"From Enemy Territory" by Mladen Vuksanovic [4]

Recollections of Jadranka Vuksanovic
Vuksanovic's wife Jadranka left for the city on April 29th for what was supposed to be a two-day trip to visit their daughter and bring their son his papers so that he could leave the city. As noted already, those plans didn't work out as the bridge in Brcko--the last way out of the city--was destroyed the next day. In the end, Jadranka's two-day stay turned into a stay of over two weeks. This brief section is her "recollections" of that stay. Although written as a diary, with almost daily entries, it's not clear whether she actually kept this diary live or wrote it upon returning to Pale at the request of her husband. At any rate, if it is the latter she must have done so almost immediately; this section certainly has the feel for mundane day-to-day details that a more polished memoir might lack.

Mladen Vuksanovic's diary is written entirely from Pale and the perspective of being behind the Bosnian Serb lines; the terror being inflicted on Sarajevo can only be surmised. Therefore, the decision to insert Jadranka's recollections in the heart of the text is more than a desire to share his wife's experiences or to keep her "with him" in the narrative. Her experience of being jumpy from incoming sniper fire, hiding from bombardment in basements, growing quickly all-too used to the experience of hearing exploding ordnance all serve as a sharp contrast to the creeping horror that his diary recounts. This is more elemental stuff--underscored by the degree to which her account becomes a record of the efforts taken to acquire bread. Some days, the only "news" she has is "bought bread."

She also notes the sadistic nature of the bombing, which occurs at irregular frequencies seemingly designed to taunt the residents of Sarajevo; sometimes at predictable intervals, otherwise oddly quiet when one has grown to expect shelling. She witnesses an ambush of retreating soldiers. She sees an incident which might have been a settling of an old feud with the war as an excuse. And there is the surreal experience of being able to come and go because of her Serb surname--at the end, she is able to leave the city and rides back into Pale with her daughter (the son was left behind, waiting for the Jewish Community to arrange for a excavation) on a truck loaded with young Serb soldiers. Another reminder of how fratricidal and bizarrely intimate the war was.

They return to Pale on May 16. Now that his wife's narrative has rejoined his, Mladen Vuksanovic picks up from there

"From Enemy Territory" by Mladen Vuksanovic [3]

Pale Diary - 5 April to 16 May 1992

This first section of the diary covers the period from the beginning of Vuksanovic's confinement to Pale and increasingly to his house, to the reunion with his wife (who left for Sarajevo on April 29 in order to help their children--still stuck in the city--get out) on May 16. The text of the diary is largely unedited and only annotated with occasional footnotes to explain references in the original which would not be clear to the general reader.

As a result, the text is somewhat impressionistic, referring to immediate circumstances, events, observations and conversations; sometimes giving a reaction, sometimes not. Vuksanovic never dwells on any one incident or observation for more than a paragraph. I suspect this is partially because the slow-motion horror is too much to bear.

Several motifs develop over these fifty-plus pages. The craven and criminal nature of the local authorities of Pale in action; whatever their rhetoric, and whatever is actually going on on the "front lines" (Vuksanovic reminds the reader how absurd the very idea of a "front line" in a multi-ethnic city suddenly wrenched along crudely nationalist lines), the reality on the streets of Pale are stolen cars without plates and shuttered homes waiting to be looted.

Another motif are the many personal betrayals and friends and colleagues suddenly reveal themselves as arch-nationalists firmly committed to an insane cause; a cause that commits them to destroying their own city and murdering their own friends. It's one thing to study the rise of nationalism and xenophobia in the abstract; Vuksanovic illustrates what is it like to experience that process on the personal level.

I used the phrase "slow-motion horror" above, and that is as close as I can come to explaining the overall feel of this section. Vuksanovic is not in Sarajevo, experiencing the bombing, the snipers, the growing desperation firsthand. Instead, he experiences the war through his radio, through reports from passers-by and neighbors, and most surreal of all through his telephone connection to Sarajevo, which is still working through the entire war. Nothing can illustrate how perverse a reversal of the normal order this war is better than the frequent references to his use of the telephone to call people he knows in the city a few kilometers away; people who are being attacked daily by the same soldiers Vuksanovic can see walking by his house in broad daylight. The Bosnian Serb government is not unaware of this connection--rather than shut down all telephone lines, they subject phone users to a constant barrage of nationalist music and radio broadcasts, so that both parties must listen and talk over this Orwellian audio backdrop.

Vuksanovic does not try to analyze the growing horror or to rationalize it in the larger context of politics and history. He simply expresses disgust and a growing fear that he has damned his family by not acting sooner to get his children out of the Old City. When this section ends, his wife and daughter have finally made it to the family home to join him--the son stayed behind for fear that he would certainly be drafted into military service if he was found. Vuksanovic notes that he has asked his wife to record her impressions of her two weeks in the Old City; those impressions form the next section of the book.

"From Enemy Territory" by Mladen Vuksanovic [1]

For a few months in 1992, author Mladen Vuksanovic was trapped in the Bosnian Serb "capital" of Pale, a victim of his refusal to be a "good Serb" and go along with the implementation of ethnic cleansing and the establishment of a fascist mini-state within Bosnia. During those harrowing weeks, he kept a diary of what he saw, heard, thought, and felt as he watched his fellow Bosnian Serbs dedicate themselves to a project of hatred and madness, and as news of the war that project created trickled in. The diary was published in Zagreb in 1997, and an English translation was published in 2004.

From Enemy Territory: Pale Diary offers an eyewitness account of how society became warped in the process of carrying out a genocidal war, of how fascism is implemented at ground level, and how that subsequently warps social relations and personal psyches. I will begin my review in the next post.

"Sarajevo Daily" by Tom Gjelten [12]

Chapter 10: A Loser's Peace
With the international reaction to two well-publicized incidents where large numbers of civilians were killed by mortar fire came the beginning of the end of the war in Sarajevo. Under extreme pressure, even from their Russian allies, the Serb nationalist army finally agreed to pull back their heavy weapons and essentially end the siege in exchange for promises that the Bosnian army would not counter-attack.

But while the shooting, shelling, and killing were over, it would be very wrong to say that life was "returning to normal." What had been normal in prewar Sarajevo was gone. The city, like Oslobodjenje, had survived, but the cost had been high. Many residents had trouble adjusting to postwar life, including the radical reworking of social relations. The rise of the military as an important institution, the replacement of many former residents by conservative rural refugees, and the increasing power of Muslim nationalism and the SDA all contributed to a new social order in which angry teenage gangs roamed the streets and Serbs who had remained loyal to the Bosnian state found themselves being ostracized simply for not being Muslim.

Oslobodjenje continued publication, now increasingly as an opponent of the government rather than a supporter. Ethnic cleansing continued in Serb-held parts of Bosnia. Ethnic separation would not go away once the war ended. Sarajevo, and Oslobodjenje, survived, but the values both had embodied were not so certain to return.

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

This is the end of the book. There is no epilogue or conclusion, and since the book was published in 1995 it ends before the war--and the final orgy of genocide in eastern Bosnia--did. I regret that this review took so long--the book is actually a brisk and enjoyable read; it's only my own distraction with graduate school and family life which has dragged this out so far. I highly recommend this book to people interested in either life in Sarajevo during the war, or the role of a free press in wartime or when democracy and secular freedom are under attack.

"Sarajevo Daily" by Tom Gjelten [11]

Chapter 9: The Wounded City
By 1993, the more than the physical infrastructure of Sarajevo was damaged. The fragile, multicultural unity of the city was also deeply wounded. For that matter, so was the will and the morale of thousands of Sarajevo residents, including the staff of Oslobodjenje. The continuation of the war and the validation of ethnic division by the Owen-Stoltenberg Plan had the effect of strengthening Muslim nationalism, which could   only further undermine what remained of Sarajevo's prewar cosmopolitanism.

Izetbegovic refused to support the plan but felt that he needed to present it; because it was for a Muslim state he called a special Muslim-only assembly to vote on the measure before it was passed on to the National Assembly. The forces of Muslim nationalism seemed to be on the rise; Mustafa Ceric became outspokenly so. In the meantime, the staff of the paper kept a low profile and focused on the goal of surviving to the newspapers' 50th anniversary.

Ultimately, the measure was defeated--even among the Muslim majority, believers in inclusive secularism still held the upper hand. Oslobodjenje managed to publish a special 50th anniversary edition. And while the staff bickered more and more, and disagreements increased in frequency, they never broke down along ethnic lines. A new government formed in the wake of the defeat of Muslim nationalism, and it quickly cracked down on the gangsters who used their position in the military to exploit the population, leading to an outpouring of public support and overt expressions of approval from the paper.

But while these were welcome developments, things were not good. The paper still struggled. Kurspahic moved himself and his family to New York City to raise funds for the paper, leaving some staff angry and an overwhelmed Gordana Knezevic in charge. Electricity became harder and harder to come by. A promised Sarajevo film festival was completely undermined by United Nations refusal to cooperate and Serb shelling. Residents found themselves wearying of the everyday struggle to meet basic needs while avoiding death.

"Sarajevo Daily" by Tom Gjelten [9]

Chapter 7: Winter
The opening sentence of this chapter is something of a shock:

"I returned to Sarajevo in January 1993 after a six-month absence and was astonished at how wretched a place it had become."

All of the earlier scenes of struggle and survival, the reader is reminded, were from the earliest months of the war. At that point, Sarajevo had yet to experience the deprivations of winter. In this chapter, we see how the grinding, relentless struggle to survive in a city under siege was wearing people down, and eroding the sense of community in the process. Society wasn't fracturing on ethnic lines, but rather atomizing into a collection of  families and households, each able to do little more than look after their own.

The cold, the darkness, the lack of adequate food, the constant work involved merely in acquiring water, the loneliness, the isolation...the nobility and spirit of Sarajevo was being reduced to grim day to day scramble for firewood, rations, shelter from sniper and mortar fire, favorable relations with the inconsistent UN officials who were the only conduit to the outside world.

Ivo and Gordana's son lost his only friend, an older neighbor boy who shared his love of hard rock, when that neighbor--serving as a soldier in the army--was killed. On average, Oslobodjenje gave over a quarter of each issue to obituaries, which now served not only ceremonial purpose but also informational, as people around the city often had no other way to learn of the fate of family members, coworkers, and acquaintances around the city.

The Cyrus-Vance plan legitimized the ethnic division of the country, scoring a victory for Bosnian Serb propaganda and triggering the Muslim-Croat civil war of 1993. The war in Bosnia took a step closer to being a self-fulfilling prophecy, the three-way war between "nations" that Karadzic and company always claimed it to be.

Gordana was able to travel to New York City for a few days to receive an award. The guilt at her temporary escape coexisted with the sense that if she allowed herself to get used to the comforts of life in a city not at war, her return to Sarajevo would be unbearable. And indeed, when she returns, she finds that the cold was worse than anyone expected; her bathroom shelves are gone, having been used as firewood.

It is only January.

"Sarajevo Daily" by Tom Gjelten [8]

[Sorry it's been such a long break--almost two full months--between posts. I couldn't give much free time to anything but graduate school.]

Chapter 6: Fighting Together, Falling Apart
Sarajevo was a cosmopolitan, multicultural city that was a bridge between different worlds--the East and the West; the capitalist world and the communist; Christianity and Islam; Orthodoxy and Catholicism. The population was mixed, and during the Yugoslav period the city had a very high percentage of mixed marriages between Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. The demographics of the city were very mixed. Therefore, the fact of Sarajevo presented a challenge to the Serb nationalists which was both pragmatic and existential. They wanted to divide this thoroughly mixed Sarajevo on ethnic lines for military reasons; they needed to divide the people of Sarajevo against each other in order to validate their own ideology.

Therefore, the siege of Sarajevo had a dimension beyond the military, because the Bosnian Serb Army wasn't merely trying to conquer the city but to destroy its social fabric. And as the war dragged on, the bonds which connected people across ethnic lines were tested frequently. Many thousands of Serbs stayed loyal to Bosnia and suffered along with their fellow Bosnians--and one absolutely cannot assume that a decision by all Serbs was a sign of support for the nationalist cause. Many, Ljiljana Smajlovic, had complex feelings about their Serb identity but did not join the nationalist cause. And human nature being what it is, many simply took advantage of the opportunity to escape. And some, it must be said, probably left because life as a Serb in besieged Sarajevo was not easy.

It was not easy for anyone, of course. But for Serbs who stayed, it was hard to escape suspicion, as some of their fellow Serbs had indeed betrayed friends, family, and neighbors to join the forces tormenting their own hometown. Senka Kurtovic wrote a piece for Oslobodjenje, an open letter to her ex-boyfriend turned Serb nationalist Dragan Aloric, which touched a nerve because so many in Sarajevo had felt the same betrayal. At the same time, in the early days of the war the militias which defended the city never shed their origins in the criminal underworld, and it was much easier to justify preying on "suspicious" Serbs when the inclination to loot and otherwise "acquire" goods took hold.

Many resisted the temptation to give in to sectarian fear and hostility. But as the siege dragged on, old loyalties continued to wither in the face of paranoia and suspicion fueled by nationalist propaganda and accentuated by every sniper's bullet, every mortar shell.

"Sarajevo Daily" by Tom Gjelten [7]

Chapter 5: Hatred

Hatred of the other has to be learned. And even once learned, it needs constant reinforcement. Hatred is a powerful motivating tool if you are willing to accept the consequences, or remain blind to them.

The leadership of the Bosnian Serb separatists desperately needed the outside world to believe that Bosnia was a land riven with ancient, immutable hatreds. To believe so made the war seem inevitable and beyond the scope of international concern. It also legitimized ethnic partition. Many in the international community were willing to oblige; none more enthusiastically than Lewis MacKenzie, who mocked any possibility of a peaceful solution and seems to have arrived in Bosnia with his mind already made up. It is worth noting that Gjelten makes note of the fact that MacKenzie was offered financial compensation by the American advocacy group SerbNet to give two speeches propagating such views to the American public. This book was published in 1995. The only people who ever took MacKenzie at his word on Bosnia in the years since he was there were people who were clearly not paying attention.

The Bosnian government, and the Muslim plurality, just as desperately needed the world to believe that there was a long tradition of coexistence and tolerance in Bosnia. Not a strife-free, utopian paradise like MacKenzie so contemptuously accused those who differed with his "they all hate each other" condemnations, but a land of long-standing intermixing and cultural sharing. It was an argument grounded in both history, and demographic facts--particularly in Sarajevo. It was a compelling argument, and an inspiring one. It should have carried more weight with the Western democracies. But the Bosnian Serbs had tanks, and heavy artillery, and an overwhelming military advantage. If they couldn't find hatred already existing, they would will it into existence with propaganda and violence.

Because they didn't just need to convince the outside world. They needed to convince the people of Bosnia, Serbs and non-Serbs alike. It wasn't enough to win territory; the Muslims needed to leave and never come back. The culture of this new Bosnia--a Bosnia devoid of that special ethnic and religious mix which made the country what it was--needed to be cleansed just as thoroughly as the demographic map needed to be. Mosques needed to be dynamited and bulldozed from memory. Orthodox priests needed to sanctify racial violence and ethnic segregation. Bosnia's Nobel-Prize winning author Ivo Andric needed to be remembered for the violence he wrote about, but not the historical continuities which framed that violence. Remember the hatreds he described, but forget that the Bridge over the Drina was, indeed, a bridge that connected people to each other.

Keep teaching that hatred, because otherwise ordinary Serbs might forget it and make the unforgivable error of thinking that they can trust their neighbors and stand by their fellow Bosnians. Oslobodjenje was targeting because it was a symbol of the cosmopolitan tolerance which Sarajevo represented; both needed to be destroyed. The Serbs who stayed in Sarajevo, the Serb reporters who continued writing for its beloved newspaper, were obviously failed Serbs. How could they be otherwise? They had failed to learn to hate.

Perhaps the Bosnian Serb leadership got to them too late. That mistake was not repeated with at least one 12 year-old Serb boy in the newly-cleansed town of Hadzici. Echoing the same sentiments of thousands of Bosnian Serbs who had learned how to hate, he told a reporter "I do not miss my Muslim classmates one bit. It has been explained to me that while we were playing together, they were actually plotting behind my back."

Gjelten lets that boy have the last word in this chapter on "Hatred." And so shall I.

"Sarajevo Daily" by Tom Gjelten [6]

Chapter 4: Humiliation

This chapter opens in the suburb of Dobrinja on May 2, 1992. Young Oslobodjenje reporter Senka Kurtovic is huddling in a bedroom with several of her neighbors as they comfort each other singing Bosnian folk songs while the entire neighborhood was subjected to one of the most intense Serb artillery bombardments yet. Senka lives in an apartment in this newish suburb, in a small apartment her parents bought her. The neighborhood is on the front line of Serb efforts to cut Sarajevo in half in order to achieve permanent ethnic partition. 

The title of this chapter is apt--cruelly so. Mixed in with the violence, the hatred, and the physical hazards of Sarajevo under siege, were endless humiliations little and big. The humiliation of living without running water. The humiliation of hoping that your ex-boyfriend the Serbian nationalist might be able to help you get permission to walk from your home to your workplace without being killed. The humiliation of being forced to crawl on your belly through tall grass because of snipers. The humiliation of standing in line to receive an inadequate quantity of basic foodstuffs from the very United Nations which treats you like a prisoner in your own country. The humiliation of having to kiss up to that same arrogant United Nations because it decides what basic supplies--such as newsprint--will be allowed to enter your own city.

The story of Oslobodjenje is the story of Sarajevo, and Bosnia, writ small; but it is also a reminder that a "genocide" is made up of thousands of individual atrocities and outrages. While a genocide is an effort to destroy, in whole or in part, a people defined by race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion, it is still experienced by individuals.

The multiple humiliations suffered by the staff begin to add up in numbing detail. They become a demoralizing "new normal" as the idea that one must dodge sniper fire in order to travel from one's home to one's place of employment becomes accepted by the international community standing by watching as if this all is some grotesque freak show carried out by some exotic species rather than fellow human beings being subjected to cruelties not of their own making. Gordana Knezevic interviews General Lewis MacKenzie, who Gjelten portrays as a glib, arrogant man who brings his preconceptions about the nature of the war with him and never lets facts or the realities on the ground shake any of them. (Keep in mind this book was published in 1995; MacKenzie's career as a craven Serb nationalist apologist-for-hire is in the future). He is as ungracious (scheduling the interview at a time when it will be especially dangerous for Gordana to travel) and amoral as he would later prove to be.(he not only refuses a request about the aforementioned newsprint, he also refused a personal request for a mere two liters of petrol for her car--all in the name of strict neutrality, of course).

In the end, all this humiliation--all this sustained, deliberate, targeted dehumanization of the "other"--can only lead to one inevitable result. Death and suffering stalk the staff of Oslobodjenje just as it does the rest of Sarajevo's population. The final section of this chapter is simply entitled "Some Who Died."
Zeljka Memic, the wife of editor Fahro Memic, is killed by a shell. Senka Kurtovic's mother suffered the same fate. Kemal Kurspahic is seriously injured in a car crash while racing through the unregulated streets of Sarajevo, trying as always to avoid the snipers. The humiliations continue.

"Sarajevo Daily" by Tom Gjelten [2]

Introduction: A War Over Names

The introduction briefly summarizes events in Sarajevo from the breakout of hostilities in April, 1992, to the 1994 post-'Breadline Massacre' ceasefire. Gjelten also briefly explains how he came to know the staff of Oslobodjenje--unable to find the rear entrance to the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo (the front, of course, was under sniper fire) on his first of many visits to Sarajevo, he instead showed up at the apartment of two people he'd been referred to: Ivo and Gordana Knezevic. Ivo is Croat and a professor; Gordana is a Serb and an assistant editor at the popular and respected daily newspaper, which had begun in 1943 as an underground publication of Tito's Partisans. Gjelten stayed with them for eight days his first visit, and on every one of his many return trips he always visited them and their youngest son (the other children had left Sarajevo before it was completely closed).

Gjelten's sketch of the situation in Sarajevo during this period is short. In general, he explains the uniquely multicultural and tolerant nature of pre-war Sarajevo, and how the idea of civic nationalism it represented was a threat to the ethnic nationalism being espoused by the likes of Karadzic and Tudjman. This idea was appealing to many Western observers and supporters, including himself, but the ideal seemed quite tarnished two years later when the city had been changed by two years of struggle, terror, violence, and ethnic tensions. The demographic makeup had become more overwhelmingly Muslim as many non-Muslims had left, many other less cosmopolitan Muslims from the countryside had arrived, and the SDA-led government had become more shrilly "Muslim" in nationalistic identity and even in confessional terms. The city seemed much less democratic and cosmopolitan than many of its admirers had believed it to be.

Gjelten notes that even as these unfortunate changes were becoming apparent, some media observers began to question the dominant narrative about the war, wondering if the majority of Western media coverage had been biased. As Gjelten puts it, "perhaps it was time for those of us who had described the Sarajevo struggle in moral terms to rethink our sympathies."

The Diana Johnstones of the world might feel a little thrill at reading that sentence, but the very next paragraph would quickly disabuse any Bosnian revisionist of the hope that they have another ally. Gjelten insists that in order to understand how the fiercely anti-nationalist Sarajevo he quickly came to admire and care about in 1992 became the predominantly Muslim, somewhat bitter and hostile, and vaguely anti-democratic city of 1994, it is necessary to take a close look at what the experience of ethnic war, nationalist agitation, and the hardships of living in a city under siege. A lot happened to the people of Sarajevo during those two years, and his book uses the experience of the city's heroic daily newspaper, with its proud tradition of democratic and anti-nationalist beliefs, in coping with the stresses of that period as a window to understand what happened to Sarajevo in general.

In the next post, I will begin Chapter One.

"Sarajevo Daily" "by Tom Gjelten [1]

[As is becoming an all-too predictable routine, this blog goes more or less dormant during the Spring and Fall semesters and then I try to get a review or two in during the Winter and Summer breaks. In keeping with this de facto tradition, here is my latest review.]

Tom Gjelten has been a correspondent for National Public Radio since 1982. In 1995, he published a book based on his reporting from Sarajevo entitled Sarajevo Daily: A City and Its Newspaper Under Siege. Gjelten chose to present the story of the Sarajevo daily newspaper Oslobodenje as a microcosm of the multiethnic city under nationalist attack. Gjelten's account has been widely praised, and although he is not a Serbo-Croat speaker, many of the principles he worked with were fluent English speakers, and he also had access to translators when interviewing others.

I will begin my review in the next post.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [23]

Epilogue 1996: Return to Purgatory

This epilogue was written a few years after the rest of the book; triggered by the end of the war, obviously, but Glenny begins his return with news of the mortar attack of February 5, 1995. Given that the rest of the book came to a close in 1993, quite a bit has happened since then. However, Glenny does not try to summarize the rest of the war. Rather, he picks up where things stand now and takes it from there.

His account of this event was written at the time, and Glenny very explicitly accepts the validity of General Rose's claim that the shell was fired by Bosnian government forces. He does not himself opine one way or the other. He also does not consider the possibility that the incident was simply a statistical probability given that the Bosnian Serbs had lobbed thousands of shells at the city, day in day out, for years.

At any rate, the main result of all this was a new cease-fire, and that both the United States and Russia got more involved. Glenny speaks highly of the unilateral Russian decision to occupy part of Sarajevo to keep the Bosnian government forces in check. Again, the moral and legal ramifications of an international community taking such action against a UN-member state fighting an insurgency are not discussed here. I suspect Glenny doesn't take such issues seriously.

The Russians, he argues, help create a situation in which shelling stops for awhile and Sarajevo becomes almost normal. Of course this situation cannot last, and Glenny himself admits that the cease-fire deteriorates over time and that no progress towards either peace or justice are made. These questions, again, don't seem relevant to him.

Ultimately, he credits the United States and Russia with forcing an alliance of convenience between the Muslims and the Croats in Bosnia. The result of this--and here I think Glenny is absolutely correct--is that Croatia becomes a direct beneficiary of resulting US support. The Bosnian government no longer has the leverage with Washington, even within its' own borders, that it used to.

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [20]

Chapter 6 [continued--pages 210-223]

Glenny recounts how the expose of concentration camps in Bosnia drove the international community into some kind of action, along with the infamous bread-line massacre of May, 1992. Glenny argues that nobody knows who was responsible for the mortar attack which killed dozens, almost fatalistically dismissing the incident as more grist for competing Serb and Muslim "mythology of war." Given that his account was written in 1993, I can almost forgive him for ignoring the obvious fact that it was the Bosnian Serbs who had been lobbing thousands of rounds of heavy ordnance into the city for the duration, and that mortars are imprecise weapons. Almost, but not quite.

He then moves on to condemn the United Nations for its resolutions on the situation because of the double-standard--while it ordered all outside forces to leave Bosnia, it treated Croat forces differently than Serb forces. He states that the "Croats were not involved in the wholesale slaughter which the Serb forces indulged in. But that is not the point--they were in violation of the UN resolution and, were the Security Council being consistent, should also have had sanctions imposed on them." This concern for the fairness of sanctions in the face of a one-sided war of genocide is another indication that Glenny has walked too far down the road of "fairness" and "balance." His concern for the ordinary people of Bosnia is admirable, and his reaction to the sometimes hysterical and often grossly oversimplified media distortion of the war is not without merits, but by this point in the narrative he has gone too far towards false equivalency. He completely decouples the sordid details of the war from the larger political and military narrative he seemed to grasp quite well in the opening chapters.

I agree with Glenny that the sanctions were ineffective and cruel to the people who deserved them the least. His account of the diplomatic efforts led by Lord Carrington and later Cyrus Vance and Lord Owen betrays more respect for, and faith in, Boutrous Boutrous-Ghali than a contemporary reader blessed with the benefit of hindsight most likely does. Even here, Glenny is able to simultaneously detail how peace talks involved Milosevic (who was able to neuter and get rid of Milan Panic and also keep Dobrica Cosic on a shorter leash) were key at this point, yet at the same time downplaying the role of Serbia in the war.

There are also some swipes at the Germans for taking less of an interest in Bosnia (there is justice in this accusation), as well as more observations that the Muslim-led government was not averse to playing to world opinion and using the victim card to shield military actions. This concern for honesty, integrity and playing by the rules in the face of a war of annihilation seems a serious case of misplaced priorities.

There are other incidents and observations, many of them poignant. Glenny is reported current events by this point, not recounting recent ones or providing interpretation. As noted in a previous post, this means that his interpretive framework is more predominant, and therefore more problematic.

I will consider the final 12 pages of this chapter in the next post.

Texas Legislature Commemorates Siege of Sarajevo as a Genocide Against Serbs

[This press release from the Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina brings attention to a resolution in the Texas Legislature recognizing April as Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month. This otherwise worthy resolution includes the statement that the deaths of 2000 Serbs in Sarajevo was an act of genocide--a statement that ignores the actual genocide against Bosnian Muslims, and which grossly misrepresents the context of the Siege of Sarajevo.]

ACTION ALERT
Call on Texas Legislature to Recognize Bosnian Genocide

March 16, 2012 - Washington, D.C. - The Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina (ACBH) along with the Congress of North American Bosniaks (CNAB), the Institute for Research of Crimes Against Humanity and International Law, Institute for Research Genocide, Canada, Bosnian American Genocide Institute and Education Center and Bosniak Cultural Association sent a joint letter to Texas Governor, Rick Perry expressing our grave concern regarding the alarming language used in Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 39 which was signed on June 17, 2011.

Lines 19 and 20 of page 1 of the Resolution state that "in April of 1992, the siege of Sarajevo began, leading to the deaths of more than 2,000 Bosnian Serbs." The aforementioned quote is a complete disregard of historical facts and an insult to the victims of genocide committed by Serbian forces in BiH. It is important to note that no one was ever indicted for an alleged genocide of Serbs in Sarajevo and we urge Governor Perry to act swiftly to amend this resolution and disallow a rewrite of history.

While ACBH strongly believes in the importance of declaring the month of April as the Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month in tribute to all those whose lives were touched by genocide, we were alarmed by the utter historical inaccuracy of lines 19 and 20 and the Resolution's failure to mention the Srebrenica genocide or other atrocities that occurred in BiH during the war of aggression.

The aggression and genocide that was waged on BiH lasted from April 6, 1992 until September 14, 1995 and resulted in the deaths of 200,000 people and the displacement of over 2 million. The genocide that occurred in BiH was characterized by the policy of systematic rape of Bosniak women and girls, horrific and prolonged siege and shelling of Bosniak cities, including Sarajevo, and the starvation and terrorization of the Bosniak population in the besieged enclaves. The city of Sarajevo was besieged by the Serb forces of Republika Srpska and the Yugoslav People's Army which was comprised of Serbs. The Siege of Sarajevo lasted from April 5, 1992 until February 29, 1996 and is considered to be the longest siege in modern day history. According to the United Nations Commission of Experts published in 1994, during the siege, Serb forces killed more than 10,000 people, 1,500 of those being innocent children. An additional 56,000 persons were wounded, including nearly 15,000 children.

In recognition of these atrocities, in 2005 the United States Congress unanimously approved the Srebrenica Resolution (S. Res. 134 and H. Res. 199) on genocide, which states that:

"the policies of aggression and ethnic cleansing as implemented by Serb forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995 meet the terms defining the crime of genocide"

Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ), co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on Bosnia (Bosnian Caucus) and an advocate of human rights introduced the aforementioned H. Res. 199. Together with Bosnian Caucus co-chair Congressman Russ Carnahan (D-MO) and the 27other members of the Bosnian Caucus, Congressman Smith has worked relentlessly on the dissemination of truth about the war in BiH and we ask Governor Perry to do the same.

The language in Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 39 of 2011 is not in line with established historical facts and we owe it to the victims of genocide everywhere, not just in Bosnia, to honor them by remembering what they suffered in a correct and accurate way. After the Holocaust, the civilized world made a promise to never let such atrocities happen again, yet because of unchecked rhetoric and appeasement, the unthinkable happened again in the heart of Europe. It is therefore of utmost importance that we increase the awareness of the dangers of genocide denial in order to prevent a genocide from happening again elsewhere in the world.

We ask all Bosnian Americans and friends of BiH to TAKE ACTION and not allow history to be rewritten.

Please find a sample letter HERE and express your concerns to:

The Honorable Rick Perry
Governor of the State of Texas
P.O. Box 12428
Austin, Texas 78711-2428

The Honorable David Dewhurst
Lieutenant Governor of the State of Texas
Capitol Station
P.O. Box 12068
Austin, Texas 78711

The Honorable Joe Straus
Speaker of the House
Texas House of Representatives
Room CAP 2W.13, Capitol
P.O. Box 2910
Austin, TX 78768

[Below is an open letter from the Congress of North American Bosniaks on the same issue.]

The Honorable Rick Perry
Governor of the State of Texas
P.O. Box 12428
Austin, Texas 78711-2428

The Honorable David Dewhurst
Lieutenant Governor of the State of Texas
Capitol Station
P.O. Box 12068
Austin, Texas 78711

The Honorable Joe Straus
Speaker of the House
Texas House of Representatives
Room CAP 2W.13, Capitol
P.O. Box 2910
Austin, TX 78768



Dear Governor Perry, Lieutenant Governor Dewhurst, and Speaker Straus:
On behalf of the Congress of North American Bosniaks (CNAB) and the Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina (ACBH) which represent the interests of over 350,000 Bosnian American citizens in the United States as well as the Institute for Research of Crimes Against Humanity and International Law and the Institute for Research Genocide, Canada, we are writing to express grave concern and dismay at language used in the Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 39 of 2011, signed on June 17, 2011. Lines 19 and 20 of page 1 state that “in April of 1992, the siege of Sarajevo began, leading to the deaths of more than 2,000 Bosnian Serbs.” The aforementioned quote is a flagrant disregard for historical facts and an insult to the victims of genocide committed by Serbian forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). We urge you and your appropriate state agencies to act swiftly to amend this resolution and disallow Serbian revisionists to rewrite history in the most brutal and insulting way. While there were Bosnian Serbs who died as a result of the Serbian siege of Sarajevo, they were victims of a larger scale attempt by the Serbian forces to eliminate the majority Bosniak population of BiH.

Genocide in BiH was the brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in which one million Bosniaks were displaced and half a million were permanently removed from their ancestral land.

Over 100,000 Bosniak civilians were killed during the 1992-95 war of aggression on BiH. The Bosnian Genocide was characterized by a policy of systematic rape of Bosniak women and girls, horrific and prolonged siege and shelling of Bosniak cities, including Sarajevo, and the starvation and terrorizing of the Bosniak population in the besieged enclaves. The brutal siege on the city of Sarajevo resulted in 10,000 killed, 1,500 of those being innocent children, 56,000 wounded civilians and the destruction of Bosniak culture and history.

We are fully in support of the idea and intent of the 82nd State of Texas Senate and House Legislature to declare the month of April as the “Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month” in tribute to all of those whose lives were touched by genocide, and as a reminder of the need for the protection of human rights and for vigilance against the forces of intolerance. However, it is imperative that such intent takes historical facts into consideration.

We respectfully request that you fully acknowledge the historical facts and rescind the SCR 39 of 2011 in the interest of promoting the full truth and correct a grave insult to the victims of genocide in BiH.

It is important to note that during the war of aggression on BiH, not one city was under siege by Bosniak forces; in fact, the majority of Bosnian Serb civilian casualties were killed by the Serbian army commanded by Gen. Ratko Mladic, a convicted war criminal, in the process of sniping and shelling multiethnic Bosnian cities like Sarajevo and Tuzla. The Serb people and the Serb culture were not deliberately targeted for ethnic cleansing, rape, siege, shelling, and destruction in Bosnia. The war of aggression on BiH was the Serb project of a “Greater Serbia”, modeled on a Nazi policy of ethnic purification that inflicted tremendous suffering on the Bosniak people between 1992 and 1995.

The four international judgments acknowledging that genocide indeed did take place in BiH other than in Srebrenica include: Prosecutor v Nikola Jorgic in the Doboj region, Prosecutor v Novislav Djajic [Dzajic] in the Foča region, Prosecutor v Djuradj Kuslic [Kusljic] in the city of Kotor Varos and Prosecutor v Maksim Sokolovic in the city of Kalesija and the Zvornik region. All three cases were tried in Germany at the request of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to ease caseload of the ongoing trials at The Hague.
We need not remind you of the horrific outcome of Serbian ultra-nationalistic plan to annihilate and ethnically cleanse the Bosniak people in Bosnia and Herzegovina. After the Holocaust, the civilized world made a promise to never let such atrocities happen again, yet because of unchecked rhetoric and appeasement, the unthinkable happened again in the heart of Europe. It is therefore of utmost importance that we increase the awareness of the dangers of genocide denial in order to prevent a genocide from happening again elsewhere in the world.

We owe it to the victims of genocide everywhere, not just in Bosnia, to honor them by remembering them. We stand ready to provide you with adequate language.
Thank you for your attention to this urgent request.

Sincerely,
Haris Alibasic, MPA
President, Congress of North American Bosniaks (CNAB)

Ajla Delkic, M.A.
Executive Director, Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina (ACBH)
Dr. Smail Cekic
Director, Institute for Research of Crimes Against Humanity and International Law, University of Sarajevo

Dr. Senadin Lavic
President, Bosniak Cultural Association, Sarajevo

Dr. Emir Ramic
Director, Institute for Research Genocide, Canada

Sanja Seferovic-Drnovsek J.D, MEd
Director, Bosnian American Genocide Institute and Education Center

[I urge everybody to contact the signers of this resolution protesting this language.

EDIT: Perhaps a mere coincidence, but both sponsors of this bill--Democratic Representative Scott Hechberg, and Republican Senator Florence Shapiro--have announced that they are retiring after their current terms. Also worth noting--Shapiro has a long and somewhat rocky history with former Pilot Scott O'Grady; he famously was shot down over Bosnia and survived for six days before being rescued. He later considered running for political office in Texas and publicly broke with Shapiro, who had been his political mentor up to that point. He has mulled running to replace her.]

"The Fall of Yugoslavia" by Misha Glenny [15]

[Apologies for the delay; I did not blog last week, contrary to my expectations. This will be a short post, but I wanted to get back to regular blogging.]

Chapter 5 [continued]

The next six pages of the chapter continue his tour of two very different areas in Bosnia which remain cheerfully optimistic that the impending war will somehow pass them by--Bihac-Cazin, and Sarajevo. Bihac, of course, was the location of Agrokomerc and the stronghold of Fikret Abdic. Glenny mentions that the only peasant uprising in Eastern Europe during the Communist period was carried out here by Serbs, Croats and Muslims. He doesn't dwell on the area much; I must say that the Bihac region, and the Abdic insurgency against Izetbegovic and the SDA, is one aspect of the war I wish I knew more about.

Then he moves on to Sarajevo, where the urbane, mixed population of Sarajlije are hoping against hope that the violence and hatred simply won't be able to find root. Most Serbs are embarrassed by the SDS.

Glenny revisits the issue of Izetbegovic and Islam; he clarifies that while he considers Izetbegovic to have been a fundamentalist of sorts at the time of his original arrest, he is nothing of the sort by this time. He gives the SDA leader credit for being a decent and humane leaders who sincerely wanted to avoid war. Yet he also blames him for organizing politically along ethnic lines (again without consideration of the fate of non-ethnic parties).

Bosnian-American Friendship Association

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: BAACBH Condemns the Arrest of General Divjak

[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 Institute for War & Peace Reporting

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.

Article from IWPR: "Bosnia War Compensation Dispute"

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 [15]

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.