Nearing the 20th Anniversary of Srebrenica

I've been meaning to kick-start this blog for some time, and there's no better reason to resurrect it than to begin commemorating a horrific anniversary. This Saturday, July 11, will mark twenty years since the Srebrenica genocide.

20 Year Anniversary

Given the prevalence of armed conflicts involving "failed" states such as Syria and Iraq, or of fragile states with restive minorities being supported and manipulated by a larger neighbor, such as Ukraine, it is very clear that the Bosnian War was indeed both a warning of the challenges the post-Cold War era would bring as well as a test the international community in general and the West specifically. It seems increasingly clear that whatever lessons were learned were the wrong ones, and that the legacy of Bosnia for policy-makers has been distorted and misunderstood. Perhaps this stark reminder of the human cost of moral indifference and strategic fumbling will lead to some healthy re-evaluation of priorities and interpretive frameworks.

War Criminal Momcilo Perisic Convicted

[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.

The 16th Anniversary of the Srebrenica Genocide

[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.

Serbia Arrests Ratko Mladic

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.

"Bosnia and Beyond" by Jeanne Haskin [4]

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.

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

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]

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.

Excellent Study on the Context of the Srebrenica Genocide

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.

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

[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.

Two New Articles from The Institute for War and Peace Reporting

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.

Journalist Peter Lippman Bosnia Journal #8

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.

The 15th Anniversary of Srebrenica Genocide-Press Release from BAACBH

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

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

[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

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.

"In Harm's Way" by Martin Bell [19]

Chapter 21: Showdown

This chapter is a brisk and exasperated account of events in Bosnia from late May up until around the fall of Srebrenica as witnessed by Bell and other members of the media, who were unable to witness much of what was happening first hand.

Mostly, this is account of the final, craven capitualation of the United Nations to the Bosnian Serb forces and of the continued increase in the volume and ferocity of the armed combat between those forces and the Bosnian government. It was clear to Bell at the time, as it is to all reasonable students of the war in hindsight, that the UN was a spent force at best by this point. Bell correctly notes that its mission had become an absurd anomoly, a protection force which seemed only interested in protecting itself. The UN was by now occupied with little other than negotiating for its own hostages and urging NATO to leave so that the Serbs would no longer threaten them. The fall of Srebrenica was the final, humiliating proof that it was well past time for the United Nations to leave.

Open Letter from Ed Vulliamy to Amnesty International

[I am passing this open letter along. Please feel free to copy the entire text and post it in any forum you wish.]

Open Letter from Ed Vulliamy to Amnesty International

Noam Chomsky has been invited to give the annual Amnesty International Lecture in Belfast. This is second time in four years that Chomsky has been invited to give an Amnesty International Lecture (following Dublin in 2006). To celebrate Chomsky’s forthcoming Lecture appearance Amnesty gives him a respectful and uncritical platform for his views over three pages of the latest Amnesty (UK) Magazine.

Amnesty appears oblivious to the controversies that surround some of Chomsky’s views on human rights, and in particular the support that he has offered and continues to offer to polemicists who deny the substance, scope and authorship of the worst atrocities perpetrated during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.

In recent years Chomsky has caused particular controversy through his support for the author Diana Johnstone, known for her “revisionist” views on Bosnia concerning the Prijedor concentration camps, the Srebrenica genocide and the existence of the Bosnian rape camps. Chomsky salutes her “outstanding” scholarship and defends her “serious, honest work”.

He represents his support for Johnstone as a defence of her right to freedom of speech while at the same time he denigrates the eyewitness testimony of The Guardian's reporter Ed Vulliamy whose account of the reality of the Omarska and Trnopolje camps forced the horror of what was happening in Bosnia onto the attention of the rest of the world and in so doing saved the lives of many of the prisoners detained in them.

Without explanation Chomsky characterises Ed Vulliamy’s description of Omarska and Trnopolje as “probably” wrong while at the same time he endorses the claim by Thomas Deichmann and LM magazine that Vulliamy, Penny Marshall and Ian Williams gave a false account of the situation in the Prijedor camps as “probably” correct. Chomsky disregards the finding of a High Court libel action which - following the evidence of a doctor detained in one of the camps - confirmed that Vulliamy and his colleagues had told the truth.

When asked why Amnesty offers a platform to a man who challenges the reporting of human rights abuses that Amnesty itself substantiated and champions the seriousness and honesty of individuals who try to deny those abuses, Amnesty’s response was to observe that invitees are not representatives of Amnesty International nor expected to deliver an Amnesty International policy position within their lecture, but rather they have been invited as having something interesting and thought-provoking to say about human rights in the world today and Amnesty International does not necessarily endorse all their opinions.

When Ed Vulliamy was asked to comment on Amnesty’s invitation to Chomsky he wrote the open letter below. The language expresses his depth of feeling, not only on his own behalf but also on behalf of the friends forced to suffer “the ghastly, searing, devastating impact” of Chomsky’s denial of their experience.

Anyone who shares these concerns can express their views for the attention of Irene Khan, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, at
http://www.amnesty.org/en/contact
or Kate Allen, Director of Amnesty International UK (AIUK), at sct@amnesty.org.uk




Open Letter to Amnesty International

To whom it may concern:

I have been contacted by a number of people regarding Amnesty International’s invitation to Professor Noam Chomsky to lecture in Northern Ireland.

The communications I have received regard Prof. Chomsky’s role in revisionism in the story of the concentration camps in northwestern Bosnia in 1992, which it was my accursed honour to discover.
As everyone interested knows, a campaign was mounted to try and de-bunk the story of these murderous camps as a fake - ergo, to deny and/or justify them - the dichotomy between these position still puzzles me.

The horror of what happened at Omarska and Trnopolje has been borne out by painful history, innumerable trials at the Hague, and - most importantly by far - searing testimony from the survivors and the bereaved. These were places of extermination, torture, killing, rape and, literally “concentration” prior to enforced deportation, of people purely on grounds of ethnicity.

Prof. Chomsky was not among those (“Novo” of Germany and “Living Marxism” in the UK) who first proposed the idea that these camps were a fake. He was not among those who tried unsuccessfully (they were beaten back in the High Court in London, by a libel case taken by ITN) to put up grotesque arguments about fences around the camps, which were rather like Fred Leuchter’s questioning whether the thermal capacity of bricks was enough to contain the heat needed to gas Jews at Auschwitz. But Professor Chomsky said many things, from his ivory tower at MIT, to spur them on and give them the credibility and energy they required to spread their poisonous perversion and denials of these sufferings. Chomsky comes with academic pretensions, doing it all from a distance, and giving the revisionists his blessing. And the revisionists have revelled in his endorsement.

In an interview with the Guardian, Professor Chomsky paid me the kind compliment of calling me a good journalist, but added that on this occasion (the camps) I had “got it wrong”. Got what wrong?!?! Got wrong what we saw that day, August 5th 1992 (I didn’t see him there)? Got wrong the hundreds of thousands of families left bereaved, deported and scattered asunder? Got wrong the hundreds of testimonies I have gathered on murderous brutality? Got wrong the thousands whom I meet when I return to the commemorations? If I am making all this up, what are all the human remains found in mass graves around the camps and so painstakingly re-assembled by the International Commission for Missing Persons?

These people pretend neutrality over Bosnia, but are actually apologists for the Milosevic/Karadzic/Mladic plan, only too pathetic to admit it. And the one thing they never consider from their armchairs is the ghastly, searing, devastating impact of their game on the survivors and the bereaved. The pain they cause is immeasurable. This, along with the historical record, is my main concern. It is one thing to survive the camps, to lose one’s family and friends - quite another to be told by a bunch of academics with a didactic agenda in support of the pogrom that those camps never existed. The LM/Novo/Chomsky argument that the story of the camps was somehow fake has been used in countless (unsuccessful) attempts to defend mass murderers in The Hague.

For decades I have lived under the impression that Amnesty International was opposed to everything these people stand for, and existed to defend exactly the kind of people who lost their lives, family and friends in the camps and at Srebrenica three years later, a massacre on which Chomsky has also cast doubt. I have clearly been deluded about Amnesty. For Amnesty International, of all people, to honour this man is to tear up whatever credibility they have estimably and admirably won over the decades, and to reduce all they say hitherto to didactic nonsense.

Why Amnesty wants to identify with and endorse this revisionist obscenity, I do not know. It is baffling and grotesque. By inviting Chomsky to give this lecture, Amnesty condemns itself to ridicule at best, hurtful malice at worst - Amnesty joins the revisionists in spitting on the graves of the
dead. Which was not what the organisation was, as I understand, set up for. I have received a letter from an Amnesty official in Northern Ireland which reads rather like a letter from Tony Blair’s office after it has been caught out cosying up to British Aerospace or lying over the war in Iraq -
it is a piece of corporate gobbledygook, distancing Amnesty from Chomsky’s views on Bosnia, or mealy-mouthedly conceding that they are disagreed with.

There is no concern at all with the victims, which is, I suppose, what one would expect from a bureaucrat. In any event, the letter goes nowhere towards addressing the revisionism, dispelling what will no doubt be a fawning, self-satisfied introduction in Belfast and rapturous applause for
the man who gives such comfort to Messrs Karadzic and Mladic, and their death squads. How far would Amnesty go in inviting and honouring speakers whose views it does not necessarily share, in the miserable logic of this AI official in Belfast? A lecture by David Irving on Joseph Goebbels?
Alistair Campbell on how Saddam really did have those WMD? The Chilean Secret Police or Colonel Oliver North on the communist threat in Latin America during the 70s and 80s? What about Karadzic himself on the “Jihadi” threat in Bosnia, and the succulence of 14-year-old girls kept in rape camps?

I think I am still a member of AI - if so, I resign. If not, thank God for that. And to think: I recently came close to taking a full time job as media director for AI. That was a close shave - what would I be writing now, in the press release: “Come and hear the great Professor Chomsky inform you all that the stories about the camps in Bosnia were a lie - that I was hallucinating that day, that the skeletons of the dead so meticulously re-assembled by the International Commission for Missing Persons are all plastic? That the dear friends I have in Bosnia, the USA, the UK and elsewhere who struggle to put back together lives that were broken by Omarska and Trnopolje are making it all up?

Some press release that would have been. Along with the owner of the site of the Omarska camp, the mighty Mittal Steel Corporation, Amnesty International would have crushed it pretty quick. How fitting that Chomsky and Mittal Steel find common cause. Yet how logical, and to me, obvious. After all, during the Bosnian war, it was the British Foreign Office, the CIA, the UN and great powers who, like the revisionists Chomsky champions, most eagerly opposed any attempt to stop the genocide that lasted, as it was encouraged by them and their allies in high politics to last, for three bloody years from 1992 until the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.

Yours, in disgust and despair,

Ed Vulliamy,
The Observer.

---

On the heels of its announcement of the Chomsky lecture Amnesty published a report on the ongoing search for justice by the victims of rape in Bosnia.
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details.asp?NewsID=18431

Nicola Duckworth, Amnesty International's Europe Programme Director, acknowledges that "During the war, thousands of women and girls were raped, often with extreme brutality. Many were held in prison camps, hotels and private houses where they were sexually exploited. Many women and girls were killed. To this day, survivors of these crimes have been denied access to justice. Those responsible for their suffering - members of military forces, the police or paramilitary groups - walk free. Some remain in positions of power or live in the same community as their victims."

Alisa Muratcaus of the Association of Concentration Camp Torture Survivors, Canton Sarajevo, insists that people who deny that the mass rape of Bosnian women was a strategic element of the war are talking “nonsense”. Her Association, composed of Muslim, Croat, Serb, and Romani members, many of them victims in camps and prisons throughout Bosnia of atrocities including rape and other forms of sexual torture, works closely with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague which has established beyond doubt that rape was used in Bosnia as a weapon of war.

Milorad Trbic Sentenced to 30 Years in Prison for Srebrenica Genocide

Great news; the wheels of international justice haven't completely stopped moving. Milorad Trbic has been sentenced to 30 years for his rule in the Srebrenica Genocide. See this post from Srebrenica Genocide Blog for more details and links. This is real victory, even though of course the sentence will always pale in comparison to the scale of the crime in a genocide trial. But what is important is the 'guilty' verdict itself. An international body has spoken for all of us, and condemned evil in our name.

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

There are people who argue that we in the international community need to "move on", either to heal or to let the past stay past, and so on. It helps to be reminded (painful as it may be) that the war over the meaning of the Balkan wars (and the larger issues involved) is hardly over. Oliver Kamm shines a bright light on one of the many dingy little corners of Srebrenica denial/Balkan revisionism in this article. Regular readers of this blog--especially those of you who stuck with my through the epic "Fools' Crusade" blow-by-blow review--will have little difficulty guessing whether or not I side with Kamm on the "ignore their poisonous nonsense, or call them out on their distortion of the historical record" debate.

Greek journalist sued for writing about the presence of Greek paramilitaries in Bosnia

With the kind permission of Daniel Toljaga, I am republishing the following interview which was originally posted on the official website of The Congress of North American Bosniaks. Thanks to Daniel for permission to republish his excellent--if disturbing--interview. This story merits continued scrutiny.

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

On 27 July 2009 Mr. Stavros Vitalis, representing the Panhellenic Macedonian Front, filed a libel suit against the acclaimed journalist Mr. Takis Michas, best known for his authorship of the book “Unholy Alliance: Greece and Milosevic’s Serbia.” He is suing the journalist for describing- in the daily “Eleftherotypia” - Greek mercenaries as “paramilitaries who took part in the slaughter in Srebrenica.”

Mr. Vitalis is one of the leading Greek volunteers who have admitted taking part in the Srebrenica genocide. But, that’s not how he sees it.

In a statement distributed to the media, he claimed that the Greek volunteers who fought in Bosnia under the command of General Mladic were there in order to help the Serbs “who were being slaughtered by international gangs that were also stealing their houses, their country and their dignity.”

DANIEL TOLJAGA: Mr. Michas, thank you for agreeing to take part in this interview. To begin with, what is the Panhellenic Macedonian Front that has filed this suit against you through its representative Mr. Vitalis?

TAKIS MICHAS: It is a Greek nationalist political organization which also includes socialists and conservative former politicians. Up until now its central campaign theme has been its advocacy of the view that Macedonia along with everything related to it (history, symbols, etc.) is exclusively Greek.

DANIEL TOLJAGA: What exactly does Mr. Vitalis hope to achieve with this lawsuit?

TAKIS MICHAS: Bearing in mind that Karadzic’s trial will also be taking place next year, what they will be hoping is to create an alternative debate in which the substance of what happened at Srebrenica will be called into question. In other words, while the world is trying the war crimes perpetrated at Srebrenica, in Greece they will be putting the critics of the war crimes at Srebrenica on trial!

DANIEL TOLJAGA: Do you have any comments about the lawsuit and the press statements Mr. Vitalis has made?

TAKIS MICHAS: Yes. First of all Mr. Vitalis explicitly admits that Greeks (i.e. himself) took part in the planning and execution of the Serb “re-occupation” (as he calls it) of Srebrenica. As he says in his press statement “I was present with a group of senior Serb officers in all the operations for the re-occupation of Srebrenica by the Serbs”.

Secondly, Mr Vitalis admits that the recruitment of Greek volunteers for the war against the legitimate government of Bosnia took place with the implicit approval of the leading Greek politicians Andreas Papandreou and (to a lesser extent) Constantine Mitsotakis. As he puts it:

“The whole of Greece knows that the Greek volunteers had the broad support of Greek society as a whole as well as the support of politicians, mainly belonging to PASOK, because of the warm friendship between Andreas Papandreou and Radovan Karadzic. They also enjoyed the support of New Democracy, through the friendly diplomatic initiatives of Constantine Mitsotakis.”

This reinforces the point I have repeatedly made, namely that Greek support for the Serb war effort was not only moral, economic, diplomatic and political but also military.

DANIEL TOLJAGA: Was Mr. Vitalis present during and after the fall of Srebrenica when Greek paramilitaries hoisted the Greek flag over the town?

TAKIS MICHAS: Well in his own statement he said that together with high ranking Serb officers he took part in all the operations that dealt with the “reoccupation” (as he calls it) of Srebrenica. Now as to whether he was physically present in the hoisting of the flag this is something that only Mr. Mladic knows (and perhaps Mr. Karadzic)!

DANIEL TOLJAGA: It is interesting that he publicly admitted being present himself “in all the military operations” related to the “re-occupation” of Srebrenica. Do you have any idea why Mr. Vitalis has not been investigated for possible war crimes?

TAKIS MICHAS: Because, as I have shown in my book, in Greece Serb actions during the war in Bosnia are not regarded as “crimes” but as “heroic deeds”. This applies to Srebrenica as well. No Greek government has made any statement at any time during the last 15 years explicitly condemning the killings at Srebrenica - this is a unique state of affairs for a European country.

DANIEL TOLJAGA: In the words of U.N. Judge Theodor Meron, who served as the President of the ICTY, Serbs - and I quote - “targeted for extinction the forty thousand Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica.” In your opinion, is Mr. Vitalis fully aware that the military operations he took part in resulted in the summary killings of more than 8,000 and the ethnic cleansing of approximately 30,000 people in July 1995? Is he aware that he took part in genocide?

TAKIS MICHAS: According to his own admissions, yes. However, just like Holocaust deniers, these people refuse to accept that mass killings took place in Srebrenica.

DANIEL TOLJAGA: Your book revealed for the first time the presence of Greek paramilitaries in Bosnia. Why has Mr. Vitalis waited so many years since the publication of your book to file a suit?

TAKIS MICHAS: This is an interesting question. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that as I have hinted in other articles I am now in possession of confidential diplomatic documents that show the Greek authorities for the first time admitting the presence of Greek paramilitaries in Bosnia. Possibly they think that by putting pressure on me now they will prevent me publishing these documents. But this of course is only one explanation. There may be others.

DANIEL TOLJAGA: Mr. Vitalis has claimed that the operations of the Greek volunteers “were widely endorsed by Greek society because of the warm friendship that existed between Andreas Papandreou and Radovan Karadzic.” To what extent did this friendship suggest that the government may have been involved?

TAKIS MICHAS: Obviously it involves government in the sense of knowing, tolerating and endorsing the open recruitment of Greek citizens with the aim of fighting against the legally recognized government of Bosnia. It certainly implicates the government of PASOK under Andreas Papandreou.

DANIEL TOLJAGA: I remember, and you also referred to this in your book, that leading Greek judges had publicly refused to cooperate with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Considering that your right to a fair trial may be seriously impaired by the extreme ultranationalist atmosphere in Greece and the fact that Mr. Vitalis has announced that he plans to call leading Greek nationalist politicians as witnesses, I would like to know whether you intend to seek support from prominent international organizations that specialize in the protection of journalistic freedom?

TAKIS MICHAS: I will certainly be trying to spread the word. Judging from the lawsuit they have filed against me, I guess that from now on they will also be making the glorification of the Serb war effort in Bosnia one of their campaign themes.

DANIEL TOLJAGA: Are you worried about the forthcoming trial?

TAKIS MICHAS: In any other European country this lawsuit would have been thrown out of court. But as I have said repeatedly Greece is not a normal European country. Given the spirit of extreme nationalism that permeates the country and the fact that Karadzic and Mladic are venerated as saints by the majority of the public and the political class, I have every reason to feel worried.

DANIEL TOLJAGA: Thank you for taking part in this interview. We will be keeping a close eye on the progress of your case.

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