While Europe Sleeps, Bosnia Seethes

MEMORIAL The names of Bosnian Muslim men massacred at Srebrenica in 1995

NEARLY 14 years after peace for Bosnia was hammered out in Ohio, the hills rising up around Sarajevo can still lead a visitor to uncomfortable thoughts about sightlines for snipers.

As I stood there in person on a visit back in May with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the violence of the ’90s didn’t feel so far away. Mr. Biden barnstormed through the Balkans on Air Force 2, also stopping in Serbia and Kosovo, with the goal of trying to draw flagging attention back to the region, delivering his sternest lecture to the Bosnian Parliament, warning against falling back onto “old patterns and ancient animosities.”

Mr. Biden is not alone in his warnings. In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, under the headline “The Death of Dayton,” Patrice C. McMahon and Jon Western write that because of ethnic divisions that refuse to heal, widespread corruption and political deadlock, “the country now stands on the brink of collapse” and “unless checked, the current trends toward fragmentation will almost certainly lead to a resumption of violence.”

Whether or not that happens, the peacekeeping force meant to crack down on any outbreaks now has fewer than 2,000 troops. And the American contingent, a promise and a deterrent to those who justifiably doubt the European Union’s resolve if force is needed, has left entirely.

These circumstances might be cause for widespread alarm, if anyone had noticed them in the first place. It didn’t used to be that way. It used to be that you didn’t have to shout to get heard on the subject of Bosnia. The name alone was enough to evoke the rape, torture, burned-out homes and mass graves that marked a three-and-a-half-year war in which roughly 100,000 people were killed, a majority of them Muslims.

But that was a long time ago. For much of the Western world Bosnia is an all-but-forgotten problem, far down the list of priorities after countries like Iraq, Iran and North Korea. As if to drive the point home, the chief architect of the Dayton peace accords in the Clinton administration, Richard C. Holbrooke, now a special envoy in the Obama administration, has his hands full with the war in Afghanistan and the even more complex situation in neighboring, nuclear-armed Pakistan. Mr. Holbrooke has complained in recent years of a “distracted international community.”

If the drift of public attention away from Bosnia is a result of more pressing issues in an age of terrorism and rogue nuclear states, it is also a function of the simple fact that this ethnically divided country finds itself in the middle of a far more united, stable and at times downright boring Europe than in the days of the civil war.

Bosnia could well return to violence, but it has lost a large measure of what might be called its Franz Ferdinand threat. For all of the moral and humanitarian arguments for getting involved in the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia, there was also the severe lesson from Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination in 1914, which provided the spark for World War I. That lesson was simple: conflicts start in the Balkans, but they do not necessarily stay there.

The end of the cold war brought elation but also trepidation. In hindsight, the march of countries like Poland, Hungary and Romania from the Warsaw Pact into NATO and the European Union may appear steady and all but predestined, but the paths of those newly freed countries were anything but certain at the time. Bosnia was a starkly destabilizing factor in a far more unstable continent. The fighting that began in the spring of 1992 was not quite three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and less than a year after the attempted coup of August 1991 in Russia, and came hard on the heels of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Today, the picture has changed again. Now that Europe is no longer the fault line of a divided world, it looks ever more like a retirement community with good food and an excellent cultural calendar. Spies cut from the George Smiley cloth could really come in from the cold, retiring with legions of their countrymen to the Spanish coast, with no more to worry about than the decline of the pound against the euro and the sinking value of their condos.

The European Union has its share of problems, including a rapidly graying population projected to shrink by 50 million people by 2050 and deep troubles in integrating the immigrants — particularly from Muslim countries — it so drastically needs to reverse the demographic slide. And the union’s energy security depends on its often capricious and at times menacing neighbor to the east, Russia.

Russia’s invasion of Georgia last summer served as a stern reminder that things can still get rough outside of the gated community, and certainly made newer members like Poland and Estonia nervous about the sturdiness of the fence.

Renewed fighting in Bosnia may not launch World War III, but it could well spread to other parts of the former Yugoslavia, including Kosovo. Kosovo declared independence last year, and the United States Embassy in the Serbian capital, Belgrade, burned at the hands of angry rioters. I walked the streets in the aftermath, interviewing Serbs, and found rage, sadness and desperation even among the most pro-Western elements of society.

It was something of a pleasant surprise, then, to return with Mr. Biden this year and find average Serbs on the same streets sounding deeply pragmatic about the visit by an American politician who not only represented the superpower that had bombed them but was personally an early and staunch supporter of Muslims in both Bosnia and Kosovo. While there were holdouts, most said that jobs and freedom to travel trumped old enmities.

With any luck the sentiment will find more traction in neighboring Bosnia too, drowning out the extreme voices and their loose talk of war. Given how far the world’s attention has wandered, supporters of peace in the Balkans will have to hope they find their own path to moderation. Otherwise the crack of snipers’ bullets and the whistle of mortar shells could herald the terrible spectacle of a preventable return to bloodshed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/weekinreview/06kulish.html?_r=1&hp

Serbia ordered the execution of 8000 Muslims in Srebrenica

Tuesday, 07 July 2009

A Mosque destroyed by Serb army in Bosnia

The Congress of North American Bosniaks (CNAB) recently published two confidential court decisions allowing Serbia to censor the most incriminating evidence showing Serbia’s direct involvement in the Srebrenica genocide.

The sensitive information included confidential orders by the court in the Slobodan Milosevic trial, not to publicise documents that implicate the Serbian state in the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, in which at least 8,372  Muslim Bosniaks were summarily executed and 30,000 forcibly expelled in a mass scale ethnic cleansing

(AP) – BRATUNAC, Bosnia-Herzegovina – Funerals have been held for 23 Muslim Bosniak civilians killed in Serb attacks during the 1992-95 war and buried in mass graves.

The victims lived in the northeast Bosnian town of Bratunac which was overrun by Serb forces at the start of the war and its Muslim population was expelled or killed.

Some 603 people were listed as missing after the attack. The remains of 160 people have so far been found including the 23 reburied on Tuesday.

The bodies were identified in the past six months. The funerals included those of a 6-month-old baby and a 110-year-old man.

More than 100,000 people died in Bosnia’s bloody war.

Srebrenica: “Army provided no more than an appearance of security”

Gavel

This is the latest comment by SP Euro-MP Erik Meijer, who on Thursday was drowned out by the continual gavel of the European Parliament’s Chairman. Erik Meijer was speaking in Strasbourg, much against the wishes of the majority of MEPs who simply wanted to celebrate the EU’s military efforts. Criticising the Dutch effort in Srebrenica is simply not done, as was clear from the disapproving remarks with which Erik Meijer’s statement was greeted. Despite this, Meijer repeated the same words as he uttered at Srebenica Town Hall in March, 2007.

11th July

“I support the resolution calling for a fixed day of commemoration, the 11th July, of the genocide in Srebrenica, precisely because the actions of the EU and its member states created a false sense of security and made the inhabitants think they would not have time to flee,” said Meijer. “Supporters of military interventions prefer not to hear my criticisms.” Because Meijer’s statement was drowned out by the president’s gavel – “perhaps partly because of irritation over its contents” – he also lodged a declaration on paper in order to ensure that his words were correctly reported in the minutes of the meeting.

Illusions

“Srebrenica is in addition the symbol of the failure of optimistic concepts about humanitarian interventions and ’safe havens’,” said Meijer. “From the start it should have been clear that a foreign military presence could offer only illusions of security. It made Srebrenica into a base for sorties into the Serb areas surrounding it, while at the same time making it inevitable that it would in the end be absorbed by those same areas.”

Attention

Erik Meijer noted in his address that the name of Srebrenica had become world famous as a result of the massacre of 8000 Muslim men in 1995. “Quite rightly, the women and young people who survived these men want to see continuing attention paid to this. After my visit to Srebrenica in March 2007 I asked the European Commission to contribute to promoting tourism projects which would allow Srebrenica to show that it has more to offer than just its history and a commemorative plaque.”

1,000 new funerals in Srebrenica in July

16 April 2009

Around 1,000 Bosniaks from Srebrenica, killed in summer 1995, will be buried at the Memorial Center in Potočari on July 11.

That date will mark the 14th anniversary of the genocide in the town, said Munira Subašić, chairman of the Movement of Mothers from the Srebrenica and Žepa Enclaves Association.

The association will hold a series of Round Tables, book promotions and other events to mark the ccasion.

3,215 Srebrenica residents have thus far been identified and buried at the Memorial Center.

The Srebrenica massacre was carried out in the summer of 1995 by members of the Republic of Srpska Army commanded by Hague fugitive General Ratko Mladić. According to some estimates, as many as 8,000 people lost their lives there.

http://www.b92.net/eng/news/in_focus.php?id=94&start=0&nav_id=58553

A question mark hangs over Serbia’s European future owing to its failure to arrest and hand over to international justice the wartime commander of the Bosnian Serbs, General Ratko Mladic. Related articles Tangled justice for Kosovo The surrender of Mladic, 66, who is accused of genocide over the deaths of more than 7,500 Bosnian Muslims in the “safe haven” of Srebrenica in July 1995, remains a prime condition Serbia has to fulfil in order to join the family of European nations. In recent months, efforts to locate Mladic have been stepped up, particularly since the arrest of the Bosnian Serbs’ former political leader Radovan Karadzic last July. The two went into hiding in 1995. Mr Karadzic, who had posed as a doctor of alternative medicine, is awaiting trial before the war crimes tribunal in The Hague. He is also charged with genocide and crimes against humanity, notably for the three-and-a-half-year siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo that left 10,000 dead. The Serbian war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic said last weekend that “every tip-off connected to Mladic had been checked out, many financial channels supporting him had been severed and his recent movements have been reconstructed”. He stressed that the political will existed to bring in Mladic: “Everyone is doing all they can to complete the co-operation [with the international war crimes tribunal].” Rasim Ljajic, the Serbian minister responsible for relations with the court, recently said he hoped Mladic will be arrested “by the end of the year”. Many details have surfaced on Mladic’s networks of guards, mostly hardcore wartime subordinates. He had a false identity card which enabled him to move around freely. While on a luxury holiday in Montenegro in 1997, he allegedly rented a villa in a small village on the Adriatic, but accommodated his 10 bodyguards in a tent outside. They were paid a mere 150 German marks each for the two weeks. Recently uncovered documents of the Serbian Security and Information Agency describe Mladic as a paranoid and egotistical person who moved frequently between Belgrade flats in recent years. He reportedly wore no slippers to avoid noise when at home, and rarely flushed the lavatory, fearing that neighbours might hear him. Cooked meals were brought to him, prepared by the mothers of his aides. Belgrade has set up a special tip-off phone line and offered a reward of €1m for details that would lead to Mladic’s arrest. But a recent survey showed 65 per cent of Serbs would not provide authorities with information about Mladic if they met him or knew of his whereabouts. This is not a surprise. Little is being done in Serbia to reveal the truth of the Bosnian war, and Mladic is still regarded by many as a hero who bravely defended Serbs in Bosnia.

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal from a Bosnian immigrant of his conviction for lying about his role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre so he could get into the United States. The high court on Monday refused to hear an appeal from Marko Boskic, who complained that authorities lied to him to get his confession of taking part in the 1992-95 Bosnian war, including the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men in Srebrenica. Prosecutors said Boskic acknowledged he was a soldier in a Bosnian Serb military unit and helped execute 1,200 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, where some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed. It was the largest massacre in Europe since World War II. Prosecutors said they believe Boskic may have been personally responsible for killing 100 people. He has not been charged in the killings. Prosecutors got his confession through a staged immigration paperwork review when Boskic asked for travel documents. He was arrested in August 2004 on charges of lying on his refugee application and later on his application to become a permanent U.S. resident. Boskic was convicted in 2006 and sentenced to five years in prison. Lower courts said the deception did not make Boskic’s confession involuntary. The case is Boskic v. U.S., 08-941.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2009/02/23/court_wont_hear_appeal_from_bosnian/

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AFP)–Remains believed to be those of several dozen victims of the Srebrenica massacre have been exhumed from a mass grave in eastern Bosnia, a forensic expert said Monday.

“So far we have exhumed 97 complete and 180 incomplete skeletons,” Murat Hurtic of Bosnia’s Missing Persons Commission told AFP.

The exhumation of the remains from the site in Kamenica village, near the eastern town of Zvornik, began in mid-August and is expected to continue for at least another week, Hurtic said.

It is the 10th so-called secondary grave found in Kamenica, where Bosnian Serbs brought bodies to cover up the Srebrenica massacre – Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II.

The previously exhumed sites contained over 2,000 bodies from the July 1995 massacre. Serb forces overran the then U.N.-protected Muslim enclave of Srebrenica in the final phase of Bosnia’s 1992-1995 war, summarily killing some 8,000 Muslim men and boys.

The victims were initially buried in a dozen mass graves. But after the release of satellite pictures showing large portions of freshly disturbed ground, Serbs moved them to other locations in order to cover up the crimes. The body parts were separated during reburial using bulldozers, and forensic experts sometimes found parts of a single person buried in three different so-called secondary graves.