"Sarajevo Daily" by Tom Gjelten [12]

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

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

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

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

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

"Bosnia and Beyond" by Jeanne Haskin [1]

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


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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

This could be interesting.

New Article from the Institute for War & Peace Reporting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karadzic concluded by thanking Rechner for his testimony.

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

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

Rachel Irwin is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.

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

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

New Article from Institute for War & Peace Reporting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you know that?” Karadzic asked.

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

“Who established that?” Karadzic asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The trial continues next week.

Rachel Irwin is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.

"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.

Crisis in Kyrgyzstan a Test for International Community

The following article from Radio Free Europe gives a brief sketch of the chaos and violence in Kyrgyzstan:

Humanitarian Crisis Deepens In Kyrgyzstan

It will be interesting to see if the international community learned anything from Bosnia and Rwanda.

"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.

"In Harm's Way" by Martin Bell [14]

Chapter 15: Of Men and Mandates

While the previous chapter raised a few troubling doubts about Bell's overall interpretation of the Bosnia crisis and the people involved in it, this chapter refutes those doubts in spades. You might disagree with some of Bell's individual judgments, but there can be little doubt that he grasped the big picture.

This chapter is largely Bell's recounting of the haphazard manner in which the United Nations stumbled into the unworkable "peacekeeping" mandate it found itself in; furthermore, he outlines the real-world implications of this confused mandate. The UN was keeping people from starving to death so that they could be murdered--Bell saw this clearly.

What he also saw was that many UN personnel were very conflicted about this, and more than a few were outraged. Some quite admirably did all they could to stretch their interpretation of the mandate as far as they could in order to save lives whenever possible. Bell's description of the UN in Bosnia as essentially a Red Cross with guns (which they were only allowed to use in self-defense) is a good one.

He also saw clearly that even as the quality and the moral courage of individual UN commanders made a difference within even a misguided mandate, so did the quality and professionalism of the soldiers. The Ukrainian contingent do not come out looking well in his account.

We also see General Michael Rose again, and the portrait this time is far less flattering than in the previous chapter; Bell tellingly refers to Rose's "supporters" in this chapter, and in context it is clear he is not one of them. Nor is he the man's enemy, but it is clear that he found Rose to be, the end of his first year in Bosnia, a deeply shaken man presiding over a failure of leadership and resolve, a far cry from the confident, decisive, can-do leader in the previous chapter. Rose has lost the plot, and failed to see the Bosnian Serb leadership for the murderous, bullying, untrustworthy thugs they were.

The chapter ends with a consideration of some lessons from the Bosnian experience of peacekeeping. Each of them is elaborated in more or less detail than I will quote here, but these few sentences will hopefully do his excellent arguments justice:

"First, a merely victim-based strategy doesn't work, and probably prolongs the war...

Second, humanitarianism conflicts with peacekeeping, and still more with peace-enforcement. The threat of force, if it is to be effective, will sooner or later involve the use of force...

Third, the credible use of force can yield results...This was the lesson of Bosnia, that force prevails...

Fourth, all threats will be tested; and if they are bluff they will be seen to be bluff...If you declare a safe area you have to make it safe...

Fifth, peacekeeping is a soldier-intensive business in which the quality of the troops matters as much as they quantity...

Finally, peacekeeping is not just soldiering under a different-coloured helmet."

Which concludes this chapter.

Mazowiecki Reports

I had noticed not too long ago that my link to the Mazowiecki Reports no longer worked--the documents had been taken down at the university hosting them.

When Daniel at "Srebrenica Genocide Blog" asked me about them, I realized I needed to actually do something about it--I am happy to report that I've corrected the problem by linking to the UN itself, where hopefully the documents will remain available online for some time.

Thank you Daniel, for motivating me! I hadn't checked that link for some time, so I have no idea how long it was faulty.

The Wheels of International Justice Move Slowly, But They Move.

On vacation or not, this story is too important to not acknowledge:

Serb cousins guilty of burning Muslims alive (from CNN)

Bosnia is no longer a sexy story for the broadcast media. Cynics and appeasers and ersatz "progressives" all wish to rewrite history, or devalue the historical record, or simply to convince the general public that "it's time to move on."

Fortunately, some people out there are still paying attention.

"Washington's War" by General Michael Rose [1]

I don't know if I'm going to review all of Washington's War: The American War of Independence to the Iraqi Insurgency or not, since the central premise of this book--that there are strong parallels between Britain in the American Revolution and the USA in the current occupation of Iraq--has no direct relation to the subject of this blog.

However, the author of this book is none other than General Sir Michael Rose, commander of United Nations forces in Bosnia from January 1994 to January 1995. This is more than an interesting coincidence--General Rose argues that his experiences in Bosnia provide him the first-hand knowledge necessary to understand the dynamic at play here. In fact, this book is in some ways an attack on the ideals of humanitarian intervention; as we shall see, when the text does address the Bosnian war specifically, it is also a work of implicit Bosnian revisionism.

I will begin to consider Rose's own text in the next post; for now, let us begin with the Foreward, by Professor Sir Michael Howard:

Foreward

This short Foreward is not nearly as clever as Professor Howard would like to believe it is; fully half is taken up with a strained description of the British military experience in the rebellious American colonies, written in a style meant to evoke the current American (and British, it must be noted) experience in post-invasion Iraq. The clumsiness of this piece of writing reveals the flaws in Rose's analysis before Rose himself has taken the stage--one can only see parallels between the British military in American, and the US coalition forces in Iraq if one ignores virtually all context, and shies away from specificity as well. By the time Howard "reveals" that is the American War of Independence, not the current Iraq war, which he is describing, only the dullest of readers will be surprised. For example, one must be completely ignorant of the fact that while the eastern coast of the USA is 3000 miles from London, it is considerably further than that from Washington, DC, to Baghdad.

However, Howard's "aha!" moment does provide a revelation of sorts--his throwaway reference to "the war that the United States has been waging in Iraq, with the British as her unhappy allies" suggests a polemic underneath the guise of historical study.

After giving credence to Rose's analysis of political incompetence in Iraq, Howard does express reservations about his belief that the US should give up and pull out of Iraq; his concern that Rose's belief that "both parties" (it will be interested to see which "party" in Iraq they are referring to) could quickly come to terms and develop a healthy relationship like the US and Britain did, or the US and Vietnam ultimately have. At least Howard recognizes the differences between the Iraqi insurgency and the revolutionary leaderships in both colonial America and--it has to be said--the Vietnamese Government.

However, Howard closes with an approving quote from the Duke of Wellington, to the effect that the hardest thing for a military commander to do is to retreat. His suggestion that this would the noblest and wisest course of action in a fragile state like Iraq, where the "party" we presumably would need to deal with is an insurgency which hardly speaks for a unified national movement, indicates that Howard and Rose are placing the cart in front of the horse. General Rose has an agenda to push, and this book will be an exercise in fitting the facts to fit the theory.

Journalist Peter Lippman--Travel Journal to Bosnia-Herzegovina Part II

Bosnia-Herzegovina journal #2: Sarajevo and Bosnia, continued

1. BOSNIA'S MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS

The nationwide pre-election campaign for municipal assemblies and mayors was in full swing when I arrived early in September. Over 3,000 assembly seats and some 140 mayoral positions were to be contested.

Elections in Bosnia take place every two years, with state and entity polls alternating with municipal races. Every election is a circus in which most candidates compete with each other to see who can raise tensions higher through the use of nationalist rhetoric. In the context of this time-proven campaign method, the rhetoric of fear and mistrust recalls the fraught discourse that dominated the pre-war period. As such, it is unavoidable that a very tense atmosphere will prevail.

A high point in the manipulation took place when Haris Silajdzic, Bosniak member of the three-person state-level Presidency, gave a speech before the UN General Assembly on September 23rd. There, Silajdzic called on the U.N. to "reverse the recognition of the Republika Srpska," which, as he terms it, is a "genocidal creation." He was not speaking for the Presidency, which has trouble crafting a unanimous position on just about any issue. As his counterparts -- mainly Serb politicians -- were quick to point out, Silajdzic was speaking for himself.

This speech, and a similar one that Silajdzic later gave before the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, caused an outcry from RS Prime Minister Dodik and his spokesmen. Always quick to respond to any perceived call to abolish the Republika Srpska, Dodik's followers voiced their oft-repeated threat to call a referendum, to be held in the RS only, on the question of secession from Bosnia-Herzegovina.

This back-and-forth verbal warfare was of great use to the nationalist parties during the election campaign. It worked to reinforce the voters' perception that they could only identify as members of one ethnicity or another, rather than as citizens with common interests. As such, they could only vote for the candidates who said that they held their constituents' "national interests" at heart -- even though what a "national interest" is, and why it always takes precedence over all citizens' needs for stability and economic recovery, have never been clarified.

For the rest of the campaign period, and beyond, the issue of abolition of the RS versus secession of that entity from Bosnia dominated the discussion. It didn't matter that this was unrelated to the local elections. It was a sideshow that upstaged the relevant issues -- but that was not an accident.

In fact, a media monitoring organization conducted a review of thousands of press releases and other pronouncements by the various political parties during the campaign, and found that a relatively small number of statements -- under a third -- pertained to local issues whatsoever. A much smaller number of statements, only around one hundred altogether, actually offered solutions to local problems.

While dust was being thrown in the eyes of the 3-million-odd voting population, other ways of swinging the vote were also underway. The clichéd practice of direct vote-buying was uncovered in some locations in both entities. This was implemented particularly in municipalities where the vote was expected to be close, such as Doboj, where Dodik's SNSD was trailing the SDS (the party founded by Radovan Karadzic). There, seventeen SDS activists were arrested a few days before the election, on suspicion of vote bribery.

Another somewhat transparent manipulation that promised an advantage to any local ruling party was the timely allocation of municipal funds for civic improvement in the months immediately before the elections. Such improvements included repair and upgrading of sports facilities, planting of new lawns, and installation of water fountains and public monuments. In some cases, spending on such projects in a two-month period equaled the expenditure for the entire previous year.

One enduring scandal involved the threatened rejection of the right of thousands of absentee voters to post their ballots by mail, due to "lack of proof of citizenship." This number included over 2,000 Bosnian Croats from northern Bosnia residing in Croatia, who wished to vote by mail. Their votes could significantly affect the outcome in some elections.

Just as scandalous was the involvement of high police officials in the RS in providing false identification -- and thus eligibility to vote -- to criminals and citizens from neighboring countries. In Brcko, some people who were illegally provided with new ID even registered the local government building as their home address.

The Bosnian state police agency, SIPA, arrested around twenty such officials in May, and another eight in September. These included top police commanders in Srebrenica and Bijeljina, and the head of the identification administration in Bijeljina. Upon the September arrests, top RS police officials complained that only the entity police had the right to arrest their own employees. These top police officials were the same ones who had cleared the appointment of the Bijeljina ID. official.

In response to these campaign manipulations, some concerned members of Parliament from an opposition party suggested that elections in some municipalities should be postponed, but this idea was rejected by the central elections commission.

The strongest non-nationalist opposition party in Bosnia is the Social Democrat Party, led by Zlatko Lagumdzija. Lagumdzija has for years written and said very reasonable things, but his party has lost popularity steadily over the years. It doesn't help that the SDP, reformed heir of the pre-war Communist Party, still works on the model of CP leadership, where the party's image is defined by one autocratic personality. (This is true of other parties as well.) Nor does it help that that personality, Lagumdzija, is one of the most wealthy politicians in Bosnia. He owns two fine apartments in central Sarajevo; an office building in Skenderija; a huge parcel of land with a summer house in the resort area of Poljine; an apartment in Dubrovnik; and a very comfortable savings account.

This year, a new non-nationalist party made a splash: Nasa Stranka ("Our Party"). NS was founded by an independent politician from the RS, with significant backing from Bosnia's best-known film-maker, Danis Tanovic, who won an Oscar for best foreign film for "No Man's Land" a few years ago. Tanovic is a non-nationalist who says many reasonable things, and seems to want to move the electoral and political process out of the hands of the finagling elite. He has been living in Paris since the war, but moved back to Bosnia recently, saying, "I want to live in this country, but I want it to be a country that my children can thrive in."

Nasa Stranka fielded candidates throughout Bosnia. Many of them were former SDP members, and others were prominent artists and intellectuals. You couldn't say that they represented as strong a movement as that of Barack Obama in the US, but among some people, they provided a measure of hope.

Another new multi-ethnic party made a small ripple, but it interested me because its principles were more in harmony with grassroots activism than with traditional electoral politics. That is the Pokret Mladih, which means "Movement of Youth." While in Bosnia there is generally a strong distinction between a movement and a political party, Pokret Mladih seemed to straddle the fence.

I talked with Jasmin Vedran Mehicevic, leader of Pokret Mladih. The party was campaigning in about twenty municipal races. Jasmin told me, "We have Serb candidates in our party in Trebinje and in Laktasi. It does no good to have a multi-ethnic political party in places where there is not a multi-ethnic voting body." I asked him if his candidates in those ethnically-cleansed towns were at all progressive. He said, "Anyone in a party in the RS with 'Bosnia-Herzegovina' in its name is forward-thinking."

Jasmin described the way that the odds were stacked against newer parties. During the 1990s, the OSCE helped to fund all parties' campaigns, but this is no longer the case. Now, parties receive governmental funding for campaigns only after they have been elected. What's more, the advertising companies are controlled by the larger political parties which, naturally, discriminate in distribution of advertising resources. Jasmin also told me, "One second on television costs ten KM (around $7.00). So a ten-second spot, every day for ten days, costs 1,000 KM." Pokret Mladih and Nasa Stranka simply did not have the resources for such advertising. Perhaps to its advantage, Pokret Mladih's youthful candidates -- and their graffiti-esque posters -- probably attracted some new young, otherwise jaded, voters.

Speaking of division among the multi-ethnic parties, Jasmin said that there are "at least seven good parties." His activists broke away from a party that had earlier split off from the SDP. He said, "The SDP is essentially a good party. The multi-ethnic parties should unite, but they can't, because all the leaders want to be the main leader. Each leader thinks they are the smartest, and they won't cooperate with each other. If we were to unite, there would be results.... Everyone would go into the SDP if it were without Lagumdzija. Zlatko Lagumdzija is someone who is wrecking his party."

I asked Jasmin about the relevance of "Dosta!" (Enough!) and other non-governmental organizations -- sometimes not even registered as NGOs -- that organize street protests. Could they help to make change happen in Bosnia? He answered, "The problems with the government can't be solved on the street, only in the government...The only change in government can happen in the elections.

I also had a chance to speak with Darko Brkan, a leader of Dosta. This group, which grew out of the successful conscientious objector movement, has been working on various civil rights issues for around four years. (see http://www.dosta.org/) It has activists in five or six cities, in both entities. Dosta's activities include protesting utility price hikes and corruption, fighting anti-Roma racism, generally promoting grassroots activism, and most recently, protesting street violence that seriously affects the population in the larger cities.

In February, some high school students randomly attacked and killed a seventeen-year-old, Denis Mrnjavac, on a streetcar. This shocked the citizens of Sarajevo, who had observed that the city government failed to respond in any effective way after several other similar murders. Fed up, people came out onto the streets and demonstrated for two months. In the largest protests since the war, between 5,000 and 6,000 people stood in front of the canton government building. They demanded the resignation of the city's mayor and the prime minister of the canton. Unfortunately, in one incident some of the angry protestors threw stones at the canton building, and this rather took the wind out of the sails of this movement, for the time being.

Darko says that although his movement lacked a strategy for building on the energy of these protests, they did attract some new activists. Dosta is currently working to expand and unite more groups of people, including student groups, in the grassroots movement. Darko agreed with Jasmin's assessment that change could only take place through the electoral process.

*

While I was following the Bosnian elections, people in Bosnia were watching those in the United States. Bosniaks were somewhat wistfully wishing for the election of Hillary, of Clinton fame. And as Obama was gaining steam, my friend Iva said to me, during a discussion of nationalism, that anything that made people feel that they were better than others was not acceptable. In that context, she wondered "why it was necessary for Obama to state that the United States was the greatest nation in the world."

2. "QUEER SARAJEVO FESTIVAL": Threats in advance

As I was arriving in Sarajevo in early September, a new scandal was brewing. Some young gay and lesbian people had been preparing to hold a "Queer Festival" in Sarajevo. This was not going to include a parade, but would present a photography exhibit, hold a public panel discussion, and show some films. Gay activists from around the region were going to attend. Association Q, the organization preparing the event, was observing its sixth year of activity. Its goals were to "offer a space in which we will evoke and reexamine heteronormativity and patriarchic values." (For the Queer Festival's web site, see http://www.queer.ba/qsf-en.htm)

In Zagreb there has been a gay parade for several years. There were violent incidents at first, but the local response has since calmed down. In Belgrade, there have been two parades. The first, in 2001, was met with such violence that there was not another attempt to hold a parade until mid-September of this year. There were attacks again, with one participant hospitalized and two attackers arrested.

In Sarajevo, opposition to the gay festival was going strong by August, and it was wide-ranging and vicious. At one end, posters appeared on the streets reading "Death to Gays." Someone founded a group on Facebook called, "Stop the gay parade in Sarajevo during Ramadan." On another web site, someone wrote in and said of the participants, “They should be bathed with gasoline and set ablaze.” Other people called for the festival's organizers to be attacked with baseball bats or molotov cocktails, subject to impaling, or run out of Bosnia.

At the high end, public officials condemned the event, and some media incited the public against it. The objections went like this: "That behavior is rejected by Islam, and it's a provocation that they are organizing the festival to happen during Ramadan."

A couple of prominent Imams, including Seid efendija Smajkic of Mostar, spoke out. Smajkic said, "We will not grab them by the neck on the street, but we have to say: This is immoral ... a promotion of ideas that are in violation with religion" (published in the Sarajevo daily, Dnevni Avaz). He added, “Freedom and democracy should not be used to promote deviant ideas and garbage imported from the West...We are certainly for a free society, but healthy ideas and healthy life must be nurtured.”

Representatives from Bosnia's other ethnicities got in on the act, providing a rare instance of agreement across ethnic lines: The general secretary of Milorad Dodik's party, the SNSD, said of homosexuality that "it is unnatural, sick and deviant behavior." Bosnian Croat politicians and clerics voiced similar opinions. The top Muslim cleric in the country, Reis Mustafa ef. Ceric, kept quiet.

Member of the Bosnian Parliament Amila Alikadic-Husovic declared that homosexuality was an "illness should be cured, and not supported." Later, she admitted that she had recently learned that homosexuality was no longer classified as an illness (for at least the last 30 years), but she was not apologetic. Mayor of Sarajevo Semiha Borovac condemned the death threat posters, but said that the festival should not be held during Ramadan.

When Start magazine writer Samir Sestan said, “With such democrats, who needs fascists?”, he nailed it. According to its constitution, Bosnia-Herzegovina is a secular society. It is a signatory to all the relevant international human rights conventions, including those that specifically protect gay rights. But these modern principles have not been well-assimilated into the patriarchal culture of Bosnia. Just as important, the violence and aggression of the past two decades has elevated mistrust of the "other" to the top rank of prevailing ethics. Sarajevo is touted as a city of tolerance, the multi-cultural city that, for example, welcomed the Jews exiled from Catholic Spain. This tolerance was showing wear and tear in August.

Some human rights activists and otherwise pro-democracy figures lapsed and joined in the criticism, suggesting that the event should have been scheduled outside of Ramadan. In response the coalition "Odgovornost" (Responsibility), composed of a dozen-odd NGOs and civil human rights organizations, reminded the public that in Bosnia, as a secular society, it is neither required nor possible for all events to be "synchronized with different religious calendars." The coalition described the festival as a "test to show whether Bosnia was truly democratic."

Among the political parties, only Nasa Stranka and the Liberal Party expressed support for the festival, which was to be partially funded with donations from the Dutch, Canadian and Swiss Embassies. The silence, on the part of people who should have reacted in defense of the event, was every bit as inappropriate as the attacks.

Besides the incitement by prominent individuals against the festival, parts of the media were involved. A late-August edition of Avaz published the blaring headline: "Provocative Gay Gathering during Ramadan! - BiH Public against Queer Festival in SA," and went on to print that "Bosnian politicians and most religious leaders think that this festival shouldn't be held during Ramadan, and some think that homosexuality is a disease."

A few magazines and radio stations defended the upcoming festival. These outlets received telephoned and written death threats. Dani magazine published a couple of relatively articulate, if angry, criticisms that it received. In one, an imam attacked Dani for expressing "anti-Muslim" opinions that were a "holdover from Communism." Another writer warned that the world-wide Mason conspiracy was promoting anti-Muslim, degenerate Western values in order to destroy Bosnian society, and asked, "Would you like to see your children marching in a gay parade, holding hands with others of the same sex?"

In a rare response from someone in the political establishment, a legal advisor to member of the Presidency Haris Silajdzic wrote that "anyone who is getting votes by justifying hatred on the basis of religious feelings misunderstands the meaning of religion. Homophobia, like Islamophobia, is a subgroup of xenophobia. The same rules apply to gender issues that apply to discrimination on the basis of race and religion."

Amnesty International and the OSCE issued statements of concern about the threats of violence against the festival. In a clarifying statement, organizers of the festival noted that it was to be a festival of arts and culture, and that it was not intentional that it coincided with Ramadan. As the festival approached, several venues cancelled their agreements to host events, citing the need to "repair the ventilation system" or other excuses.

A festival spokesperson voiced the hope that there would be no violence, saying that she was counting on the protection of the police department and a private security agency. But commentator Asim Beslija wrote, referring to Ramadan, "And while sins are being confessed, and people are behaving in a humble and pious manner, under the table the knives are being sharpened and the clubs are being grasped. It is good to kill at least one queer..."

*

DEFEAT IN HOLLAND: Dutch Court Rejects Srebrenica Lawsuit

Hasan Nuhanovic, a survivor from Srebrenica, filed a suit several years ago against the Dutch government, together with the family of another former employee of the Dutch battalion in Srebrenica. The lawsuit charged the Dutch with criminal involvement in the massacre of at least 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, which took place upon the fall of Srebrenica in July of 1995. On September 10th, Hasan's claim was rejected in the first-instance District Court at The Hague.

During the war Hasan, living in Srebrenica, was a young interpreter for the Dutch Battalion, which was tasked by the UN with defending that enclave. Upon Srebrenica's fall, thousands of residents fled to the Dutchbat base ahead of the advancing Serb forces. The Dutch allowed 5,000 refugees to enter their base, and then welded shut a hole in the fence. After negotiating with the arriving Serbs, the Dutch decided to hand the Bosniaks on their base over to General Mladic's troops.

Most of the men in that group were killed, and the women and children were expelled from Serb-controlled territory, driven to the front line and dumped there. Hasan still had protection from the Dutch because he was their employee. But Dutch officers ordered him to tell his mother, father, and brother that they were to leave the base. He never saw them again.

This story is written in greater detail in other places, such as Emir Suljanovic's Postcards from the Grave, and Hasan's own, recently-published book, Under the UN Flag. For anyone who wants to know the story of what happened in Srebrenica, and especially for anyone who is inclined to be forgiving towards the Dutch, this book is absolutely necessary. With painstaking detail, Hasan provides an airtight condemnation of the Dutch troops' active cooperation with Serb forces, especially, but not exclusively, at the time of the fall of the enclave.

After the Dutch District Court's rejection of Hasan's lawsuit, Hasan told a magazine interviewer that he had not expected much from the court, but he was glad that the court was finally forced to address the issue of Dutch responsibility in a serious way. Hasan said,

"The Dutch court used the phrase 'Under the UN Flag' several times, but there were two flags [the UN flag and that of the Netherlands] there at the time that the Dutch were expelling my family and 5,000 more people from the base. I saw this with my own eyes.

"In my opinion, the Dutch are responsible for participating in a war crime. They actively controlled the situation, deciding to drive people from the base and to hand them over to the Serb forces. Not one official organ of the Dutch government has answered the question of how to legally address the act of handing over the refugees.

"They have in fact admitted that they knew ahead of the handover that there were people who had already been killed; they saw the bodies....but they left open the question of who drove people from the base, as if it was the Serbs who did it."

Hasan explains that Dutchbat, instead of handing the refugees over to the Serbs, had the power to allow more of them, at least the males, to enter the base. But the Dutch were more concerned with smoothing the way towards their own safe departure than with the safety of the Srebrenicans.

The Dutch court denied that the Dutch government had any responsibility for what happened in Srebrenica, and said that the appropriate place to address this question was the UN. However, the same District Court had previously judged that the UN had "absolute immunity" with regard to the massacre.

A friend of mine who works at the Bosnian war crimes court said, "Where politics meets justice, politics wins. So the ICJ [World Court] didn't decide to convict Serbia of genocide, because of the possible repercussions in other countries where such things have happened, thus preventing the payment of restitution. The same thing happened with Nuhanovic's case with the Dutch government. They weren't about to convict themselves."

When I met with Hasan later in the month, he told me that he was planning to appeal the decision all the way to the EU human rights court in Strasbourg. But this will take years.

For more information on this case and the history of the Srebrenica massacre, see http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com/2008/05/under-un-flag-international-community.html
and
DomovinaNet page on Srebrenica
and
Wikipedia entry on Srebrenica Genocide (recommended to me by Hasan Nuhanovic)
and
Balkan Witness: The Srebrenica Debate

###

Next -- Bosnia-Herzegovina journal #3: A visit to Srebrenica

UN Mission in Kosova Muzzles Woman's Right Advocate

As if we didn't need another reason to condemn the United Nation's ill-advised attempt to appease Serb extremist sentiment by violating Kosova's sovereignty, the UN is now taking it upon itself to dictate the limits of participation in civil society.

Please read the link at Advocacy Project.

Once again, the UN manages to screw things up in the former Yugoslavia. These people seem positively addicted to partition and capitulation.

Bosniak American Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina Commemorates the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Bosniak American Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina
815 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 200, Washington DC 20006
(202) 291-7080; board@baacbh.org; www.baacbh.org
For Immediate Release Contact: Elmina Kulasic
December 9, 2008 Executive Director
Washington, D.C. Direct: 202-291-7080
BAACBH Commemorates the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
The Bosniak-American Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina (BAACBH) would like to
commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the 60th
anniversary of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
BAACBH holds true the principles outlined in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
the Crime of Genocide and condemns any act committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group. The disregard for human rights led to genocide and
ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) that eliminated the historical pattern of tolerance
and shared experiences from a plurality of religious and cultural groups from which BiH profited
and flourished as a multi-ethnic nation in Europe. Although the Dayton Peace Agreement ended the
aggression on BiH, it lacks the core principles of democratic governance needed for a stable BiH. In
fact, the Agreement has institutionalized ethno-territorial divisions overshadowing human rights and
enabling nationalistic sentiments to prevail.
In order to embrace the Declaration’s mission, BAACBH strongly believes that justice is the closure
for victims and the only foundation for peace in BiH. Therefore, advocating on behalf of Bosnian-
Americans, people who have survived the Bosnian genocide and escaped human rights abuses by
immigrating to the United States in search of a better and peaceful future, BAACBH strongly
believes a constitutional reform is needed that will accentuate equal rights and democratic
governance for all of its citizens.
Therefore, we can not forget about the victims of the Bosnian genocide and ethnic cleansing as well
as the Holocaust, Rwanda, Darfur, and other betrayed countries and regions who saw “never again”
happen after World War II, for their memories are our voices for the future.
Guided by the principles for justice, freedom, democracy, and equality for all, BAACBH is
committed and dedicated to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedoms.

Two Videos I Forgot To Share

Real quick, a couple of recent videos, which were forwarded to me, and I was too busy and/or addle-brained to immediately pass along.

First, Haris Silajdzic's recent speech at the United Nations:

President Silajdzic's speech at the UN

Also, Allan Little recently did a short (and rather depressing, I must warn you) report on Karadzic's legacy (i.e., the continued ethnic division of the country):

Allan Little on Newsnight

I tested both links yesterday and they still worked. Again, I must admit I've been sitting on each of them for a couple of weeks, so don't wait to long to check them out.

"The Bridge Betrayed" by Michael Sells [14]

CHAPTER SIX: MASKS OF COMPLICITY [continued]

Passive Violence and False Humanitarianism

"Western policy makers also manipulated the language of pacifism to justify an arms embargo against the Bosnians while refusing to use force to help them."

This is well-known to any reasonably informed observers of the Bosnian war; Sells notes dryly that the same Western governments engaged in and authorized arms sales to countries all over the world. Furthermore, he rightly notes that those same governments had

"...a moral and legal duty to uphold Article 51 of the UN Charter guaranteeing the right of a nation to defend itself, as well as the 1948 Geneva Convention requiring all signatory nations not only to prevent genocide but to punish it. By refusing either to allow the Bosnians to defend themselves or to use NATO power to defend them, these leaders engaged in a form of passive violence, setting the parameters within which the killing could be and was carried out with impunity."

The outrage that informed such books as David Rieff's Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West was primarily fueled by similar observations. The slightly condescending indifference towards the practical and moral implications of this faux pacifism. Sells notes that most Western churches and religious groups were complicit in this campaign as well.

The catastrophic consequences of what Sells aptly terms "passive humanitarianism"--struggling mightily to get food to civilians while leaving them at the mercy of their heavily armed tormentors--is also discussed. And Sells briefly mentions a couple of infamous incidents--the use of Muslim rape camp slaves by UN officials, and the cooperation between UN peacekeepers transporting Dr. Hakija Turajlic and his murderers.

Moral Equalizing

I doubt any readers of this blog will need a refresher course on the moral equalizing ("There are no saints in this war"; "All sides share some of the blame") frequently indulged in my Western pundits and politicians in their never-ending efforts to avoid their moral and legal responsibilities. The list of incidents and statements Sells includes is damning but hardly comprehensive--Stoltenberg repeating the Serb nationalist line that Muslims were "really" Serbs; Owen claiming that 60% of pre-war Bosnia "belonged" to "the Serbs"; Susan Woodwards pseudo-objective claims that the entire conflict was due to impersonal factors and and organizational breakdowns; and so on. And of course Peter Brock's Foreign Policy article, which gave Bosnian revisionist an actual article in an actual, reputable mainstream publication which to cite ad nauseam.

National Interests

Sells notes that many Western leaders made the Kissingeresque realpolitik claim that the USA and other NATO members had no "national interest" in Bosnia. He notes how international indifference to the Palestinian problem in the wake of the 1947 war still haunts us today; he also argues that indifference in Bosnia most likely emboldened Hutu extremists in Rwanda (although, of course, the "realists" would most likely respond that we had no national interests in Rwanda, either). He also points out that indifference to the plight of Bosnia's Muslims almost certainly lent credibility to Islamist and jihadist claims about Western hostility to Islam and Muslims. And what is the cost of allowing religious violence to succeed?

He closes with an over-reaching claim that some arms-producing nations might actually welcome the instability that acquiescence in Bosnia's destruction might unleash. This smacks too much of paranoia and conspiracy theories for my taste; I would have preferred for Sells to have left this paragraph out of the final draft.

Not Two Cents

The title of this final section comes from Thomas Friedman's callous and stupid comment "I don't give two cents about Bosnia. Not two cents. The people there have brought on their own troubles." Sells' verdict on this statment is concise and accurate:

"It marks the logical end of moral equalizing, the equating of the victim and the perpetrator and the devaluing of both."

Sells notes that Friedman was only stating in bald terms what many in the West were implying with comments about "Let them keep on killing one another and the problem will solve itself." Sells' argues that the solution to such moral vacuousness is to replace the general with the specific, to give the suffering a human face, such as the famous picture of the young Bosnian woman who hung herself after the fall of Srebrenica. That picture was cited by Senator Dianne Feinstein, who had been against US involvement in the region. As Sells puts it:

"It was what the picture left unsaid that allowed the senator to look beyond the linguistic masks of "warring factions" and "guilt on all sides" to the reality that this young woman was most likely not warring, not guilty, not an ancient antagonist or hater, and that her act was "not the act of someone who had the ability to fight in self-defense." "

Sells concludes by noting that it is difficult to make moral distinctions in a religious genocide since so much of our moral thinking is grounded in religious teachings to begin with. Religious leaders and teachers, he concludes, have an obligation to

"...better understand and more clearly explain the full humanity of those who embrace other religions and the variety and richness within other traditions. Another response is to begin with a basic premise--that needless, willfully inflicted human suffering cannot and should not be explained away."

How sad that after thousands of years of organized religion, such simple and fundamentally decent proposals still need to be put forward.

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

This concludes Chapter Six. In my next post, I will consider the final chapter.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [25]

CHAPTER TWELVE: NATO'S WAR CRIMES

[continued]

Parenti makes a drawn-out and rather odd analogy comparing civilian casualties in wartime to pedestrians killed by a reckless driver. As Parenti tells it, since a driver who kills bystanders through reckless driving can be held liable for their deaths, then shouldn't the accidental killing of civilians during military action, specifically bombing, automatically be considered a war crime?

Unfortunately, Parenti doesn't delve any deeper into this comparison--which would be necessary, since he makes no exceptions and adds no qualifiers. He does not draw any distinction between precision guided bombs versus carpet-bombing, for example. Because Parenti has written in other places in defense of revolutionary violence, and because he certainly is no anarchist--the man has no problem with state power when the state is socialist (or, preferably, Stalinist), he should have examined this point further. I do not believe he is advocating absolute pacifism, so to leave the analogy hanging is simply lazy.

But no matter--he goes on for several pages attempting to imply that civilian casualties were intended. That is his choice of words; he is not claiming that NATO planners were indifferent to the civilian suffering on the ground in 1999, or that the military and political restraints pushed NATO to use tactics which placed pilot safety ahead of ensuring the highest standards of accuracy (which would have been a fair point to make). No--Parenti says this:

"But there is a real question as to how unintended the killing of civilians has been."

This is a very serious accusation, yet the evidence he gathers is rather weak. It may come out that NATO knowingly dropped cluster bombs onto civilian areas--I am no fan of the manner in which the Kosovo campaign was implemented--but Parenti hardly makes a convincing case.

And so this chapter goes--more quotes and occasional stray facts gathered in an attempt to reverse the guilt. Predictably enough, the fact that most of the expulsions of ethnic Albanians began after the onset of bombing is used to somehow damn NATO--as if the planning for such ethnic cleansing wasn't already in place; as if forcing over a million people out of their homes is a moral and reasonable response to military assault. But this is standard Balkan revisionism, and Parenti adds nothing new to this tired storyline.

There is a list of "Fictions" and "Facts" in which Parenti presumes to uncover various Western "deceptions". The list ends with this "fact":

"The "stiffest military challenge" in NATO's history was actually a sadistic, one-sided, gang-battering of a small country by the most powerful military forces in the world."

I defy any undergraduate to cite that "fact" in a paper.

And so the chapter ends, with yet more protestations that ethnic Albanians were not being driven from their homes in large numbers until the bombing started and the usual outrage about diplomatic hardball at Rambouillet. And then the standard list of past US crimes and foreign interventions and invasions. Noam Chomsky does this too, as does Diana Johnstone, and I can only repeat what I've written previously--for the far-left Balkan revisionists, the problem isn't that we cared too little for the people of East Timor, it is that we care too much about the Muslims of Bosnia and the Albanians of Kosovo. Because the motives of the world's most powerful nation are never pure and wholly altruistic, then those motives must be entirely suspect. And it is the motives--not the actual actions, or the effects of those actions, which matter most to Parenti and his fellow travelers.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [24]

CHAPTER TWELVE: NATO'S WAR CRIMES

[I've been busy and out of town for most of the past week--sorry it's taken me so long to get back to blogging]

Parenti has a big ax to grind--NATO, not Milosevic or Seselj or Karadzic, was the real war criminal in Yugoslavia in his version of events. To begin, he lists the laws both national and international that NATO, in his opinion, violated.

The problem with this section is not that he is incorrect--strictly speaking, Parenti sticks to the facts in these opening paragraphs (although he seems to consider the NATO Charter to be "international law"--I'm not so sure about that). His objections are all over the map and rather disjointed. He objects to the violation of Serbian sovereignty on the basis of the UN Charter (which, in better hands, could have prompted a worthwhile examination of how the UN deals with domestic crises). He also claims that the Clinton Administration violated the War Powers Act as well as bypassing Congress altogether. Again, there are merits to these objections--so it is all the more distressing that Parenti doesn't seem the least bit interested in discussing them further. He throws the information out, raw and unexamined, and assumes that his job is done. Other than another couple of legalistic paragraphs on about the War Powers Act, he has already moved on.

We next discuss how NATO represents a newer and more sinister form of imperialism because it represents no particular people or geographic entity. NATO is a lot like a corporation, you see, and corporations are bad. I apologize for the glib tone--Parenti has actually quoted an interesting point--but once again the man has borrowed an insight without adding anything to it. Much of this book has the feel of a hastily-written undergraduate paper with random quotes inserted into the text post de facto in order to make the instructor happy.

Just as Parenti lacks the intellectual curiosity and even-handedness to make anything interesting of the issue state sovereignty, international interventions, and international law, he lacks the honesty necessary to discuss the issue of diplomacy. In short, he returns to the scene of Rambouillet. We already know that Parenti wants to believe that the Belgrade regime were unfairly set up; there is no need to rehash that imaginary scenario.

What follows is an odd exercise in logic; one that seems to suggest that any and all military actions by a state are fundamentally immoral, no matter what the cause or circumstance. We will consider this in the next post.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [19]

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE OTHER ATROCITIES

[continued]

Having listed a number of incidents involving Croat, Muslim, and Bosnian government forces, Parenti now turns to attention to the seige of Sarajevo.

This is interesting--I would have expected him to go for broke and break out the Srebrenica denial material at this point, but Sarajevo it is. And unlike Srebrenica, there is far too much visual evidence of the siege to deny that it happened, so instead Parenti opts for the argument that it wasn't really a siege at all--or at least not a very bad one--and it was the Bosnian government's fault.

Parenti's 'evidence' for this assertion essentially boil down to two points--the Bosnian government's intermittent intransigence both with the international community and its own citizens; and the fact that, at certain (no doubt carefully chosen) points in time, life in Sarajevo was less than completely hellish. Parenti inadvertently betrays his own dishonesty in the first paragraph. First, he writes:

"The key story that set much of world opinion against the Serbs was the siege of Sarajevo which lasted, on and off, from April 1992 to February 1994."

(The "on and off" is a condescending little touch, isn't it?)

Then he approvingly quotes Charles Boyd, who noted that local markets were selling produce at reasonable prices on the day the Bosnian government was commemorating the 1,000th day of the siege.

Boyd has become quite the darling of Balkan revisionists (apparently US generals are not guilty of being imperialists if they happen to have convenient excuses) but Parenti could have at least addressed how a siege that lasted less than two years "on and off" could have made it to Day One Thousand.

And then, of course, the usual charges that Bosnian forces (always--ALWAYS--ABiH forces are referred to as "Muslim" forces; but then, he later talks about an interview on "Muslim television") systematically shelled their own citizens; that the famous marketplace bombings were actually bombs planted by "Muslim" troops; and of course that the entire siege (as it were) was entirely the fault of the Izetbegovic government, which refused to accept cease-fire and peace agreements. God forbid we blame the heavily armed troops in the surrounding mountains and hills. Parenti even praises the Serb forces for this:

"Bosnian Serb forces had offered safe passage to all civilians. With noncombatants out of the way, especially women and children, the Serbs would be able to treat Sarajevo as a purely military target."

He honestly seems to believe that this was a noble, humane, and reasonable gesture. It is worth noting that in this chapter, Parenti's previously noted pretense of relying mostly on Western sources has gone out the window--nearly all of his 'information' comes from fellow revisionists.

At the end of the chapter, Parenti cynically plays at being even-handed by admitting that "Violations of the Geneva convention can be ascribed to Serb forces, especially Chetnik paramilitary units and irregulars." He proceeds to list a series of rather random and unconnected atrocities (almost as an aside, he concedes that Serb forces bore "much of the responsibility for Sarajevo").

But this all comes after several pages of predictable and decontextualized incidents, a crude and barely-sourced attempt to snow the gullible reader. The Bosnian government forces are blasted for refusing to allow the UN access to the Sarajevo marketplace after the infamous 1994 bombing. Which begs the question--why should the UN expect to have unrestricted access, anyway? Where is Michael Parenti's concern about sovereignty now? Why should the UN be allowed to go anywhere and see anything in the Bosnian capital? He does not explain--in the former Yugoslavia, the sanctity of state sovereignty was apparently only for Serbia and the RS.

This tedious and thoroughly dishonest chapter closes with a comparison between the "moderated truths" mouthed by mealy-mouthed neutralists like Boyd, Rose, and so on versus the "barrage" of "Serb-bashing stories broadcast unceasingly around the world." This level of hyperbole and paranoia is worthy of Karadzic and Cosic at their best. In the next chapter, Parenti signs on to the Serb nationalist cause whole-heartedly.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [17]

CHAPTER SEVEN: REPUBLIKA SRPSKA: DEMOCRACY, NATO STYLE

This is the somewhat infamous chapter in which Parenti argues that the Republika Srpska was the unwitting victim of a Western capitalist plot to destroy a legitimate, democratic and socialist state. By this point in the book, it is clear that Parenti is either a pathological liar or, more probably, a classic case of the "true believer" who filters all received information through a dogmatically ideological preconception.

It is instructive to read this book in tandem with Samantha Powers' A PROBLEM FROM HELL--Powers' impassioned but also well-researched book exposes the myopic and cramped vision that Balkan revisionists present. The information needed to expose the lies of Parenti, Johnstone, and company is voluminous and readily available. Her chapter on Bosnia relies on plentiful information, data, and testimonial which collectively make a mockery of Parenti's paranoid and simplistic fairy-tale about a sinister and well-executed Western plot to destroy Yugoslavia. The true story, course, is that the US government, under two Presidents--one from each party--was desperate to stay out of Bosnia and mostly managed to do so for several years. The facts, and vast bulk of documentation available to any person even mildly curious about the war, are clear. In order to avoid the obvious conclusion, one must refuse to see what is clearly there.

Therefore, there is little point in wasting time refuting the minutiae in Parenti's screed. I will briefly summarize the contents of this truly insane chapter with only a couple of comments.

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

The reader cannot claim, at the outset of this chapter, that he or she was not warned--Parenti writes that:

"Gregory Elich provides an excellent and well-documented account of the Western colonialist rule imposed on Republika Srpska. What follows is drawn almost entirely from his writing."

As always, the Balkan revisionists are a self-contained, self-referential closed loop. Don't worry, it isn't all Elich in this chapter--our good friend Diana Johnstone gets quoted more than once, as well.

In Parenti's world, Radovan Karadzic is a misunderstood and tragic figure; a well-meaning champion of minority rights and a victim of a smear campaign by Western capitalists. His crime, as it turns out, was that:

"...although Karadzic was not a Communist, he appointed many Communist and leftist officers because they were his most capable military men, and they shared his anti-separatist goal."

Well, that's one way to put it, I suppose. In Parenti's telling Karadzic was brushed aside by NATO in favor of Biljana Plavsic, whom he dismisses as "a right-wing monarchist", who would prove more compliant with the demands of the free-marketers. Karadzic was "now branded as a war criminal" (as if he weren't already). Parenti is not content to merely whitewash Karadzic's actual war crimes out of existence, he goes one further and writes:

"Although sent down the Orwellian memory hole, Karadzic was still at large and being hunted by Western intelligence agents as of 2000."

Now that we've all shed a tear for Radovan Karadzic (mysteriously, Parenti has a not a word in defense of that good leftist anti-separatist military officer Ratko Mladic), we move on to more ranting about Plavsic's purge of 'leftists' from the Western colony of RS and the maneuvering to place OSCE approved politicians in positions of power, all in the name of dismantling the worker's paradise of Republika Srpska. Parenti and Elich's complaints about the unconstitutional nature of such moves appears to be genuine--they seem to regard the RS as a legitimate state conceived under normal circumstances, it's internal affairs no concern to the international community.

The entire chapter essentially makes the same 'point' over and over again--the moves to hold war criminals accountable for their actions and to oust nationalists from positions of power and influence were all just a front, a Trojan Horse allowing capitalists to destroy an free, democratic, and socialist economy with impunity.

The NATO moves to shut down the RS police stations is regarded with all the horror and outrage you would expect--Parenti uses a quote from UN police spokesperson Liam McDowell--"We basically let them know what is expected of a normal police force; not a socialist police force..."--to alert the reader that free-market capitalism at the point of a gun, not war crimes, was the real motivator at work. But even if one acknowledges that the quote is not only genuine but really does convey the thrust of the move to take over the police stations, rather than being a throwaway line--so what? Does Parenti believe that a police force should be "socialist"? How would a police unit fight crime in a "socialist" manner? Are police in the USA generally "capitalist"?

The takeover of TV stations is cast in the same light--Parenti dismisses Western portrayals of the stations as being run by hardliners as complete piffle. At this point, Parenti and Elich have things so completely backwards one could write a chapter-length essay refuting the assumptions underlying almost any paragraph chosen at random. Comments such as:

"Under the guise of "democratic reform," foreign powers were dictating what the media could or could not say in their own nation."

both misrepresent the mandate of the forces attempting to create space for a secular, tolerant civil society to flourish away from the withering blizzard of nationalist bombast; and are completely disingenuous as far as accurately conveying the motives and actions of the supposed victims of these Western diktats.

There is more, but I assume the reader has had more than enough by this point. However, it is worth noting that Parenti makes dark and sinister claims about NATO which I suspect Johnstone, for one, would hesitate to state so baldly. Namely:

"Under the guise of hunting down war criminals, NATO continued to commit war crimes of its own, including kidnapping and assassination."

Yes, he really says "kidnapping" and "assassination." He recounts the arrests of several different war crimes suspects (these are the "kidnappings"), as well as a couple of attempted arrests which ended in gunfire, with the suspects dead "the "assassinations"). One telling detail--in his account of the arrest of Djordje Djukic and Aleksa Ksrmanovic (arrests which were certainly ambushes, a tactic which is not an uncommon law enforcement technique no matter how much outrage Parenti brings to the story), Parenti mentions that they were taken by "Bosnian Muslim soldiers" rather than Bosnian government soldiers, or even soldiers from the Muslim-Croat Federation. His choice to identify them by ethnicity rather than by their official provenance is telling.

And thus Parenti's story of the tragic debasement of RS ends--with its people reduced to colonial status, at the complete mercy of the Western imperialists, who had even cut the country in half by turning control of the Brcko corridor over to joint control. The irony of his outrage on this particular point would be laughable if it weren't so stupidly offensive on more levels than I have patience to articulate.

---------

There is a boxed aside in this chapter, as well, entitled "Imperial Double Standards," and the reader can most likely guess the thrust of the piece with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Parenti complains that the US government is guilty of

"...characterizing Serb media as propaganda and tools of war (as if the US media weren't)..."

The rest of this short piece is equally sophomoric and crude. Parenti is preaching to very devoted and uncritical choir.