Karadzic trial: impartial tribunal found Bosnian Serbs were main villains

NOTING the inaccuracies in Steven King’s column on Radovan Karadzic and the Yugoslavian wars of the 1990s (October 28), I feel compelled to outline a few historical facts.

The Srebrenica massacre took place during a war that was orchestrated by the Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic. He used the Bosnian Serb politicians, Bosnian Serb army, the Yugoslav army and the Serbian paramilitaries to achieve the aim of carving out an ethnically pure Serb state in Bosnia that could secede to Serbia.

In contrast to Steven King’s image of a country where “petty hatreds abounded” it took a lot of extreme nationalist propaganda to make Serbs believe they couldn’t live with Muslims or Croats throughout Yugoslavia.

This was especially true for Bosnia where they had lived and worked together and frequently intermarried. But Milosevic worked tirelessly at stirring up paranoia and fear in his desire to create a “Greater Serbia”. He had a willing follower in Karadzic, who frequently told journalists: “Serbs and Muslims are like cats and dogs. They cannot live together in peace. It’s impossible”.

In fact, Sarajevo was a model of coexistence for centuries. None of Yugoslavia’s leaders did more to keep the country from splitting up than the Bosnian president, Alia Izetbegovic. Before the fighting started in Bosnia, (April 1992), Izetbegovic had insisted there could be no war because one side, his own, would not fight. “It takes two sides to have a war and we will not fight”. Some months later, with tens of thousands of Muslims dead in eastern Bosnia and hundreds of thousand displaced, Haris Silajdzic, Bosnia’s foreign minster, said: “In the west, many people choose to call this war. But it’s not war, it’s slaughter. We must fight.”

The west constantly labelled these atrocities as a civil war. It was no such thing. A trapped population took up hunting rifles and any weapons they could find or steal to prevent displacement and massacre.

History shows that the main atrocities were committed by the Bosnian Serbs. These have been examined by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague (ICTY). Many Bosnian Serbs have already been convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to long prison terms. Few Bosnian Muslims have been brought to trial and convicted commanders received minor sentences for failing to control foreign troops under their command, (maximum 5 years in prison). I presume we believe that the ICTY is impartial. Thus, the finding infers that the Bosnian Serbs were the main perpretators of atrocities during those four years of slaughter.

Steven King wonders whether the killings during and after the fall of Srebrenica were “acts of a bloody civil war” or “acts of evil”.

Again, history outlines how Srebrenica’s civilian Muslim population fled the town in the spring of 1992 amid the mass slaughter in eastern Bosnia committed by the Serbian paramilitaries. Displaced in the mountains, civilians were forged into a fighting force by a young policeman, Nasir Oric. After some months they were desperate enough to attack and retake the town from the Serbs who had displaced them.

Nasir Oric’s volunteer local fighters were hardly the “Bosnian Muslim army” referred to by Steven King. Once home, this group of approximately 30,000 people were surrounded, starved and shelled for over three years until they were finally driven out and over 8,000 of them killed in July 1995.

Many historical accounts of this massacre are available and all point to poorly trained men bearing primitive weapons trying to defend their families against a modern, well-equipped army who had them surrounded and trapped like rats. Somehow your columnist seems to have a problem believing the number of men and boys murdered by the Bosnian Serb army at the time. Let him check the International Red Cross (ICRC) records to get the exact figure. Surely he believes that the ICRC is neutral and impartial?

I was in Bosnia for periods during and after the war and can see clearly why the ICTY have convicted Bosnian Serbs and not Bosnian Muslims of the more serious crimes against humanity. Even without a conviction of genocide to date, this impartial court is essential to let corrupt, murdering leaders worldwide know they may well end up accounting for their actions there.

Dr Mary McLoughlin

Spy Hill

Cobh

Co Cork