly just observing events and learning about them second-hand. His description of being in the middle of the attempt by the students to cross the bridge over the Sava against police barricades, and of being subjected to tear gas, is effective, but other than than any more detail would simply be rehashing the same cynical schemes we all already know all too much about.

It is worth noting that while Glenny acknowledges the depth of nationalist sentiment among the larger Serb population, he doesn't examine it as deeply as I wish he had. We will see if this becomes problematic in later chapters.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [3]

2012-01-07T10:05:00.005-05:00

Chapter 1 [continued]

After a brief consideration of how Tudjan's heavy-handed Croatian nationalism managed to undermine the fragile unity of the nascent Croatian state by needlessly alienating and implicitly threatening the Serb minority, Glenny's meeting with Milan Babic (once Macura is finally able to get them together) finally happens.

This is before Babic has fully wrested overt control of the Croatian SDS away from Raskovic (although in practice the coup was all but over with), and before Babic defied Milosevic, but all this was easy to see coming; Glenny's initial impression that Babic is simply a stupid, crude, unimpressive figure is soon replaced by a sobering awareness that Babic is Milosevic's equal when it comes to ruthless cunning and amoral deceit. Raskovic's naive attempts to defend Serb rights and Krajina autonomy through peaceful, political means within the framework of the Croatian state were doomed when this man grasped the reins of power.

This was all during 1990, before the war broke out and before anyone could be sure just how bad things would get. The rest of the chapter covers Glenny's second visit to Knin in January of 1992, after the Croatian war was in full swing (but before the outbreak of hostilities in neighboring Bosnia). The setting is somewhat surreal--Knin was an important hub of the Serb military machine (a mixture of local militias, the forces of the breakaway Krajina Republic, Serb nationalist paramilitaries, and the Serb-controlled Yugoslav army--as well as a smattering of Bosnian Muslim units; remember, this was still nominally a war for Yugoslav "unity"), and therefore saw a great deal of activity, increase in population, movement of troops, but very little actual fighting. The town was spared the worst effects of war, for the time being.

But the signs of war are everywhere, the choking pollution and omnipresent fear and hatred has wiped out whatever signs of discontent, doubts, and hopes for compromise. The people who before might have at the least betrayed some reservations about the single-minded push for ethnic war have now all fallen into line; the Croatian minority, of course, are long gone.

In his interactions with local military, Glenny again describes the menace and, what's more, the stupidity of so many of the footsoldiers of this war. And this returns me to the point touched on in the previous post--how Glenny manages to deal with what I am rather broadly (maybe even crudely) describing as the country-versus-city aspect to the Balkan wars; also, however, I think he is touching on something less demographic and more universal. Simply put, some people are attracted to violence, brutality, and bigotry, and will eagerly embrace any opportunity to identify an "other" to lash out at. Under normal circumstances, a healthy civic society seeks to--at the very least--control and contain such people, and to avoid empowering them. During the Balkan Wars, however, these people were by and large given the keys to the kingdom and set loose; everybody else was forced to decide whether to flee, resist, or fall into line. This is the "hell" that Knin had become, even though the overt violence of war is largely absent. The sociopaths are now largely in control of daily life.

This is an important distinction, because as I alluded to in the previous post, far too many observers (particularly those with an anti-interventionist agenda) have portrayed the paranoid, belligerent hostility of the armed thugs who carried out so much of the carnage in the former Yugoslavia were somehow emblematic of the people of the Balkans in general. Glenny is hinting at something less particular to the region here--that they were, instead, local variations of a universal type, unleashed from social control and empowered by unscrupulous politicians.

In Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the political order was hijacked by provincial local elites who realized that virulent nationalism provided an opportunity to leverage history and latent ethnic consciousness into greater power for themselves. In order to do so, they needed to tear apart the fabric of society which existed. And who better to do that than the stupid, the hateful, and the vindictive among us? When civil society is unable to control the bullies among us, disorder and violence are bound to follow.

The degree to which Glenny sees this as a universal question rather than a specifically Balkan question is unclear--as he has already shown, the particular cultural, historical, social, and political context matters just as much as the more general questions of human nature I have sketched above. I would suggest that the answer is that what happened in Yugoslavia in the 190s was a tragic nexus between particular local conditions and human fallibility. Whether it was SA Brownshirts in Weimer Germany or hooded Klansman in the Reconstruction South--the empowerment of gleefully hateful thugs by the breakdown of civil society or the debasement of a just social order is bound to unleash the bullies among us

Therefore, the title of this chapter ("The Heart of the Matter") has a double-meaning. On the one hand, Knin is the heart of the Serb Krajina, even as the Krajina is the heart of the rebellion and ultimately the Serb war against the Croatian state. At the same time, however, the question Glenny closes his chapter with is also the "heart of the matter":

"...I am still frustrated by my own inability to determine whether Knin is the victim of the grandiose stupidity and callousness which swill around the corridors of power in Belgrade and Zagreb. Or whether this wilderness with nothing to recommend it on the surface was merely waiting for the chance to exact revenge for its social, economic and political inferiority complex."

The specifics of this question are without a doubt particular to the former Yugoslavia; the larger theme, however, is not.

Glenny ends by describing his meeting with Ratko Mladic, who was at the time still based in Knin. But not for long--shortly, he was reassigned to Bosnia. At the time, Glenny recognized this as an ominous development. Sadly, he would soon be proven correct.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [2]

2012-01-05T20:05:00.005-05:00

Chapter 1: Knin, August/October 1990-January 1992: The Heart of the Matter

Glenny begins with a visit to the breakaway statelet of the "Republic of Serbian Krajina" in the Fall of 1990. This was the period just prior to the war, when separatist tensions were high. He describes a tense drive from the warm, scenic Adriatic coast up into the dry, harsh Krajina interior around Knin. Negotiations through multiple roadblocks manned by suspicious locals armed with anything from old shotguns to automatic weapons are the first interaction Glenny has with the ethnic Serb locals. We get the first glimpse of an "us-against-them" seige mentality, of which we will learn much more.

After briefly describing the unimpressive but strategically important town of Knin itself, Glenny goes on to briefly sketch the historic origins of the Krajina and its population of gun-loving, proudly independent Serbs.*Then he finally makes his way to his contact, Knin Town Council Deputy President-turned-Information Minister in the afore-mentioned rebel statelet Lazar Macura, who had agreed to take Glenny to meet Milan Babic, the President of the Knin Town Council and the rabble-rousing Serb politician who did so much to create the rebellion and would ultimately take control of the Serbian Republic of the Krajina. They have to go through a couple more roadblocks--although this is much more perfunctory now that Glenny is with Macura--before this meeting happens; but before I go on there is something worth commenting on in these first few pages.

Glenny does an effective job of conveying the paranoid belligerence the rural Krajina Serbs, and he does so in terms which suggest a dimension to the coming war which many Western observers failed to realize--how the war was, in addition to an ethnic war and even a religious war, was also to some degree a war of the countryside against the city; of the provincial peasant against the cosmopolitan urbanite. This is a difficult subject to examine, partly because the descriptions of suspicious, hostile locals can so easily drift into a more general portrait of a stereotypical Balkan "type" or even just plain racism. Some of Glenny's descriptions of the appearance of the some of the gunmen he encountered, as well as their gun-loving machismo, could be said to skirt the margins of such overkill, but he never crosses the line.

He is not merely describing these people for the sake of "color" nor is he doing what so many glib observers did--dismissing the war as simply an expression of intrinsic Balkan primivitism or propensity for violence. As we will see in the next post (covering the rest of the chapter), Glenny is making a larger, and more subtle, point.

*As always, my reviews assume some degree of knowledge on the part of the reader; I presume I don't need to explain the history of the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans; that "Krajina" means a military frontier; and so forth.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [1]

2012-01-02T19:10:00.003-05:00

Preface

Glenny's book was originally published in 1992; revised editions were released in 1993 and then again in 1996. This review is for the final US edition.

The Preface, from the 1992 Edition and included here, is simply a short statement made by an actor from Belgrade named Boro Todorovic, given on a television broadcast on November 2, 1991. The war was still largely confined to Croatia at the time.

Todorovic spoke out against the violence, but just as much against the nationalist rhetoric and the "with us or against us" group-think mentality that it required. He spoke of the war--which at that point had yet to reach its darkest depths--as a horrible nightmare which nobody could wake up from. It is an explicit rejection of nationalism and patriotism in the name of ethnic murder.

Glenny left this prolouge in the final version; adding only a 1996 postscript noting that due to the end of the war and the de facto partitioning of Bosnia, he believes that while the fighting has stopped "I am not yet convinced that the stability of the Balkans has been secured."

In the next post, I will review chapter 1.

Happy New Year--and my 2012 Resolution for this blog

2012-01-01T18:43:00.002-05:00

I hope all my readers had a good ending to 2011, and I hope for a happy and healthy 2012 for all of you.

I realize that, in terms of both quantity of posts and quality of what I did bother writing, 2011 was the weakest year yet in the history of this blog. My New Year's Resolution for "Americans for Bosnia" is a modest one--I promise to post more regularly and frequently than I did in the past year, and I promise to do more than merely pass along articles and blog posts by others from time to time.

I will start off right away tomorrow, with the first of what I hope will be several reviews of English-language books on the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s (the task which has long been the strength of this blog, to the degree that it has one at all). The book I intend to summarize and review is one most readers should be familiar with--Misha Glenny's The Fall of Yugoslavia: the Third Balkan War. This is toward the long-term goal of transitioning this blog into an interactive database of book reviews and summaries someday (most likely after I finish my Master's studies, to be honest).

I will begin this review tomorrow; hopefully this will breath some life back into this blog.

More to follow.

Bosnia Still in Running for 2012 Euro Cup

2011-10-12T09:17:00.005-04:00

Bosnia came very close to upsetting France at home and qualifying for the cup outright; as it is, they are in the play-offs. Not as a seeded team, but while the seeded teams all certainly present real challenges, none of them are teams Bosnia should be intimidated by (I think that Portugal are a shadow of their former self right now, despite still having some great individual talent, including Cristiano Ronaldo, obviously).

Seedings confirmed for EURO play-off draw

The draw will be later today; I will update this post once I see the results.

UPDATE: Bosnia will play Portugal in the two-leg playoffs, to be played in November.

Misguided Op-Ed on Balkan Partitioning

2011-10-02T10:05:00.008-04:00

My thanks to Yakima Gulag for this catch (from her Friday, Sept. 30 post).

This week, Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute published an article advocating for ethnic partitioning of Bosnia and Kosova, in the apparently not ironically titled The Dangers of Rejecting Balkan Partitions.

Yakima Gulag states the obvious first objection--that doing as Carpenter suggested would be a reward for genocide (I believe this would be less overtly true in Kosova than in Bosnia, but the point stands). But more to the point, Carpenter makes a very fundamental error when he makes a false equivelency between the breakup of the Yugoslav Federation into its constituent units--which were, as noted in this blog many times--historically legitimate and geographically defined geopolitical entities--with the artbitrary division of these polities along demographic lines. When one considers that these demographic divisions have been accomplished by violence and terror, and that this would be a "solution" which would merely atomize the same problem--since no ethnic division can be perfect or "clean"--it becomes even more clear that this is a proposal from a context-free alternative universe; one in which taking an ahistorical view of political conflict and regarding ethnic violence as somehow a static, natural order of things substitutes for nuanced analysis.

But then again--this is the Cato Institute we're talking about. Libertarian foreign policy wonks don't generally do nuance or context.

CNAB welcomes the ruling striking the controversial Bosnia and Herzegovina Citizenship Act as unconstitutional

2011-09-28T15:34:00.002-04:00

[I am passing along this press release from the Congress of North American Bosniaks. My thanks to them.]

The Congress of North American Bosniaks (CNAB) welcomes the decision of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) ruling that the controversial Citizenship Act is unconstitutional. The Court ruled that the Bosnia and Herzegovina Parliament has six months to change the law which takes away the Bosnian-Herzegovinian citizenship to those citizens who have also become citizens of another country, except for those holding citizenship of countries with whom BiH has signed bilateral agreements on such issues. CNAB has repeatedly warned that the Citizenship Act discriminates against Bosniaks in the Diaspora because of the fact that the majority of them were forced to leave the country during the Bosnian war. Enforcement of the Citizenship Act in 2013 would have devastating consequences for relations between Bosniaks living outside of Bosnia and Herzegovina and their homeland.

This decision is extremely important in its intention to encourage more serious and long term solution in relation to the Bosnia-Herzegovinian diaspora. More must be done to improve the relations of the Bosnian government and the large number of citizens who now live in other countries. It is appalling that the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which has an extremely high percentage of citizens who live outside of its borders, does not have an established Ministry for Diaspora relations which is necessary to adequately address the needs and concerns, especially of those citizens who were forced to leave as refugees.

CNAB will continue to lobby the state institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as all relevant institutions in the United States, Canada, and the European Union to call attention to the problems faced by Bosnians living abroad. Furthermore, we will continue to voice our concerns with human rights violations against Bosniaks in the Republika Srpska entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, including obstruction to the return of refugees as well as the lack of progress in development and implementation of key reforms that would create the necessary conditions for the return of refugees to their homeland.

On behalf of CNAB,

Hamdija Čustović, CNAB spokesperson
www.bosniak.org

Hitchens on 9/11 - Bosnia Mentioned

2011-09-16T09:15:00.004-04:00

Christopher Hitchens revisits the essential moral point about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in this article for Slate.com. Like virtually everything the man writes, it is worth a read not only for the substance of his arguments but for the elegance of his prose. I'm linking it partly because it is always good for the public to be reminded that the Bosnian genocide was essentially an act of evil (as he does at the end of this piece); and also because I am grateful that even with the advanced cancer he is afflicted with, it is still possible to pass along a link to the "latest from Christopher Hitchens". I hope Mr. Hitchens would approve of my choice to describe cancer as something he is "afflicted with"; it may not be the most precise or apt choice of words, but I suspect he would prefer my choice to "suffers from."

I don't know Mr. Hitchens--I once stood a few feet away from him, at a show of support outside the Danish embassy in Washington, DC, but chose not to introduce myself or take up any of his time, and unfortuately that was the only opportunity I've ever had to speak to the man. But I have a great regard for him, and I know I am not alone in saying that my own political and ideological journey has been enriched, informed, and partially shaped by the force and pursuasiveness of his polemical journey. His cancer diagnosis is not "new news", but neither is my intellectual and ideological debt to the man. Consider this post my humble tip-of-the-hat from an aspiring historian and budding writer to a master of the craft.

War Criminal Momcilo Perisic Convicted

2011-09-07T08:33:00.002-04:00

[Press Release from Bosniak American Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina]

Today, the former Yugoslav army chief, General Momcilo Perisic was convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for war crimes that he committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and Croatia. Gen. Perisic was sentenced to 27 years in prison for inhumane acts, such as providing military aid to General Ratko Mladic in orchestrating the genocide in the U.N. protected zone of Srebrenica that took the lives of over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, as well as for providing crucial military assistance during the four year shelling of Sarajevo.

Furthermore, Gen. Perisic is responsible for having direct control of rebels that injured and killed innocent civilians in the city of Zagreb in May of 1995. Lastly, he is responsible for sending military aid such as countless bullets and artillery shells from Belgrade to Serb rebels in BiH. Gen. Perisic's support of these Serb forces had a direct impact on the atrocities that were committed in BiH during the war that lasted from 1992-1995. Gen. Perisic is the most senior Yugoslav officer to be put on trial at the ICTY and presiding Judge Moloto stated that "the crimes charged in this case were not perpetrated by rouge soldiers acting independently, rather they were part of a lengthy campaign overseen by top (Bosnian Serb) officers on the Yugoslav Army's payroll."

Today, BAACBH remembers all of the victims that lost their lives due to the cruel and inhumane acts that were perpetrated by individuals such as General Perisic; and let us not forget that justice is the only path towards a democratic and prosperous Southeast Europe.

Balkan Revisionism meets Apocalyptic Christian Fundamentalism

2011-08-31T08:52:00.002-04:00

One of these days, when I'm finished with graduate school and have more time to once again devote to this blog and Bosnia-related issues, one of the deeper questions/issues I'd like to dig into is to try and determine whether or not there is any cohesive ideological or psychological motivation behind the various, seemingly-incompatible strands of Balkan Revisionism and Bosnian Genocide Denial.

For now, though, I'll just pass along this piece of drivel I discovered, in which the theoretical basis for the Michael Parenti/Diana Johnstone post-Stalinist school of thought is embraced by Christian fundamentalist/prophetic end-of-times believers:

What Really Happened in Bosnia [Note: This is the title of the article, not my own take on the content--far from it].

It's the same nonsense we've all heard before, only this time is service to Rapture-believing right-wing Christian fundamentalists. The Z-magazine crowd must be so proud.

Sorry if you feel I'm wasting your time with this drivel, but I need to periodically touch base just to keep this blog on life support until I once again have the time to do more substantive work. Hope my regular readers are all fine.

Pessimism about Bosnia's politcal order

2011-08-16T10:25:00.004-04:00

From Radio Free Europe comes this interview with Morton Abramowitz on the inherently unstable nature of the Dayton Constitution, and what this means for the future of Bosnia:

Interview: Morton Abramowitz On The 'End Of Bosnia'

Unfortunately, it appears that The National Interest doesn't have the original article archived on the website. If I find a link to it, I will certainly update this post.

The 16th Anniversary of the Srebrenica Genocide

2011-07-11T10:02:00.002-04:00

[Press release from Bosniak American Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina. Thanks for permission to reproduce.]

The Bosniak American Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina (BAACBH) marks the 16th anniversary of the Srebrenica Genocide with grief and sorrow and together, with the families of those killed, is remembering the innocent victims that lost their lives in the worst atrocity that Europe has seen since World War II.

On July 11, 1995, the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, a declared United Nations safe haven, fell to Serb paramilitary forces led by General Ratko Mladic, an indicted war criminal who was recently arrested in Serbia. The fall of Srebrenica marks the final act of brutal ethnic cleansing and genocide in BiH, where more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were slaughtered within a five day period. Today, 16 years after the worst atrocity committed in Europe since the end of the Second World War, we are reminded that the world did not keep its promise when it said "Never Again."

The 16th commemoration of the Srebrenica Genocide is a dark reminder that the world failed to protect innocent civilians. BAACBH, an independent non-governmental organization advocating on behalf of Bosnian Americans is committed to preserving the memory of those who suffered and lost their lives in Srebrenica.

Lastly, as the surviving relatives, neighbors, diplomats and members of the international community gather to commemorate the Srebrenica Genocide, let us not forget that justice must prevail, and that the truth must be told in order to prevent atrocities such as this one from ever happening again in BiH, or anywhere else in the world.

Republika Srpska to pay for Mladic, Karadzic Hague Legal Defence

2011-06-29T10:15:00.000-04:00

I wish I was surprised:

As explained in this article from the Southeast Europe Times, the political leadership of RS is still willing to play games with the toxic legacy of its nationalist foundations. This is shameful, and yet another sign that the administrative division of Bosnia only strengthens nationalist extremists and institutionalizes ethnic divisions.

Reasonable Editorial from The Economist

2011-06-21T12:58:00.000-04:00

Genocide
It seems like a handy word

Ratko Mladic: All Serbs Are Guilty

2011-05-30T10:29:00.005-04:00

I have argued before on this blog--in my review of Diana Johnstone's "Fools' Crusade" for example--that one reason why so many Serb ultra-nationalists and their Western enablers so vigorously deny basic facts about events during the wars in the former Yugoslavia is because the collectivist nature of the nationalist myths they used to fuel and justify those wars erase any concept of individual conscience or accounatability. Because these myths fully embrace a collectivist notion of collective guilt on the part of the "enemies of the Serb nation", they also implicitly accept the notion of collective action, and guilt, on the part of the Serbs themselves.

In this article from The Guardian, Ratko Mladic essentially makes my point for me:

What has been visible since then is a more familiar Mladic, arrogant and demanding, insisting not only on his own innocence but on the shared guilt of all of the Serbian people. "He said: 'You elected [Slobodan] Milosevic, not me. You are all guilty, not me'."

On one level, this is ridiculous. One of the core principles of this blog is that individuals are not primarily or solely members of a collective ethnic, national, or religious group, but rather sovereign individuals who should be equal before the law. But on another level, Mladic is merely taking the collectivist mentality of Serbian ethno-nationalism to its logical conclusion. If ethnic national groups rather than individual citizens are the core foundation of states, then individuals can only be judged as members of their ethnic group. It takes more than elections to make a democratic culture, and in that regard Mladic is speaking more truth than he most likely realizes.

Serbia Arrests Ratko Mladic

2011-05-26T09:33:00.000-04:00

I was getting ready to post another story, when I saw that this news story had broke:

Ratko Mladic arrested in Serbia, president says

Not much to say, we'll see how it goes from here, but this is undoubtably great news.

Article from latest National Congress of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina

2011-05-26T09:32:00.006-04:00

From: REPUBLIC OF BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA National Congress of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina (NCR B&H) ONLINE NEWSLETTER, International issue, No. 727 May 12, 2011

1. Is Europa going to take part in the end game of the genocide in Bosnia?

The following article nicely summarizes the issues regarding Dodik’s personal motivation to organize a “referendum” in the so-called Serbian Republic in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The more important issue -- that such a referendum would violate even the Dayton peace accord -- is set aside in the article, but it is addressed in many other published articles. In fact, that was the reason the High Representative in Bonsia, Valentin Inzko, explained for his decision to sanction RS and Dodik if they proceed with the referendum.

The most important reason against a referendum in Republika Srpska is that it is an illegal entity created by aggression and genocide from Serbia, but this is also not the focus of the article. The major problem for citizens of Bosnia is that Dodik always finds his marionettes even among the so called Bosniak politicians. However, the eventual support of the corrupt Bosniak politicians to Dodik's request should not be an excuse for Europeans to give up their influence in Bosnia.

According to the Dayton peace agreement, OHR has real power in Bosnia; it is not merely a mediator. Their influence is necessary in order to save at least some justice in Bosnia. If Europeans, i.e. Stefan Füle, the European Commissioner for Enlargement, act merely as mediators and allow the Serbs and “Bosniaks” to disable the Bosnian judiciary, it would be the complicity in the end game of the destruction of Bosnia that was started by aggression and genocide.

--Muhamed Borogovac, Ph. D., ASA, MAAABoston, USA National Congress of the Republic Bosnia&Herzegovina

2. Bosnian Court: a European entity Radio Netherlands Worldwide International Justice Tribune
Published on : 23 May 2011 - 10:51am

At the end of May, EU foreign ministers will discuss Bosnia and Herzegovina following a deal Catherine Ashton, EU foreign policy chief, achieved with the Bosnian Serb leadership on 13 May. By Nidzara Ahmetasevic As a result of this deal, Bosnian Serb President Milorad Dodik, called off the referendum challenging the legality of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Prosecutor's Office - in exchange for a reform of Bosnia's judiciary system, supervised by the EU. Both institutions were formed during the last judiciary reform 10 years ago and led by the international community in Bosnia and Herzegovina represented by the Office of the High Representative (OHR).

State judiciary institutions, as well as number of laws (including the Criminal Code) were established in 2002 by the OHR decision. After the war from 1992-1995, Bosnia and Herzegovina was divided in two entities - Republika Srpska with a majority Serb population and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina with a majority Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and Croat population. The country is a semi protectorate. But the ultimate power to impose laws and sack politicians, is in the hands of the OHR. The Court and the Prosecution, the highest state judiciary institutions, deal with war crimes and organized crime.

Structured dialogue Stefan Füle, the European Commissioner for Enlargement, will chair the first session of the "structured dialogue" on the judiciary reform in Bosnia in the first half of June, in the Bosnian Serb capital Banja Luka. This was not the first time Dodik threatened the Court and Prosecution with a referendum, and not the first time he changed his mind. At the end of 2009, he opposed an extension of the mandate of the international personnel in both institutions. In order to guarantee the independence of the Court and Prosecution when they were established in 2002, the OHR engaged international personnel as judges, prosecutors, analysts and advisors. In that decision, their mandate was limited to the end of 2009. However, finding that these institutions still need an international presence as a guarantee for their work, the OHR extended their mandate until 20 December 2012. Dissatisfied with the OHR decision, Dodik, then Bosnian Serb Prime Minister, said he would call a special session of his Parliament to vote on whether to hold a referendum.

Dodik said his decision had nothing to do "with destabilization" but "with the legal dignity and sovereignty of the country and the right of the Bosnian Serb Republic to its own opinion and we will not back away". However, he backed away that time, as well as this time. Since 2004, when the Court and Prosecution officially began their work, over 200 people have been indicted and prosecuted for war crimes, including genocide in Srebrenica. Some of the indictees were former high-ranking politicians, military and police officers.

The Court also dealt with the cases transferred from the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) as a part of its completition strategy. Embezzelment Analysts claim that the real reason for Dodik's objection to the existence of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Prosecutor's Office is related to the ongoing investigation into his alleged involvement in embezzlement of public funds. "Over the last couple of days, there have been different explanations for Dodik's decision to hold a referendum. The most common is that he is trying to draw attention away from the economic issues that he cannot solve," Azhar Kalamujic, editor for the Center for Investigative Journalism (CIN) in Sarajevo said.

Over the last couple of months, CIN has been conducting an investigation into Dodik's financial dealings. Based on this research, Kalamujic claims that Dodik should face trial. "The State prosecutor is the only one in this country ready to investigate Dodik's business. He tried everything to stop this investigation...," Kalamujic said. Eldar Hadzovic from the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) agrees. He claims that Dodik has tried to jeopardize the State Court and Prosecution in different ways since 2006 and that these attempts have intensified since the investigation was launched.

It is not known in which direction judiciary reform will go now, or what exactly Dodik or the EU want to achieve by it. Nevertheless, the Sarajevo daily Dnevni Avaz reports that Dodik considers Ashton's visit and acceptance of open talks on reform as a "political success for Republika Srpska".

[I edited the above press release slightly by adding somewhat arbitrary line breaks to improve readability, and some other minor cosmetic changes. The text itself is unchanged.]

Bosnian-American Friendship Association

2011-04-28T12:27:00.002-04:00

It's my pleasure to pass along this Facebook page for a fairly new and very worthwhile venture:

Bosnian-American Friendship Association

I encourage anyone reading this blog to check them out.

Press Release: 19th Annivsersary of the Bosnian Genocide at Visegrad

2011-04-13T18:25:00.005-04:00

[Please see Visegrad Genocide Blog for more information. The press release follows.]

2011 Visegrad Genocide Calender
Visegrad Genocide Memories

Press Release

The central commemoration of the 19th anniversary of the Visegrad genocide will be held on 28.05.2011 on the Mehmed-pasa Sokolovic bridge in Visegrad. The commemoration will be followed by the burial of Visegrad martyrs at the Straziste Muslim cemetery.
This commemoration is organized by the Association of victims families “Visegrad 92″.
Contact person: Hida Kasapovic (062 212 631) – Bosnian
and Berina Pekmezovic (061 508 691) – English
Email: udruzenje.visegrad92@gmail.com

The Pionirska Street massacre will be commemorated on 14.06.2011 at 12 o’clock noon. The official ceremony will be followed with religious prayers for the victims. The commemoration will be held in front of the site of the massacre in Pionirska Street, Visegrad.
On 14.06.1992. around 70 Bosniak civilians were burned alive in Pionirska Street by Serb soldiers – only a few survived.
This commemoration is organized by the Association Women-Victims of War.
Contact person: Bakira Hasecic (061 272 000)-Bosnian
and Berina Pekmezovic (061 508 691)
Email: udruzenjezenazrtva_rata@bih.net.ba

The Bikavac massacre will be commemorated on 27.06.2011 at 12 o’clock noon. The official ceremony will be followed with religious prayers for the victims. The commemoration will be held in front of the site of the massacre in the Bikavac settlement, Visegrad.
On 27.06.1992. around 70 Bosniak civilians were burned alive in Meho Aljic’s house in Bikavac by Serb soldiers – only one person survived.
This commemoration is organized by the Association Women-Victims of War.
Contact person: Bakira Hasecic (061 272 000)-Bosnian
and Berina Pekmezovic (061 508 691) – English
Email: udruzenjezenazrtva_rata@bih.net.ba
♦For more information on these commemorations or information on Visegrad please contact Visegrad Genocide Memories editor at visegradgenocide@gmail.com♦

********************************

[Please see the original Press release at 2011 Visegrad Genocide Calendar. I also recommend keeping tabs on the Visegrad Genocide Blog; it's been quite active lately and I suspect that will continue with the commemoration coming up.]

EDIT: I just realized that for months, I have had the wrong link for Visegrad Genocide Blog--I was using a link to a specific post rather than the main link to the main page; if anybody got the mistaken impression from my misleading link that the blog had not been updated since last June, I sincerely apologize.

Third Annual Bosnian Women's Day on Capitol Hill

2011-04-11T12:06:00.003-04:00

[Press Release from The Bosniak American Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina (BAACBH)]:

Third Annual Bosnian Women's Day on Capitol Hill
Empowerment through Film: "Back to Bosnia"
The Bosniak American Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina (BAACBH) cordially invites you to the Third Annual Bosnian Women's Day on Capitol Hill. We will celebrate the courage of women and emphasize the role of film and multiethnic dialogue in a post-conflict society.

Opening Program and Reception: Tuesday, April 12, 2011

2:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Location: Rayburn House Office Building, Room 2253

Keynote speakers 2:30 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
The Honorable Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX)
Ms. Sabina Vajraca, Bosnian-American Award Winning Filmmaker

Showing of documentary "Back to Bosnia" 3:00 p.m. - 4:15 p.m.

**Bosnian delicacies will be provided.**

BAACBH along with the help of Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), her staff and the Heinrich Böll Foundation North America would like to emphasize the role of women in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The documentary film "Back to Bosnia" is a story of a family who returns to Bosnia in order to reclaim their property after being forced out from their home during the war in Bosnia that lasted from 1992-1995. While there, the family is confronted with the destruction of their city's multiethnic character and forced to examine the community they left behind. They witness an exhumation, visit the sites of war crimes, and seek out the remnants of a city that was once their home, as well as confront those that forced them out.

This event is sponsored by the generous financial support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation North America.

"Bosnia and Beyond" by Jeanne Haskin [5]

2011-04-10T22:09:00.003-04:00

Part 2

...will have to wait.

My interlibrary loan copy is due to be returned to the lending library system tomorrow; the issues covered in Part 2 (lessons about humanitarian intervention, international responses to genocide, and other "lessons of Yugoslavia") deserve more than a perfunctory review; and since I haven't found much substance in Part 1, I really cannot justify putting aside further time for this book when my graduate studies are piling up.

I may revisit this book sometime later this year; in the meantime, I hope to begin tackling another, more substantive book, within the next week or two.

Sorry to bail out mid-stream.

"Bosnia and Beyond" by Jeanne Haskin [4]

2011-04-08T21:34:00.007-04:00

Chapter 7

The role of international aid and humanitarian campaigns; the establishment of safe areas; different peace plans and the creeping institutionalization and acceptance of ethnic partition among the Western powers; the Croat-Muslim war; atrocities carried out by Muslim forces; "lift and strike"; criticism of the inactivity and passivity of the international community by Western observers in and outside of Bosnia.

Haskin passes along this quote from Lewis MacKenzie: "Now obviously the critics will say this rewards force and sets a bad example. I can only say to them, read your history. Force has been rewarded since the first caveman picked up a club. occupied his neighbor's cave, and ran off with his wife." She got this quote from Norman Cigar's "Genocide in Bosnia." She provides no comment; hopefully that is because she believes the stupidity (what sort of "history" has MacKenzie read?) and amoralism of his comment requires no explication. Unfortunately, after reading her book I am not at all certain that Haskin has a firm enough hand on the rudder.
Despite the fact that the book purports to "[show] how Western plans for the liberalization of the country resulted in ethnic polarization and the election of ethno-nationalist leaders", it is largely a mediocre and flaccid work of historiography; little more than a "this side vs. that side" summation of other people's work, with occasional--and not very convincing--editorial asides.

Chapter 8

The war ends, finally--and in this chapter, pretty quickly--11 pages to cover the Markale Massacre, the Srebrenica genocide (she calls it a "slaughter" but given how superficial her knowledge seems to be it is not surprising that the April 2004 ruling that it was a genocide had not yet registered wtih ther), Operation Storm, the intervention of NATO, and Dayton. Haskin veers dangerously close to justifying the Serb attack on Srebrenica as being of "military necessity" but at least she doesn't accept the rationales for how that attack was carried out or for the genocide which subsequently took place. She mostly rejects Sremac on the subject--but then again, why quote her at length (as she does yet again) in the first place?

This account is so perfunctory it simply isn't worth the time it would take to analyze what little substance is here.

Conclusion of Part 1

This five-page summary of what Haskin claims to have shown in the first eight chapters. As I hope to have sufficiently expressed already, I remain unconvinced, to put it mildly. Haskin sees parts of the whole, but she began by uncritically accepting the notion that Yugoslavia was broken up "by Western manipulation of the Yugoslav economy"; and that subsequent events were stage-managed by Western powers in order to achieve an end result which benefitted Western financial interests. This, in spite of the fact that even the back cover preview of the book admits that "no formal plan has surfaced to show that the whole thing was engineered to provide a base fo US/NATO troops"; I have no problem with speculative writing, except that in this case she seems to be forcing 'evidence' to fit an ideologically motivated thesis. It never occurs to her than Western inaction might have been a product of a lack of domestic political support, for example.

All in all, a very flimsy case for a very dubious thesis, made with a hodgepodge of hardly-esoteric secondary sources. I won't be reviewing Part 2 in such detail; I will summarize it briefly in my next post.

"Bosnia and Beyond" by Jeanne Haskin [3]

2011-04-04T12:06:00.008-04:00

Chapter 4

This is a perfunctory synopsis of the War in Croatia.

Chatper 5

This is a perfunctory account of the outbreak of war in Bosnia; there is nothing surprising or new for any reader with even a cursory knowledge of events; except for the author's unsubstantiated claim that "the West had given up on the idea of retaining Milosevic as their man due to his refusal to enact further [economic] reform." There are no notes, citations, or evidence presented; she merely states that this is "[m]y own analysis" and leaves it at that. Her only "evidence" is that the West supported independence for Bosnia without being willing to take further measures to allow the country to defend itself. Of such reverse-reasoning are conspiracy theories made.

One other odd choice in this chapter--the author quotes Danielle Sremac, points out that her arguments amount to little more than a defense of the actions of the Bosnian Serb leadership--and then states that "Sremac's defense of the Bosnian Serbs is something to which I will give voice throughout the account of the war"! Why she feels the need to balance her account with a contrary and dubious interpretation is not explained.

Chapter 6

An account of the early phase of the war; the seige of Sarajevo and how it served to distract international attention from the massive campaign of genocide throughout the country; the public relations/propogranda campaign by the Bosnian Serb leadership and their allies/enablers (Sremac and Lewis MacKenzie here) to cloud the issue of guilt and responsibility by claiming that the Bosnian government was responsible for attacking its own people; concentration camps throughout the country; etc.

Haskin continues to quote Sremac; mostly she rebuts Sremac's assertions but sometimes concedes a point. For example, she notes that there were Croat- and Muslim-operated concentration camps, and that the Bosnian government forces sometimes committed atrocities; yet she does so in context of accepting that Sremac's "report" that the numbers of non-Serbs held was wildly inflated and the numbers of Serbs held highly underreported. Either those accounts were accurate (as accurate as they could be during wartime), or they were not; instead, Haskin gives Sremac's contrary account plenty of room (she quotes Sremac at length), and then without considering the specifics of her claims, goes on to state that there were reports of atrocities committed by Croat and Muslim forces, so therefore "this does not mean that Sremac's report is invalid." That's quite a leap, and completely ignores the context in which Sremac's "report" was given. Haskin, in short, completely avoids making critical judgements about the relative reliability and honesty of conflicting sources; a serious flaw in a book which relies on secondary sources.

Oddly, despite her decision to include the revisionist accounts by Sremac and to give space to Lewis MacKenzie's statements (even though she acknowledges that he was later a secretly paid spokesman for the Serb nationalist cause), she does not bring up the Living Marxism smear against Ed Vulliamy's reporting on the concentration camps. Given her odd editorial choice to give Sremac equal time, this came as something of a relief.

Bosnia Banned from FIFA and UEFA

2011-04-01T08:44:00.002-04:00

From ESPN.com:

Bosnia federation banned by FIFA, UEFA

The article is short, and sadly not surprising considering the state of other national institutions in Bosnia; the Bosnian Serb leadership of the FA refuses to give up autonomy, and therefore is hobbling the national FA. And the result is paralysis and an inability to participate internationally as a nation. The subject in this case is soccer, but the metaphor applies to the failure of the Dayton agreement in general.

"Bosnia and Beyond" by Jeanne Haskin [2]

2011-03-30T13:53:00.008-04:00

I'm going to preface this post with two short apologies:

1) Sorry it took me over a week from the first post to continue this review; and

2) Sorry I selected this book without knowing more about it. Haskin does not seem to have anything particularly original to add to the debate on Bosnia. This is not necessarily a bad thing--I don't I have much to add to the debate on Bosnia, either, but I'm an amateur blogger. I freely admit to being a non-specialist and a non-speaker/reader of Serbo-Croat who relies entirely on secondary sources in English for his information. As such, I try to focus more on book reviews and historiography rather than any pretense to original research or analysis. Of course, this requires that I exercise some judgement and a willingness to make critical evaluations of the sources I rely on.

I am not convinced that Haskin is sufficiently aware that she works under the same limitations I do. This book is little more than a summary of other works, seemingly shoehorned into an ideologically pre-determined conceptual framework. A quick visit to the website of the publisher, Algora Publishing, reinforces that perception.

I will stick with this review, if only to give Haskin the chance to redeem herself, but so far I am not impressed.

Part 1
Chapter One: The Pre-War Situation

This chapter explicitly rehashes the argument made by Susan Woodward and Michael Chossudovsky--that the breakup of Yugoslavia was a direct result of a Western-imposed financial crisis at the end of the Cold War. The argument here is nuanced to the extent that she doesn't believe that the West intended to destroy Yugoslavia, but rather merely intended to overthrow the Communist government. The theory here is that disparities between the different republics created fault lines that nationalists were able to exploit; Milosevic most adroitly.

Her 'evidence' is slim, and the weakness of her book is evident within the first few pages; she states her positions briefly, includes a handful of footnotes from the same few sources, and considers her case made. If this were merely an aside to the larger issues to come, the reader could forgive her--but the premise of the entire book is that the West, particularly the United States, were primarily responsible for the breakup of the country and therefore bear a great deal of the blame for the violence which followed. Because of that, it is important that the author should establish this crucial point as best she can before moving on. She fails to do so.

Chapter 2

And yet--often is seems that Haskin's heart is in the right place. Although she accepts one of the key premises of Balkan revisionism, she seems not to have followed Woodward and Chossudovsky into the arms of Johnstone, Parenti, and company.

In this chapter, she briefly summarizes some of the context for the rise of nationalism in post-Tito Yugoslavia; specifically among Serbs and Croats. Nothing here will surprise any readers of this blog, but frankly they will surprise a reader who has just finished Chapter 1 and thinks he or she knows where Haskin is going.

Chapter 3

This chapter briefly summarizes the preparation for war among Serb nationalists, within the Milosevic regime and its proxies, to a lesser extent among nationalist Croats and the Tudjman regime, and the lack of preparation by Izetbegovic and the nascent Bosnian state. Again, there is nothing new here.

One interesting note: While Haskin accepts Woodward's thesis that Western-imposed economic hardship was the primary cause of the eventual breakdown of the Yugoslav state, she explicitly rejects Woodward's claim that the RAM--the Serb paramilitary forces created either by Milosevic or his allies--was created to defend against Western aggression. While I suppose it is good that she rejects Woodward's ridiculous claim, it is curious that she doesn't recognize that this is a warning sign that Woodward's thesis is an ideologically driven project to make the facts fit the theory rather than the other way around. Haskin picks and chooses which trees she likes without any awareness that someone is trying to get her lost in a forest.

***********

I will probably continue to review Part 1 in a perfunctory manner; Part 2 might merit slightly more measured consideration and attention.

"Bosnia and Beyond" by Jeanne Haskin [1]

2011-03-22T21:24:00.004-04:00

I realize that this blog has been semi-dormant for the past several weeks; I will make an effort to get things moving again. Beginning with a review of Bosnia and Beyond: The "Quiet" Revolution that Wouldn't Go Quietly by Jeanne M. Haskin, a book which seems to straddle between different competing Western narratives about the Bosnian war. After paging through it, I've decided simply to read it a chapter at a time and report what I find as I go. I am doing this after sitting on a copy for a couple of weeks, unable to decide whether or not the book warranted a full review. Ultimately, I decided that it's been so long since I've blogged at all, I needed to just jump head first into the book and hope the review ends up being worth the trouble, regardless of whether or not the book is worth the trouble of reviewing. So I'm blogging without a net, so to speak.

I checked it out without knowing anything about it; I do not promise anything other than a straightforward accounting of the text as I go through it on a chapter-by-chapter basis.

Introduction

This book consists of many short chapters divided into very short sections. It seems that many of the section titles are quite self-explanatory, which makes it pretty easy for the curious reader to quicly ascertain where the author is coming from. Although the confusion doesn't quite end there, as we shall see.

The breakup of the country is placed at the feet of the West, who had imposed draconian financial restructuring terms on the country at the end of the Cold War; this argument is a familiar refrain of left-wing revisionists; Haskin even goes as far as to say that the rise of nationalist political factions (and the dearth of moderate non-nationalist political) leadership was a direct result of the "economic and political climate that the West had contrived to achieve"; a claim which goes even further than such revisionists as Diana Johnstone, who at least acknowledges the indigenous origins of the post-Tito political culture.

Yet at the same time, Haskin bluntly states that there was a genocide against the Muslims of Bosnia, carried out by the Serb leadership, and that the international community essentially tolerated it because with the exception of the United States, they either supported the incorporation of Bosnia into a Serb-dominated rump Yugoslavia, they simply preferred the Serb leadership, or they were anti-Muslim. You would never hear any of this from Diana Johnstone or any of her fellow revisionists, to put it mildly.

The book is in two parts--Part One argues that the international community established the terms by which the country was pulled apart, and then managed the destruction of the country in such a way that the Muslims of Bosnia were used as sacrificial lambs in order to create a postwar order in accordance with the new international consensus. Part Two focuses on what might have been done to prevent or stop the genocide in Bosnia, and what lessons we can learn to stop future genocide.

This could be interesting.

Press Release: BAACBH Condemns the Arrest of General Divjak

2011-03-04T13:52:00.003-05:00

[It seems that the government in Belgrade is still playing this tired game; apparently the government there still feels that there is political traction is these stunts. Thanks to the Bosniak American Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina for this press release.]

General Jovan Divjak, former Deputy Commander of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), was detained on March 3, 2011, by the Austrian authorities on an international arrest warrant issued by the government of Serbia. General Divjak was arrested at the Vienna International Airport at approximately 8:00 pm local time. The Austrian judicial authorities have indicated that they intend to keep General Divjak detained for two weeks until a determination is made regarding Serbia's extradition request.

The Serbian government issued a warrant for Mr. Divjak's arrest on the grounds that he was involved in war crimes during the siege of Sarajevo which lasted from April 5, 1992 to February 29, 1996. Specifically, Mr. Divjak is accused of war crimes during an incident that occurred on Dobrovoljacka Street in Sarajevo on May 3, 1992.

Mr. Divjak's arrest is not an isolated case and is part of a continued pattern by the government of Serbia to intimidate all those who stood in defense of BiH. Last year, on March 1, 2010, the Serbian government issued a similar arrest warrant for Mr. Ejup Ganic, the former member of the wartime presidency of the Republic of BiH. Mr. Ganic was arrested on March 1, 2010, at London's Heathrow Airport for the alleged crimes committed during the same Dobrovoljacka Street incident. Four months after the arrest, Mr. Ganic was released because there was no evidence against him, proving that Serbia's arrest warrant was politically motivated.

BAACBH strongly condemns the arrest of General Jovan Divjak and believes that once again, Serbia's action is an assault on Bosnia's inherent and inalienable right to defend its population against the Serbian aggression. It is an assault on the reconciliation process, and it is an attempt to undermine the atrocities committed in BiH from 1992 to 1995 by the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) and Serbian paramilitary troops under Belgrade's command. Serbia has demonstrated by this politicized action that it does not respect Bosnia's sovereignty and that it is not yet prepared to be a trusted neighbor in the Balkans.

BAACBH urges for the appropriate authorities to swiftly carry out the necessary investigation so that General Jovan Divjak is released.

New Article from the Institute of War & Peace Reporting

2011-02-14T18:01:00.002-05:00

It is again my privilege to reprint this article with the kind permission of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting. Many thanks for permission to reproduce it and pass it on:

Karadzic and Mladic “Operated Together”
Ex-UN military chief in Bosnia gives evidence about relations within Bosnian Serb leadership.

By Rachel Irwin - International Justice - ICTY
TRI Issue 679, 11 Feb 11

The former commander of United Nations forces in Bosnia told Hague tribunal prosecutors this week that Radovan Karadzic and his top general Ratko Mladic were effective leaders and “operated together”.

“Both Mr Karadzic and General Mladic were very clearly in command of what they were doing,” said prosecution witness General Sir Rupert Smith, who met with both men on several occasions during 1995.

“They were clearly operating together [with other members of the Bosnian Serb leadership],” Smith continued. “That was [what] we were told by them - that they operated together as one.”

“With respect to the military itself, the Bosnian Serb army, did you have the opportunity to observe the nature of its command structure and command and control relationships?” prosecuting lawyer Alan Tieger asked.

“Speaking from the impression formed over time - here was any army in which orders were obeyed,” Smith replied. “Instructions, if given at the top, saw action at bottom, and you could see communications going to the top.”

Prosecutors allege that Karadzic, the president of Bosnia's self-declared Republika Srpska, RS, from 1992 to 1996, planned and oversaw the 44-month siege of Sarajevo that ravaged the city and left nearly 12,000 people dead. Karadzic’s army is accused of deliberately sniping and shelling the city’s civilian population in order to “spread terror” among them.

The indictment - which lists 11 counts in total - alleges that Karadzic was responsible for crimes of genocide, persecution, extermination, murder and forcible transfer which "contributed to achieving the objective of the permanent removal of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from Bosnian Serb-claimed territory". He was arrested in Belgrade in July 2008 after 13 years on the run.

Smith said that when he would express concern to General Mladic about the continued sniping and shelling of Sarajevo, there was a “frequent theme” to the latter’s response.

“The response is, ‘We’re doing it because they (the Bosnian government) are doing it,’ and secondly, ‘You are not stopping it, so I had to do it’,” Smith recalled.

However, the witness said that in his opinion, the “bulk” of the shelling was coming into Sarajevo from Bosnian Serb forces, which surrounded the city.

“During the course of your service, were you able to identify the effect or objective of the shelling of civilian areas?” Tieger asked.

“The objective appeared to me to be the harassment of the population at large,” Smith said. “There was no specific target, and events occurred randomly. You couldn’t see them connected to events happening on the ground where this shell landed.”

Smith said he also met with Mladic after paying a visit to the eastern enclave of Srebrenica in March 1995, when it was still a UN designated safe area. In July of that year, Bosnian Serb forces captured the enclave and murdered some 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, an event which both Karadzic and Mladic are accused of planning and overseeing.

However, Smith said that in March, Mladic had a “different understanding of what the safe area was”.

According to Smith, Mladic took out a map and drew a small “lozenge” centered on Srebrenica town itself.

“If he attacked, he would respect that lozenge but nothing else,” said Smith, who added that he disagreed with Mladic’s limited characterisation of the safe area.

A few months later, in May 1995, Smith said he issued a warning to both the Bosnian Serb army and the Bosnian government army to return heavy weapons to what was called a “weapons collection point”.

“I made a point that whether force was used was entirely in the hands of General Mladic - if he returned the weapons, it would not be used,” Smith said.

But the weapons were not returned by the imposed deadline, Smith continued, and NATO airstrikes on Bosnian Serb military targets commenced on May 26. In response, Bosnian Serb forces allegedly took hostage more than 200 UN military observers and peacekeepers, using many of them as human shields.

Smith said he believed the hostage-taking was a “centrally controlled” effort which Mladic led.

“I don’t think there was a doubt in either of our minds that he was in charge of dealing with the hostages,” Smith said.

When it was Karadzic’s turn to conduct his cross examination, he greeted Smith and remarked on his “good health”.

“I see you are not aging and that your memory is very fresh,” Karadzic noted with a smile.

As the questions got underway, however, their exchange was at times quite tense.

“You arrived with the intention to end the war, and to end it, it was necessary to bomb the Serbs, and that the UN should change [its] mandate and be able to use force, would you agree?” Karadzic asked.

“I did not arrive with intention to end the war,” Smith responded.

“Was your position that the United Nations should resort to force?” Karadzic asked.

“No, it was not my position, and it certainly wouldn’t have been one at all at the beginning of my tour,” Smith said.

Later, Karadzic presented a series of documents related to the NATO bombings and ensuing hostage crisis, and said that “one gets the impression that you’re waging a personal war against Mladic”.

“Did you try to vanquish Mladic during the war… to humiliate him, and did that contribute to our suffering?” Karadzic asked.

“No, I didn’t want to humiliate him and I wasn’t interested in increasing the suffering of anybody,” Smith replied. “The burden of what I was required to do … was to change the intentions of that commander (Mladic) and those around him such as yourself. In that sense, of course, it’s personal.”

Karadzic countered that in a “planned fashion you became a war time ally of our enemy”.

“Is it not clear that … you tried to change the situation on the ground in order to make it possible for Muslims and Croats to have better negotiating position?” Karadzic asked.

“I was not doing anything to improve the situation for the other party,” Smith said. “Inevitably what we were doing, attacking the Bosnian Serb army [through the NATO bombings], would alter that balance. My purpose was to re-impose the exclusion zones and get weapons withdrawn from them.”

The trial continues next week.

Rachel Irwin is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

New Article from the Institute for War & Peace Reporting

2011-02-09T17:51:00.005-05:00

It is again my privilege to reprint this article with the kind permission of the Instiute for War & Peace Reporting. Many thanks for permission to reproduce it and pass it on:

UN Hostage Speaks of Execution Fears
Ex-Canadian observer tells court how he feared for his life after being seized by Bosnian Serb soldiers.

A former United Nations military observer testified this week at the Hague tribunal that he was taken hostage by soldiers in Radovan Karadzic’s army and repeatedly threatened with violence.

Canadian army major Patrick Rechner is the fifth prosecution witness in recent weeks to describe his ordeal as a hostage during the Bosnian war.

On May 25 and 26, 1995, NATO forces conducted air strikes on Bosnian Serb military targets. In response, Bosnian Serb forces allegedly took over 200 UN military observers and peacekeepers hostage between May 26 and June 19 of that year, including Rechner, and according to the prosecutor’s pretrial brief, held them at “various locations in the [Bosnian Serb entity], using them as human shields and maltreating some of them”.

Rechner told the court that prior to the events in May, his team lived and worked in the town of Pale, in a three-storey house about 300 metres from the headquarters of the Bosnian Serb presidency. Unlike some others, his group of military observers, UNMOs, did not go on patrol, but instead mainly worked as liaisons between the UN and the Bosnian Serb political and military leadership.

On the morning of May 26, Bosnian Serb soldiers entered their house, Rechner said. Before they saw him, Rechner said he managed to call a few people with whom he had been in frequent contact, including Karadzic’s personal secretary and Jovan Zametica, Karadzic’s senior political advisor. The secretary told him that the soldiers were sent “officially” while Zametica suggested Rechner be “as cooperative as possible”.

At that point, Rechner said that his interpreters summoned him to the office where two Bosnian Serb soldiers were waiting, both of whom carried AK 47s. One of the soldiers, Nicholas Ribic, was a “Canadian of Serbian origin”, Rechner had met before, he said.

Rechner contacted his headquarters via radio and said there were armed men in this office, and then “Ribic, who of course spoke perfect English as a Canadian, started making threats that he wanted the airstrikes called off”.

Ribic’s threats soon became more specific, Rechner said.

“[Ribic] said that if the bombing continues, we will execute the UNMOs, meaning myself and other two team members,” Rechner recalled. “The threats got more specific to the point where [Ribic said] ‘For the next bomb that falls, one UNMO will be killed’.”

Ribic then called the office of General Rupert Smith, who was the commander of UN forces in Bosnia at the time, and made similar threats, Rechner said.

After that, Rechner said he and his colleagues were driven away to an ammunition depot known as Jahorinski Potok, a NATO target. During the journey, they were handcuffed to each other, he said, and once they arrived, they encountered an angry group of civilians.

“One of them then broke away from the crowd, came to our vehicle and opened the door and started punching and kicking me,” Rechner said. “Unfortunately I had only one hand to defend myself [because of the handcuffs] so I got a few good punches and kicks in the process.”

Bosnian Serb soldiers pulled the man off and he appeared to calm down, Rechner said, but then he took out a pistol. Once again, the soldiers took it away, but the man then grabbed Rechner by the throat, he said.

“[The man] said he had lost 12 sheep in the airstrike and he said that this was his livelihood,” Rechner recalled, adding that the man also expressed fear that a missing relative had been killed in the airstrike that morning.

“He ended by saying that for those reasons he should be allowed to kill me and I shouldn’t be surprised by his reaction,” Rechner said. “I told him that we had nothing to do with the airstrikes, but he was too emotional and angry to discuss that issue.”

When the group finally entered the facility, another Bosnian Serb soldier approached and took out a revolver, Rechner said.

“[The soldier] pointed to two notches he had in the handle and he explained that those notches were for two people he had already killed with it,” Rechner recalled. “And he said that if airstrikes would not kill us by the end of the day, he would come over and personally execute us, and he would really enjoy getting three more notches on his revolver handle, indicating that the three notches were for the three of us [military observers].”

Sometime later, Rechner said they received confirmation that the airstrikes had been called off, but shortly thereafter, there was yet another airstrike.

“It wasn’t clear to any of us what real situation was—if airstrikes had been called off or not,” Rechner said.

The group was then driven to four bunkers that had not yet been hit, Rechner said. The soldiers handcuffed him to one of the lightning rods in front of the bunkers, he said, adding that his two colleagues were subject to similar treatment.

Rechner said he remained handcuffed to the lightning rod for five to six hours, but was given a crate to sit on after a while. During this time, a group of people in civilian clothes came to visit the facility, one of whom was Zametica, the political advisor to Karadzic who in an earlier phone call had told Rechner to cooperate.

“Mr Zametica came over to me and I expressed to him my shock and surprise at how we were treated, because up to that point I had thought maybe there was some kind of mistake, that this was an out of control group that had taken us hostage,” Rechner said.

“…I asked him what was going on and how he could justify this treatment of us, and I explained that I had been attacked and so on, and [Zametica] said, ‘Well, times have changed’,” Rechner continued. “And then in a self-satisfied way, he added a comment to himself, ‘I wonder what General Smith will do now.’ And then he walked up the road.”

At around 5 pm, some Bosnian Serb soldiers unhandcuffed Rechner, blindfolded him, and took him and some other UNMOs for a drive up “a steep and bumpy” road, the witness said.

When the car stopped and his blindfold was taken off, Rechner said he found himself in front of a “large radar dome.

“Two of the soldiers took out AK47s, donned black masks and then [one of them] turned to us and asked if we were afraid, and I said no, trying to appear as calm as possible.”

Prosecuting lawyer Alan Tieger then asked what Rechner thought would happen at that point.

“…When we were taken to the radar dome, my grave concern was that we were being taken there to be executed,” Rechner replied. “Driving up the dirt track, one soldier turned to another and asked why they were going there, … and the other soldier turned to him and said, ‘Oh, it’s because [General Ratko] Mladic wanted us to film some UN people there’, so one of the possibilities was we were being taken there to be executed and filmed in the process.”

That did not happen, and instead the soldiers took one of Rechner’s colleagues up to the radar dome and “conducted some sort of interview” with him there.

After that, the day took an especially “bizarre” turn, Rechner said. He and his colleagues were taken to a hotel and treated to dinner “as if nothing at all had happened to us”.

They were subsequently allowed to pick up blankets and provisions from their house in Pale, and Rechner was taken to a military garrison and reunited with other UNMOs.

“It was a very relieving situation to see that everyone was ok,” Rechner said, his voice breaking with emotion.

Rechner also said that, according to his interpreters at the time, local newscasts had shown video footage of him handcuffed to the lightning rod and they “accused us of being the people on the ground who were guiding the airstrikes.

“[This] was not only false, but it infuriated us because accusations like that put our lives in danger, because local people had very little access to independent media and we were concerned that … [they would] see these reports and take their angry and frustrations out on us.”

Towards the end of his time in captivity, Rechner’s repeated request for a meeting with Professor Nikola Koljevic, the vice-president of the self-declared Bosnian Serb entity and a close associate of Karadzic, was granted.

“I wanted to make sure Professor Koljevic understood everything [about how we were taken hostage]—he was bit surprised,” Rechner said. “He knew about some of the details but not everything, that we had actually been threatened and how the whole situation had impacted on all of us.”

Koljevic told Rechner that the airstrikes had been a “major crisis” for the Bosnian Serbs, and that the strikes had occurred prior to a deadline set by the UN for certain conditions to be met.

“He used the analogy of electric shock—sometimes if you treat a patient with electric shock you can kill him, but you can also cure him,” Rechner recalled. “[Koljevic] said that from his point of view this was worth the risk.”

When it was Karadzic’s turn to cross-examine the witness, he spent several minutes asking about Rechner’s status during his captivity.

“Were you ever told that you were prisoners of war?” Karadzic asked.

Rechner said that he was told this twice, but on one occasion he was referred to a “captive combatant”.

“You as a group asked for certain rights and privileges, among other things, for visit from the Red Cross, from a doctor and to watch television, right?” Karadzic asked.

Rechner confirmed that they asked for those things, but emphasised that the request to watch television was so as to “receive information through the media”.

“It was not because anyone called us prisoners of war, but because we considered it unjust to be taken captive,” Rechner continued. “…We requested the minimum that we as a group were entitled to if the Bosnian Serb side designated us as prisoners of war, because we weren’t getting any of that.”

“You got all three [requests], didn’t you?” Karadzic asked.

“Towards the end, yes,” Rechner responded. “We made the requests early on.”

Rechner said he also asked Koljevic for permission to make more frequent phone calls home, since the few that were permitted only lasted for one or two minutes at a time.

“You were in different theatres of war on behalf of the UN,” Karadzic remarked. “Did you ever see POWs entitled to satellite phones or wireless communications? Does international law envisage that kind of thing?”

“Move on to the next question,” presiding judge O-Gon Kwon interjected.

Karadzic concluded by thanking Rechner for his testimony.

“I’m sorry you went through what you went through, but I can’t help thinking also of the Serbs who were there at the time suffering from NATO airstrikes.”

The trial will continue next week with the testimony of General Rupert Smith, the commander of UN forces in Bosnia from January 1995 until the end of the conflict.

Rachel Irwin is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.

**************************************

Allow me to editorialize a little bit--I hope that the next person who interviews General Lewis MacKenzie puts him on the spot about this. MacKenzie was collaborating with and publicly supporting an illegal regime which committed terrorist actions against his own troops. He may not have been the direct commander of this particular UN troop, but they were still from his force; what's more, this man was from the Canadian military. It is simply incomprehensible that a military office with any sense of honor and loyalty would have chosen to support a military force and 'government' which was committing this sort of war crime against a soldier from his own army. The man should be ashamed of himself.

New Article from Institute for War & Peace Reporting

2011-01-24T08:44:00.003-05:00

It is again my privilege to reprint this article with the kind permission of the Instiute for War & Peace Reporting. Many thanks for permission to reproduce it and pass it on:

Bosnian Serb Command Structure "Crystal Clear"
Witness tells Karadzic trial that action could not be taken in Sarajevo without high command authorisation.

By Rachel Irwin - International Justice - ICTY
TRI Issue 676, 21 Jan 11
A former member of the United Nations peacekeeping operation in Sarajevo told the Hague tribunal trial of Radovan Karadzic this week that the Bosnian Serb army could not initiate attacks on the city without first receiving orders from the army’s top commander.

“The … command in Sarajevo could not take [its own] initiative,” said anonymous witness KDZ450, who testified in French with digital image distortion.

“It was General [Ratko] Mladic who was telling them, act on Sarajevo in order to exert pressure on the Muslims so they would stop their actions in the rest of Bosnia-Hercegovina,” the witness continued. “For me it was crystal clear.”

Mladic, who remains wanted by the tribunal, was commander of the Bosnian Serb army and subordinate to Karadzic, who from 1992 to 1996 was president of the self declared Bosnian Serb entity, Republika Sprska, RS.

Karadzic – who represents himself - stands accused of planning and overseeing the 44-month siege of Sarajevo that left nearly 12,000 people dead. His army is accused of deliberately sniping and shelling the city’s civilian population in order to “spread terror” among them.

The indictment - which lists 11 counts in total - alleges that Karadzic was responsible for crimes of genocide, persecution, extermination, murder and forcible transfer which “contributed to achieving the objective of the permanent removal of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from Bosnian Serb-claimed territory”. He was arrested in Belgrade in July 2008 after 13 years on the run.

During the cross-examination, Karadzic asked the witness to elaborate on his previous statements regarding the “initiative” of the Bosnian Serb army.

“The [Sarajevo Romanija] corps could only take the initiative to return fire,” the witness reiterated. “When they had to launch an action… on Sarajevo and when there was a link with an operation outside Sarajevo, [the corps commander] was receiving orders from the higher command, from Mladic.”

After posing some questions in private session, Karadzic asked if the witness agreed that the “civilian head of state and the civilian commander of the army does not deal with operative and tactical issues, only strategic issues?”

“I do not understand the difference you are making between operational and tactical,” the witness replied.

Karadzic also asked the witness to identify a “single case” where the Bosnian Serb side “started action” in Sarajevo.

The witness pointed to a shelling incident that killed eight people on February 4, 1994, in a residential area of Dobrinja.

“The shell fell and it was clearly identified as coming from the Serb sector and it led to the casualties of civilians - adults and children,” the witness said. “As far as I know, Dobrinja [was] not a military target and [this] only led to civilian deaths.”

The witness mentioned another shelling incident in the area of Alipasino Polje on January 22, 1994, in which six children were killed.

“Those examples show that actions were taken, and were … targeting the population and coming from the Bosnian Serbs,” the witness said.

Karadzic then contended that the origin of the shell was never established in the Alipasino Polje incident.

“For technical reasons it wasn’t possible to ascertain where the shell was coming from, but there were suspicions,” the witness said.

“But we informed you that we didn’t open fire, and we still claim that all major incidents involving civilian casualties originated from those who wanted to involve NATO as a warring party on their side,” Karadzic replied.

He also contended that “as many as 5,000 troops” from the Bosnian government army were deployed in Dobrinja at the time of the February 4 shelling.

“Did you know that?” Karadzic asked.

“The confines of Dobrinja were indeed on the confrontation line, but shells arrived in a residential area and only caused civilian casualties,” the witness responded. “This is what I noticed, and I could tell without a doubt that those shells were coming from an area controlled by Bosnian Serbs.”

“Who established that?” Karadzic asked.

“An investigation carried out by UNPROFOR [UN Protection Force] services,” the witness said.

Karadzic countered that he had “managed to prove” that there was a mistake in this report through the testimony of a prior witness.

He was interrupted by Judge Howard Morrison, who told the accused that it was “not appropriate to put a witness’s testimony to another witness and claim it has been proved.

“It’s not accurate, and certainly not appropriate,” the judge said.

Karadzic later asked if the witness had “proof” that Bosnian Serb forces targeted civilians.

“Do you know there were up to 70,000 Serbs living in the Muslim part of Sarajevo?” he asked.

“I was not aware of exact figures, but I was aware of the fact that Serbs were living in the Bosnian Muslim-controlled part of city,” the witness said.

“Is there a difference between Serbs and Muslims when you see them walking in the street?” Karadzic asked.

“It is difficult to tell them apart and you are quite right to underscore this,” the witness answered.

“If Serbs are the type of criminals who wouldn’t spare civilians, how [did they do this] considering that one third of the population was Serbs? Is any proof that [Bosnian Serbs] deliberately targeted civilians?” Karadzic asked.

“I have proof that civilians were targeted and fire was coming from a sector controlled by Serbs,” the witness answered. “That’s what I can ascertain here.”

The witness acknowledged that it was often difficult to establish the origin of fire, but they “tried to do it every time” and also sent protests to the side they believed to be responsible.

At the end of the cross examination, prosecuting lawyer Carolyn Edgerton asked some follow-up questions.

“Did the protests [regarding shelling incidents apply] equally to both sides or more frequently to one of warring factions?” she asked.

“We sent more protests to Bosnian Serbs than we did to Bosnian Muslims,” the witness said.

“Did this signify anything in terms of the establishment of the origin of fire?” Edgerton asked.

“This demonstrates that we established that the origin of fire came more often from Serbian sector than it did from the Muslim sector,” the witness said.

The trial continues next week.

Rachel Irwin is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.

David Gibbs--Another Balkan Revisionist

2011-01-21T18:36:00.005-05:00

Any readers of Greater Surbiton or Daniel Toljaga's excellent blog is already aware of the minor storm that was kicked up when Gibbs--who proved himself to be as thin-skinned in debate as he is confused or (more likely) dishonest about American intervention in Yugoslavia--took offense at Marko Attila Hoare's review of his perfectly awful book First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia.

Gibbs' response to Hoare wastes no time in indulging in self-pitying hyperbole--the title "The Second Coming of Joe McCarthy" is evidently intended with irony or self-depreciating humor. Gibbs, seemingly, actually believes that he is a persecuted victim simply by virtue of having his horrid little book subjected to a negative review in a blog.

Gibbs' petulant tantrum speaks for itself--he lashes out without dealing in any meaningful way with the substance of Hoare's criticisms, while throwing out unsubstantiated innuendo about "ethnic partisanship" and other slights against his motives. Meanwhile, he actually makes the claim that while Hoare is fluent in Serbo-Croat and he is not, he is actually more qualified to write about the conflict because he is fluent in German! As if being able to read primary sources regarding German diplomacy is more important than Serbo-Croat documents from the region in question; it is astounding that the man was able to write that and not then realize how stupid it makes him sound. But again, I refer you to the hysterically pathetic title of his response. David Gibbs seems to lack both self-awareness and shame.

Those shortcomings come into play in the comments section below, particularly after Marko showed up to defend himself against the ridiculous charges. Gibbs--with an assist from his fanboy Louis Proyect, a hideous defender of the genocide in Bosnia who at one point seriously attacks the Modernity Blog by mocking its low readership (sounding very much like a preteen girl mocking the less popular crowd)--keeps throwing things at Hoare in an increasingly desperate attempt to hope something sticks, or at least distracts the less discerning participants in the argument from the substance of Hoare's arguments and the thinness of his own. At one point, he even throws in a veiled attack on Marko's parents--a loathsome and gutless tactic. Gibbs and Proyect reveal themselves as cowardly, passive-aggressive bullies who turn nasty and vindictive when exposed.

The weakness of Gibbs' book has been ably detailed by others, so for the time being I won't waste any more pixels dragging my poor readers through yet another piece of disengenuous dreck. However, the important thing to know about this book--and the reason that it potentially could be slightly more damaging to the historical record than Johnstone or Parenti's assaults on the truth is because Gibbs has learned a painful lesson that many of his fellow revisionists have yet to fully digest--the facts are in, and their cherished myths have wilted and died in the harsh light of reality. It is no longer possible to pretend that Srebrenica didn't happen or the Racak massacre was faked or the Bosnian Serb Army committed widespread crimes against humanity. That ship has sailed.

Instead, Gibbs hangs his hat on the equally-debunked (but less publicly so) myth that it was Western intervention, not domestic politics, economic insecurity, and constitutional instability, which destroyed Yugoslavia. In order to make this argument, he constructs a strawman caricature of humanitarian interventionism in the first chapter. In this chapter, he reveals the intellectual shallowness and crudeness of his method; despite the superficial improvement over Johnstone and Parenti, Gibbs ultimately makes an argument which requires the reader to accept a simplistic view of the Western/American handling of the Yugoslav wars. He claims a level of deliberate planning and centralized coordination that simply isn't there.

One example will hopefully suffice--while repeatedly dismissing the notion that Western powers were reacting to intense media coverage rather than quietly guiding events from behind the scenes, he often quotes media sources such as the New Republic by way of demonstrating what "the interventionists" believe. In other words--the media are part of the whole conspiracy when it suits his rhetorical purposes, and they are not when they aren't.

And that, really, just about sums it up--facts count when they fit his argument, they don't count when they don't. Context, intellectual honesty, using source material in a manner consistent with the argument and thesis of the source--such traits are absent here. Gibbs seems more reasonable than the rest, but ultimately underneath his sober facade is the same tune being played in a slightly different key.

New Article from Institute for War & Peace Reporting

2011-01-17T18:22:00.004-05:00

It is again my privilege to reprint this article with the kind permission of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting:

Siege Was “Noose” Around Sarajevans
BBC man recounts hardships and risks faced by residents during the 44-month campaign against their city.

By Velma Šarić - International Justice - ICTY
TRI Issue 675, 14 Jan 11
British journalist Jeremy Bowen told the Hague tribunal trial of Radovan Karadzic this week that he believed the siege of Sarajevo was used as a weapon of war by the Bosnian Serbs.

“It was simply a noose around the neck of the ordinary people in the city which could be tightened and loosened as necessary,” he said.

Karadzic, the first president of Republika Srpska, RS, and supreme commander of its armed forces, has been charged with 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including orchestrating the 44-month campaign of sniping and shelling of the city of Sarajevo, whose aim was to “terrorise the civilian population”, and which resulted in nearly 12,000 civilian deaths.

The indictment alleges that Karadzic was responsible for crimes of persecution, extermination, murder and forcible transfer which “contributed to achieving the objective of the permanent removal of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from Bosnian Serb-claimed territory”.

After years as a fugitive, Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade on July 21, 2008 and his trial started in October 2009.

Prosecution witness Bowen, now the BBC’s Middle East editor, reported from various parts of Bosnia and Hercegovina, including Sarajevo, Gorazde and Srebrenica, between 1992 and 1995. He told the court that when he first came to the Bosnian capital in July 1992, he saw that life was desperate.

“People would stand in line for water and food despite all the fear and dangers,” he said. “They had to avoid snipers, living in horrid conditions, without access to communications, it was a time before internet and mobile phones, and they were simply cut off.”

The witness stated that the population’s fear and anxiety continued to deteriorate. “In 1995, briefly before the end of the war, the conditions in which people were living in were worse, and despite all the humanitarian aid, the desperation was enormous,” he continued.

“Sniper fire had become a part of the citizens’ lives. People had to run, I had to run as well, although as journalist I was privileged to wear bulletproof clothing, or to have money. However, we had to realise how it was to be found in a situation in which you could simply be shot.”

Bowen said that he had personally seen “bodies of the dead and of sniper victims”, explaining that foreign cameramen used to film crossroads, or rather film citizens running across crossroads hoping not to be shot by snipers. Recalling one sniper incident he witnessed during lunchtime at the Sarajevo Holiday Inn hotel, he said that he saw a man shot in the leg while running across the parking lot.

“I saw bullets falling around him, he fell to the ground, I ran out with a colleague and a vehicle, and we wanted to save him, but by the time we got there he was gone; only a stain of blood had remained on the asphalt,” Bowen said.

The witness emphasised that Sarajevo’s residents were never able to feel safe, recounting how the pavements throughout the city were dotted with weapon marks and craters, and one could never know where the next mortar would hit.

“I used to report about the bombing of Sarajevo, every morning we had have a meeting at the UN headquarters and every morning would begin with the shelling and the number of mortars which fell during yesterday, and the numbers were often four-figure. You could never know that shelling would happen because it could happen anywhere and anytime,” the witness continued.

“During shelling, it was dangerous to be outdoors, but if you wanted to report on it you could just stand in front of Kosevo hospital to see wounded people being brought in some 20 or 30 minutes after the shelling.”

Prosecutor Carolyn Edgerton showed a BBC report by the witness, without stating its date in the courtroom. In the film, Bowen reported on an incident in which at least five family members and close friends of a certain Zijad Kujundjic had been killed. The account was included onto the prosecution’s evidence record.

“This news report demonstrated that the shelling was going on everywhere and at all times,” Bowen said, “while you moved through Sarajevo, you were vulnerable.” The prosecution also showed another BBC story on how a two-year-old girl, Vedrana Glavas, had been killed, alongside a boy named Roki Sulejmanovic who was several months younger.

They died on August 1, 1992, when a bus full of children from the Ljubica Ivezic orphanage was fired upon. This BBC report was also included onto the record.

The witness said that he and colleagues from Reuters tried to attend the funeral of the girl, alongside her mother and grandmother. However, by the time the family members and the journalists arrived at the cemetery, the funeral had already been carried out because the cemetery had been targeted by sniper and artillery fire.

A boy from the orphanage, who had come with his friends to bring some flowers to the funeral, had been wounded during the funeral. The grandmother of the girl had also been wounded. Describing that day, Bowen said, “I have extremely rich experience covering conflict and I have seen some really bad things, but I get furious even today when I think of this very, very cruel day.” “Even during a funeral you were still exposed to artillery fire,” he continued, adding that the cemetery was targeted very often.

In his film at the time, he reported that gunfire from Serb positions. “The Serbs said that it was a set-up and that the Bosnian authorities had been setting up incidents of shelling and sniper fire knowing that foreign cameras would be there, and that they would film those things, but I can’t believe it,” Bowen told the tribunal.

“The city was a permanent target and was being shot even while the cameras were off, so I cannot believe that any of it had been staged for us. “I stand by my statements, 100 per cent, because I believe them to be based on solid facts.”

The trial continues next week.

Velma Saric is an IWPR-trained journalist in Sarajevo.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [19]

2011-01-15T21:53:00.002-05:00

Chapter 30: Conclusion

Because this book was published in 1996, this final chapter is obviously somewhat dated, but unfortunately not nearly enough--the pessimistic tone of this closing chapter remains largely justified. War did not return to Bosnia or Croatia, and both Milosevic and Tudjman have done the world the favor of dying, but on the other hand this book was written before the Kosova war so the author's concerns about possible future conflict was not unmerited, even if the worst-case scenarios or renewed conflict in Bosnia and a possible wider Balkan war was mercifully avoided.

The Dayton agreement achieved peace by institutionalizing ethnic separation, and the biggest winners were Tudjman and Milosevic, even if both Croatia and the rump Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro were still maintaining the fiction of Federal Yugoslavia) were suffering the effects of economic hardship and autocratic rule.

And so this excellent book--probably the best one book to read on the Yugoslav wars (except Kosova, obviously)--comes to a close. The authors make no projections for the future, nor do they suggest a road map. They are too aware of how flawed and compromised Bosnia's chances were, and how limited the international community was to anything other than a simplistic "stability" which could keep the region out of the news.

If you haven't read this book, it is an essential account of the war. If you are looking for suggestions on where Bosnia and its allies need to go from here, you will need to look otherwise--but the next time you are arguing with someone who has been fooled into thinking that the "standard narrative" of the Bosnian war is an emotionally-charged and ideologically-slanted justification for Western intervention, you can rest assured that they have never read this sober, methodical account.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [18]

2011-01-14T15:33:00.003-05:00

Chapter 29: Pax Americana

This penultimate chapter detals the negotiations which led to the peace treaty that ended the wars both in Bosnia and between Croatia and Serbia, and established the Dayton Agreement which divided Bosnia into the Republika Srpska and the Bosnian-Croat Federation. Milosevic embraced his new-found role as a respectable "peacemaker" even as he continued to show contempt for his kin in Bosnia and Croatia whom he had once presumed to speak for.

The negotiations were tangled and contentious, and ably summarized in this chapter. The end result was the Dayton agreement, and hastily called elections, in which the three nationalist parties dominated and the ethnic cleansing of the country, to which the United States and the Western powers were now a party to, became further institutionalized. The leadership of the three nationalities were still determined to look for an advantage at the expense of the other two, and although the war was over it was a peace that was accomplished at the expense of mulit-ethnic Bosnia.

Article from IWPR: "Bosnia War Compensation Dispute"

2011-01-11T08:42:00.003-05:00

This latest article, which covers the issue of how Bosnian Serbs say claims being made by hundreds of Sarajevo residents are politically motivated, is being reprinted here courtesy of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting. Many thanks for permission to reproduce it and pass it on:

*********************

Bosnia War Compensation Dispute:
Bosnian Serbs say claims being made by hundreds of Sarajevo residents are politically motivated.

Bosnian Serb leaders have described demands for hundreds of war reparation payments from Sarajevans as an “organised political act” against Republika Srpska, RS.

The RS authorities said last month that they received some 1,400 compensation requests from the Union of Civil Victims of War from the Sarajevo canton - amounting to around 470 million euro - for the suffering endured by residents of the capital during the 1992-95 siege.

The legal basis for the reparation claims stems from the Hague tribunal’s judgement in the case against the former commander of the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps of the RS Army, VRS, General Stanislav Galic.

In 2006, Galic was sentenced on appeal to life in prison for crimes committed against civilians in the besieged city. Nearly 12,000 Sarajevans were killed and many more wounded by Serb forces during the 44-month sniping and shelling campaign.

The RS government has until January 13 to respond to each of the 1,400 claims, or else it will be assumed that it does not oppose them. The municipal court in Sarajevo could then issue a ruling ordering RS to pay the requested amount to the victims.

RS politicians have responded angrily to the legal action.

Bosnian Serb president, Milorad Dodik, told the local media, “Lawsuits are usually filed by individuals, and here we suddenly have 1,400 people filing their cases simultaneously, which is a proof that this is an organised political act and an attack against RS.”

The RS legal representative Slobodan Radulj told journalists, “This has nothing to do with law and is aimed at weakening the RS economy.” He said the authorities were using “all available resources” to process the reparation demands by the deadline, but questioned their legal validity, claiming they were incomplete and lacked the necessary evidence.

The Union of Civilian Victims of War has dismissed RS politicians’ claims that the compensation claims are politically motivated.

“The judiciary has to provide satisfaction for victims, and we are victims in all this. We have no one’s support, but justice is on our side and that’s what’s important to us,” said the union’s president, Senida Karovic.

The union’s secretary, Muzafer Teskeredzic, believes reparation demands were being unnecessarily politicised, adding that “the only reason why the plaintiffs have initiated proceedings was because they were wounded in the war or because their immediate family members were killed”.

Newly-elected RS prime minister, Aleksandar Dzombic, said it’s unrealistic for the victims to expect to be paid in cash and that any compensation would come in the form of RS bonds.

“The legal framework for paying the compensation for the civilian victims of war is clear – we can give out bonds for the period of 14 years, with a certain grace period,” he said.

However, Teskeredzic said this was not an option, claiming that international law stipulates that the kind of damages the Sarajevo residents are seeking cannot be paid in bonds.

“It has to be paid out in cash. We are talking about compensation for lost limbs, for murdered family members. Bonds will not be accepted,” he said.

Teskerdzic added that the union would take its case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, if necessary, and is preparing further compensations claims.

“This is not the final number. We are being contacted on a daily basis by union members who have acquired their status in accordance with the law. This means that only those who have a proof that they were wounded or lost a family member during the siege can demand reparation through our union,” Teskeredzic explained.

At the beginning of this month, Radulj, the RS legal representative, told the local media that his office had received an undisclosed number of reparation claims from residents of Tuzla, a town in Bosnia’s Federation, who demand compensation for the suffering inflicted on them during a VRS attack on Tuzla in 1995.

The legal basis for these lawsuits is the judgement of the Bosnian state court in the case against the former VRS general Novak Djukic. In September last year, Djukic was sentenced on appeal to 25 years in prison for ordering the shelling of Tuzla on May 25, 1995, which resulted in 71 deaths and injuries to 150.

Radulj said his office would demand that these actions be dismissed, because RS cannot be held responsible for an act of an individual.

While RS is struggling with a great number of reparation demands, Bosnian Serb war victims have yet to issue similar claims against the Federation.

According to the president of the Union of Associations of Civilian Victims of War in RS, Dusan Babic, there were about 3,700 civilian victims of the 1992-95 war in the Bosnian Serb entity, but he is not aware of any lawsuits filed against the Federation.

One of the problems is that there’s no law regulating the issue of reparations in Bosnia.

In June last year, the Bosnian ministry for human rights and refugees prepared a draft law on victims of torture and civilian victims of war, but it has yet to be passed.

Assistant Minister for Human Rights and Refugees Saliha Djuderija said there are still many issues that the two entities cannot agree about, “such as who should be paying reparations and who should protect rights of the victims - state or the entities”.

According to Djurderija, no real progress is expected for at least another year. In November last year, the United Nations Committee Against Torture urged Bosnia to pass the draft law on war victims.

According to Lejla Mamut Abaspahic, Human rights coordinator for the NGO Track Impunity Always, current state legislation on reparations for war victims is unsatisfactory because they have to prove that they are unable to work and have no other source of income in order to exercise their right to compensation.

“This is contrary to international standards, because a victim of war has to be compensated, regardless of whether they are employed or not, rich or poor,” she said.

Maja Bjelajac is an IWPR reporter in Banja Luka.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [17]

2011-01-08T17:26:00.002-05:00

Chapter 28: "Let Us Be Pragmatic" Cleaning up the Maps July-August 1995

In order for the United States and its allies to achieve the peace deal they wanted and which they believed their clients could live with, the map of Bosnia needed to be "cleaned up" quite a bit. The three eastern enclaves of Srebrenica, Zepa, and Gorazde were an obstacle to this end, as was the fact that the Bosnian Serb regime still controlled much of Bosnia, and their allies in the Croatian Krajina still controlled a third of Croatia. Event during the summer of 1995 would change all that in grim fashion.

While this chapter is quite lengthy, I will not give a detailed synopsis of it because frankly if you don't know the essential outlines of what happened at Srebrenica in July of 1995, you most likely either aren't reading this blog or you have no interest in truly understanding what my mission in maintaining it is. As you might guess from the title of this chapter, the authors focus mainly on the sobering reality that the fall of Srebrenica and Zepa, if not exactly "planned" by the Bosnian government and the United States, were certainly events which proved beneficial to larger strategic goals.

The authors also understand that Washington and the international community were equally cynical in their dealings with Tudjman when Croatian forces unleashed "Operation Storm" which was clearly a creature of NATO planning and covert (and theoretically illegal) arms acquisition. The collapse of the Krajina Serbs statelet was sudden and total, as it had become little more than a corrupt paramilitary state led by craven bullies (Martic and Babic) who also turned out to be cowards who fled immediately, having done nothing of substance to prepare for the return of war. They left their people at the mercy of a well-armed and vengeful Croatian war machine, who helpfully publicized escape routes for terrified Serbs, although all too often they found that those routes, while open, weren't safe. They were exposed to abuse and attack from Croatian forces and civilians alike; and those who stayed behind--mostly those too elderly to flee--death and torture was their fate. Although the number of atrocities and deaths pales next to the numbers inflicted by the Serb nationalists, they were still part of a systematic plan which resulted in the largest single mass expulsion of people of the entire war. Within a few days, centuires of continuous Serb society in the Krajina had been completely eliminated.

Milosevic was silent through all that, even as he had pretended to be completely uninvolved in the Srebrenica operation (this book was written before later revelations of the involvement by the "Scorpions" and other Serb units had come to light). The protector of all Serbs, who had done so much to stir up and encourage the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia to take up arms, was now throwing them all aside.

The Croats were able to get away with this because they were obligated by their American sponsors to cooperate with the Bosnian government to take the war to the Serbs. They did so, and the Bosnian Army Fifth Corps took advantage of the altered balance of power to launch a successful attack out of the Bihac pocket. The collapse of the Bosnian Serb frontlines was about to happen.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [16]

2011-01-04T00:33:00.001-05:00

Chapter 26: To the Mogadishu Line The Battle for Gorazde April 1994

Of the three government-controlled Muslim enclaves remaining in eastern Bosnia, Gorazde was the most formidable and the most obstructive from the Bosnian Serb perspective. Given the obstacle that Gorazde presented to the completion of a contiguous Serb Republic in Bosnia, reports that the Bosnian Serbs were launching a serious offensive operation should have been taken seriously. However, the initial reports were dismissed by UNPROFOR commander General Michael Rose.
The reasons for his refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation eventually would become clear to UN personnel on the scene in Gorazde, who became increasingly frustrated as their reports were not only ignored by Rose, but he continued to misrepresent them to the international media while hiding what he knew. In a word—Rose did not want NATO to repeat the air strikes which had been launched against the Serb forces around Sarajevo. He had become more concerned about maintaining neutrality and protecting his mission than anything else.
Pressure to do something finally mounted however; but Rose kept the airstrikes at such a limited and restrained level that they had no effect. It was hard to avoid at least suspecting that he had deliberately undermined the effectiveness of this strategy in order to devalue the use of air strikes in the future.
At the point the Russians became increasingly involved; at the same time, the calls for air strikes had not gone away simply because Mladic almost seemed to relish mocking the international community, this time by taking UN personnel hostage like the terrorist he was while launching extensive artillery attacks on the government-held stronghold of Tuzla. All the while, the death toll in Gorazde continued to rise.
Eventually, UN envoy was to wrest “concessions” from Karadzic, who was eager to give the international community the illusion of progress and who may have suspected that the rift between his government and the Milosevic regime was coming. These concessions were sufficient to halt the air strikes, although naturally the Serbs did not comply with them. In the end, Mladic was able to get pretty much what he wanted—it was not clear that he intended to completely take Gorazde, only to “neutralize” and contain it—and Karadzic had managed to deepen the rift between the NATO allies. The cost was high, though—the Bosnian Serbs had also managed to alienate their Russian allies and their patrons in Belgrade. The consequences of this new development would soon appear.

Chapter 27: “A Dagger in the Back” The Serbian Split June-August 1994

Karadzic and the Bosnian Serbs didn’t know it, but they had tried Milosevic’s patience as far as he felt he could afford, given the continuing damage economic sanctions and international pressure were inflicting in rump Yugoslavia. When the Western Powers represented by the “Contact Group” presented the parties (the Bosnian Serbs and the Croat-Muslim Federation) with yet another peace plan (one which gave the Serbs just under half the country but which expected them to give up secure control of the northern corridor) with their peace plan, the Bosnian government accepted it reluctantly, knowing that it wasn’t just but conceding that they knew the Bosnian Serbs would reject it. And, despite pressure from Milosevic (mostly through Yugoslavian President Zoran Lilic), they did exactly that.
Milosevic was furious, and this time the embargo he imposed on his ethnic allies was genuine, if not total (he didn’t want them to collapse militarily, he merely wanted to punish Karadzic and the other leaders who had defied him). Serbs in Serbia were mystified that the war for Serbian unity could be tossed aside so quickly, while those in Bosnia were stunned that they were being condemned for fighting the unwavering war of ethnic cleansing that Milosevic had done so much to bring about.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [15]

2010-12-24T19:59:00.005-05:00

Chapter 23: HMS Invincible Talks at Seas Summer 1993

This short chapter mostly concerns the ongoing talks which were held in 1993 in which the Western powers tried to push a peace plan onto the three parties they could all be coerced into signing. The theme that the international community implicitly accepted the ethnic carve-up of Bosnia continued, and the Bosnian government were increasingly being pushed harder to accept a peace plan which by this point left them with a fractured, land-locked statelet which was simply not viable as a functioning nation-state. As part of this pressure, the West had cultivated Bosniak politician/warlord Fikret Abdic as a potential rival to Izetbegovic, if only for leverage. At this point, Abdic--who had good relations with many of the nationalist Serbs in the areas around the so-called "Bihac pocket" which was his stronghold--declared his independence from the Bosnian state and established his own breakaway statelet within the borders of Bosnia.

While this was going on, the Croatian leadership was still maintaining diplomatic relations with their Serb counterparts. But while the continued possibility of a mutual Croat/Serb division of Bosnia at the expense of the Muslim plurality was ongoing, there was a contrary diplomatic track being pursued--the American pressure on the Croats to cooperate with the Bosnian government.

Chapter 24: A Question of Control The Market Square Bomb and the NATO Ultimatum February 1994

The mortar shell which killed sixty-nine people in Sarajevo on February 5, 1994 might have served as little more than a test case for how the differing parties in the war reacted. The Bosnian government was quick to express its outrage to any media outlet they could find. Radovan Karadzic was equally quick with his laughably inconsistent and illogical denials--the man had a real talent for changing his story as the facts eroded the ground under earlier disavowels of responsibility. And Canadian General Lewis MacKenzie was more than willing to lend his support for the whispering campaign among pro-Serb Westerners that Karadzic's claim that the bomb was actually planted by the Bosnian government was true. Of course, neither MacKenzie nor anyone else could come out and say such things--if they had done so, they might have been required to provide evidence. Evidence for a claim that the Bosnian government would have--indeed, could have--launched an inaccurate mortar shell into a crowded market square on a quiet day (mortars are not very accurate weapons--getting a direct hit on the first try is mostly a matter of dumb luck) in order to increase pressure on the Serbs. And for that matter, evidence that this scenario was more likely than the possibility that this mortar was simply one of the approximately 500,000 artillery projectiles the Bosnian Serb army had inflicted onto Sarajevo by that point. Such evidence was, not surprisingly, never forthcoming.

The attack pushed the international community to finally call for decisive action against the Serbs in the form of airstrikes. The Russians stepped in and pressured the West to work out a compromise. The Serb leadership, who realized that the presence of the Russians along with the UN willingness to serve as troops patroling--and therefore maintaining--the battle lines in Sarajevo--eagerly jumped on the opportunity to appear reasonable, and therefore agreed to a plan to place their heavy weapons under UN "control." Eventually, the Bosnian government--who smelled a rat--were pressured by the international community to accept this compromise.

The UN forces on the scene, led by General Michael Rose, were more concerned about avoiding air strikes than any larger strategic aims. It was typical of the mentality of the UNPROFOR leadership by this point in the war, Rose was primarily worried about the safety of the "peacekeeping" troops under his command and had little inclination to consider the larger issues of justice in the conflict. Therefore, as the Serbs continued to change the terms of the agreement and then drag their feet on complying even with that, Rose put his energies into finding ways to spin the reality in order to, in effect, "sell" the Serb actions in the best possible light. In the end, Karadzic and the Bosnian Serbs came out ahead--they still had actual control of their weapons, they still held the high ground around Sarajevo, UN troops now did some of the grunt work of manning the front lines for them, and the international community had been told that they had made concessions for peace. And certain elements within the UN were complicit in all this.

"Gaining Moral Ground" The Washington Agreement February 1994

While all that was happening, though, American diplomacy was pushing an agreement which would ultimately change the dynamic and the balance of power on the ground. This chapter summarizes the diplomatic and political actions which led to the formulation of the Croat-Muslim alliance, which was supported by the Croatian government out of necessity and moral pressure, and which was only possible with continued prodding and pressure from Washington. It was a marriage of convenience, not love, but it would work.

Sarajevo’s “War Without End”

2010-12-20T08:41:00.005-05:00

[The following is reprinted with permission from the Institute for War & Peace Reporting website. My thanks for continuing to give me the opportunity to share articles.]

Former BBC correspondent recounts life in city targeted by shelling and sniper fire.
By Rachel Irwin - International Justice - ICTY
TRI Issue 674, 17 Dec 10

A former BBC journalist told the trial of Radovan Karadzic this week that civilians in the besieged city of Sarajevo were deliberately targeted by snipers and subjected to “appalling” conditions.

“I would say that [civilians] were subjected to three and-a-half years of an appalling ordeal,” said prosecution witness Martin Bell, who covered the wars in Croatia and Bosnia from 1991 to 1995.

“It was not just a question of being caught in the crossfire, there was deliberate targeting also, on both sides of the lines.”

Karadzic was the president of Bosnia’s self-declared Republika Srpska, RS, from 1992 to 1996. He allegedly planned and oversaw the 44-month siege of Sarajevo that left nearly 12,000 people dead, and his army is accused of deliberately sniping and shelling the city’s civilian population in order to “spread terror” among them.

The indictment - which lists 11 counts in total - alleges that Karadzic was responsible for crimes of genocide, persecution, extermination, murder and forcible transfer which “contributed to achieving the objective of the permanent removal of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from Bosnian Serb-claimed territory”. In July 2008, he was arrested in Belgrade after 13 years on the run.

In one of Bell’s television reports screened during the hearing, Sarajevo civilians run past what are said to be Bosnian Serb sniper positions in order to reach the only available water supply, located in a nearby basement. One man who was making the journey is shot in the leg as he turns a corner. He collapses and appears to go into shock.

“He was shot for a bucket of water,” Bell narrates in the report.

“Was this a situation where someone was caught in the cross-fire?” prosecuting lawyer Carolyn Edgerton asked.

“No, the man who was wounded had clearly been targeted,” Bell answered. “…After all these years I still find the report difficult to watch… the images themselves called for international intervention.

“In terms of the situation for civilians in the city, do you find this report of yours to be an accurate depiction?” Edgerton asked.

“Yes, I am confident this is accurate and truthful,” Bell said. “You can see the woman wincing when she hears the sniper fire… I think this report conveys an accurate picture of suffering inflicted on innocent people.”

Edgerton then asked him to describe the “psychological effect” that the constant shelling and sniping had on civilians.

“This is anecdotal, but I have never seen such anxiety etched on everybody’s faces - they lost weight and some looked almost grey with fear,” Bell answered. “We [journalists] had it easy, we came in and out… [Civilians] were there all the time with no means to escape. They were trapped in a war without end.”

Bell also described his experiences reporting from other Bosnian cities and towns, including Zvornik, which borders neighbouring Serbia.

In one report from early April 1992, Bell says that “95 per cent” of Zvornik’s Serb population had already fled and that war was “unstoppable”. After the Serbs fled, he reported that the town was taken over by “Serbian irregulars” led by a man named Zeljko Raznatovic, otherwise known as Arkan, who is interviewed briefly in the report.

Arkan led a group known as Arkan’s Tigers, said to be one of the most notorious paramilitary groups during that time. He was assassinated in Belgrade in 2000 before he could be arrested and transferred to The Hague, but he is named in Karadzic’s indictment as one of the alleged members of a joint criminal enterprise that includes the accused and various other members of the Bosnian Serb and Serbian leadership.

On April 10, 1992, Bell filed a report where lifeless bodies are seen being dragged on the ground. He describes Arkan’s forces as “mopping up the last of Muslim resistance” and “making greater Serbia happen”.
The report also captures on film the flight of an estimated 20,000 Bosniak civilians from the area. One woman tells the camera, “We are unarmed and they are firing at us.” Another man begs the world to help them. Groups of women, children and babies huddle together, and many of them are crying. Bell narrates that “the ethnic map of Bosnia is being redrawn”.

“When you said that the ethnic map of Bosnia is being redrawn, what did you mean?” Edgerton asked.

“This was the first visual evidence of what came to be known as ethnic cleansing,” Bell answered. “This report did have considerable impact and actually, your honours, it still does.”

Bell said that earlier this year, he received a letter from a man, now living in Canada, who was one of the babies captured in the video footage that day.

“He was grateful for the existence of this report because it was the only evidence of what happened at this time,” Bell said.

After the events in Zvornik, Bell said he wanted “Dr Karadzic to know what was going on”.

“[The] fighting, as far as we know, was done by Arkan’s [paramilitaries], which was not under control of the accused,” Bell said.

“How do you know that?” Edgerton asked.

“I knew Arkan,” Bell responded. “Arkan took orders from nobody. He had a very tense relationship even with the [Yugoslav army]. Having said that, he couldn’t get across the border [from Serbia] without collusion somewhere… [but] I knew him really well, I knew his mind, Ms Edgerton.”

When it was Karadzic’s turn to cross-examine the witness, he asked if Bell agreed that until May 20, 1992, when the Yugoslav Army, JNA, pulled out of Bosnia, Karadzic had “no opportunities to gain insight or control on the developments on the ground” including the events in Zvornik.

“We were hardly able to find out what was going on, much less control it,” Karadzic contended.

“That was the very early days [of war],” Bell responded. “There was no Bosnian Serb army in existence at that time.”

He added that “anarchy” had reigned during “those early days”.

Karadzic also questioned Bell on his interpretation of the Zvornik takeover.

“You said the Serbs first fled Zvornik,” Karadzic said.
“First, the Serbs fled Zvornik across the river, and then I’m assuming that some of them returned, and then the fighting forces were commander Arkan’s,” Bell responded.

“Did you receive any information as to who Serbs were fleeing from?” Karadzic asked, adding that there were “numerous Muslim paramilitary formations” in the area.

“That’s your information, not mine,” Karadzic said. “Two or three days before the fighting in Zvornik, Serbs had fled and obviously they fled in fear.”

Karadzic contended that Bosniak civilians “didn’t even wait for Serbs to arrive, so they are refugees rather than displaced persons”.

“They either left before the Serbs came, or they left following instructions,” he continued. “In any case, they were not driven out, they were refugees.”
Bell responded that in his television report “you actually heard guns firing in background as [the Bosniak civilians] crouched there.

“I don’t doubt that some left before the Arkan attack, but others left because of it,” Bell said.

When Edgerton had the opportunity to ask some follow-up questions, she challenged Karadzic’s assertion that up until the JNA pullout on May 20, 1992 there was no “centralised control or command”.

She produced several transcripts from Bosnian Serb assembly sessions which suggested that Karadzic had organised crisis staffs, executive boards and reserve units in various municipalities by late March 1992.

Bell said that it would be “hard to overstate the degree of chaos and anarchy in early weeks of April 1992”.
“What I saw on the ground were bands of armed men on both sides, [and] very often they appeared to be undisciplined [and] improvised,” he said.

“But I will accept that by early May there was a degree of command and control in some areas,” Bell continued. “Armies are not formed and organised overnight, not even in times of war.”

Also testifying this week was Almir Begic, who said his father was killed in the first massacre at Sarajevo’s Markale market on February 5, 1994. His father wore a prosthetic leg, and Begic testified that it was the same prosthetic leg that appears in video footage of the massacre, already shown several times during the trial.

Karadzic contends that the massacre was staged by the Bosnian government and that the prosthetic leg was planted at the scene.

The trial is scheduled to resume the week of January 10, after the court’s winter recess.

Rachel Irwin is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [14]

2010-12-19T14:31:00.006-05:00

Chapter 21: Last-Chance Cafe The Rise and Fall of the Vance-Owen Plan January-May 1993

The Vance-Owen plan had many flaws, and I am not here to defend it. However, it did have two advantages which should be taken into consideration:

1) Cyrus Vance and Lord Owen seemed to recognize a harsh, infuriating, and disheartening reality--the West had no interest in a truly just or lasting solution for Bosnia. The nature of their plan may very well have been simply a concession to the political realities they were laboring under.

2) Unlike the Dayton agreement which would come a few years later, the Vance-Owen plan actually took the territorial integrity of Bosnia seriously. For all the faults of the central concept of partitioning Bosnia by ethnic cantons, the Vance-Owen plan at least scattered the Serb-assigned cantons so that they could not form a unified whole; unlike the de facto ethnic partition of the Dayton constitution, Vance-Owen undermined the geopolitical viability of Republika Srpska.

The plan famously divided Bosnia into 10 cantons--3 for the Bosniaks, three for the Serbs, two for the Croats, one for the Bosniaks and Croats to share, and Sarajevo as a "special status" canton. The Vance-Owen plan essentially signalled that while the West deplored the tactics of the Serb nationalists, the leaders of the "international community" accepted the premise that Bosnians would not be considered as individual citizens but as aggregate ethnic entities. The Vance-Owen plan itself would perish, but it defined how the West would deal with Bosnia from 1993 until the present day.

The chapter details the political "rise and fall" of the Plan, which was eventually rejected by the Bosnian Serb parliament* against the wishes of Milosevic--the break between him and the Bosnian Serb leadership was now open and would ultimately provide the diplomatic room for the West to apply some pressure between the government of Serbia and the Serb rebel government in Bosnia.

*My failure to capitalize "parliament" is deliberate; whenever possible, I seek to avoid giving the appearance of legitimacy to any of the institutions of the illegal Bosnian Serb Republic of 1992-1995.

Chapter 22: Beware Your Friend a Hundred-fold The Muslim-Croat Conflict 1992-1994

The Muslim-Croat War of 1993 (the dating here is an acknowledgement that the seeds of the conflict dated back to the beginning of the Bosnian war) is often treated as an unfortunate sideshow to the larger conflict. In some ways this is accurate--the group which had the most to gain were the nationalist Serbs, who were delighted to see their mutual foes turn on each other, simultaneously strengthening the hand of nationalist Croats who wished to see an ethnic partition of Bosnia between Croatia and Serbia while further isolating the Muslims even further. Those who criticize the Vance-Owen plan for its pessimistic vision need to remember that in the Spring of 1993, the Muslims of Bosnia very much looked to be on the verge of being wiped off the map.

They weren't, of course, but the price was steep; many Muslims would embrace a hardline, more explicitly Islamic approach as Muslims in general came to realize that they were truly on their own. Ultimately, too few Bosnian Croats were radicalized enough for the HVO to have its way, and of course Tudjman would soon realize he had more to lose by continuing to support radical nationalists while courting international favor. In the end, the conflict mostly served to hasten and intensify the ethnic division, radicalization, and mutual suspician that the Serb nationalist project had put into motion.

National Congress of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina Report on Holbrooke

2010-12-19T11:43:00.002-05:00

National Congress of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina (NCR B&H)

ONLINE NEWSLETTER International, No. 704 December 17, 2010

CONTENT:

1. Richard Holbrooke – Unlawful and Immoral Diplomacy

2. The Declaration of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina Posted by The Henry Jackson Society

3. Epitaph for Richard Holbrooke

4. Holbrooke's Obituary for the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina

5. Found on WikiLeaks: Dishonest Clinton era politics regarding Bosnia continues 6. Statement of the Bosnian Citizen Action regarding indictment for their protest against intended cosmetic changes of Dayton constitution

1. Richard Holbrooke – Unlawful and Immoral Diplomacy By Vahid Sendijarevic, Ph.D. National Congress of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

“I never met anyone more tenaciously committed to delivering on results and negotiating and doing whatever had to be done to achieve positive outcomes. And sometimes, people get lost in the methods and means, and thinking that has to be very moral and right. And Richard didn't get lost there.” These are words of Mr. Steve Clemons about legacy of Mr. Holbrook spoken hours after his death. Mr. Steve Clemons, author of the political blog, “The Washington Note,” was introduced as a friend of Mr. Holbrook by Rachel Maddow in her show on MSNBC on December 13, 2010. What Mr. Clemons said in very polite manner is that Mr. Holbrook would use any mean necessary, regardless how immoral and unlawful, to achieve his diplomatic goals. Dayton Peace Accord brokered by Mr. Holbrook was sold to the public by President Clinton as one of the highest achievement of American diplomacy. However, in reality Mr. Holbrook’s diplomatic negotiations instigated the genocide in Bosnia which led to the Dayton Peace Accord imposed on Bosnian people. The Dayton Peace Accord represents a LEGAL AND POLITICAL PRECEDENT that constitution of sovereign nations can be changed by foreign aggression, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. The claim by President Clinton, Mr. Holbrook, and their protégés that Dayton Peace Accord brought peace to people of Bosnia is a plain lie used to cover up the immorality and unlawfulness of the negotiation process that led to Dayton Peace Accord. The objective of the 1992 aggression by Serbia against the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was creation of an ethnically pure “Greater Serbia”. This could be achieved by dismantling the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and by ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs from 50% of Bosnian territory to create “Republika Srpska” next to Serbia to be used as bases for creation of continuous “Greater Serbia.” With the genocide in Srebrenica in 1995, the continuous territory was established, and with US backed diplomatic efforts of Mr. Holbrook, Serbian objectives in Bosnia were solidified in the imposed Dayton Peace Agreement. According to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment for the Crime of Genocide and the UN Charter, the administration of President Clinton was obligated to protect the UN member state, the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, from aggression and genocide and not to reward the perpetrators of aggression and genocide with the territory of the victim state. President Clinton and Holbrook can not claim that they did not know what was going on in Bosnia from the day one of aggression in 1992. In legally binding Resolutions 752 and 757 from 1992, the UN Security Council adopted economic sanctions and political isolation to Serbia and Montenegro as punishment for their aggression against the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the provisional measures of the International Court of Justice on September 13, 1993, in the case of Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro, “the Court recorded that, since its Order [to Serbia and Montenegro] of April 8, 1993, and despite it and many resolutions of the United Nations Security Council, "great suffering and loss of life has been sustained by the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina in circumstances which shock the conscience of mankind and flagrantly conflict with moral law ...". The war crimes that shocked the conscience of mankind and flagrantly conflicted with moral law moved the American people to do good for people of Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The USA congress adapted two times a resolution to lift arms embargo on Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina so that Bosnians can defend themselves from those horrible crimes. President Clinton vetoed both resolutions. The second resolution was adapted by 2/3 majority in both The House of the Representatives and the Senate. At the hearing at the Senate after the second veto by President Clinton, Senator Joe Biden accused Administration of President Clinton and Warren Christopher, a Secretary of State, for actively participating in partition of the sovereign nation of Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and thus participating in war crimes against Bosnian people. After passionate exchange of arguments between Mr. Biden and Mr. Christopher, hearings were moved behind the closed doors far from the public eyes, and Mr. Biden changed his passion for justice and rule of law into new passion which can be described as by any mean necessaryto achieve diplomatic goals, regardless how immoral and unlawful those goals were. Off course, nobody gave any explanations what were the benefits to the American people of President Clinton and Ambassador Holbrook’s decision to go along with Milosevic’s genocidal project. We know well that America benefits when it stands for what is right. And, what was right in the case of Bosnia was to defend the letters of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment for the Crime of Genocide and not to go along with goals of Mr. Milosevic, indicted war criminal for war crimes in Croatia and genocide in Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Still there is time to correct the wrong done by President Clinton and his administration. The International Court of Justice ruled in the binding judgment in February 26, 2007 in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro that genocide was committed by the government and institutions of “Republika Srpska” and specifically the Army (VRS) and Police (MUP) of “Republika Srpska” and that Serbia had an obligation to prevent the genocide. Filing the law suit for genocide in 1993 preceded all subsequent constitutional and legal arrangements for Bosnia and Herzegovina. The final judgment of the International Court of Justice supersedes all constitutional arrangements that are offered today to the victims of aggression and genocide including Annex 4 to the Dayton Agreement (the Dayton Constitution). The U.S.A. should help Bosnian patriots to restore the constitution and institutions of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina as they were before the aggression and genocide by applying the legal right to RESTITUTIO IN INTEGRUM (restoration of the original condition) based on the peremptory norms of International law JUS COGENS, and to declare null and void the Dayton Constitution and institutions created under the Dayton Constitution. The constitution of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina is the only legally binding document on the basis of which the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina has been recognized. This constitution ended communism and provided for free multiparty elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1990 and provided for free referendum of its independence in 1992. Under this constitution, Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina became a UN member nation. This constitution provides that each individual is sovereign on entire territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina irrelevant on ethnicity or religion. The lawfulness and justice in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina will be accomplished only after the goal of the aggression and genocide is denied to the perpetrators of the aggression and genocide. According to International law, and domestic laws, anything what was achieved unlawfully can not be recognized as lawful. Under the Dayton Agreement, the unlawful governing power over the victims of aggression and genocide in the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina was put into the hands of those who committed the genocide and those who were complicit in aggression and the genocide. The U.S. government should terminate its support to those in Bosnia who were complicit in the aggression and genocide.

2. The Declaration of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina Posted by The Henry Jackson Society: http://www.henryjacksonsociety.org/stories.asp?pageid=49&id=1782

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: 1. The International Court of Justice and International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia have ruled that the Bosnian Serb entity 'Republika Srpska' is guilty of genocide, and that Serbia is guilty of failure to prevent and punish genocide. 2. These rulings provide a legal basis for the abolition of the regime established by the 1995 Dayton settlement, which was illegitimately derived from this genocide. 3. To uphold the Dayton regime is to recognize the precedent, that a legitimate constitutional order may be overthrown by aggression and genocide. 4. The international community should work with the citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina to restore the legitimate constitutional order of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

3. Epitaph for Richard Holbrooke

I am very sorry to learn that Richard Holbrooke has died . Because I fully intended to bring him to Justice and get him criminally indicted for the genocidal massacre at Srebrenica on behalf of my clients, the Mothers of Srebrenica and Podrinja. It was Holbrooke who deliberately sacrificed Zepa and Srebrenica in order to produce Dayton’s genocidal carve-up map. Holbrooke was the Father of the genocidal statelet known as Republika Sprska. Holbrooke was the Destroyer of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Holbrooke was an Accessory Before, During and After the Fact to the Extermination of 8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, which the International Court of Justice ruled was genocide in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Holbrooke shall live in Infamy as a Genocidaire. In his classic work The Phaedo, Plato has his hero Socrates comment upon the transmigration/reincarnation of souls. With respect to Holbrooke, Socrates said as follows: “And those who have chosen the portion of injustice, and tyranny, and violence, will pass into wolves, or into hawks and kites;--whither else can we suppose them to go?” Let Socrates’ words of wisdom serve as Holbrooke’s Epitaph and Fate. Professor Francis A. BoyleGeneral Agent for the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina before the International Court of Justice; Attorney for the Mothers of Srebrenica and Podrinja Francis A. BoyleLaw Building504 E. Pennsylvania Ave.Champaign, IL 61820 USA217-333-7954 (Voice)217-244-1478 (Fax)(personal comments only)

4. In many occasions, Prof. Francis Boyle openly said to Richard Holbrooke the truth about Dayton accord. For example, the following essay was the first time published in 18 Human Rights Quarterly 515 (1996) 4. Holbrooke's Obituary for the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina By Francis A. BoyleProfessor of International Law Pursuant to the Dayton Accords, on 15 December 1995 the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was carved up in Paris by Richard Holbrooke, the United Nations, the European Union Member States, the United States, and the many other states in attendance, despite the United Nations Charter, the Nuremberg Principles, the Genocide Convention, the Four Geneva Conventions and their two Additional Protocols, the Racial Discrimination Convention, and the Apartheid Convention, inter alia, as well as two overwhelmingly favorable World Court Orders this author won for the Republic on 8 April 1993 and 13 September 1993. This second World Court Order expressly prohibited Holbrooke's partition of Bosnia by the vote of 13 to 2. Bosnia was sacrificed on the altar of Great Power politics to the Machiavellian god of expedience. In 1938 the Great Powers of Europe did the exact same thing to Czechoslovakia at Munich. The partition of that nation state did not bring peace to Europe then. Continued partition of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina will not bring peace to Europe now. This U.N.-sanctioned execution of a U.N. Member State violated every known principle of international law that had been formulated by the international community in the post-World War II era. This nihilistic carve-up of Bosnia indicates that the current regime of international law and organizations set up by the United States and Europe in direct reaction to the genocidal horrors of the Second World War is in the process of gradual but irretrievable disintegration. The unstopped genocide in Bosnia already served as the harbinger to the genocide in Rwanda. Bosnia will become the precedent for the perpetration of similar mass slaughters around the world in the future. Holbrooke's Dayton/Paris Accords shall always stand for the proposition that genocide pays. So much for the slogan: Never again! ______________________________

5. Found on WikiLeaks: Dishonest Clinton era politics regarding Bosnia continues

The following are several cables sent from American Embassy in Sarajevo, and published on WikiLeaks Summary ¶1. (S/NF) The emergence of a new Bosniak party, led by the powerful, reportedly corrupt, and sometimes vindictive media mogul Fahrudin Radoncic, is likely to create further rifts in the Bosniak political scene, particularly amid the campaign for the October 2010 general elections. Radoncic has the support of the leader of the Islamic community. Also, Radoncic's ownership and direct control of the most widely-read daily newspaper in Bosnia will ensure that his campaign message is well propagated. Radoncic's reputation for questionable business ventures with partners from across the political spectrum, combined with his likely desire for influence over the judiciary to escape prosecution for corruption, suggests that he will seek political alliances based on lucrative personal prospects, rather than ideology or even ethnic affiliation. Although it is too early to make concrete predictions, Radoncic's party is poised to capture votes primarily from Haris Silajdzic's Party for BiH (SBiH), as well as a wide swath of apathetic voters allured by his pledges to fix the economy. End summary. The Scandals ¶3. (S/NF) Radoncic is widely believed to be responsible for corrupt business practices, most notably his role in a scandal involving the Federation Development Bank (FDB) (ref A). Radoncic admitted to having hired Ramiz Dzaferovic -- SDA member, director of the FDB -- to conduct an audit of Avaz through Dzaferovic's personal audit company. At the same time, Dzaferovic through the FDB gave Radoncic a loan of KM 22.5 million -- which the FDB had allocated for agriculture -- for the construction of Radoncic's Avaz Tower in Sarajevo. Separately, local media recently reported alleged ties between Radoncic and international drug dealer Kelmendi, which led Radoncic to launch a full-scale attack in the pages of Avaz against the police officials working on that case. Also, staff of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) recently linked Radoncic to an international money laundering scheme. This allegation, which was leaked to the press, sparked a smear campaign in Avaz against the Principal Deputy High Representative, a State Department employee on detail to OHR, somewhat belying Radoncic's claims that one of his priorities will be to cooperate with the international community. The Entree into Politics ¶4. (C) In September 2009, Radoncic launched a new Bosniak political party, the Alliance for a Better Future of BiH (SBB-BiH) (ref B). Radoncic is almost certainly seeking political status in order to secure protection from the investigation of his illegal business deals by wielding government influence over the judiciary. Moreover, now may be a personally appealing time for Radoncic to enter politics, as media outlets besides Avaz indicate that Radoncic's business is struggling and that Avaz's chief rival daily newspaper, Oslobodjenje, is rapidly catching up to Avaz in its sales. This suggests that the pragmatic Radoncic is entering the political scene to seek lucrative deals wherever he can find them, rather than choosing partners based on ideology or even ethnic affiliation. This approach would make him an appealing ally for Republika Srpska (RS) Prime Minister Milorad Dodik, who also dabbles in business and is himself under investigation for corruption. Dodik therefore may see Radoncic as his ideal Bosniak interlocutor. Indeed, Radoncic told the DCM in January that he has met with Dodik, as well as Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ)-BiH President Dragan Covic -- who has been indicted for corruption and is forging a closer relationship with Dodik (septel) -- and has a good relationship with both men. Moreover, the fact that Avaz has kept mostly quiet on the very issue that it could use to galvanize the Bosniak populace ahead of the election -- rhetoric on a referendum in the RS -- has led to speculation that discussions on a partnership between Dodik and Radoncic may already be underway. The Weapons The SBiH Political Vacuum ¶7. (C) Radoncic's entree into the Bosniak political scene will most likely come at the expense of the deteriorating SBiH. SBiH garnered poor results in the 2008 municipal elections, and our SBiH contacts continue to tell us of the disgruntlement within the party with Silajdzic's poor leadership. Bakir Izetbegovic, who is a friend of Silajdzic, has suggested to us that Silajdzic may in fact be preparing to leave the political scene. Moreover, the Islamic community, which had previously endorsed Silajdzic, now supports Radoncic at the expense of SBiH. (...) Comment ¶11. (S/NF) (...) An alliance between Radoncic and Dodik, perceived as two of the country's more corrupt leaders, would send a very discouraging message to those in Bosnia and Herzegovina who are seeking the rule of law, especially the Bosniak intellectual elite. Comment Cont'd ¶12. (S/NF) At the same time -- however distasteful it may be to us or others -- if Radoncic and gains enough authority through the October 2010 elections to join a ruling coalition at the state or Federation level, his comparative lack of discord with RS leaders and pragmatic approach on issues ranging from economic development to constitutional reform and Euro-Atlantic integration could perhaps contribute to a more peaceful political situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina over the near term. ENGLISH ---- COMMENT: In those cables from the American Embassy in Sarajevo we can see that Ambassador English knows that Radoncic, Dodik and Covic are the most corrupt politicians, criminals, and that they have secret meetings amongst themselves. It is not a surprise for Bosnians, because it is very well known that both Radoncic and Covic were secret agents of the Serbian dominated secret police of Yugoslavia and as such they are serving the Serbian aggression against Bosnia. Ambassador English also knows that: "An alliance between Radoncic and Dodik, perceived as two of the country's more corrupt leaders, would send a very discouraging message to those in Bosnia and Herzegovina who are seeking the rule of law, especially the Bosniak intellectual elite." What is surprising for Bosnians is that the possible taking of power by those politicians does not bother English. He sees Radoncic's "lack of discord with RS leaders" as a solution. Is this not a repeat of Holbrooke-Clinton politics in Bosnia a.k.a. "the ends justify the means"? Muhamed Borogovac, Ph.D., ASA, MAAANational Congress of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina In this links are more leaks form American Embassy in Bosnia http://213.251.145.96/cable/2010/02/10SARAJEVO134.html ______________________________ 6. Statement of the Bosnian Citizen Action regarding indictment for their protest against intended cosmetic changes of Dayton constitution Citizen Action is one of many Bosnian grass-root organizations that fight for unfied Bosnia-Hezegovina, against Dayton constitution and its cozmetic changes. To all concerned people, We wish to inform you that the first hearing of the trial, which is being brought against the association "Citizen Action" for an unannounced gathering organized by our association during the first "Butmir" talks (Oct. 9, 2009), is scheduled for tomorrow Nov. 26 2010 at 10.00 pm in the Municipal Court Sokolac, East Sarajevo Division at Karadordeva Street, No. 5. Namely, during the talks of the representatives of the BiH (Bosnia and Herzegovina) political parties and the officials from the E.U. and the U.S., held at the military base in Butmir on Oct. 9, 2009, the representatives of the association planned a peaceful gathering in the base under the jurisdiction of the international forces. The previous day we had visited the military base and obtained verbal permission to hold our campaign. In the campaign titled "Big Shots Defending the Status Quo", the association did not invite the public to protest; it had the intention of sending a message to the participants of the meeting in Butmir that the citizens of BiH want a more functional and stable country. However, the MUP RS (Ministry of the Interior, i.e. police of the Republic of the Serbs) used its authority to deny the group access to the location of their presentation, and in full view of the media detained the activists and took them to the police station Kula for questioning and identification. Many organizations and individuals expressed their full support to the association, including Srdjan Dizdarevic, then president of the Helsinki Committee BiH, who offered to assist us in the further process. Although the nine activists of the association were not harmed at all during their stay in jail, we believe that their arrest was completely unwarranted because they did not in any way violate public order, nor was there any indication that the group would act in such a way. We invite you to follow this trial because it is not just a trial for our association. Instead it is a message to any formal or informal groups and individuals who may want to similarly express their political opinion in the future. Sincerely, Citizen Action ----- Let us recall that the Butmir negotiations brought a few meaningless and token "reforms". Their purpose was not to open discussion on the key changes that "Citizen Action" and other Bosnians are calling for.Their purpose was just the opposite: to affirm and cement the status quo in Parliament, and thus give a veneer of legality and legitimacy to an apartheid constitution that was created in time of war and signed by Serbian perpetrators of genocide and by their agent on the Bosnian side.

Excellent Study on the Context of the Srebrenica Genocide

2010-12-12T13:48:00.002-05:00

It is my pleasure and honor to pass along this link to an important and necessary piece of scholarship by my comrade Daniel Toljaga, published by the Bosnia Institute:

Prelude to the Srebrenica Genocide

This was published on Nov. 18 after Daniel had put in a great deal of time researching, writing, editing, and soliciting input and advice from his wide circle of writers, scholars, activists, and other contacts. I apologize to Daniel for not having posted this immediately; if you haven't already read this piece, you need to do so immediately. And then bookmark this page so you have it handy as a reference whenever you are compelled to refute any of the ridiculous justifications for Serb nationalist actions at Srebrenica, the inaction of the international community at the time, or for attempts to derail the ongoing efforts to bring the responsible parties to justice. Daniel effectively demolishes the arguments which are used by revisionists to cloud the issue of responsibility and causation.

Latest News and Reporting from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting

2010-12-11T18:26:00.003-05:00

Please take the time to read the following story, an in-depth piece of reportage and analysis by Rachel Irwin and Velma Saric:

Calls for War Memorials Divide Bosnia

Also, please see these other recent stories, also from IWPR:

Srebrenica Mass Graves Allegedly Interfered With

Clearly, Karadzic has developed neither a conscience nor a sense of shame since his arrest:

Karadzic Markale Staging Claims Challenged

And finally:

Sljivancanin Appeals Conviction Reversed

New Story from Trial of General Tolimir at ICTY

2010-11-29T09:57:00.002-05:00

Please read the following story from the Institute for War & Peace Reporting:

Srebrenica Survivor Confronts Tolimir

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [13]

2010-11-23T07:43:00.004-05:00

[Apologies for dragging this out so long. Graduate school is eating up much of my attention span, and I've been having computer problems on top of that. In the interests of keeping this moving, I'm probably going to stick to bare-bones summaries from now on.]

Chapter 19: "We Are the Winners" The London Conference May-December 1992

This short chapter recaps the events of the aforementioned conference, at which strong Western rhetoric aimed at rump Yugoslavia was (as Milosevic understood even prior to landing in London) not to be coupled with any meaningful, decisive action. As would be the pattern for the next two and a half years, the international community would issue threats which seemed substantive on paper, but were empty in practice.

This chapter also marks the end of the abbreviated political career of Milan Panic, the California resident who briefly returned to his homeland to serve a few months as Prime Minister in an ultimately doomed attempt to rescue Serbia from Milosevic's rule. And finally, Lord Carrington was replaced by Lord David Owen.

The most important and meaningful result of this otherwise rather useless conference was the the Bosnian Serb leadership began to emerge from under Milosevic's protective cover; and this worked quite well for Milosevic, who cleverly began distancing himself from his compatriots across the Drina.

Chapter 20: The Hottest Corner The Fall of Srebrenica and UN Safe Areas April 1993

This chapter details events which are well-known to anyone who hasn't swallowed the revisionist lie that the Srebrenica genocide of 1995 was actually a retaliation for unprovoked attacks on Serb villages which just happened to be near a large concentration of Muslims. This context for what happened at Srebrenica two years later is not essential to understand that what did happen was, in fact, genocide, but it does put that crime in context; furthermore, it explains how the bizarre Bosnian war phenomena of "safe areas" came to be.

New Article from the Institute for War & Peace Reporting

2010-11-12T09:08:00.003-05:00

I am pleased to pass along this new article from The Institute for War & Peace Reporting. It is an interview with Merdijana Sadovic, IWPR's international justice/ICTY programme manager. In this interview Merdijana consider's Serbia's commitment to the Hague tribunal and its hopes for EU accession. It is a balanced and fair-minded examination of the relative willingness within the Serbian government to ultimately arrest Mladic and turn him over.

Is Serbia Serious About Arresting Mladic?

New Article from the Institute for War & Peace Reporting

2010-11-09T22:44:00.004-05:00

I am happy to direct my reader's attention to the following article from The Institute for War & Peace Reporting:

New Mladic Arrest Bid a "Media Show"

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [12]

2010-11-04T20:26:00.002-04:00

Chapter 16: The Gates of Hell The Outbreak of War in Bosnia April 1-10, 1992

This chapter opens with a moving and illuminating episode from the opening days of the war, then backs up to recount the opening of full-scale warfare in and around Sarajevo. It is clear from the narrative that, up until this point, Izetbegovic had not fully grasped how much danger his country, and his fellow Muslims, were in. Balkan revisionists and apologists for the Serb nationalist project conveniently forget that this "Islamic fundamentalist" was completely unprepared for armed conflict of any kind.

Chapter 17: The President is Kidnapped May 2-3, 1992

This chapter recounts, in detail, the infamous incident where the JNA apprehended President Izetbegovic and his companions at the Sarajevo airport. This event was revisited inthe news in the past few months when Serbia tried, and failed, to have former member of the Bosnian Presidency extradicted for his role in this affair.

The details here are important, and the book makes a convincing case that the entire incident, which ended with an ambush by Bosnian militiamen and left several dead, was simply the tragic result of some incredibly poor decisions made in the middle of a confusing war. It is worth noting that the JNA forces in Sarajevo were under the command of an old-school general who was not on board with the Greater Serbia project--he would be relieved and replaced with Ratko Mladic--yet another detail which illustrates how confusing the situation on the ground was.

Also of interest to readers of this blog is how this incident, more than anything else, seems to have turned Canadian General Lewis MacKenzie into a de facto ally of the Bosnian Serb government. His initial anger and disgust with the Bosnian government forces was understandable, but his failure to put the incident into context, to recognize his own role in the tragedy, or to realize that trapped in Sarajevo as he was he was--much like the rest of the Western world--unable to see the greater horrors unfolding in the rest of Bosnia--are not.

Chapter 18: The Cleansing The Summer of 1992

While much of the Western world was unaware of what was going on in the rest of the republic, that would soon change. This chapter details both the "ethnic cleansing" of Bosnia as well as the stories of the different journalists who helped bring them to light; all this in the context of hundreds of thousands of refugees bringing incredible and grotesque horror stories which quite often were simply not believed. All this also in the context of an international reaction which chose to regard the war as a humanitarian, not a political crisis (an illusion the West would cling to far beyond the point at which this politically convenient fiction could stand up to the light of day); the authors point out that the creation of refugees was not a by-product of the war, it was the entire point.

The incidents in this chapter are infamous, and well-known to any reader of this blog. The discovery of death camps by Roy Gutman of Newsday, and then the reporting of ITV, should be news to nobody here. Still, the fact remains that there are revisionists who need to believe that these things simply didn't happen. It is crucial, then, to remember that reliable and sober reportage on these atrocities existed from the early days of the war, and that these accounts have stood the test of time and the rigor of analysis and second-guessing. Parenti, Johnstone, Chomsky and the rest don't want to know it. But we are not free to pick and choose which reality suits our ideological purposes.

Two New Articles from The Institute for War and Peace Reporting

2010-11-01T09:15:00.003-04:00

I strongly encourage you to read the following two articles from the invaluable Institute for War & Peace Reporting. [These were passed along to me and, with permission, I am including the brief explanatory synopsis I received with each link.]

Court Hears of Mladic Rage at Bratunac by Velma Saric, which is a courtside report on a Dutch ex-UN official who spoke of Serb intimidation in meetings with peacekeepers on the outskirts of Srebrenica.

Revised Indictment in Haradinaj Case by Rachel Irwin discusses how the upcoming partial retrial of ex-Kosovo president Ramush Haradinaj will focus on alleged crimes at the Jablanica headquarters of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Diana Johnstone Shows Her Cards

2010-10-20T09:10:00.015-04:00

In the comments section of this post on this blog, an anonymous poster passed along the following link:

"Why the French Hate Chomsky" By DIANA JOHNSTONE"; he or she also suggested that "I think some of her criticism is driven by emotional issues." I rather glibly agreed with him/her, intending only to suggest that her "analysis" is neither honest nor serious.

Frequent reader Owen countered, quite rightly, that there is nothing "emotional" about this latest screed from the well-known genocide denier; her work on such issues is rather deliberate and self-aware. As I noted several times in my lengthy deconstruction of her truly awful work on the Bosnian War, Johnstone clearly knows enough about the facts and information which would obliterate her painstakingly crafted arguments to avoid them completely; nobody can negotiate the minefield of contrary information and eyewitness testimony as successfully as she does if they are actually unaware of those inconvenient complications. Johnstone knows what she is doing.

But what, exactly, is it that she is doing? This rambling, open letter-turned-editorial screed doesn't address Bosnia except in passing, but it does reveal some of the larger ideological agenda that Johnstone and other advocates of a Red-Brown/anti-liberal democracy coalition are crafting. I no longer believe that these people are unconsciously stumbling into the embrace of petty fascists such as Hamas and the Serbian Radical Party; Johnstone, Chomsky, and others have concluded that the far right are their best allies in a fight to undermine the liberal order. Johnstone set out merely to scold the French media and intelligensia for being insufficiently deferential to Chomsky, but the scope of this open letter soon widens greatly. In order to make her case that Chomsky was a "victim" of a concerted Western ideological campaign to discredit him, she chooses to elaborate what the ideological underpinings of this supposed campaign are.

First off, though, the obvious needs to be stated--Johnstone is a terrible writer. She veers between addressing Chomsky directly ("Dear Noam"; "to see you in person") to referring to him in third person ("deep geopolitical significance that Chomsky has") in the same paragraph! Of course, the reasons why Johnstone is such a poor writer are easy enough to ascertain--good writing is clear writing, and clear writing is a product of clear thinking, a reasonable mastery of the subject material, and most of all of intellectual honesty. Johnstone seeks not to illuminate but to obscure and obfusticate; she does so through tortured logic, selective use of decontextualized facts, and a disingenuous misrepresentation of opposing viewpoints and contrary information. If she were a more effective demagogue or a crudely emotional populist, she might be able to somewhat transcend the feeble foundations of her arguments, but Johnstone is a drearily pedestrian propagandist and therefore her rhetoric is thoroughly hampered by her decision to dissemble, deceive, and mislead. She cannot write clearly because her ideas would not withstand the scrutiny which direct presentation would subject them to.

But while Johnstone cannot bluntly state the collectivist/anti-liberal ideology she espouses without setting off alarm bells, it's all there in this letter. And not by accident--Johnstone has rather neatly laid out the underlying rationale for the far-Left embrace of, and advocacy for, genocide denial.

Her assertion that the "the animosity you have aroused in certain circles in France may have less to do with linguistics than with your role as the most prominent American critic of US foreign policy" might be attempt at humor, but is also a neat summation of how Johnstone, Chomsky, and their comrades deflect any and all criticism of their ridiculous claims and dissembling--by dismissing all specific criticism of specifics as merely general attacks on the general idea of a critique at all. Chomsky, in other words, is not attacked for supporting Hamas, or the Khmer Rouge, or for making any of his many inaccurate, misleading, and/or dishonest statements about American foreign policy and history--no, all attacks on him are clearly simply a reaction to his status as a critic of American foreign policy, period. Of course, Johnstone is a little too shrewd to actually say that; but this standard defense gets used with such regularity, there is little need to give her the benefit of the doubt.

The rest of the paragraph after the above quote is worth noting:

"My own opinion is that this role as virtual symbol of systematic moral criticism of American foreign policy is the fundamental cause of the campaign against you that began over thirty years ago. To my mind the uproar first over Cambodia and then over the defense of Professor Robert Faurisson’s right to express his views freely was essentially a means to the end of discrediting the leading American critic of United States imperialism."

And there we have it--there is a "campaign" against Noam Chomsky, and the issues at the core concern his statements on the genocide of the Khmer Rouge and the Holocaust denial of Robert Faurisson. Fine--at least she does not ignore the elephant in the middle of the room. So what to make of this?

First, though, Johnstone needs "to put this argument in context". No doubt. The context, then, is the Cold War--specifically, American hegemony over the West during that period. Johnstone is not entirely incorrect to describe Europe at this time as being split between "the two victorious nations" (United States and USSR), but her analysis seems to reduce the situation to nothing but a division of spoils, with nothing to choose between the two. Citizens who lived under the two different systems might beg to differ with that.

But that is another issue. What is of interest here is how Johnstone, as she so often does, dresses a simplistic dichotomy up in the guise of nuanced, sophisticated analysis. Not very well, but she tries--French intellectuals were split between the elite who were secretly anti-American and the more pubilc (and presumably less qualified) intellectuals who were either pro-American or, as she prefers, "anti-French."

That is really the crux of the matter--Johnstone is truly a statist and a collectivist, who can only conceive of people as being part of a group of some kind. What "French interests" are or might be is something she doesn't feel needs to be be addressed. What is important to her is that far too many of these French intellectuals don't feel that they need to be lectured to by Noam Chomsky; the reason for this, as it turns out, is that "Chomsky's criticism is laden with facts", a statement as bland as it is questionable. But she runs with this idea for a full paragraph; it is striking how self-evident she believes this to be. Chomsky deals in a large volume of facts and clear analysis--evidently this is not up for discussion. If you disagree with Noam Chomsky or object to his general critiques, then you are clearly uncomfortable with facts and clear thinking. End of discussion.

It is quite tiresome to follow her plodding thought process by which she repeats Chomsky's standard defense of his activity on behalf of the Khmer Rogue and Robert Faurisson's Holocaust denial--that his activities did not constitute support for either, but rather for the rather vague notion of "free speech." This allows her to avoid the necessity to clearly state what she or Chomsky actually think about either "issue"; the notion that there is any validity to the charges in question is simply irrelvent to her. Yet she goes on to speak of the Holocaust ("Shoah myth" as she soon comes to refer to it as) as "dogma."

Now, I have serious objections to laws which criminalize such garbage as genocide denial, and if that was truly all that Chomsky and Johnstone are concerned with, there would be no argument. But that has never been the case; neither one of them has ever had the moral honesty to discriminate between Faurisson's right to spread his dishonest filth versus the legitimacy of his claims, which are of course complete nonsense.

Johnstone moves right along to the larger claim that the "Shoah cult" has had a sinister effect:

"Initially, Nazi crimes were taught as contrary to humanity in general, but as identification of victims has been increasingly centered on Jews, the effect is to implicitly divide school children between potential victims, namely the Jews, and everyone else, whose innocence is less assured."

This is complete garbage; the Holocaust was an actual historic event which actually happened at a certain time and place, and was carried out by actual people against actual people; it was not an abstraction which imposes a template on all people at all places and times.

Johnstone, however, assures the reader that this very template is now applied to situations which, she states without explanation, do not qualify as "genocide" (where have seen from the review of "Fools' Crusade" that Johnstone is in no position to lecture anyone on the meaning of the term). And yes, one of those places was Bosnia, where the Muslims eagerly accepted the role of "Victim" in order to play the proper role in order to curry American favor. Srebrenica, it turns out, was nothing more than a shrewd act of foreign policy.

There is really nothing more to be said. The rest of the article treats Chomsky's visit as if it were an event of immense geopolitical significance; Johnstone seems genuinely mystified that the entire French media didn't simply turn over their cameras and microphones to the cranky America-hating linguist to let him lecture the entire nation. As for her argument tying the Cold War to her implication that "genocide" is little more than an ideological tool by the West to divide and conquer the rest of the world, all that remains to note is this--many have noted that Bosnian genocide denial is incredibly similar to Holocaust denial. Yet it is no coincidence that so many of the people involved in the the former have also dabbled in the latter. Bosnian genocide denial is not, as it turns out, like Holocaust denial--it is Holocaust denial. We can thank Diana Johnstone for spelling that out.

Update on the Angelina Jolie Film

2010-10-20T09:00:00.002-04:00

Well, I feel like an ass for falling for what seems to have been a propaganda campaign to discredit a well-intentioned effort to bring international attention back to Bosnia and the aftereffects of the war. In short--the rumors were false; the movie is not about a Bosnian woman falling in love with her Serb rapist (and even if it were, it should not have been censored), and once again the cynacism of apologists for the Greater Serb nationalist project knows no bounds.

Rather than rehashing the story, I will simply redirect readers to this excellent analysis from the always-excellent "Greater Surbiton" blog.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [11]

2010-10-17T18:24:00.003-04:00

PART FOUR: BOSNIA

This section takes up the bulk of the remaining text; indeed, it makes up over a third of the book in total. By this point in the narrative, it is clear that the war which was brought to Bosnia was driven by forces outside the republic; by the time the fighting broke out, whatever chances there had been to avert it had long since been squandered by the republic's political leadership.

Chapter 15: Before the Deluge July 1990-March 1992

This chapter essentially catches the reader "up to speed" on events in Bosnia while first Slovenia and then Croatia were engulfed by radical nationalism, paramilitary intimidation, and finally full-fledged war.

Much of the chapter is taken up with the political developments in Bosnia after multiparty elections were held; as in the other republics, nationalist parties easily dominated the election returns--a situation only exacerbated by the republic's constitution, which dictated that representation was by nation, not individuals. The chapter also discusses Muslim intellectual, SDA leader, and eventual Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, who turned out to be a mostly ineffectual leader who did little more than provide ammunition for his nationalist opponents such as Radovan Karadzic. Izetbegovic was more "Islamic" than most of his people; this would create drawbacks for the Bosnian Muslims and precious few benefits.

It was obvious almost from the start that the Serb leadership in the SDS had no interest in a unified independent Bosnia; the Croat leadership in the HDZ made a tactical alliance with the Muslims but it was purely a temporary marriage of convenience; the Croats were in no position to take on either of the larger groups politically but at least the nationalist Croats of Herzegovina had a longer-term goal of union with Croatia proper. While the Serbs quietly armed and radicalized their civilian population, Izetbegovic stumbled closer and closer towards a war he made no significant preparations for. It is true that his hands were largely tied, and that his options were few and mostly dictated by others; but his failure to recognize what was coming and to make better preparations would soon cost his government, his about-to-be-independent state, and the Muslims of Bosnia dearly.

Angelina Jolie Film Project Meets Opposition in Bosnia

2010-10-15T10:54:00.003-04:00

I hope to return to regular blogging in the next few days; in the meantime, here's an update on actress Angelina Jolie's controversial film:

Jolie: People should 'hold judgment' until they see Bosnian film

I don't know enough about the project to have an opinion yet.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [10]

2010-09-27T18:46:00.005-04:00

Part Three: The Explosion of War

Part Three consists of three chapters which detail how the actual outbreak of hostilities in the former Yugoslavia, first in Slovenia and then in Croatia, and how the international community, most notably Europe, responded.

Chapter 12: "The Hour of Europe Has Dawned" Slovenia's Phony War, June-July 1991

Slovenia's 10 day long "war" of independence is now rightly regarded as a brilliantly-executed piece of political theater carried out by the Slovene and Serb leadership, with the JNA (and the people of Slovenia) largely in the dark as to the real game being played. Another party left out of the loop was the European Community, who sent a "troika" of leaders to Yugoslavia, where they managed to accomplish two things--"force" the Yugoslav leadership into concessions they already planned on making; and revealing just how naive European leaders were for the responsibilities of international diplomacy of this sort, and how fundamentally they misread the situation in the former Yugoslavia. The Europeans never seemed to grasp that the warring parties had clearly-defined goals and rational--if not moral--reasons for resorting to using armed force. The likelihood that European diplomacy was up the task was slim from the very beginning.

Chapter 13: "An Undeclared and Dirty War" The JNA in Croatia July-December 1991

While the war in Slovenia was a largely bogus and stage-managed affair with a pre-determined outcome, the war in Croatia was an all-too-real preview of the even greater horrors to follow in Bosnia. The use of heavy artillery against settled areas, followed by paramilitary forces; the cynical manipulation of the United Nations in order to consolidate gains; ethnic cleansing--it all happened in Croatia. Soon, it would all happen again, at greater extent and over a much longer period of time, in Bosnia.

Chapter 14: Yugoslavia A La Carte Lord Carrington's Plan September 1991-January 1992

This chapter details the failed efforts led by Lord Carrington to get what became known as the "Carrington Plan" agreed to by the various republic leaders, as well as other European diplomatic initiatives, most notably the Badinter Commission, which was driven by German diplomatic pressure on the rest of the EC and which ultimately made the Carrington Plan--which Milosevic at any rate was not going to accept--a moot point. In the meantime, Cyrus Vance was able to broker another deal, one which brought "peace" to Croatia in exchange for a de facto ethnic partition; i.e., the Serbs agreed to let the UN do the dirty work of policing the border between the Serb-controlled areas of Croatia and the rest of the republic.

By the end, the independence of Slovenia and Croatia had been recognized, that of Macedonia was held up by Greek protests (which still reverberate today), and Bosnia was faced with the choice of declaring an independence it was ill-equipped to defend, or remaining in a "Yugoslavia" which by this point was rather nakedly a "Greater Serbia." The Badinter Commission's findings were duly ignored by the EC in the interests of political expediency and deference to German insistence (the commission had rejected Croatia's application), and Lord Carrington's plan was forgotten.

What this chapter makes clear is that his plan was not nearly as ill-conceived, unrealistic, and morally vacuous as many of the famous Western-designed plans for Bosnia which were to come. Carrington understood that the republics--not ethnicity--needed to be considered the constituent units of Federal Yugoslavia. This is the main reason his plan was rejected by Milosevic. His plan also demonstrated how far the international community was willing to go to assuage Serb fears and concerns, contrary to later propaganda claims that the Serbs were being railroaded by an "anti-Serb" international community.

**************************

This concludes Part Three. Part Four: Bosnia, is next.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [9]

2010-09-18T22:16:00.002-04:00

Chapter 10: The Descent Into War Croatia and the Serbs February-June 1991

The situation in Croatia continued to deteriorate, as neither the SDS nor the HDZ were seriously interested in working out a peaceful compromise. The Tudjman government was playing a game of brinksmanship without being fully prepared, even as the Slovenians were much further along in their quiet preparations.

Tudjman and the HDZ took more and more provocative moves to challenge and threaten the breakaway Serb areas even as the SDS consolidated its hold over Serb majority areas through a combination of propaganda (which the HDZs extreme rhetoric helped legitimize) and strongarm tactics against moderates within the Serb community. In Slavonia, it took a sustained campaign of nationalist intimidation to force out the moderate leadership of the not-yet radicalized Serb natives.

In the meantime the JNA began to get dragged into the conflict, slowly morphing into a de facto "Greater Serbia" army in the process. The SDS began a clever strategy of taking provocative actions, egging the Croatian government into a response, which would then justify intervention by the JNA, which would move in to come between the two parties, thus demarcating more territory for separatist Serbs.

Chapter 11: Conversations of the Deaf The Last Chance Squandered May-June 1991

Last-ditch, half-hearted efforts at constitutional reform, and perfunctory and half-baked diplomatic signals from the United States gave only faint and illusory hope that war could be averted. Izetbegovic of Bosnia and Gligorov of Macedonia tried to convince the other republic leaders that it was not too late to avert war by reconfiguring Yugoslavia into what would be called an "asymmetrical federation", but the Croat and Serb leadership were not truly interested in the plan.

US Secretary of State James Baker and Ambassador Walter Zimmerman both gave the warring parties the same mixed messages, which ultimately added up to one clear message--the West was simply not paying that much attention.

Some of the concerned parties were sincerely interested in averting war, but they were not the parties in a position to do so. It was too late.

*************

This is the end of Part Two; I apologize that this review has taken so long. The real reason isn't that I think the text is difficult to follow--anything but. I have been going chapter by chapter for the very simple reason that it has been years since I've read this book and I wanted to re-read it for the review. Which normally wouldn't be a problem, but with graduate school and other claims on my time it's been a slow process. I will try to pick up the pace and get this project moving a little quicker.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [8]

2010-09-13T18:00:00.004-04:00

Chapter 9: "If we don't know how to work, at least we know how to fight"

Further subtitled "The Decisive Month", this chapter details political events in March of 1991. The opening two sentences summarize the import of these events:

"March was the decisive month. Milosevic set the country on the course to war."

That is really what this chapter is all about--the grubby details elaborating the process by which Milosevic took off the gloves, and, in certain select company, the mask of being bound by legality and of maintaining any pretense to Yugoslav unity. Faced with mass uprisings and the possibility of the people turning against him, the man who a few short years earlier had claimed the mantle of Serb nationalism by telling the Serbs of Kosova "nobody should dare to beat you" sent the riot police to beat the Serbs of Belgrade, even as his deputy Jovic was trying to strongarm the collective Presidency into authorizing the JNA to take military action against dissent. Reading this chapter alone makes one wonder how Balkan revisionists are able to maintain the fictions their delusional versions of Yugoslavias' demise require.

This chapter is crucial not only for the portrait of Milosevic nakedly throwing Yugoslavia under the bus and declaring himself committed to a de facto Greater Serbia; it also undermines the propoganda that he was merely following the dictates of public passion of the Serb people. It is worth noting that at the moment when Yugoslavia teetered towards war, the Serbs of Serbia stood against him and forced him to play authoritarian strongman.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [7]

2010-09-04T22:04:00.003-04:00

Chapter 8: "You've Chosen War"
The Arming of Slovenia and Croatia, April 1991-January 1991

This chapter details efforts by the newly elected governments of Slovenia and Croatia to arm themselves. The JNA--which now viewed TOs as a danger to national unity in republics with multiparty elections--had already disarmed the TO (Territorial Defense) forces in Croatia, and made moves to do the same in Slovenia; although largely successful, the Slovenes managed to halt this move before it was completely sucessful. Small-scale smuggling was organized to augment the remaining stash of mostly small arms.

In Croatia, where the TO had largely already been eliminated, smuggling was carried out on a much larger scale. The JNA, unwilling (under the wavering leadership of Kadijevic) to take decisive action without orders from the Federal Presidency, watched with growing alarm as domestic spying accumulated damning evidence of what Croatia was up to.

The collective Presidency would ultimately never give Kadijevic the go-ahead he desired for legal legitimacy. While Milosevic had four of eight votes, Macedonia stayed out and Bosnia stuck to its guns and refused to give the JNA the majority it needed.

In the meantime, Milosevic was moving towards embracing the idea that nations--but not republics--had the right to leave Yugoslavia. He still paid lip service to Yugoslav unity, but this was increasingly a tactical position, not an inflexible belief. He would begin to move away from a strategy of keeping Yugoslavia united and towards a plan to keep all ethnic Serbs--and the land they lived on--united in one state. And he would begin the process of turning the JNA away from its traditional mission of defending Yugoslavia towards becoming, in mission and makeup, an instrument for creating Greater Serbia.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [6]

2010-09-02T17:48:00.004-04:00

PART TWO: LIGHTING THE FUSE

Chapter 7: "The Remnants of a Slaughtered People"

The Knin Rebellion, January-August 1990

The chapter opens with a sobering anecdote; Milan Babic, the future SDS heavyweight, recounts how he was taught as a child that the scar on the old tree outside their house had been cut by the local Ustasha member who had come to kill his father, who was then only 12 years old. His father was lucky to escape with his life, and the complicity of local ethnic Croats became part of Babic family lore from then on.

There are a few notable things about this story. First, it is by no means an anomaly--ethnic Serbs in the Knin area were frequently the victims of Ustashe atrocities. Secondly, the Babic family legend about the scar in the mulberry tree was also typical, in that it represented the sort of folk history about World War II which contradicted the official Titoist history, and which was passed along secretively within communities, families, and ethnic groups. Thirdly, the fact that Milan Babic was so personally affected by this story should not obscure the fact that he was born 15 years after the incident. There were certainly many stories which could have been passed on to him and other members of later generations, but the story of the murderous Croat neighbor was the one which he remembered most. This, too, was no anomaly in Tito’s Yugoslavia.

The rest of this chapter recounts the growth of the Serb Democratic Party in the Krajina, the former frontier region of Croatia where most of Croatia’s ethnic Serbs lived, and where memories of Ustashe terror had been both passed down and kept alive; fertile ground for nationalistic ideologues to recruit. Tudjman’s clumsy nationalistic sloganeering only fanned the flames. By the time Milosevic shrewdly and discretely moved in to put Belgrade’s support into the mix, the Krajina Serbs were already well on the way towards being radicalized, organized, and armed.

The first armed confrontations between the nascent regime in Zagreb and the fledgling statelet based around Knin (which would soon grow much larger) ended without bloodshed or even any shooting. But it was still an armed confrontation; Milosevic was one step closer to abandoned an effort to dominate Yugoslavia and beginning to carve out an exclusively Serb state from its corpse instead.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [5]

2010-08-30T22:41:00.002-04:00

Chapter 6: "A Croatian Rifle on a Croatian Shoulder"

While Serbian nationalism had been unleashed and harnessed by Milosevic, in Croatia the two-decades long crackdown on expressions of Croatian nationalism still held sway; it took time for nationalist dissidents like Franjo Tudjman to test the waters and see how far they could push the envelope. The growth of the HDZ was greatly helped by Tudjman's relative freedom of movement--his Partisan past allowed him better treatment in prison after the crackdown, but also he was allowed a passport, which enabled to him to travel and network with the widely-dispersed Croatian emigre population, who would provide key support in the HDZs rise to power.

Tudjman was (unlike Milosevic) a genuine nationalist, and once he and the other members of the HDZ leadership found that they would be able to meet and campaign openly, he quickly became adept at using mass rallies and ostentatious displays of populist support. When the elections in Croatia were held, this support (combined with the British-style election rules) resulted in an electoral victory which gave the HDZ uncontested status as the ruling party (it's winning margin over the reformed Communists was not all that great, but the system was set up to reward the first-place party disproportionately).

This was all being watched by the Slovenes--who had a head start on multiparty elections and were working towards them carefully; ultimately, Kucan would win the Presidency and immediately quit his membership in the (renamed) former Communist Party--and the Serbs. In Serbia, the Milosevic regime played to very real fears among Croatias' Serbian minority that the Ustashe regime was being resurrected. Tudjman and his party did little to assuage such fears, and sometimes even exacerbated them.

The Army was also watching; the threats to take action to defend the integrity of Socialist Yugoslavia were repeated, and Kucan and Tudjman needed to consider how genuine the threat from General Kadijevic and others really were.

*************

And so Part One, "Laying the Charge", comes to an end. One theme which has been contstant through all six chapters is this--the breakdown of Yugoslavia happened along genuine, pre-existing fault lines of nationalism, national grievances, economic disparities, social unrest, and political dysfunction. All of this is true. But Yugoslavia did not fall apart 'naturally' or without further stress; it was not preordained to break apart violently once the ghost of Tito's iron fist had finally faded away. It took deliberate actions by political and cultural elites to align Yugoslavia's weakened fissures against the hard edges of intolerance, fear, insecurity, and paranoia. These actions were taken by real individuals, and their actions and words have been recorded and witnessed. The tragedy which is about to follow was not organic, it was not the inevitable product of deep-seated, almost animalistic impulses. Rational, powerful, calculating people made deliberate choices to exploit Yugoslavia's weaknesses for short-term political gain.

In Part Two, we will see many of these same actors apply the violent pressure to Yugoslavia, so that the breakup they placed into motion did, finally, become inevitable.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [4]

2010-08-29T11:37:00.002-04:00

Chapter 5: Tsar Lazar's Choice

The new Yugoslave Prime Minister, Ante Markovic, believed that liberal economic reforms were the key to stabilizing, indeed saving, federal Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, by the time he took power, the Federal institutions were too weak to force the Republics into compliance, and the three most powerful republics--Serbia, Slovenia, and Croatia--were against him.

In the meantime, Milosevic fully embraced Serb nationalism as a political tool by leading and speaking at the huge commemoration of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo Polje. The unprecedented public display of the bones of Prince Lazar, and the move to transport those bones to Serb Orthodox monasteries around Yugoslavia was a provocative move to symbolically lay claim to "Serb lands." Milosevic, as President of Serbia, was flexing his political muscle in full view of his rivals.

Slovenia saw the writing on the wall, and moved to take action to protect itself from the moves towards centralization under Serb domination. Proposed constitutional changes (some of which was premised on selectively chosen economic grievances) would have made Slovenia virtually a sovereign nation, although the Slovenes answered Serb complaints by pointing out that Serbia, too, had altered its Constitution without input from the other republics. The Slovenes understood that Milosevic had figured out how to use the structure of the Federal government against itself, and felt they had no choice in order to protect Slovenian interests.

The Slovenes were able to go ahead with their plans when the constitutional court argued that it could not rule on proposed changes; and then again when the JNA surprised everybody by refusing to take action against Slovenia, which disappointed Milosevic.

Serbia responded by attempting to stage a Serb rally in Ljubljana, and then by pushing for a Serb boycott of doing business with Slovenia. The break was nearly complete.

This all culminated in the Fourteenth (and final) Extraordinary Party Congress, during which every single amendment proposed by Slovenian delegates--no matter what the content--was voted down by solid majorities from Serbia and Montenegro. It became clear to the Slovenes that they were not only to be humiliated but completely emasculated; eventually, they chose to walk out of the Congress to the cheers of Serb and Montenegrin delegates. Milosevic's attempt to carry on without them was foiled, however, because the Croatian delegation also walked out, a contigency Milosevic had not counted on. Without a quorum, the Congress was suspended, never to be reassembled. Yugoslavia as a functioning state was nearly finished.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [3]

2010-08-21T16:38:00.004-04:00

Chapter 3: "No Way Back."

Subtitled "The Slovene Spring, 1988", this chapter begins with the sentence: "As Milosevic consolidated power, the authorities in Slovenia were relaxing their hold." This parallel development is crucial to understanding the dynamics of what happened next, but it is also important to look closely at the political dynamics in Slovenia in the final years of Yugoslavia in order to understand, as so many revisionists do not, how neither the Slovene leadership nor the Slovene nationalist opposition were not the drivers of the breakup of Yugoslavia. The liberalization of political and civil society in Slovenia did not necessarily lead inexorably towards the dissolution of Yugoslavia.

While the Slovenian leadership were dealing with the push towards democratization and economic liberalization, the one Federal institution with real power--the Army--took offense at some actions taken by the influential opposition magazine Mladina, including leaking of confidential documents as well as harsh criticism of the military leadership.

The resulting crackdown--which was clumsy and overbearing, and mostly revealed how out of touch the army leadership had become--united the Slovene opposition and rallied the normally conservative Slovene public behind them. It also put Kucan and the rest of the republics Party leadership under pressure to pick a side; ultimately, they would side with the public against the Army and the Federal institutions.

The situation was not yet critical and the damage was not yet irreparable; it would take the calculated and cynical manipulation of the situation by Milosevic to make sure that there was truly "No Way Back."

Chapter 4: Comrade Slobodan: Think Hard"

Slobodan Milosevic was a calculating petty tyrant who was capable of appearing to believe whatever ideology was convenient at the moment. He was also a master manipulator of the complex Federal and republican bureaucracies in the former Yugoslavia; and he was the first politician in that country to understand the power of populism as a force and of the mob as a political weapon.

This chapter details the systematic way Milosevic used these abilities to stymie attempts by the leadership of other republics and even the Federal government to halt his destructive path to gaining power over first Serbia, then Kosovo, then Vojvodina, and finally Montenegro. It lays bare how cyncially and proactively popular sentiment was finessed, channeled, and harnessed by Milosevic and his cronies in order to intimidate and defeat rivals within his growing sphere of political power; claims by revisionists and apologists that the wars in Yugoslavia were the regrettable but unavoidable consequence of the loosening of Federal authority are exposed as patronizing falsehoods.

One sentence in particular is worth quoting: "With this move, Milosevic made clear his strategy towards the Yugoslav federation: when it was opportune he invoked the supremacy of the federal institutions over the republics; but when it was in his interest, he claimed that Serbia would not obey the dictates of the federation." Two things are noteworthy about this statement. One; it is no exaggeration. Many times, Milosevic explicitly declares that the Serb people will not allow any Yugoslav institution stand in their way (such statements were often made in the context of carefully planned and stage-managed mass rallies, complete with the threat of violence), and at other times he is a stickler for the letter of the law; he was a master at using the complex rules of the Yugoslav constitution to his own benefit, even as he sought to destroy it. Two; this statement must be remembered whenever revisionists and apologists for the Greater Serbia project utilize arguments based on the technicalities of Yugoslav law. Milosevic only played by the rules of the system when it was in his tactical interest to do so, even though his larger strategic aim was to destroy the system. He openly flouted his contempt for the rule of law time and time again; something which his pathetic minions of admirers consistently fail to acknowledge.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [2]

2010-08-16T17:40:00.004-04:00

Part One: Laying the Charge

The six chapters in Part One detail political events in Yugoslavia from the publication of the infamous Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Art in 1986, to the eave of armed fighting in the Krajina region of Croatia in early 1990.

It is worth stressing again, that the book traces the political developments in the country; while the authors understand and explain that nationalist tensions and grievances were a real issue prior to the outbreak of hostilities, they categorically reject the possibility that the mere existance of such resentments and prejudices could explain the Yugoslav wars. The book makes it quite clear that the wars which destroyed Yugoslavia were the direct result of deliberate political decisions made by ambitious and shrewd political leaders.

Chapter 1: "This Is Our Land"

We begin with the publication of the Memorandum, which the authors put into context of the political situation in Yugoslavia after the death of Tito in 1980 and the Yugoslav constitution of 1974. We are also introduced to Dobrica Cosic, Ivan Stambolic, and Slobodan Milosevic, among others. Cosic's status as the godfather of modern Serbian nationalism is briefly sketched out, and while Stambolic takes the position of an orthodox Communist official who fears the latent power of nationalism and who wishes to keep the Titoist system working, we are shown Milosevic shrewdly keeping silent on the issue, although a party official in his position should very well have had an opinion. The calculating, ruthless nature of the man is already beginning to show.

At the end of the chapter, the Serbian government took Cosic and his co-conspirators under its wing; the Communists were coopting the nationalists for their own ends--a power play to replace the vacuum still left vacant by Tito's death.

Chapter 2: "No One Should Dare to Beat You."

This chapter is a detailed summary of Milosevic's infamous visit to Kosovo in 1987, the circumstances surrounding it as well as the context it occured in. While the basic outlines of the story are familiar to anyone who has studied the Balkan wars, what is striking about Silber and Little's account is how much of these events were thoroughly stage-managed and prepared. Milosevic, the nationalist Kosovo Serb leadership, and the Serbian media all cooperated to create a flashpoint moment which, more than any single event, sent everything which followed into motion.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [1]

2010-08-15T14:03:00.004-04:00

[I am now embarking on my promised ongoing/open-ended series of books reviews; I am undertaking this project with an eye towards developing an online annotated bibliography of books on the Bosnian war, the context it occurred in, and related issues. I am working these reviews out in process in public view in hopes of soliciting feedback, editorial suggestions, and knowledgeable feedback. Please feel free to weigh in on these reviews as I work them out in this public forum.]

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Laura Silber and Alan Little

In 1995, BBC broadcast a six-part documentary entitled "Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation", which won wide praise for its in-depth reporting and extensive use of previously unseen archival footage.

Two of the journalists who were deeply involved in creating the series, Laura Silber and Alan Little, would subsequently go on to produce a book by the same title based on the body of documentation gathered for the production of the BBC series. This book would also garner much-deserved acclaim, and nearly fifteen years after its publication remains probably the best widely availabe single-volume English-language history of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

As the Introduction makes clear, the authors intended this book to be a dispassionate, fact-based work of sober reportage; to quote:

"It is also important to state what this book is not. It is not a crie de coeur of the "Save Bosnia Now" type (though we both believe that Bosnia could, and should, have been saved). It is not a polemic against the failure of the West to protect the weak against the strong, or even to honor its own promises. And it is not a book about journalism or journalists; it is not a "we were there and it was horrible" account of life on the front line."

This disclaimer is accurate. The authors are willing to let the facts speak for themselves, and they do powerfully in this book. For someone who knows nothing of how the wars started or what happened once they did, this is the place to start. The authors do not dwell too deeply on history--the story begins with Milosevic's rise to power, after only the briefest of historical sketches in the Introduction to set the stage. There is no examination of cultural or social undercurrents to the violence. The authors are concerned with political decisions made by mostly unscrupulous leaders who were willing to utilize the latent power of nationalism to fill the political void left by Tito's death.

The Introduction is brief, and sets the stage for the story to come. There are multiple maps, a "Cast of Characters" giving names and a brief identifying entry for approximately 175 persons, a list of acronyms, and a sense that the reader is in the hands of two authors who are able to present sober, even-keeled analysis without jettisoning their respective moral compasses in a misguided quest to be "neutral" or "objective."

Journalist Peter Lippman Bosnia Journal #9

2010-08-13T22:08:00.001-04:00

Bosnia journal #9
Herzegovina and wrap-up
August 12, 2010

ODDS & ODDS

For me, Bosnia-Herzegovina is a complicated place. When I went there after the war, people asked me why I was there. Most foreigners were going because it was a career move. I answered, “I want to understand.” Not necessarily understanding my response, people said, “Oh, you can’t understand this place, when we hardly understand it ourselves.” I resolved to keep trying.

I have realized that in any place and in any situation, it is good to ask the same question of several people in order to get different answers. There is always something that someone either does not know, does not understand, or simply does not want to tell you. In some places, I consider a specific person my “third answer,” the one I can present with odd information that he or she will help me sort out.

There is Nerin in Stolac. Huso in Mostar (unfortunately for me this year, he was out of town). Jadranka in Sarajevo is one of those as well, my “third answer.” I have written about the grassroots level of activism in Bosnia and my impression that it is in a slump. Some of the people who had previously been involved in edgy activism have moved into institutional work. Jadranka concurred. She told me that a certain prominent activist has been traveling from one Western European country to another, meeting with the Bosnian diaspora, and urging them to vote. Maybe that is important work, but it is hardly the front line.

Jadranka also criticized another grassroots group I have visited, that more recently has “come indoors.” They are conducting a charity project that, according to Jadranka, could be done by any NGO. There’s no risk in it.

I recounted to Jadranka a factoid I had heard: that Muhamed Ali Gashi was one of Alija Izetbegovic’s pallbearers at his funeral in 2003. Gashi is the Albanian mafioso I mentioned in my reports in 2008-2009, one of the few who has ever actually been sentenced for his crimes and is now doing time in jail (see http://www.glypx.com/BalkanWitness/journal2008-10.htm). Among other things, his group is suspected of having killed gang leader Ramiz Delalovic “Celo” in 2007. Jadranka said, “Of course Gashi was Alija’s pallbearer. They were all there, Celo too.”

MOSTAR

Mostar is one of the most compelling places in all Bosnia, probably because of its astonishing beauty, but also because of its particularly tormented recent history. You go to the old section. You walk above the rushing Neretva. You take the same photos every time, and new ones.

There is the beauty, and there is the climate -- I felt like I was baking the whole time I was there in early July -- and the humor of local people.

Then, if you are not just a tourist, you walk over to Bulevar and Santiceva streets, which divide east and west -- it’s not the river that divides. You feel the completely different atmosphere of the two sides, one dominated by the Croat nationalist political infrastructure, the other by the Bosniaks. You see how the Bosniaks, with fewer weapons, got the worst of it -- even today you still see the rubble. You see how west Mostar looks and feels like a Zagreb suburb. And if you read a little or talk to local folks, you hear about how the division exists in the minds of the inhabitants and is cemented by cooperation between the two political machines. Here is Mostar, in the words of some people I talked with.

I have known Kreso Krtalic for quite some years, since the time of the campaign to rebuild Santiceva Ulica (Street). An architect, Kreso was instrumental in that struggle, together with Silva Memic. They succeeded in pressuring local authorities and the international community to fund the reconstruction of this street, the heart of modern Mostar. Kreso says, “We all fought to return to Santiceva. Ninety percent returned. We planted new linden trees there. No one sold their apartment because of nationalism; some sold because they needed the money. I would never leave here; I was born here.

“There are a couple of buildings on Santiceva that are not fixed. Many of the buildings are fixed on the outside, but not on the inside. They are supposed to be fixed, but the money is lacking. Meanwhile, they are building a sports hall and a new bridge.”

“Everyone needs a place to live, social coverage, and health care. But people are hungry and poor. And they vote unrealistically. The dissatisfied just think about ethnic problems… The political parties should make plans and programs, and they should be required to quit if they do not fulfill them within a year…The international community should have taken over and built factories. In a half year, people would be working, not hating. When we work, we don’t talk politics.”

Kreso advocates development and environmental protection. He says, “The economic crisis divides people; for example, if we could open 10,000 work places in Mostar, then the tension would disappear; there would be no problem. We all work together in building; we keep occupied together from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., and we don’t think about politics.

“Mostar needs to protect the water and the environment. There are more plastic bags in the river than in the supermarkets. The government must comprehend that the environment is an urgent issue.”

Summing up his outlook on local development, Kreso said, “If qualified people were to lead Mostar, we would be the first in the Balkans in five or six years. Because we have the resources, the people, the culture, the environment. For example, we could export water. Money should be directed towards technical development, to reconstruction, not to the politicians and the economists.”

Looking back at the 1990s, Kreso said, “It was hard to come out of the war with a clean conscience…All of the politicians from 1990 should receive between five and fifty years in jail. They are all criminals. If they were against the war, they should have resigned. They all won, and there is no state.”

*

I talked with Marko Tomaš, who works with the youth group Abraševic Cultural and Artistic Society (“KUD Abraševic”). Abraševic works with media and produces concerts and other cultural events. It strives to create an atmosphere of normality, of young people collaborating regardless of ethnicity, in a city where Croats and Bosniaks are expected to conduct completely separate lives.

We talked about activism in the city. Marko said, “As for grassroots movements, unfortunately, there is very little that is sincere, that people can believe in. I am skeptical towards the movements. They tend to be a way of money laundering, self-promotion. They are not focused. They do not have a clear idea or plan. They are involved in raising a fuss without a goal. This describes ‘pokret Dosta.’ As for Nasa Stranka [the relatively new non-nationalist party], I have heard good things about them, but they are politically illiterate. I agree with their goals, but they lack a strategy. You can’t change things suddenly; you must go step by step.”

Q. Is there anything positive happening in Mostar?

Marko: “Very little. Most of the change is going to take place in the political realm. But the present situation will continue as it is until the political operators sell off the entire city. If the politicians were compelled to behave legally, they would not have room for the murky business. These corrupt operations have nothing to do with ‘national interest,’ but with financial interest. So there is a situation in which chaos is maintained. But the day will come when all this will become illegal.

“Change must take place in the political structure. In this situation, there can be no civil revolution, because of the manipulation. In the media, there are people who produce forgetfulness. In politics, people are voting from fear. There is a construction and commercial lobby that backs the politicians, who are stealing as long as there is something to steal. It is a ridiculous situation, but the reality is as clear as day.”

*

Finally, I talked with Predrag Zvijerac, a young journalist for the independent daily Dnevni List. Speaking of the divisions in Mostar, Predrag said, “Here in Mostar it is absolutely divided. The youth don’t meet each other. The older people only do if they work together. The water system is divided, the public maintenance companies as well, the fire company -- all the public companies. Private firms are segregated as well. If I as a Muslim work on the east side and my kids go to school there, then it is easier for me just to move there.

“Young people can meet in a kafana, or at the movie theater. But everyone has their favorite kafana, and they are divided by the geography. There are the two separate football clubs. There are fewer fights these days. [Sports events have often broken out into violence]. There are 1,500 police, and they are strict. But just the fact that there have to be that many police is bad.”

The situation of the (non-existent) movie theater illustrates the problem of Mostar: “The theaters are all closed except for the big Kazaliste, which opens occasionally,” says Predrag. “There is no movie theater. The local politicians are not interested in having one. They are all corrupt, and they can’t agree how to divide the money. Everyone has to pay for permits. A movie theater would be a place where young people could go to meet each other. The population of Mostar is 150,000. The city has no money for a movie theater. So the question is, who will build it? Here, you only get permits via political connections.

What happened was that one man who had the money to invest came to town, but he gave up in ten days. He saw that he had to bribe the mayor and both sides, too many people.”

On the subject of the upcoming national elections in October, Predrag said, “The youth are not interested in politics. In the elections, only about 40% of them will vote. More vote in the general elections than in the local ones, which is absurd, since local politics affect us much more. Youth are not interested because the candidates are either unknown, or they have something bad on their record. The parties like young and stupid candidates.

“The young people are only interested in politics if they are directly involved, for example if they work in the media, or they are in politics themselves. Or if they are seeking some benefit for themselves. For example here, the Elektroprivreda [regional electrical distribution company] only hires people who are members of the HDZ.

“Eight out of ten university students never vote, because they don’t like our politicians. Or, among the Croats, there is no alternative. The differences between our (Croat) politicians are not political, but about money. That is, they are just involved in a struggle for power. The young people can see this. There are 40% unemployed, and they see when they are looking for work that people connected with the parties decide who gets a job and who does not. So they don’t vote. And that leads to minority rule, because it’s a minority that votes. So the parties must change.

“Most of the people who do vote are from the village or they are the less educated people. They vote according to tradition. All they know is to circle one party.

“There is a real Catch 22 situation: We choose our government, and then a month later we are against them. Then in the next elections we choose the same people.”

Political power in the city and the region is maintained through ethnic division. Where there are Croat and Bosniak students in one school, they study under the apartheid system called “two schools under one roof.” Based on what Predrag says, it appears that ethnic mistrust is still strong: “There was a survey in west Herzegovina, in Posusje, Siroki Brijeg, Grude, Citluk, and Ljubuski, that is, mainly Croat places. The question was, ‘Have you ever been to Sarajevo, and would you go there?’ Ninety percent of the young people never went there, and are not interested in going. So it is easy to convince people that Sarajevo is Tehran, and that they beat up nuns there.

“If you order ‘kafa’ or ‘kava’ [the latter being the Croatian pronunciation of the word for coffee] in the wrong place, it’s not a problem. But people very rarely go to the other place anymore. Among Croats in Mostar there is the stereotype that ‘if you go to Sarajevo, you must order ‘kafa.’

“The politicians use this ignorance to push people into corrals on an ethnic basis. So my conclusion is that we will always have these nationalist parties, and they will always win. The only exception is places where there has been less conflict, such as in Tuzla.”

STOLAC

Stolac is an idyllic, pleasant town with a brook rustling through it, the Bregava. It is another one of those small towns of Bosnia, older than Sarajevo, with its own history and culture. In fact, Stolac is one of the oldest continually inhabited settlements in the Balkans.

The idyll was destroyed by the war when, in mid-1993, extreme nationalist Croat forces drove out all of the Bosniaks, who had been the majority in the town. Bosniaks started returning bravely towards the end of the decade, and Stolac is somewhat resettled now. In the core of the city the mosques and some of the old estates are rebuilt, although there are still ruins along the river and up into the hills. Apartheid is the order of the day in Stolac, with Croat nationalists controlling the politics and the economy. As in Mostar, what power the Bosniaks have is in the hands of the SDA, the nationalist Bosniak party, which cooperates with the Croat lords of separatism.

Activists struggle in different ways to assert Bosniak rights in Stolac. The reconstruction of the ancient mosques says, “We are still here.” I happened to be in the town for the “Days of Stolac Mosques,” when solemn ceremonies of prayer celebrated the reopening of one of the mosques. The prayer reverberated across the center of the old town. Catty-corner to the Czar’s Mosque sits a kafana that is popular among the Croats, who have erected a monument right on that main corner. That monument, topped by a Catholic cross, honors the Croats who died in the 1990s war. As the amplified call of the Imam filled the air, Stolac Croats drinking coffee across the street, whether they wished to or not, listened and looked at the green banner strung up in front of the mosque, announcing the event. Such is coexistence in apartheid Stolac.

I talked to Minva Hasic of the Stolac women’s organization “Orhideja” (Orchid). This organization helps disabled people, offers various social services for women, and conducts workshops on such topics as health issues and street violence. It also runs a mixed-ethnicity youth club. Minva says, “There is a larger rate of returned Bosniaks to Stolac than to all the rest of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Stubborn people have returned. Then, there are also Croats in the region who were forced to leave central Bosnia, and the local Croats do not support them. We [Bosniak] returnees and those displaced persons have the same problems.”

The high school in Stolac has long operated under the “two schools under one roof” system. On this situation, Minva said, “People are losing knowledge, and there is no development of the culture. There are two sports clubs for each sport…We conducted a survey of high school students’ plans for the future. The Bosniak director had it filled out and sent back to us. The Croat director returned it, saying he could not understand it because it was ‘not in Croatian.’ This just adds to the frustration and the heating up of nationalism.”

I visited with Nerin Dizdar, a prominent young leader of grassroots activism against apartheid around Stolac. His organization, the Youth Forum of Stolac, has been active in all kinds of projects over the past eight or ten years, including guerrilla actions like removing emblems of Croat dominance around the town. The Forum also holds an annual camp for young people from all over Bosnia and abroad. And the group tries to restore and protect architectural and cultural symbols of the old Stolac -- not only mosques, but the Serbian Orthodox cemetery as well, and the ancient pre-Ottoman tombs known as stecci (stecaks).

The municipal government of Stolac tries to obstruct the Forum’s multi-ethnic summer camp. When the Forum requests permission to use centrally-located property, the municipal council withholds electricity and permits. They tell the Forum, “Get permission from Jozo Peric to use that property.” But Jozo Peric, a pre-war gangster, is in hiding, wanted for war crimes, tax evasion, and other post-war crimes.

The Forum has gotten around the obstruction by getting funding from abroad and by holding its events on private property that supporters made accessible. Meanwhile, Nerin and his colleagues continue to fight against discrimination and nationalist domination. For example, last year some high school students took down symbols of Catholic ethnic dominance in the school, and the Forum supported this action. The struggle is ongoing in that school where, until last year, a former member of the Croat nationalist militia (HVO), accused of war crimes, was principal of the school. He was removed last year. There has been pressure from the Federal Parliament to end the segregation of the school, but it has not happened yet.

When I asked Nerin if he could still characterize the situation in Stolac as “apartheid,” he said, “Yes, this is apartheid. They put a cross up in a public space (near the entrance to town). This is a monument to the ‘Croat defenders.’ It was approved by the SDA [the dominant Bosniak nationalist party]. Cikotic [Bosniak Minister for Defense] was ok with this. Soldiers from the Bosnian army came when it was unveiled, carrying the banned Herceg-Bosna flag [of the wartime Croat parastate] and singing the Croatian anthem.

“When you ask about justice, you are called ‘radical.’ No one has said they are sorry [for the war crimes that the Croat nationalists committed against the Bosniaks of Stolac during the war]. In fact, people are still celebrating the crimes that happened. But if you suppress history, it comes back.

“I do not believe in collective guilt, but there is collective responsibility. I feel responsible for what the Muslims did in Grabovica [a war crime committed in a Croat village in central Bosnia, where Bosniak troops killed thirteen villagers]. We need to resolve that history. Now, war criminals are treated as national heroes. It is unacceptable to diminish the victimhood of anyone.”

Nerin spoke of the collaboration between the leading Bosniak and Croat nationalist parties, the SDA and HDZ, respectively. He noted that the old principal of the high school, Ivo Raguz, had been appointed after approval by the leaders of those two parties, Sulejman Tihic and Dragan Covic. “Tihic is close to Covic. There are too many old politicians in position…A stable state with transparency and rule of law would put an end to those politicians.

“There is a great project of corrupting the public; for example, there are a half million “defenders” [a number that has been inflated so that more people can take advantage of pension rights] of BiH, and another large number of war disabled. This is a way of buying people off. There are people who get donations, say, two tractors, so they can sell one of them. The parties make extra donations to corrupt NGOs, which are not required to give receipts for the donations.”

In the midst of all this corruption, the HDZ obstructs real economic reconstruction of the municipality, and the SDA goes along with this obstruction. Nerin gave me several examples of projects with promised donations from international sources, but roadblocks to the projects were thrown up by the local authorities.

“The Croats are not comfortable with what the HDZ is doing,” Nerin said. “They know that we are just asking for equal rights. But they are still disciplined voters for the HDZ. They never raise their voices against what is happening.”

In my last visit to Stolac, in 2008, I had met with Zvonko Peric, head of the youth section of one of the Croat nationalist parties, the HDZ-1990 (a splitoff from HDZ). I wrote about him in a journal after that visit -- see http://www.glypx.com/BalkanWitness/journal2008-9.htm (there’s more there about Mostar and other stories about Stolac as well). Peric had discussed problems of post-war recovery with me, and he called for the establishment of a “third (Croat) entity.” Towards the end of our talk his discourse devolved into a repetition of various crude conspiracy theories.

Soon after I arrived in Bosnia in May this year, I heard on the news that Zvonko Peric had been arrested for drug trafficking. Together with seven other people, including a police inspector from nearby Capljina, Peric was arrested for possession of over 25 kilos of marijuana. A (Croat) Stolac high school professor was involved as well, as were a couple of Serbs from Banja Luka and Montenegro. In organized crime as at the heights of nationalist politics, multi-ethnic collaboration remains alive and well.
(See http://www.blic.rs/Vesti/Republika-Srpska/192069/Uhapsen-lider-mladih-HDZ-1990-sa--30-kg-droge and http://www.croatiantimes.com/news/General_News/2010-06-01/11362/Youth_of_HDZ_1990_leader_arrested_for_drug_trade).

This all reminds me of one of my favorite comments from an old friend, that the postwar regime is a manifestation of the “revenge of the bad students.” I mentioned this phrase to Nerin, and he said, “Zvonko Peric is an example of the revenge of the bad students. It is their policy to choose such people.”

Looking for comment on the state of activism in Bosnia-Herzegovina, I also mentioned to Nerin what I had written about Pokret Dosta earlier in this series, that they are “apparently not in a dynamic phase.” Nerin replied, “They have never been in a dynamic phase. They have only organized protests that would have happened anyway. They print t-shirts.”

TREBINJE

Trebinje is but an hour’s ride from Stolac, but I had not been there for thirteen years. A friend mentioned to me the names of a couple of people it would be interesting to talk with in Trebinje, so I decided to take a day trip to the southernmost town in the Serb-controlled part of Herzegovina. I got up early one day and took a ride with Stolac’s only taxi driver, a friendly man who doubles as the newspaper delivery link for Trebinje.

Herzegovina is like California -- only more Mediterranean in culture -- and you feel this especially in Trebinje, with its warm and sunny climate, its fig trees and kiwi and grape vines, and its broad main square lined with kafanas. On the morning I arrived there, a couple dozen local farmers, merchants, and craft workers had set up their tables and were selling fruit, vegetables, books, and dry goods on the square. Having a couple of extra hours, I walked over the hill above the Trebisnjica River and down to the old Arslanagic Bridge, built by the Ottomans.

The town, sitting under the Leotar mountain, felt peaceful and quiet. I walked among the stone buildings and into the walled Old Town, where I noticed that the old mosque had been rebuilt. It was a bit spooky, however, knowing that Trebinje had been “cleansed” of its Bosniak population early in the war.

It’s easier to be a tourist if you don’t know any history.

I met with Nikola Sekulovic, a local opposition politician who had been president of the municipal council for some years. He has distinguished himself by opposing the hegemony of Prime Minister Dodik’s party and the local mayor Dobrislav Cuk, one of Dodik’s men. An economist, Sekulovic is the leader of a bloc of swing voters called “Movement for Trebinje.” Not long after Dodik’s party [the SNSD] and Cuk replaced the old hardline SDS rule, Cuk began replicating the corrupt behavior of the earlier party, selling off concessions to his cronies for exploitation of local resources, and appointing his relatives to various government positions.

Sekulovic described the local situation for me: “There are deals being made, blackmailing, corruption, criminality. In 2009 there was a development strategy paper released that dated from 2008 to 2017, but there is still no development. The budget was 22 million KM in 2008, and now it is around 15 KM.

“We are borrowing from Austrian banks. There could be chaos; we will be paying for this for years. When the SNSD came to power, companies here started disappearing. They destroyed the lumber industry. They made deals for corrupt projects. There have been no capital projects except Intereks (the department store), if you can call that development.

“Former communists, from the fourth echelon of the politics of those days, are in the SNSD now. They don’t know how to create employment. There are two or three Bosniaks in the local government; they are for show, to satisfy the international community.

“Ordinary people are living worse than ever. Corruption and criminality have increased, as has nepotism. People have been threatened and followed. This is reminiscent of 1948, when there was the break with the Soviet Union and much repression.”

Echoing a theme from Nerin Dizdar and Marko Tomaš, Sekulovic said, “Dodik does not like smart people. He is only looking at where he can steal more.”

The regional bishop of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Bishop Grigorije, excommunicated Nikola Sekulovic (See http://humanrightshouse.org/Articles/10514.html). Grigorije presumably took this extreme move because of Sekulovic’s outspoken opposition to Dodik’s and Cuk’s corruption and regional hegemony. Since Grigorije is based in Trebinje and is a close collaborator with Dodik, Sekulovic’s criticisms affect him as well.

Of his problems with the church, Sekulovic said, “I am a religious person. I was baptized when I was little. The church played a very negative role in the war, and now, instead of uniting people, it has worked to create disunity.”

Q: Why were you excommunicated?

Sekulovic: “I asked uncomfortable questions: Why did you sell church land to [a local politician]?; Why don’t you pay the priests’ pensions? Grigorije also made corrupt deals with other local personalities. The Church buys companies here. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

Q: I heard that Grigorije is leaving for Belgrade.
Sekulovic: “He already stole what he could here.”

I asked Sekulovic about refugee return to Trebinje: “It has been weak. Many Bosniaks went to Scandinavia. There were 5,500 Bosniaks here; now there are between 100 and 200.”

Assessing the overall situation, Sekulovic said, “We need a lot of time for things to change. In a way, the youth are worse than the older people, since they are infected with nationalism. We could need another twenty years, to forget the war.”

I did not have the impression that Sekulovic was concerned as much with the correction of historical injustices in Trebinje as he was with stopping local corruption and, probably, getting into a position of power. He reminded me of the phenomenon of a certain political type that appears periodically among the politicians of Bosnia: someone who rises up and calls for a stop to the corruption among his own ethnicity. Usually that person fails and disappears. Sometimes they succeed because people believe in them. Then, sometimes, they go on to become corrupt themselves. Such was Biljana Plavsic in 1997; she ended up in a Swedish prison (until recently), convicted of war crimes. Her protégé was Milorad Dodik.

One thing that reinforced my impression of Sekulovic was how he showed me a raft of photographs of himself with former US Ambassador Clifford Bond, and any number of prominent Bosnian Serb politicians.

As I left his office, I asked Sekulovic what happened with the excommunication, and he told me he had been pardoned. He was wearing a cross around his neck.

*

I had also been advised to meet Blazo Stevovic, a local Serb activist on a more grassroots level. Blazo had gained media notice over the past few years for calling attention to corruption and the war criminals residing in Trebinje. He has declared against “Greater Serbian hegemony,” campaigning to remember the Bosniak victims of the ethnic cleansing that took place in the eastern Herzegovina region early in the war. For his efforts he was, like Nikola Sekulovic, excommunicated from the Serbian Orthodox Church. Stevovic has also called for a public admission of genocide in the RS and an official apology to the victims. It is extremely rare to find a Serb in the RS who will behave like Stevovic, so I felt compelled to go meet him.
(For a couple of articles on Stevovic, see http://humanrightshouse.org/Articles/12877.html and http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/main/news/27490)

Stevovic greeted me with a smile and an expansive affect in the main square in Trebinje. As we sat at a kafana, he told me that he had been involved in Otpor [the youth organization that helped dump Milosevic] in Belgrade in 2000, and that he is now engaged in theater work in Trebinje.

Stevovic painted a picture of the situation in Trebinje: “There are big problems. Life is very hard. There are war criminals in power. No one has tried them. And there is no real opposition. There were twenty people [Bosniaks] killed here during the war, and 5,500 deported. There is no civil society. Those who attacked Dubrovnik from here [during the war between Serbia and Croatia in 1991] have also not been prosecuted.”

On corruption, Stevovic elaborated, “Many development and construction projects here have been contracted without tenders. Serbian Telekom bought the RS Telekom illegally. Then, there were chests of cash delivered to Radovan Karadzic in Serbia via Bijeljina [he names two operators who channeled the money to Karadzic] …In the last year and a half more than 100 city functionaries broke the law. These criminals have to be put in jail. This is a regional problem. There is much drug trafficking coming through Trebinje. But the police inspectors in charge of investigating trafficking collaborate with the drug dealers…We need to make some surgical cuts to establish rule of law here.

“There needs to be court processing of the criminals and the corrupt actors. I am in favor of creating a civic, unified Bosnia-Herzegovina without entities, cantons, or districts. One state with a strong central government and local self-government.”

I found Stevovic’s discourse to be roughly appropriate, politically, but a bit airy and conspiratorial, with statements like, “Goran Zubac is the chief of police here. I have evidence against him.”

Stevovic told me that his apartment was burglarized as retaliation for his activism, and that he knows who did the crime, and who ordered it: “There was a newspaper called Prst [finger], a tabloid. They attacked me, calling me a queer, and an agent. Cuk [mayor of Trebinje] ordered the burglary. Since that happened, I sleep during the day and stay awake at night.”

Stevovic works with an organization called “Trebinje Alternative Club.” He hopes to establish a free newspaper, a blog, and a Facebook page in four languages. He also talks of initiating a festival as a cultural collaboration with nearby Dubrovnik. “I see the development of tourism, a demilitarized region, and multi-ethnic society,” he told me, “We have a good strategic position here, because we are close to Dubrovnik, Nikšic, and other attractive and interesting locations. Tourism could be developed. But I talk to all the politicians, and they do not have vision about what should happen in one month, let alone five years from now.”

It takes time to assess the scene in any locale in Bosnia-Herzegovina. I have been going to most of the places I have reported on for over a decade, but I don’t have deep connections in Trebinje. I don’t have a “third answer” there yet. So it is still hard to get a perspective on what’s real and what’s hot air coming from Sekulovic and Stevovic -- but this is a start.

Stevovic’s talk about war crimes and apology was refreshing -- I had heard nothing of that from Sekulovic. But I don’t have a sense of how solidly Stevovic’s feet are on the ground, how much he has a local base. I asked him if he had local support, and he answered, “I have no support, but 80% of the people here agree with me. There is a network of corruption and criminality, and people are afraid to talk about who has robbed whom in this city.

“In 2004 I ran for office. I talked about the need for ‘de-Nazification.’ I was called a traitor, and I received 84 votes in the election. If I had been elected, things would be very different here today.”

On religion, Stevovic said, “I come from a religious family. There is no five-pointed star [symbol of socialism] in my village, only crosses. Grigorije excommunicated me because since 2003 I have been calling him a criminal. He helped bring the tycoons to power.” I asked him what the status of his excommunication was. He said, “The Church pardoned me, but I will accept that when Grigorije apologizes.” When I mentioned that I had heard that Grigorije was going to move to Belgrade, he repeated Sekulovic’s assessment: “He has to, he has stolen everything he can steal here.”

YUGONOSTALGIA

Before the war, all kinds of tacky things used to happen when you would take a bus ride in Yugoslavia, especially in the poorer, less-organized parts of the country. For example, I remember traveling the length of Serbia and the whole busload of passengers getting getting dumped in the middle of the night with no explanation other than that “nema guma,” there are no “wheels.”

After the war, in Bosnia, the Croat-owned or Croatian buses tended to be the nicest, some of them even with two stories, or air-conditioning. The Bosniak-owned lines were ok, average. The Serb-owned buses were old and run down. They were getting the least money.

Back in Srebrenica: After we were done with observances and visits, we rushed to the little bus station in Srebrenica to catch the 4:30 to Sarajevo. It was the only bus of the day.

However, when we got to the station, the bus that was to take us had run into the overhanging roof of the station. The driver had forgotten about the air-conditioning unit projecting up from the back of the bus. It was spewing water and hanging off the back. The back window was broken too.

Local police were making their investigation and announced that this bus wasn’t going anywhere. That seemed reasonable. So we waited an hour for another bus. After an hour, a wretched Zvornik (Serb-owned) bus with its dirty windows and smelly vinyl came to take us away.

We hung a left at Bratunac and headed towards Kravica when there was a loud “PSSHHH” and a flat tire. We stood by the side of the road. Sarah and I discovered a plum tree. After half an hour the original bus, with the broken back window and now no air-conditioning unit, came to get us.

I was wondering what the third problem was going to be, but there wasn’t really one. Except that it was stifling in the bus, and predictably, a woman behind us would not allow us to leave the skylight open -- she said the draft was “killing her.” Instead, we breathed fumes coming in through the back window.

CRITICAL THINKING

I sat in a Croatian bus to Vukovar with tables like breakfast nooks. The bus had two stories, but I never went upstairs -- no driver up there. A middle-aged woman from Tuzla sat across from me and we became acquainted. She told me that she had seen a French documentary that proved that the whole moon landing was filmed in a studio in Hollywood or somewhere.

After a while she asked me, “Do you believe that the moon landing happened?” I said that I was inclined to believe it. She asked me, “Then why were all the people who filmed it in that studio killed later?”

A couple of announcements

2010-07-28T11:59:00.003-04:00

First, I'm going on vacation so I won't be blogging or even reading any news or updates about Bosnia for the next couple of weeks. Given that I haven't been posting all that frequently, this might not even be worth mentioning, but just in case you leave a comment and I don't publish it for awhile--now you know.

Secondly, I've been struggling to find a way to keep up this blog while working on some other projects--the beginning of a novel I'm trying to write, and a return to graduate school--and I have yet to make more than token progress on that long-promised annotated bibliography. Having considered what I am able to do with this blog, what I most enjoy doing, and what I would like to accomplish, I have concluded the best course of action, once I return to blogging in two or three weeks.

I plan to simply begin writing reviews of books on at least a weekly basis, maybe devote multiple post to longer books and just one or two for shorter books. This way I can work out the rough draft of the reviews in public, gather feedback and criticism as I go, and begin to organically develop a body of information for this bibliographic database I still want to create.

So, look for review after review after review, beginning sometime in August. I will begin with books on my own bookshelf, particularly better-known and bestselling works, and go from there. For books I've already reviewed, I might revisit some of them.

Once started, I hope to get feedback from anybody who has read the books in question. I'd like to get this project moving forward.

Journalist Peter Lippman Bosnia Journal #8

2010-07-25T18:38:00.005-04:00

Bosnia journal #8
Srebrenica
July 25th, 2010

THE MARŠ MIRA

I embarked on the “Marš mira” (march of peace) to Srebrenica on July 8th, three days before the annual commemoration of the 1995 massacre. The trail of the march retraces, backwards, the escape route that thousands of men and boys took to avoid capture by Serb forces in July of 1995 as the Srebrenica enclave fell. Out of 10,000 to 15,000, only five thousand arrived safely to free territory.

Since 2005, people have been walking the route back into Srebrenica, specifically to Potocari, wartime location of the Dutch UN base and now the memorial cemetery for the massacre victims. There, each year newly-identified remains of exhumed victims are reburied.

The march has been growing every year. Last year there were almost 5,000 participants. I have heard estimates upwards of 6,000 for this year.

Participants gathered on a hill above Nezuk, a village near Sapna, well to the north of Srebrenica and east of Tuzla. This was the end-point of one of the two main escape routes. The other went westward, emerging from Serb-controlled territory near Kladanj, south of Tuzla.

There was a sense of disorganization at the beginning when the head of the march, Camil Durakovic (deputy mayor of Srebrenica) admonished the crowd to get in formation, and people yelled back at him. But the main elements of the march were organized; all we really had to do was walk. At the opening, we listened to the Bosnian national hymn (without words) and held a moment of silence for the victims of Srebrenica.

After a while, around 9:30 a.m., we walked down through Nezuk and south towards the inter-entity borderline between the Federation and the Republika Srpska.

I have fifty-eight years behind me. Every day I take my customary post-prandial walk of approximately a half hour. During the weekends I engage in rampant physical activity as a carpenter. With this regime, before the march I gave myself a 50-50 chance of making the whole thing. A hundred-odd kilometers in three days is not so small.

I knew members of a couple of groups of foreigners and, it seemed, all the Bosnians. I never lacked for company in the crowd. There were the university students from Denver under my friend Alison Sluiter’s capable guidance. There were other scholars from Europe and the US. There was Julia, my colleague from the outback north of Seattle, who arrived from North America the day before without a trace of jet lag. For that matter, there were foreigners from everywhere between Sweden and Australia, Turkey and Canada, Italy and Poland.

Meanwhile, the majority of the march was composed of Bosnians and Herzegovinans from Tuzla and Kljuc, and Mostar and Sarajevo, and everywhere between. There were also participants from Croatia and a contingent of Women in Black from Belgrade and other parts of Serbia.

We hurried up and then waited at bottlenecks in the woods where a massive crowd simply could not pass quickly. Things moved more smoothly after a while, as the group spread out.

Someone near me looked up at the sky and remarked on the light cloud layer: “On these days before the anniversary, the sky should cry.”

I met Sahman, originally from Srebrenica. He had made the march out in 1995, and now comes back every year. I asked him if it was hard for him. He told me, “There are nights when I don’t sleep.” For the march, he said, “I take a couple of pills and that helps me keep calm.”

After a couple of hours we arrived at the first village, a collection of just a few houses. By the time the men were trying to escape in 1995, Serb forces had emptied and torched all the villages on the route. Now most of them have been at least partially repaired and there has been significant return. All the villages we passed in the first two days were populated by Bosniaks. The region of Podrinje, alongside the Drina River (the border with Serbia), had a majority Bosniak population before the war. Srebrenica municipality was 70% Bosniak. Only one town, Cajnice, did not have a Bosniak majority.

Villagers came out to greet us and to offer coffee and water. Teta (aunt) Hanifa came from the next village over. She told me that she had a daughter in the United States, but she could not remember exactly where.

I got some coffee around 11:30 and got my first wind. My old friend Zulfo Salihovic from Srebrenica, earlier a strong leader of return and now a member of the Srebrenica municipal council, was participating in the march with his ten-year-old daughter. I made friends with a young imam from Sarajevo, Mehidin. Later Alison and I fought over whether Mehidin was her imam or mine.

Young men who traveled with ease made up a large minority of the crowd, running back and forth as the rest of us trudged along. I met some youngsters from Gracanica in north-central Bosnia. They were born in Srebrenica but now displaced. One of them told me his father had been killed in the warehouse massacre at Kravica.

I met Ruweida and others from Toronto. They sang the Canadian national anthem, which was not as bad as the American one. Italians walked into the forest and came back holding big mushrooms.

At another village I spotted an old man talking to a couple of marchers, a man and a woman. The woman, Serifa, was from Vitez, central Bosnia. Serifa wore around her neck a photo of her handsome young husband, killed in 1993. She was marching for him. The man, Sabahudin, told me that he had lost his ten-year-old son. The older man told us how all his relatives were killed or else living abroad, and then he broke down, crying.

We marched on through the hills, some of the most beautiful countryside in all Bosnia. As we passed the dense beech forests, my friend Sarah Wagner and I agreed that we felt reconnected to Bosnia in this way. I looked out at the dark green upon green of Podrinje and hoped that I would live long enough to see Bosnia a happier place.

On the first day the weather was warm, but not scorching. It was a long day. The best estimate I heard was that we walked 35 kilometers that day. People seemed unsure about it; the route has changed slightly over the years. We walked ten hours. I didn’t eat much, focusing more on getting water. I kept moving, without undue hustling. In the crowded places, I felt carried along by the tide. The mood was supportive and sometimes buoyant. There were pensive moments too; never much singing; occasionally some chanting.

That night we arrived to a camping place near the village of Kamenica. Soldiers from the Bosnian army set up dozens of UNHCR tents that held ten or fifteen people each. Alison’s students went to sleep in a house, but I wanted to be “with the narod” (people). I didn’t end up sleeping much; there were presentations, then there was noise; it took until midnight for people to settle down. At 4:00 a.m. there was the prayer call.

On the second day we marched several hours until we came down to a river, maybe the Jadar, and rested there. I shaved in the river. We then started the big hike over Udrc mountain, 1200 meters in elevation.

Somewhere on that hill, above Cerska, I heard a young man speaking about a local legend, and I caught up with him. He was pointing to the dense fog in the valley below. He said, “There is a legend, I don’t know if it’s true because I haven’t investigated it. But people used to jump into that fog, thinking that it was a pile of wool.” Adem was from Cerska himself. He pointed in the direction of a cave that could hold 500 people, and said that he had hidden there during the war. Both of his parents were killed.

Adem said, “Tell the world about this march and ask people to come next year.”

I sat with Adem and a couple of other new friends at a villager’s house along the way and drank coffee. The man of the house told me that he and his family had returned to this village and rebuilt their house eight years earlier. There were a dozen-odd kids in the schoolhouse. Some days during the winter they had to walk to school through waist-deep snow.

Once or twice a day we would come up to a big truck where men and women were standing in the flatbed and throwing out kifle (bread similar to hot-dog buns), bottles of water, sometimes cookies, to the crowd. There seemed to be enough food; mine was augmented by nuts and dried fruit that I had carried. In some places the local people had made cookies for the marchers. There were villagers who were just working all day to serve water and coffee.

Periodically we would pass a concrete fountain built by the villagers; some of these fountains, with their Arabic inscriptions, had remained from Ottoman times. People would crowd around them but tended to wait patiently for their turn to get water. I figured out that where there was one fountain, you could skip it and there would be another one, less crowded, a little further down the trail.

I made friends with Jovana from Leskovac, Serbia. She is a member of the valiant Women in Black. I told her that I admired her for coming from Serbia. She talked to me in her endearing south Serbian accent. I asked her why she had come on the march, and she said, “I wanted to be with my friends…maybe that’s not the answer you wanted to hear.” I said, “My job is just to listen.”

The second day was a bit shorter, maybe 25 kilometers. I was tired and dirty that night, and opted to stay in a house with Alison’s students. Several dozen of us foreigners gathered at Djile’s place. There, the women of the house made us a dinner that never seemed to stop, ending with watermelon.

At one point one thing that upset me took place, and I didn’t really realize how shocked I was until later.

A man asked me why I was in the march. Instead of giving the two-hour answer, I just said, “Solidarity.” After a while he asked, “Why here and not…” I finished his sentence: “Palestine, Rwanda, Bolivia?” I explained to him my connection to the region. Then he told me that he had been with DutchBat in 1995, with the UN troops that had failed to protect the enclave of Srebrenica. I shook his hand.

I had heard that some DutchBat soldiers had been participating in the marches over the years, and was glad to meet one of them. “Alonzo” told me that he was there to work out his guilt and his responsibility. I told him, “Yes, a lot of people are not taking their part of the responsibility for the good of this world.” He said, “Maybe.” I insisted, “Definitely.”

Alonzo had been participating in the march since the first year. I asked him if he had read certain books about the fall of Srebrenica, and he said that he had, and that he had participated in a Dutch-produced film about the place.

Then Alonzo began to criticize certain survivors who were active in preserving the memory of the genocide. Of one person, Alonzo said, “He should move on. He’s always crying about the Dutch. He could take better care of his family, and make something of his life. I am going to tell him this myself.”

Here is where I was quite upset, especially later as I thought about it. Alonzo was dealing with his own trauma. But he was not thinking rationally about a survivor’s response. I am convinced that survivors, especially those who have lost family members, have little choice but to fight for the rest of their lives for the establishment of “truth and justice” about what happened. For us who have not had to live through this terrible experience, those words may sound like platitudes. But they are deeply meaningful in this situation.

Alonzo was not up to the task of understanding that situation, I’m afraid. Although he was traumatized, and although he was making an effort to work out his feelings, still he was cushioned by his own privilege to come and go, and to survive with much less pain and loss than the survivors of Srebrenica.

*

On a lighter note, at that same dinner I met a couple of older Italians and a couple of younger ones. Donata is a 76-year-old woman who uses a cane to help her get through the march. This was her fifth time. Last year her husband started accompanying her. Donata and I hit it off because she is also a Palestine solidarity activist.

I spent that night at Smail’s house in Krke, a village near Konjevic Polje. Smail and his wife welcomed me and the students from Colorado with tea and walnuts, as we took turns showering. Smail showed me his farm, full of squash, cucumbers, eggplant, and a heavenly raspberry plantation. Up in the hills Smail also cultivated apples and plums.

There was plenty of chance to talk politics, history, and all related things. Smail was in the Srebrenica enclave throughout the war and made the march out with the column of men. I asked him, “Why did the army remove Naser Oric (one of the main commanders of the resistance against the Serb-held siege) shortly before the fall of the enclave?” Smail said, “That is the question that never gets answered. But I know a couple of things. Naser took a pile of gold out of the enclave with him when he went. And the enclave had to fall. We all knew that, those of us within the enclave as well as outside…this was all planned.”

Smail is moving on in life. His two sons are educated and one has a good job in nearby Milici municipality, the other in Srebrenica. Smail earns enough to live from his farming. He explained to me that there in Bratunac municipality farming was more viable than in Srebrenica, since the land was somewhat flatter and transportation was better-developed. I asked him about refugee return, whether it was mostly older people who had returned. Smail said no, there were plenty of children in the villages along the route we had walked.

The weather got warmer on the second and third day. The terrain coming through the hills in Bratunac municipality, between Konjevic Polje and Potocari, was not as difficult as the day before. We walked farther, maybe 33 kilometers. You started seeing the same people again, walking with different groups at will, even though there were probably over 5,000 of us. The march took on the air of a roving social gathering, one in which everyone was your comrade.

Although the march commemorated a world-class crime and a tragic event, it couldn’t help but be light-hearted at times. I don’t think that was disrespectful; it was simply the nature of such a gathering, with many young people, full of energy. And those young people will go back to Bihac and Visoko and remember the signs noting the mass graves that we passed: Crni Vrh, Cancari, Glodi, and many more. They will tell their friends about what they saw, and more people will come on the pilgrimage next year.

I asked two older men from Olovo what made them come on the march. One said, “I came in order to feel at least a little of the suffering of the people who passed this way before.” The other said, “I came to honor those who came out in 1995.”

A young Turkish man was scrambling around, taking many photographs. It turned out that he was a professional photo-journalist and a member of the IHH, the Turkish humanitarian organization that supported the aid convoy of ships that tried to sail to Gaza in late May. This man, Sarkan, was supposed to go on the Mavi Marmara as ship photographer. At the last minute, work responsibilities kept him from participating. The photographer who took his place was shot in the head by the Israelis.

I also met a couple of men from northwest Bosnia who had spent two hundred days in Manjaca concentration camp, near Banja Luka. One of them was from the village of Hrustovo near Sanski Most, and was the next-door-neighbor of some Bosnian immigrant friends of mine in Seattle.

We neared our goal mid-afternoon, passing through the village of Pale in the hills above Potocari. We stopped there for coffee. We slowed down a bit, savoring the last part of the march. It had been an effort, but not a torment.

THE COMMEMORATION AND MASS FUNERAL: JULY 11TH AT POTOCARI

As we descended the steep last part of the trail on Saturday night, we walked out of the hills into Potocari, right alongside the northern fence of the memorial cemetery. The cemetery is a large compound, big enough to fit the more than 8,000 victims killed during the massacre. Since 2003, over 3,700 identified remains had already been reburied there. Looking through the fence, we saw some of the pits dug to receive another 775 remains the next day.

During the massacres in July of 1995, Serb forces buried the victims in quickly-dug mass graves in dozens of places around Srebrenica and beyond. In the following months most of the graves were dug up and the remains reburied in “secondary graves” to conceal the crime. The complete skeletons often fell apart, the bones becoming mixed up with others. The remains have been discovered so far in over seventy graves. One victim’s remains were retrieved from eleven different locations.

We walked out onto the main street in front of the cemetery, the road from Bratunac to Srebrenica. It was late afternoon and just then, a long double line of men was relaying the coffins out to a field in the memorial compound from where they had been stored, in one of the buildings in the defunct battery factory across the street.

They are not coffins, actually. The Bosnian word is “tabut.” I don’t know an English equivalent for that word. The tabut is a wooden board or tray with a framework coming up from it that is covered with green cloth after the remains are laid inside. This is part of the Muslim tradition. The tabuts are very light, because all they are carrying is bones.

The carrying of the tabuts to the field took a long time. Throngs of marchers and other people, mourners and visitors, sat on the ground or milled around during this time. Eventually we were able to go settle down for the evening.

Sunday warmed up quickly as I trekked down to Potocari from Srebrenica. Non-stop traffic slowed down, eventually to a standstill, as tens of thousands of people arrived at the cemetery. By late morning people had given up on their buses and started walking the rest of the way. And by that time it was almost impossible to enter the compound. Thousands of people waited, seeking a little of the scarce shade around the edges of the factory across the street.

As I entered, Haris Silajdzic was speaking about the need to prohibit the formation of any fascist or neo-Nazi parties in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The US Ambassador, Serbian President Boris Tadic, the Turkish prime minister, and the French foreign minister all had spoken before Silajdzic. No official attended from the Republika Srpska.

President Tadic, attending the ceremony for the second time, said that he had come “as an act of reconciliation.” Srebrenica survivors present had mixed feelings. Some welcomed him, and others asked, “Where is Mladic?” Ratko Mladic, the fugitive wartime general indicted for genocide regarding the Srebrenica massacre, is believed to be living in Serbia under the protection of supporters. About his continuing evasion of capture, the German daily Die Welt wrote, "In a time when the whereabouts of every mobile phone can be traced using global positioning satellites, when satellites can take pictures of the tip of a match and when Google records every street lamp on its maps, this sort of disappearing act is incomprehensible. Serbia obviously still lacks the will to accept the past. How long will they need before they find Mladic?"

Meanwhile, in Belgrade a demonstration celebrating “the liberation of Srebrenica” had been banned. And in Bosnia, SDS, the party founded by Radovan Karadzic, awarded him a special decoration (presented to his wife, since he’s on trial at The Hague for genocide) in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the founding of that party. The party also honored Momcilo Krajisnik, now serving a twenty-year sentence for crimes against humanity. (For more on unreconstructed Serbian nationalism, see http://www.glypx.com/balkanwitness/SerbianNationalism.htm.)

On the other side, Women in Black organized a temporary monument in Belgrade with thousands of shoes, representing the Srebrenica victims.

Finally Bosnia’s chief imam, the Reis Mustafa efendija Ceric, spoke before a prayer, and again at length after a prayer. The central dova (prayer) of the ceremony was the most powerful one I had ever heard -- I experienced it, more than just hearing it. All the emotions of the fifteen years of waiting and the loss of one’s family members seemed to be contained in that Arabic prayer which, as I felt it rather than understood it, united, soothed, and encouraged, all at once.

Masses of praying men and women stood, bowed, and kneeled as the tradition indicated. Then the Reis spoke again, longer than before. In fact, everything about the day’s event was bigger: more people attended; more than ever before were interred; the speeches were longer; and it was hotter. People started fainting and being rushed to the first aid station. Some people became impatient with the Reis as he was speaking angrily in both English and Bosnian about the faults of the international community. Most just waited.

Numerous Srebrenicans I talked to resented the speechifying and politicking that has taken over the anniversary commemoration. There have been protests against the mixing of campaigning for elections and geopolitical maneuvering into such a solemn event. But it seems that the political manipulation that takes place is unavoidable.

Finally around 2:00 p.m. the speeches ended and family members began carrying the tabuts to their final destinations throughout the grounds. Rows of the green-clothed tabuts wound through the crowd and up the hill, each one carried by five or six men. Readers announced the full names of each victim over the loudspeaker, one by one, as the remains were being moved. This reading took a couple of hours.

Mothers cried for their sons at the burial sites.

As the tabuts were delivered to the gravesites the crowd thinned out. Family members lowered the tabuts into the earth and began to shovel soil into the pit. The work went very quickly and in an hour or so, 775 more victims rested in the Potocari soil.

One of these was a Catholic; all the rest were Muslims. The Catholic victim had been killed while trying to escape from Srebrenica, just like thousands of others. He was given a burial at Potocari with a wooden coffin, by a priest, just before the rest of the ceremonies had begun. Even so, the heat and the crowd were such that the victim’s mother was overcome and was not able to attend her own son’s funeral.

Hakija Meholjic buried his father and one of his brothers. Hasan Nuhanovic buried his brother Muhamed and his mother Nasiha.

After the shoveling, an imam reads a prayer at each gravesite. Then the family sits silently for a while. Never have I seen anything as quiet and inward as that particular moment.

TAXI DRIVER

That evening Sarah and I hired a taxi driver, a local man from Srebrenica, to drive us up to the war-wrecked Guber mineral springs spa in the hills above Srebrenica. The first thing the driver said was, “My wife is Muslim,” implying a couple things: 1, that he was not Muslim, and 2, that he was open-minded. The first implication turned out to be true.

The driver was a local Serb. He soon began to share with us his version of local history, saying that the memorial cemetery at Potocari contained many bodies that had been moved from other cemeteries. That the Serb troops who had taken over Srebrenica had only numbered 500. That the Muslims who were killed were all soldiers, and that they had more weapons than they could carry -- “that’s why they threw them in the river.” And that since they were soldiers, it was legitimate to kill them, as “they would have killed someone.”

The taxi driver told us, “I’m not on one side or the other.”

MONDAY IN BRATUNAC

On Monday Sarah and I went to the Serb observations of the July 12th saint’s day, Petrovdan. This day is observed annually in the Srebrenica region in several ways. In the Orthodox churches there are religious ceremonies starting in the morning and lasting several hours. Local and entity-level officials also take advantage of the day to commemorate the Serb war dead of the “Birac” region (including Srebrenica, Bratunac, Milici, and Vlasenica municipalities), which they number at somewhere around 3,200 for the entire war period.

Then there have been the hardline Serb nationalists who call themselves “Chetniks,” who come to Srebrenica on the day after the anniversary of the massacre and strut around in their black tee-shirts bearing the photo of General Mladic and trying to make local Bosniaks feel bad. For some footage of this, see the YouTube clip “Četnička orgijanja u Srebrenici 13 juli” from 2009, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSZF7TRTZu4&NR=1 (from minute 3:31). The clip is in Bosnian, but the visuals show clearly what’s going on. The Chetniks are chanting “This is Serbia.”

I saw some of this last time I was at the commemoration, in 2006. Someone plastered Srebrenica with posters at that time, showing war crimes suspect Vojislav Seselj’s face (as I have recently seen in Foca). Thankfully, this year the Chetniks were apparently prohibited from entering Srebrenica.

We went to the military cemetery in Bratunac to observe the Petrovdan commemoration there. It was posted as starting at 1:00 p.m., but nothing happened for at least an hour. A few dozen people were huddled up against the cemetery administration building, trying to get some shade. We walked around the cemetery containing a few hundred graves of Serbs killed during the war. After an hour priests, politicians in grey suits, and bodyguards started arriving.

A dozen-odd young people (“activists?”) wore Seselj buttons. An old man wore a šajkača, the traditional Serbian military cap. One mother cried by a tombstone.

The suits and their assistants gathered under a long canopy, the priests under a nearby kafana umbrella advertising Tuborg beer. Sarah pointed out to me that some people were being refused entry to the ceremony.

After we had waited nearly two hours there was a crowd of two or three hundred. Then Prime Minister Dodik showed up and spoke to the press for quite a while. Finally, the ceremony began with people lighting sweet-smelling wax candles. The priests chanted their harmonious liturgy, and Dodik spoke.

We weren’t able to stay around much longer, but Dodik spoke about “the legitimacy of the Republika Srpska” and “preserving the memory of the liberation war.” He was also quoted as saying, “Republika Srpska does not deny that a large scale crime occurred in Srebrenica, but by definition it was not genocide as described by the international court in The Hague…If a genocide happened than it was committed against Serb people of this region where women, children and the elderly were killed en masse.”

As we were leaving I spotted a few of the black-shirted Chetniks, who had been barred from attending the gathering. I asked one of them if I could photograph him. He consented, but his comrade jumped in and said, suspiciously, “Who is it for?!!” Another comrade, an older man with a long beard, said, “Let him, anyone can take our photo who wants to.” So I took the photo.

SINCERITY

Reading back through notes and reports on the anniversary events, it occurs to me that perhaps Dodik’s comments were the most sincere. He is a liar and a manipulator, but he is far less of a hypocrite than the scads of politicians and diplomats, domestic and international, who speak much sweeter words than Dodik’s at the anniversary events.

For example, Valentin Inzko said:
“But we should not only remember. We should not simply be passive observers.
We have a duty too.
Our duty is to act.
First, to establish the truth and that those who participated in the killings at Srebrenica are punished and that justice is done…”

Valentin Inzko is the international community’s High Representative (something like a viceroy, without the teeth) to Bosnia-Herzegovina. The international community is aware of the 800-odd soldiers, policemen, and other government officials who participated in the Srebrenica massacre, who are still on the payroll of the Republika Srpska today. But the international community is not acting.

For another example, Samantha Power, advisor to President Obama, attended the Srebrenica memorial and gave an interview to the conservative populist daily Avaz, in which she announced that “President Obama has created a new office here in the White House, specifically devoted for atrocities prevention, the genocide prevention, and what that means is - that, at least here, we have the ability to react quickly, to process intelligence, to move through the chain of command quickly...”

I wonder what bombing weddings in Afghanistan is, if not an atrocity? Or bombing civilian residences in Pakistan with drones?

And US Ambassador to Bosnia Charles English read President Obama’s message, which in part went, “We recognize that there can be no lasting peace without justice...Justice must include a full accounting of the crimes that occurred, full identification and return of all those who were lost, and prosecution and punishment of those who carried out the genocide. The United States calls on all governments to redouble their efforts to find those responsible…”

--I wonder if it’s possible for there to be a time when politicians speak what they mean or else just zip it. I guess not. It’s nice to hear about justice from Barack Obama, but beyond the wonderful words, his policies in Bosnia (nor Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine…) don’t show any interest in justice.

Divided Bosnian FA In Trouble

2010-07-17T23:36:00.002-04:00

It's amazing the Bosnian national team has performed as well as it has in recent years (just missing out on Euro 2008 and World Cup 2010) considering how dysfunctional it is at the head.

Bosnia Risks Exclusion From FIFA, UEFA Competitions

The 15th Anniversary of Srebrenica Genocide-Press Release from BAACBH

2010-07-11T10:06:00.001-04:00

The Bosniak-American Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina (BAACBH) marks the 15th anniversary of Srebrenica Genocide with grief and sorrow and together with the families of those killed is remembering the innocent victims.

On July 11, 1995, the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, a declared United Nations safe haven, fell to Serb paramilitary forces led by General Ratko Mladic, an indicted war criminal who is still at large. The fall of Srebrenica marks the final act of brutal ethnic cleansing and genocide in BiH, when more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were slaughtered within a five day period. Today, 15 years after the worst atrocity committed in Europe since the end of the Second World War, we are reminded that the world did not keep its promise when it said "Never Again," and that it failed to protect the innocent civilians.

As the surviving relatives, neighbors and hundreds of diplomats and members of the international community gather to commemorate the Srebrenica Genocide, let us not forget that justice must prevail and that the truth must be told in order to prevent this grave atrocity from ever happening again in BiH or anywhere else in the world.

In honor of the fallen victims, BAACBH calls upon all friends of BiH to support House Resolution 1423, recently introduced by the Co-Chair of the Congressional Caucus on Bosnia, Congressman Christopher Smith. House Resolution 1423 commemorates the 15th anniversary of the genocide committed in the Bosnian city of Srebrenica in July 1995, and expresses support of the U.S. Congress for the designation of a Srebrenica Remembrance Day in the United States.

Serbs Honor Srebrenica Victims With Shoe Memorial

2010-07-10T18:43:00.003-04:00

It is vital that we acknowledge the voices in Serbia who value their common humanity more than demagogic posturing and nationalist myth-making:

Radio Free Europe Story on Srebrenica Memorial in Belgrade

I suspect that there are many other Serbs who know, at some level, that such gestures are necessary, and it will take the courage and integrity of such groups to open up a greater public space for dialogue on the legacy of the wars of the 1990s. Especially given the intimidating presence of ultra-nationalist thugs in the immediate area.

Credit must also be given to civic authorities in Belgrade, who from the sound of it made sure there was a sizable police presence on the scene to protect the free speech rights of the Women in Black and sympathetic supporters from jackbooted intimidation.

National Congress of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina (NCR B&H) ONLINE NEWSLETTER – International No. 680 July 10, 2010

2010-07-10T18:35:00.001-04:00

[I am on the mailing list and am passing it on.]

1. Criminal Charges against Ibran Mustafic

Date: 09/07/2010 16:54

Author: U. Vukic,

Serbian “Independent News”

Srebrenica - Srebrenica Municipal Police Basic Court in this city has filed misdemeanor charges against Ibrahim Mustafic, president of the Association "Mothers of Srebrenica", because he failed to respond to their orders to remove the controversial billboards set on the eve of commemorating 11th July at the Memorial Centre in Potocari.

Officials of the District Prosecutor's Office in Bijeljina say they have ordered the Municipal police in this city to remove the billboards and flags because they are criminal, and that they in turn ordered Mustafic to remove the disputed content within two days.

Given that Mustafic has not removed the disputed content, the municipal police against him filed misdemeanor charges in primary court of contempt for the decision for enforcing communal order.

The source for the "Independent" from the municipality of Srebrenica explained that in such cases, the Municipal Police should remove the disputed content, and that the bill for the cost of removing should be delivered to Mustafic, but none of that has happened.

"It's all politics. The Communal police have a duty to remove the offending content, if told by the district prosecutors' office in Bijeljina that there is a criminal offense, however, those such as Mustafic do not listen to anyone, nor fear anyone," said this source.

Mustafic setup billboards with offensive content, war flag of the former BiH Army and signs offensive to Serbs.

At the MUP RS (Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Republic of the Serbs) we were told that ten days ago, after they learned of the disputed content, they went to the scene and drew up an official note and submitted the report to the District Prosecutor's Office in Bijeljina, which has assessed that there are elements of the crime of causing racial and religious hatred, discord or intolerance.

"The District Prosecutor has filed a criminal complaint against Mustafic for this crime and has informed the Municipal police in Srebrenica," said Mirna Šoja, spokesman of the MUP RS.
____________________________________________

2. Attorney for the Mothers of Srebrenica: URGENT ACTION OF THE AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL REQUESTED

Dear Friends:

As you can see the Republika Srpska has now filed Criminal Charges against Ibran Mustafic, Co-President of the Mothers of Srebrenica and Podrinja, over political Signs and Flags at the Potocari Memorial Center--a mere expression of his political opinion. Furthermore, the RS are the same people who committed the genocide at Srebrenica, and Mr. Mustafic was one of the very few male survivors of that genocidal massacre. There is a serious threat to his life if he is taken into custody by the RS pursuant to these criminal charges. Therefore, I hereby request that Amnesty International issue an Urgent Action on behalf of Ibran Mustafic. The sooner the better.

Thank you for your consideration.

Yours very truly,

Francis A. Boyle
Professor of International Law
Attorney for the Mothers of Srebrenica and Podrinja
Board of Directors, Amnesty International USA (1988-92)

Francis A. Boyle
Law Building
504 E. Pennsylvania Avenue
Champaign IL 61820 USA
217-333-7954 (voice)
217-244-1478 (fax)
(personal comments only)

_____________________________________________

3. Honest people must urgently act to prevent this terror in Srebrenica

Ibran Mustafic is a victim of genocide. He lost 14 members of his family including his brother and father. He raised flags of the Republic Bosnia and Herzegovina in his own property and he
raised the 4 (four) banners with the following statements, all of which are stated by legal authorities of the world including the International Court of Justice:

1. SERBIA IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE SREBRENICA GENOCIDE

2. SERBIA = AGGRESSION = GENOCIDE = DAYTON = REPUBLIKA SRPSKA

3. JUDGEMENT OF THE INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE SUPERSEDES DAYTON'S GENOCIDAL CREATIONS

4. VICTIMS OF GENOCIDE DEMAND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE DECISION OF THE INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE

For those banners he is charged with “criminal charges” by the same entity and police that committed genocide in Srebrenica.

The Golden Lilies flag was the flag of the Bosnian Medieval kingdom and was internationally recognized in 1992 as the flag for the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. There is no law against that flag. It is not the flag of the Bosnian army, which displays two swords crossed above the shield. No mass crimes were committed under either flag – the Golden Lilies flag nor the Bosnian army flag -- and neither is forbidden.

We hope that the honest people from Europe and the world will urgently act and prevent this new terror over the victims of the Srebrenica genocide.

The following are pictures of the location with flags and banners

http://republikabih.net/content/odgovor.htm

NCR B&H
_______________________________________________

4. PRESS RELEASE: Surviving victims of genocide do not want Boris Tadic in Srebrenica

The “Mothers of Srebrenica and Podrinje” were the first to initiate annual commemoration of the genocide in Srebrenica. They were the ones who spearheaded and fought for the decision of the High Commissioner to build the Memorial Center in Potocari/Srebrenica. Despite this role of the “Mothers of Srebrenica and Podrinje” in establishing the Memorial Center, the self-proclaimed “Organizing Committee” for the Commemoration of the 15th Anniversary of the Genocide in Srebrenica failed to invite or include the “Mothers of Srebrenica and Podrinje” to participate in the planning of the activities surrounding the 15th anniversary. The sole goal of the “Organizing Committee” was to give exclusive control to the members of criminal and genocidal political party of The Party of Democratic Action (in Bosnian: Stranka Demokratske Akcije, SDA) .

In order to realize their genocidal plans, in conjunction with the 15th Anniversary of the Genocide the entire leadership of SDA led by Sulejman Tihic and Sadik Ahmetovic set off on an official visit to Belgrade, and with heartfelt hugs and kisses with Boris Tadic and Ivica Dacic they agreed that the president of Serbia will visit the Memorical Center in Potocari on July 11 and Bratunac on July 12 to commemorate the crimes against Serbs – not Bosnian victims of genocide.

Even though the Mothers tried to work with the Organizing Committee for the commemoration of the 15th Anniversary of the Genocide and the burial of newly found remains, the Mothers only found out through the media that at the ceremonies, the survivors of the Genocide will addressed by Osman Suljic, the official head of the Srebrenica county; Haris Silajdzic, member of the presidency of the Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina; Sadik Ahmetovic, minister of internal affairs; and Boris Tadic, President of Serbia, the same Serbia that committed aggression and participated in the Genocide in Srebrenica.

The presence of Serbia’s president in Potacare and his speech have only one goal—to solidify and validate the nationhood of Republika Srpska whose army and police, working directly with the Government of Serbia, committed genocide. With such plans by the Organizing Committee, the living victims of genocide who will be present at the ceremonies are left to lower their head, weep, and accept their fate.

For those who may have forgotten: president of Serbia, Boris Tadic, is the son of Ljubomir Tadic, an academic and member of the group of Serb intellectuals who created the plan of aggression and genocide. We should not forget that Boris Tadic was the Minister of Defense at and under his watch the war criminal Ratko Mladic was gallivanting freely around military bases across Serbia acting as the Commander of the Serb forces.

It is also by no accident that Premier of the Turkey, whose new role as peacemaker between “two sister peoples,” will be present on July 11. This is despite the fact that Turkey, one of the most influential member countries of NATO, did not lift a finger while aggression and genocide were being committed against the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its people.

Under the unseen pressures put upon the victims of genocide by the plans and actions described above, we are informing the world that on July 11 the voices of the victims of Genocide will not be silenced in Potacare. If the “guests” think they are coming to the territory of the Republika Srpska, to those “guests” the doors of the Memorial Center and Cemetery are permanently shut. We are informing all of the “guests”, that they are only welcome to come and visit the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina because the decision of the International Court of Justice overrides the Dayton Agreements which was created by genocide.

If President of Serbia and Prime Minister of Turkey view Republika Srpska as an untouchable, durable, and legal state, then the surviving victims of genocide under the norms of international law have only one thing to say: “Vojvodina is an independent state, Sandzak is a Republic, and Kurdistan is a Republic.” International legal norms can only be legal norms if their application is just and equally applied across the world. If the “guests” think that the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina is precedence, they only fool themselves.

The living victims of genocide demand the implementation of the decision of the International Court of Justice and they will never give up the fight because genocide will never be accepted as the means of creating genocidal states and genocidal constitutions.

Sarajevo.
July 8, 2010.

Ibran Mustafic,
President of the Mothers of Srebrenica and Podrinje

Journalist Peter Lippman Bosnia Journal #7

2010-07-09T17:50:00.000-04:00

MARŠ MIRA

The anniversary of the fall of Srebrenica and the massacre committed there is approaching. On July 11th, 1995, extreme Serb nationalist forces took over the eastern Bosnian enclave, which had been declared a “safe zone” by the UN. In the end, the UN did not defend Srebrenica.

Tomorrow I will hit the trail -- literally -- on the “Marš mira,” or “March of peace.” This hike goes from Nezuk, near Zvornik, to Srebrenica.

Upon the fall of Srebrenica in mid-July of 1995, thousands of people fled to nearby Potocari to seek protection where the Dutch UN troops were located. Meanwhile, many thousands of men of military age, expecting that they would be killed if they fell into the hands of the Serb forces, headed for the woods. They walked in a column towards government-controlled territory, roughly in the direction of Tuzla. Out of somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand men and boys, approximately five thousand survived.

The Marš mira traces one of the routes of escape taken by those men. It runs 110 kilometers (about 70 miles) and is to be traversed in three days. This is the fifth year of the hike. Last year, over four thousand people, from all over Bosnia-Herzegovina and abroad, participated. This year, the fifteenth anniversary, should see at least as many people involved. The Bosnian army helps to coordinate the hike, providing tents and food.

I am hoping that I will be able to take the march from beginning to end. When I was a bit younger I used to do hikes of twenty miles a day, say, in the Appalachians. But I am a bit older now. I am hoping that what I may lack in physical endurance, I will compensate for in determination.

Some people may consider such visits to Srebrenica as “war tourism.” That is probably true for some people, but participating in this march is important to me because I consider it an act of solidarity with the survivors and remembrance of the victims.

In an Internet center, I met a woman from Podrinje (the eastern Bosnian region), from Han Pijesak, not far from Srebrenica. She told me that she has 22 relatives buried in the memorial cemetery at Potocari. She is going to make the march.

Elsewhere I met a man from Vlasenica, also in Podrinje. He had hiked out in July 1995. He was one of the lucky ones -- very lucky, in fact, as he arrived at the safe end in a week. Some people were lost, or stuck in dangerous places, for a month or even more.

He told me that he had been hit in the face by shrapnel during the war, and that the tip of his nose was torn off. The Americans performed reconstructive surgery, and the faint line that showed where his nose had been repaired was only noticeable after the man pointed it out to me.

The man from Vlasenica told me that he ate slugs and leaves in order to survive during the escape. He swore that he would never participate in the march, that the one experience, coming out, was enough for him. But some people who made the march out in 1995 are repeating the march the other way.

“THE QUESTION”

There is one question that everyone who comes here and thinks about this beautiful and tormented little country asks, in one way or another: “What can happen that will save this country and make things work?”

This is my question as well, and I have been approaching it from every angle, and trying to listen to as many people’s evaluations as possible, trying to weigh them and compare them. There are few conclusive answers, other than the vague “time will tell.” But there are indications, and some concurrence of opinion among intelligent and informed people. I will share some of these opinions here.

This is a complicated country. A lot happens behind the scenes and there is much information that never sees the light of day. It has occurred to me that my search for solid, viable analysis is hindered by the fact that many people have not only too little information, but too much time -- a bad combination. Some people are tempted into “kafanski razgovor” (coffee-house conversation), which is full of conjecture, and short on facts. This pursuit is even more popular than football.

There are roughly three factors that can influence the future of Bosnia: the domestic politicians, the international community, and the people. Put simply, at present the politicians are not interested in giving up their profitable positions or changing their behavior. The international diplomats have behaved with carelessness and ineptitude, with certain honorable exceptions.

Given this, I have directed my attention towards the activism of the ordinary people. There, I see three main segments:

First are the organizations fighting for “truth and justice,” that is, apprehension and prosecution of the war criminals; establishment of memorials for the victims; and exposing the facts about wartime events.

Second, there are the NGOs that provide social services to people who are neglected or discriminated against by the government. Sajma’s “Women Can Do It” in Banja Luka (see my first report) is one of those.

Third, there are the local grassroots groups, often not even registered as NGOs, that are demonstrating, agitating, collaborating across ethnic boundaries, working against segregation, corruption, and historical amnesia.

These three groups, in varying degrees, are part of the solution. I have placed my hope in these activists. However, after talking to dozens of people in the past month and a half, I am bending towards another conclusion. Many people have told me that there is no “movement for change,” and that the change has to come from within the political structure. Or that it has to come from the international community. In any case, it is clear that change is a matter of a generation or two, not a year or two.

I am coming to the conclusion that, while the grassroots is crucial, I have placed too much hope in the possibility of change as prompted by what people here call the “civil sector.” Jusuf Trbic told me that there is no possibility of change from grassroots activism. Slavko Klisura shouted, “Nema pokreta!” (there is no movement).

I don’t agree that there is no movement. All three of the sections of the grassroots that I mentioned above are still working. However, the system of corruption is too entrenched, and the movement is too weak, for the grassroots to do it alone. And it happens that organizations that once took risks have gotten grants, moved into comfortable positions, and lost their bite. Other risk-takers will have to appear and take their place. The effort ebbs and flows.

Here is something of what others are saying about change in Bosnia. I have had the opportunity to meet with various people here who are either working with agencies of the international community or are in positions to provide intelligent analysis. Because most of what they say is “not for attribution,” I will call them Warren, Bill, Barry, and Merima.

Republika Srpska Prime Minister Dodik is one of the most common topics. People ask, “What will Dodik do?” and, “Is he really that crazy/stupid/crude/nationalist?” Much of what Dodik does is seen as pre-election performance designed to frighten people and gather votes for his team. This evaluation applies to his threat to call for a referendum on secession in the RS. Whatever else he is, Dodik is a skilful manipulator and probably the most powerful politician in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Barry told me, “Dodik is so used to getting his way that his sense of the other side’s breaking point may not be well calibrated… Dodik does not want war, but he may get one if he pushes too hard for secession. The question is how together the other side is.”

Like many other analysts, Barry said that Dodik is “a product of the system” -- “We created incentives for Dodik to be what he is. He is the beneficiary; he figured out that he could keep what the SDS (former leading Serb nationalist party) gained, without their historical baggage.”

As to the possibility for constructive measures coming from the international community, Barry said, “We need to create conditions where people will be able to make compromises. Now, that is still possible, but it could become impossible. Political stagnation is bad, but collapse would be worse. With Dodik leading, he could go too far. He keeps pushing the red line further. And we are consistently lowering the dike while the waves are getting higher.”

Barry, though not an employee of the international community, still uses “we” in reference to the internationals. But he declares, “There is no international strategy. There needs to be an arrangement that all three sides can buy into, and feel protected. Then the country can function. Dayton is not that arrangement.”

Putting it differently, Slavko Klisura earlier told me, “We don’t have a constitution, we just have the Dayton document. That constitution is fascist. It recognizes ethnicities, not citizens.”

Warren, closer to the international community, told me, “Don’t expect pressure from the international community. The real pressure has to come from the voters.”

Warren and Bill both spoke of the earlier years of the international governance of Bosnia, under High Representatives Petritsch and then Ashdown, as being more orderly times. Warren said, “We imposed a constitutional structure. Under Petritsch and Ashdown the Dayton Peace Agreement was stretched to its limits.”

When I asked Bill about the strategy of the international community, he answered, “There is no strategy. Ashdown’s strategy was transition (to domestic governance). This failed after 2006 because his reforms failed. Since then there has been inertia. And the ambassadors, who are here for three years, have no institutional memory…the biggest failure was of the Ashdown period, and, of course, the immediate postwar period. Ashdown saw the system as something to override, and he overrode it, but didn’t change it.”

In frustration, Bill said, “Mother Teresa would become an extremist in the present system.”

I spoke to Merima, another analyst. She outlined her hopes for the future of Bosnia: “We are on the road to integration. Security is important to Europe. There is already a Bosnia office in the new NATO building in Brussels. So we are going into NATO. And if we are going into NATO, then we are going into Europe.

Merima’s construction is logical. I hope that her understanding of international dynamics proves to be accurate.

POLITICS

The World Soccer Championship is running all month in South Africa -- and in the kafanas of Sarajevo. You can’t walk down the street without tripping over a wide screen. People come out for the evening to drink a few beers and watch the games. I admire the skill of the soccer players, wondering how someone can catch a ball flying fifty meters through the air with his head, and then deflect the ball off to just the right player another ten meters away.

At a certain point, talking to Slavko, it struck me that conversation about the upcoming fall national elections, and about all the parties and all the players, is a superficial thing. A distraction from real life -- like talking about sports. Discussion of electoral politics, in a situation where so little can change as the result of an election, is stuck in the virtual realm. So much that matters to people here resides in that realm. Is not religion a virtual thing, something you decide in your head? And then if you use that abstract concept as a reason to vote for someone, is that not absurd

Many politicians talk about that most abstract of things, the “national interest” of their constituency -- as if Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks do not all in equal measure need health care, jobs, better pensions, and security.

So religion and politics -- especially when mixed together -- become a distraction. When someone asks you what religion you are, too often they really mean, “Are you a member of my club?”

In response to my comment about politics being a distraction, Barry agreed but said, “Talking about politics matters in that it defines the realm of the possible.”

Meanwhile, of course, there are people who cultivate their identity, in the face of such massive social trauma, and hold onto it “like a drunkard to a fence,” as they say here (“drzi se toga kao pijan plota”). You can’t deny the validity of someone’s moral lifeline. So the virtual becomes more important than the concrete. But all this gets out of control in the hands of skilful political manipulators.

It is easy to get tangled up when navigating in the virtual realm. People talk about another ethnicity as if they are 19th-century anthropologists. Marko (a Serb) in Foca told me, “The Muslims have this pleasant custom of sitting and drinking coffee…” -- while we were sitting and drinking coffee. Jure, a Croat in central Bosnia, told me, “The Muslims are not industrious, they are content if they have a comfortable place to sit and drink coffee.”

This kind of facile, essentially ethnic-chauvinist characterization became fashionable in the 1990s, and it has been part of the process of the creation of new identities in opposition to the “other.” It is easier for people to think in this way now, as they are more physically separated than they ever were before. The separation was the objective of the war, and it succeeded to a huge extent.

I know many people who swear that they are anti-nationalist and that they hold no prejudices. But genuinely arriving at that position takes more work than most people are prepared to do. So I regularly find, among the most agreeable and even delightful people, that some backwards attitude reveals itself. It seems that the hardest thing to do is to be completely consistent.

*

I took a couple of walks in the Sarajevo hills with Sarah from Portugal. Sarah pointed out to me that before the disintegration of Yugoslavia, it was a more developed country than Portugal. Portugal has a population of around ten million. Sarah told me that they are overcoming the problem of slums there. I said, “There are probably over ten million people living in slums in my country.”

Sarah is a remarkably bright and creative scholar, here to investigate “genocide and collective memory” (my approximate description). We have talked about how not only journalists, but scholars and others come to this country for “a good story.” The observers are caught up in the “story,” and the survivors and inhabitants of this country are caught up in it too. It is unavoidable -- but must be treated with sensitivity. Sarah talks about “genocide tourism” as an example of the worst of this phenomenon.

For more from Sarah, see www.cafeturco.wordpress.org

TRAVNIK

As I was starting out on a trip to Herzegovina, I visited some of my pal Steve Horn’s friends in Travnik, in central Bosnia. Steve went to Bosnia (and vicinity) in 1970 with a camera, and then came back thirty-three years later with his old photos and another camera. He made a very fine book about the experience -- see http://www.pictureswithoutborders.com/

I walked up to the fortress above the town for a beautiful view of Travnik, nestled among the hills, with the river Lasva running through it, fed by the tributaries Plava and Hendek. Travnik is surrounded by those tight, dark fir and pine mountains that epitomize central Bosnia. If you are not from a mountainous area, those hills can be mysterious and foreboding. If you are from a mountainous region, Travnik feels like a cozy, protected place. It was the capital of Ottoman-occupied Bosnia for 150 years, and the home of Ivo Andric, Bosnia’s Nobel Prize winner for literature.

I met Saban, who took me up in the hills to his cottage. He showed me the pigeons that he raises as a hobby. He has over a hundred pigeons. I asked if he earned anything from them, and he said, “No, they are just a hobby and a loss.” Saban also has one peacock. I looked through the wire mesh at it. His head was a little above my eye level, and his tail feathers reached to the ground. He moved towards me and looked me in the eye, and then let out a loud, “Piaao!”

Saban told me that peacocks have a better sense of smell than dogs, and that in some places they are used to guard jails.

I met Steve’s friend Alen and Alen’s friend Erna. They play in a rock band. They told me that they write love songs, and that most of their songs are in English. I asked if there were any bands around that write protest songs. They mentioned Dubioza Kolektiva. Erna said that “anyone who does anything other than turbo-folk, if they’re introducing new elements or writing in English, those are protest songs.”

Turbo-folk is a crude kind of modern, pseudo-folk music with a strong Serbian influence, popular in kafanas all around the former Yugoslavia. The lyrics range from banal to brutal.

In the evening I visited a local Croat family. Travnik used to be a mixed Bosniak-Croat town, but since the war it has been dominated by Bosniaks. Most Croats left during or after the war, but the family of “Vilko” stayed. Vilko told me, “During the war, you prayed to God that no one would call your (obviously Croat) name in the streets.”

Vilko said that his family was not able to leave the town in any case, though many Croats left from the surrounding villages, and that those villages are now all but empty.

Like everyone else in town, Vilko’s family was terrorized by Serb shelling. By the end of the war there was no unscathed glass in their apartment, not even in the interior doors. But the family also suffered from intimidation and discrimination -- during the war and to this day -- on account of being Croats. The family told me that the Bosniaks who dominate Travnik do not hire Croats, regardless of qualification. Hearing all this, I felt like I was amidst an embattled group of people.

The morning that I went to Travnik, right up the road in Bugojno there was a terrible bomb attack on the police station. A member of a militant Islamic group planted a land mine there, which did much damage throughout the building and in the neighborhood as well. Neighbors said it was stronger than anything they had felt during the war. One policeman was killed, and several others were injured. The dominant theory about the bombing attack was that it was a reprisal by local Muslim extremists for local court proceedings against fellow extremists.

At the same time the religious (Muslim) observances were taking place not far away at Ajvatovici. There, according to folklore, five hundred years ago a religious mystic prayed for water. The mountains split and a creek flowed through the gap, bearing water to the thirsty land.

The head Imam of the Islamic community, the Reis Ceric, gave a talk at the massive gathering at Ajvatovici, stating that “Muslims are not protected by the state of Bosnia-Herzegovina.” This statement was given headline space by the popular but manipulative daily Avaz, published by Fahrudin Radoncic, who recently founded his own political party. With or without Ceric’s blessing, Radoncic apparently finds it useful to quote Ceric in the promotion of his own political goals. The electoral campaign is in full swing.

Maybe I will write more about the upcoming election later. It’s another horse race, with the dark horse being Nasa Stranka.

Americans For Bosnia

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [10]

Chapter 4 [concluded]

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [9]

Chapter 4 [continued]

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [8]

Chapter 4: July 1991-January 1992: The Twilight Zone

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [7]

Chapter 3 [concluded]

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [6]

Chapter 3 [continued]

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [5]

Chapter 3: June-July 1991: State of Independence

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [4]

Chapter 2: Belgrade, March 1991: Dress Rehearsal--Serb Eat Serb

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [3]

Chapter 1 [continued]

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [2]

Chapter 1: Knin, August/October 1990-January 1992: The Heart of the Matter

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [1]

Preface

Happy New Year--and my 2012 Resolution for this blog

Bosnia Still in Running for 2012 Euro Cup

Misguided Op-Ed on Balkan Partitioning

CNAB welcomes the ruling striking the controversial Bosnia and Herzegovina Citizenship Act as unconstitutional

Hitchens on 9/11 - Bosnia Mentioned

War Criminal Momcilo Perisic Convicted

Balkan Revisionism meets Apocalyptic Christian Fundamentalism

Pessimism about Bosnia's politcal order

The 16th Anniversary of the Srebrenica Genocide

Republika Srpska to pay for Mladic, Karadzic Hague Legal Defence

Reasonable Editorial from The Economist

Ratko Mladic: All Serbs Are Guilty

Serbia Arrests Ratko Mladic

Article from latest National Congress of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina

1. Is Europa going to take part in the end game of the genocide in Bosnia?

2. Bosnian Court: a European entity Radio Netherlands Worldwide International Justice Tribune Published on : 23 May 2011 - 10:51am

Bosnian-American Friendship Association

Press Release: 19th Annivsersary of the Bosnian Genocide at Visegrad

Third Annual Bosnian Women's Day on Capitol Hill

"Bosnia and Beyond" by Jeanne Haskin [5]

Part 2

"Bosnia and Beyond" by Jeanne Haskin [4]

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Conclusion of Part 1

"Bosnia and Beyond" by Jeanne Haskin [3]

Chapter 4

Chatper 5

Chapter 6

Bosnia Banned from FIFA and UEFA

"Bosnia and Beyond" by Jeanne Haskin [2]

Part 1Chapter One: The Pre-War Situation

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

"Bosnia and Beyond" by Jeanne Haskin [1]

Introduction

Press Release: BAACBH Condemns the Arrest of General Divjak

New Article from the Institute of War & Peace Reporting

Karadzic and Mladic “Operated Together”Ex-UN military chief in Bosnia gives evidence about relations within Bosnian Serb leadership.

New Article from the Institute for War & Peace Reporting

UN Hostage Speaks of Execution FearsEx-Canadian observer tells court how he feared for his life after being seized by Bosnian Serb soldiers.

New Article from Institute for War & Peace Reporting

Bosnian Serb Command Structure "Crystal Clear"Witness tells Karadzic trial that action could not be taken in Sarajevo without high command authorisation.

David Gibbs--Another Balkan Revisionist

New Article from Institute for War & Peace Reporting

Siege Was “Noose” Around SarajevansBBC man recounts hardships and risks faced by residents during the 44-month campaign against their city.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [19]

Chapter 30: Conclusion

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [18]

Chapter 29: Pax Americana

Article from IWPR: "Bosnia War Compensation Dispute"

Bosnia War Compensation Dispute:Bosnian Serbs say claims being made by hundreds of Sarajevo residents are politically motivated.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [17]

Chapter 28: "Let Us Be Pragmatic" Cleaning up the Maps July-August 1995

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [16]

Chapter 26: To the Mogadishu Line The Battle for Gorazde April 1994

Chapter 27: “A Dagger in the Back” The Serbian Split June-August 1994

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [15]

Chapter 23: HMS Invincible Talks at Seas Summer 1993

2. Bosnian Court: a European entity Radio Netherlands Worldwide International Justice Tribune
Published on : 23 May 2011 - 10:51am

Part 1
Chapter One: The Pre-War Situation

Karadzic and Mladic “Operated Together”
Ex-UN military chief in Bosnia gives evidence about relations within Bosnian Serb leadership.

UN Hostage Speaks of Execution Fears
Ex-Canadian observer tells court how he feared for his life after being seized by Bosnian Serb soldiers.

Bosnian Serb Command Structure "Crystal Clear"
Witness tells Karadzic trial that action could not be taken in Sarajevo without high command authorisation.

Siege Was “Noose” Around Sarajevans
BBC man recounts hardships and risks faced by residents during the 44-month campaign against their city.

Bosnia War Compensation Dispute:
Bosnian Serbs say claims being made by hundreds of Sarajevo residents are politically motivated.

Chapter 8: "You've Chosen War"
The Arming of Slovenia and Croatia, April 1991-January 1991