Top war crimes suspect Karadzic arrested in Serbia

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One response to “Top war crimes suspect Karadzic arrested in Serbia”

1. 

   haluk

   July 23, 2008

   [1]

   RESIST THE AGGRESSORS!

   I find it both extraordinary and disgraceful that many people seem to take it for granted that Bosnia should be partitioned, or at least divided into segregated “cantons”, and that the Serbs and Croats actually have a right to divide it so long as part of the country is left to the Muslims. To think like this is to understand very little about Bosnia or what its government is standing for. It is simply to succumb to the demands and propaganda of aggressors, demands which can still in fact be successfully resisted, if the world community has the will to do so.

   Why should such demands be emphatically rejected? First because Bosnia-Herzogovina is a country with an identity and history of its own. In a letter from P. B. Walsh to which The Times chose to give pride of place last Monday, it is claimed that it has “entirely arbitrary administrative boundaries”. This is, of course, part of the Serbian case but it is profoundly untrue. Bosnia has existed as a recognisable entity for far more than 500 years, with its capital at either Travnik or Sarajevo, including such towns as Banja Luka in the north, Mostar in the south and Tuzla in the east.

   Bosnia is not some sort of geographical hole between Serbia, Croatia and Albania as some people have oddly suggested. It has at least as strong a historic claim to exist as its neighbours. But its identity has not been realised through pursuit of the religiously monolithic, as in Serbia. On the contrary, it has a long record of tolerant pluralism, incorporating Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox throughout the country and not in segregated areas. Until this year Sarajevo was well-known throughout Europe as a place with outstandingly good Muslim-Christian relations. To say that all this is lost forever because of a few months of appalling Serbian aggression should be unthinkable. Europe actually needs Bosnia in a way it does not need a nationalist ultra-Catholic Croatia or a nationalist ultra-Orthodox Serbia.

   The fact that a minority of Bosnians happen to be Orthodox and another minority Catholic provides no right whatever for Serbia or Croatia to annex part of its territory. Ethnically they are all one. Nor was any minority ill-treated in Bosnia. The appalling ill-treatment meted out by Croats to Serbs 50 years ago is wholly irrelevant to Bosnia and to 1992, much as it has been used for propaganda in recent months. The present conflict has been produced by the ambition of Slobodan Milosevic, well documented over years, to produce a “Greater Serbia” and is by no means supported by all Serbs. The novelist Mirko Kovac has even argued for the bombing of strategic targets in his own country to stop it. Many Serbs and Croats are helping in the defence of Sarajevo in support of their legitimate government which was elected by a majority of the people and is in no way “Muslim”.

   Sarajevo is besieged by the heavy weaponry and conscript soldiers of the Serbian army. Without them Radovan Karadzic’s bands would not last long. Karadzic himself, self-styled “leader” of the Bosnian Serbs, has been elected by no one. It would be unbelievable, were it not true, that the United Nations, strongly backed by Britain, has maintained an arms embargo on Bosnia and its civilian defence force while its aggressors control one of the largest armament industries in Europe.

   Finally, let us remember that the very purpose of the Serbian campaign has been “ethnic cleansing”, the systematic expulsion of all non-Serbs from their homes throughout the greater part of Bosnia. Milosevic and Karadzic are personally responsible for these expulsions. Even apart from the massacres and other barbarisms which have accompanied them, this is something comparable with the major crimes of the Second World War. Any settlement ratified by Britain, the European Community or the United Nations which accepted these expulsions as final and allowed their perpetrators to achieve permanent success, would constitute a gross violation of the basic rights of hundreds of thousands of individuals and would itself be a crime against humanity.

   Milosevic’s aggression has gone from Slovenia through Croatia to Bosnia, each time getting worse, and it will continue to devastate the Balkans and produce a legacy of ceaseless conflict for the future (because its victims will never accept its finality) unless the world intervenes effectively as it could quite easily do but has, hitherto, lamentably failed to do. In this I wholly agree with Jacques Delors, Paddy Ashdown, Margaret Thatcher, Michael Foot and David Owen.

   Adrian HASTINGS,
   Professor of Theology,
   Department of Theology and
   Religious Studies, University
   of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK

   Source: THE TABLET, 29 August 1992

   [2]

   THE MYTHS OF SARAJEVO

   (…)

   During the Nazi occupation in the Second World War, the city’s Muslims tried to shelter Sarajevo’s Jews, descendants of the Shephardic community exiled from Spain in 1492 who in 1581 founded a settlement in Sarajevo. When the Serbs began their siege last April, perhaps 700 Jews remained – survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants.

   The Serbs are now helping to complete Hitler’s work, albeit less savagely. Last week they allowed 150 Jews to leave the city by bus, almost a quarter of the entire community. And why should they stay?

   Even the old Jewish cemetery is now part of the front line. The Serbs – so Sarajevo’s defenders have told the city’s Jewish leader, Ivan Ceresnjes – have dug their trenches through Jewish graves.

   (…)

   Source: THE INDEPENDENT WEEKEND, 26 September 1992

   [3]

   CULTURAL GENOCIDE IN YUGOSLAVIA

   Madam, – During this summer one of the great libraries of Europe, that of the University of Sarajevo, was deliberately shelled and destroyed. It was a crime against learning comparable to the destruction of the library of Louvain in the First World War but so much worse as being part of a systematic policy of cultural genocide. I have as yet failed to hear any outraged cry of horror and protest from the academic world.

   Would it be too much to ask that every university in Britain begin the first meeting of Senate this academic year with a minute’s silence, witnessing to the lost library of Sarajevo and to what in cultural destruction 1992 has meant for Europe? Only a Vandal could say “No”.

   Adrian Hastings,
   Professor of Theology,
   Department of Theology and
   Religious Studies,
   University of Leeds,
   Leeds LS2 9JT, UK

   Source: THE HIGHER, 2 October 1992 (London)

   [4]

   SLOW DEATH OF BOSNIA’S IDENTITY

   The fall of Bosanski Brod points a finger directly at the conscience of the free world, and quite especially of Britain, still president of the European Community.

   Another historic part of Bosnia has become instead a part of Serbia and its inhabitants are dead or on their way into exile. What was traditionally a remarkably unstressful society comprising Muslims and Christians, Croats and Serbs, all of whom saw themselves as Bosnians, will be turned into a further monolithic extension of a nationalist state.

   When Melaine McDonagh recently visited Bosanski Brod and talked to its defenders (The Tablet, September 12) she found she was actually speaking to a Serb. I hope he has escaped from the Chetniks (the name everyone in Bosnia uses for Karadzic’s armed gangs). The defenders of Bosanski Brod were fighting and dying for something of enormous value, perhaps the most consistently tolerant society Europe has known, ever since it began with the Bogomils and then went out of its way to welcome Jews. It is only Western ignorance which makes most people in this country, even historians, unaware of what is at stake.

   Bosnia’s historic identity is as worth dying for as any culture in Europe but it cannot now survive the shells and bombs of Milosevic and his tool Karadzic if Europe continues to do nothing. Hitherto we have indeed done less than nothing even arbitrarily denying Bosnia’s defenders the weapons to counter a heavily armed aggressor, while refusing to intervene.
   
   Britain in particular has blocked every attempt to impose an air exclusion zone, although it is the daily bombing from the air which is doing so much to render town after town uninhabitable through the coming winter.

   Our sanctions have been a fraud, unmonitored and effectively unenforced. We have left Yugoslavia’s old embassy in London open and in Serbian hands, the centre of constant propaganda where Bosnia is quite unrepresented. Resolutions passed at the UN have, in some cases, not even begun to be enforced. No hard attempt has been made to carry out the decisions of the London conference, so absurdly described by the Prime Minister as “successful”.

   All that it has done is to continue the pathetic conversations of which Lord Carrington finally tired at a rather higher level but to no better purpose. Discussions in Geneva about the future constitution of Bosnia are no less than macabre when its capital is being daily pounded to death and its attackers have shown no intention at all of moving from their stated aim of a Serbian take-over of most of the country.

   For Karadzic the Geneva discussions are useful precisely because they leave him free to destroy Bosnia while furnishing him with the weapon that he can threaten to withdraw from discussion if anything is done to stop his murderous campaign.

   No part of Bosnia will escape the fate of Bosanski Brod if we continue as hitherto. Our so-called humanitarian aid is fundamentally unhumanitarian in that it relieves our conscience, covers up our inactivity, while simply keeping the victims of aggression alive until their homes are finally destroyed and they die of cold, have their throats slit in concentration camps, or escape into exile.

   None of this would have happened if Europe had intervened or seriously threatened to intervene four months ago. For that Mr Hurd is more responsible than anyone and history in due course will make that as clear as it has made Eden’s complicity in the 1956 Israeli invasion of Egypt.

   We can still save Sarajevo, Travnik and Gorazde but only if we act quite differently and cease to be deterred by the threats of Karadzic, a man who is not a Bosnian but whose paranoid ambition to turn Bosnia into a Serbian province was recognisable by people who knew him years before this war began.

   (Prof) Adrian Hastings.
   Dept of Theology and Religious Studies,
   University of Leeds.

   Souce: THE GUARDIAN, (Letters to the Editor), October 10, 1992

   [5]

   GENOCIDE IN BOSNIA

   From Lord Hylton

   Sir, Mr Cosic and Mr Panic, the president and prime minister of Serbia and Montenegro, are expressing admirable sentiments about the conclusion of a Bosnian peace treaty. While they do so, the vile business of “ethnic cleansing” continues and no one knows whether concentration camps still function.

   Sarajevo is shelled by heavy artillery, mortars and tanks, wounding scores of people in one recent day (report, October 19). The Serbian aim appears to be to cut off all water and electricity supplies and to destroy as many houses as possible, so that most of the 350,000 ethnically mixed inhabitants will die this winter.

   The United Nations and Nato have decided not to intervene militarily, and only to provide humanitarian aid. This is regularly interrupted by attacks on convoys and aircraft. The Sarajevo airlift will also be limited by winter fogs. Other besieged towns only receive sporadic supplies.

   In these circumstances, it is only just that the UN arms embargo should be lifted from Bosnia. This would make it possible for the Bosnian people and their democratically elected and internationally recognised government to defend themselves effectively against genocidal attacks. These attacks are inspired and sustained by forces from outside Bosnia.

   Yours faithfully,
   HYLTON,
   House of Lords.
   October 19.

   Source: THE TIMES (Letters to the Editor), London, October 24, 1992