What was Srebrenica, and why is it relevant to Ukraine updated

Update April 10, 2022: War in Ukraine: Gordon Brown backs Nuremberg-style trial for Putin - BBC News     

Continuing with original post:

Ukraine President Zelenski called the massacre of civilians in Bucha genocide and Biden accused the Russians of war crimes.  There are often references to Srebrenica in comments from officials and pundits to it in reminding us of the most recent experiences in post-World War II with the horrific ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, 1991-1995.  The turning point in US and Europe getting more involved to stop the slaughter was an incident in a town in Bosnia where every male was marched out of town by Serbians, gunned down, and buried in a mass grave for one reason: they were Muslim.  The resulting international tribunals resulted in the Bosnian Serb leader being found guilty and imprisoned.  Eventually, Slobodan Milosevic, the president of Bosnia's neighbor, Serbia, was voted out of office and turned over to the tribunal in the Hague. He died of natural causes while awaiting trial in prison. Milosevic was accused of being the inspiration and mastermind of the bloody attempt to incorporate northern Bosnia into greater Serbia and to rid the region of Muslims, there since the Ottoman takeover in the 15th century. Bucha may be Ukraine's Srebrenica. I wrote the following column published in the local Grand County newspaper, the Sky Hi News in July 2015. Bosnia today is the poorest country in Europe, with the Bosnian Serbs threatening to instigate another civil war to deal with their unfinished business and suspected to  take inspiration from Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

This March's rallies in the Serbian capitol of Belgrade  supported Putin's aggression. .  While Bosnia does not border Russia, the parallels are still frightening.  Bosnia is more or less under control of the EU which still has peacekeepers there. In light of the Ukraine conflict, the EU doubled their peacekeeper military there and the French fighter jets are doing flyovers to remind the Bosnian Serbs to cool it. The fate of Putin could also resemble Milosevic's, He has been  warned. The international tribunal and the UN have many on the ground in Ukraine documenting Russian atrocities and those responsible with a view for future Hague or UN related trials.

The original 2015 column and an explainer of Srebrenica: Imagine if every  male, man and boy, in Grand County were assembled, hands tied behind their backs, marched to a killing field, and shot dead for one reason: they were all of the same religion, an identified ethnic group, hated by a superior force.

  Something like  that took place twenty years ago in a city with a population a little larger than our county.  You say that must have happened in Africa, maybe Rwanda? It is difficult to believe that such a horrendous event  also took place in an industrialized European country, especially since the Western world had hopefully  learned its lesson from the Holocaust. 

The world is just now coming to grips with its failure to stop the worst genocide  in Europe since World War II. July 11 in   Bosnia, former President Bill Clinton and former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright,   prime ministers, presidents, a queen,  from Croatia, Slovenia, Kosovo, Turkey, Serbia, and Jordan ( Angela Merkel of Germany paid her respects earlier), marked the twentieth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, occurring  in a conflict which gave birth to  the term “ethnic cleansing”.

 On July 11, 1995, 8,372 men and boys were  marched to the countryside, shot to death, and  their executioners attempted to cover up the slaughter by moving the bodies, scattering body parts, and burying them so that no one would know.  A few of the victims played dead or hid under other bodies to escape and testify  to the world.    Thanks to DNA and forensic  recovery of the remains, all but 1000 have been identified, and another 136 coffins with parts of identified victims, were buried in the memorial ceremonies Saturday.

Oh, you say,  the Muslims did it?  (In Bosnia at that time, the largest ethnic group was Muslims).  Wrong.  The killers were Bosnian Serbs , Christian Orthodox, and the victims were killed for one reason. They were Muslim.

 It was a bloody incident in a bloody war as the former Yugoslavia broke apart in 1991 and the province of Bosnia struggled to gain its independence, with ethnic Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, and Muslims engaged in a civil war to determine governance. Bosnia’s population was a little more than Colorado’s. Over 100,000, mostly Muslims, died   before Srebrenica and  in smaller incidents of ethnic cleansing. The United Nations had already intervened and had established Srebrenica as a safe haven, but some Dutch peacekeepers were held hostage and courts later ruled  the Netherlands liable for their failure to protect those in a safe haven.

News of the massacre resulted in the following month with  NATO retaliatory air strikes against Bosnian Serbs  The Dayton Accord three months later   ended the Bosnia conflict, thanks mostly to the belated leadership of the US.  Joined in a federation with a Croatian/Muslim entity, Bosnia Serbs gained autonomy.   War crimes trials of Bosnian Serbs accused of responsibility for Srebrenica are still taking place in The Hague.

 The US last week introduced a resolution in the UN to commemorate the Srebrenica genocide,  but Russia, to its shame, yet  historically allied with Serbia,   vetoed it.  Showing more grace, the prime minister of Serbia attended the commemoration ceremonies and endured rocks   thrown at him by impassioned activists.

Post note: The Bosnia Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was found guilty in the Hague in 2016  and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Felicia Muftic is a columnist with the Sky Hi News, Grand County, Colorado

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 Highly recommended:http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/11/europe/bosnia-srebrenica-massacre-commemoration/ and listen to the audio version.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/world/europe/srebrenica-genocide-massacre.html?_r=1

Two mass murderers brought to justice in one year

My column in the Sky Hi News July 20,2011

The year 2011 will be remembered as the year two mass murders were caught.

Osama Bin Laden was one. The other, the Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic, was indicted by the Hague Tribunal for crafting and carrying out ethnic cleansing in the Balkan wars of the 1990s . He was arrested in May and his trial has begun.

The Balkan wars had been forgotten by many except the European Union, which put handing over Mladic as one of the conditions for Serbia's admittance. Mladic was the second high profile Serb to sit in the dock at the Hague. The other was Slobodan Milosovic.

 A three-year siege of Bosnia's capital Sarajevo, which resulted in the death of 10,000 Muslims and Catholics, was overseen by Mladic. The world, and particularly Europe, dithered in the name of “fairness” to both sides. It was the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim males between the ages of 10 and 77 in Srebenica in 1995 that was the catalyst for worldwide outrage, which ended the phase of the war that dragged on in Kosovo, ending with NATO bombing Belgrade. The war crimes court in the Hague had indicted Mladic in 1996 for carrying out the massacre.

Bin Laden's admitted masterminding of Sept. 11 and Mladic's Srebenica outraged the Western world and the West drew a line of behavior that was Post World War II unacceptable. Both used terror and the killing of innocents to advance their hate-based goals. Terror, which Mladic practiced to force Muslims and Croatian Catholics out of predominantly Serbian areas, was honed finely, using rape as a calculated tool and mass executions to eliminate groups. The ethnic division he engineered exists today in modern Bosnia, which is ungovernable, ungoverned, and poor.

It is suspected that Osama's supporters within Pakistan made it possible for him to live in plain sight for six years there. Until 2001 Mladic had been living a normal, open life in Belgrade, Serbia, under the protection of Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president, even though the Hague had issued arrest warrants in 1995. Milosovic was finally deposed and brought to the Hague in 2001 (where he died of natural causes during the trial). After 2001, some believe Mladic lived among cousins and other Bosnian Serb refugees in northern Serbia, though he kept undercover and was suspected to have been protected by elements of the Serbian military.

 In 2007, a younger generation of Serbs, feeling the results of a poor economy, elected a younger leader, Boris Tadic. Even then, it took three years to “find” Mladic. Serbians began to see membership in the European Unions as a way out of their depressed economy, enough so that the desire for moving on outweighed the Serbian nationalism that had protected Mladic.

The EU was to meet in this coming November to begin the long process to admit Serbia to the EU, but failure to capture Mladic was their deal killer. He was found, though it is believed U.S. and U.K. special forces helped, but the actual arrest was credited to the Serbs themselves.

Mladic so far has been disruptive in the courtroom. He will probably try to claim he knew nothing and was not in control. The Hague Court has always been condemned by die hard Serbian nationalist supporters as anti-Serb. Sixteen years of evidence gathering and a pledge by President Tadic to bring to justice to Mladic's lieutenants may make the Mladic defense a weak one.

Perhaps now Serbia can move forward toward a better economy and connections with Western Europe as it begins the long process to meet the other criteria of EU admittance. 

Perhaps now Bosnia can also begin to heal, though memories of such atrocities will take generations to dim. Perhaps now that the tyrants of this world who are motivated by ethnic and religious hatred to use terrorism as a tool know that eventually they will pay for their outrages against humanity.