Bosnia

Speaking to the Armenian Reporter, Ms. Amanpour said, "When I ask former U.S. officials who were in national security or the State Department during the Clinton administration – in which genocide happened in Bosnia and in Rwanda – I ask them why was there this collective failure to act, and some of them said to me, ‘Look, we need our public behind us. This is something very difficult for us to intervene when our national security is not directly threatened. We need our public behind us.’"

She said her purpose was to raise awareness of international affairs among Americans, the citizens of the most powerful nation on earth.

During an international news conference in 1994, Ms. Amanpour challenged Mr. Clinton: "Do you not think that the constant flip-flops of your administration on the issue of Bosnia set a very dangerous precedent?"

Can there be true justice if courts ignore the interests of victims?

The international courts and tribunals in The Hague deal with some of the darkest pages of human history. Yet all too frequently the rights of the survivors of these mass atrocities – whether they are from the former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone or the Democratic Republic of the Congo – are sidelined.

The court focuses on the rights of the accused and on bringing the trial to a swift conclusion. There is a growing consensus that the needs of victims need to be addressed, but opinions differ on how this should be achieved.

The Yugoslavia Tribunal has a programme of its own for victims in Bosnia Herzegovina. One of the participants is Kadira Hodzic, who lost her son and her husband in the 1995 Srebrenica genocide:

"This is very little justice for us, the victims. I am surprised it took so long to prove this was a crime. It is so obvious and the punishments have been so minimal. The only justice is that it has finally been confirmed as genocide. However not enough people have been prosecuted. Many of the criminals who were on Potocari are still here, I know them."

Prosecutors in the case had sought sentences totaling 150 years’ imprisonment. However, although the judge ruled that the men had helped round up civilians, he said it had not been proven that they were directly involved in the murders.

“This is a disgrace. While we are looking at mass graves all day long, verdicts like this are made. I’m very unsatisfied with the Bosnian courts,” Sabra Kolenovic, a member of the Mothers of Srebrenica group, told IWPR.

Defendants Zdravko Bozic, Zoran Zivanovic and Zeljko Zaric were released from detention immediately, despite the judge’s finding that they had helped to guard buses holding Bosniak men.

Several protected witness, known only by pseudonyms, said the defendants had guarded detained civilians in Srebrenica, and had also been guards of a column of around 30 buses that shipped the men out of the town of Bratunac.

Of Herman’s many dubious and outright false assertions about Srebrenica, one of the most contemptible is his attempt to make disappear from history the roughly 8000 Bosnian civilians massacred by Serbian forces. Some of his mystification is couched in slippery deniability, in a half-hearted attempt to deflect the criticism he deserves. But taken together, his comments comprise a clear endeavor at war-crimes denial.  Herman is perturbed that the estimated number of victims has stayed relatively constant around 8000. But this estimate has been documented in detail by several independent sources and has been accepted widely, from the corporate media to such progressive reporters as Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now” (Srebrenica 10th anniversary report, July 11, 2005). Though Herman uses misleading and out-of-date reports to cast doubt on the credibility of the lists of missing, he ignores the detailed documentation of the lists from several sources.

The U.N. Security Council Resolution 819 demanded Serbia and Montenegro (Yugoslavia) to take measures to prevent Srebrenica genocide and cease the supply of military arms, equipment and services to the Bosnian Serbs. The resolution also demanded Bosnian Serbs cease attacks on Srebrenica, stop ethnic cleansing, and immediately withdraw from areas around the enclave. Serbia and her proxies in Bosnia had repeatedly violated this resolution. Bosnian Serbs from militarized Serb-held villages around Srebrenica continued attacking and terrorizing Bosniak (Muslim) population in the besieged town of Srebrenica. Serbia continued supplying arms and logistic support to the Bosnian Serb terrorists around Srebrenica. As a result, the International Court of Justice ruled in 2007 that Serbia had violated its obligation under the Genocide Convention to prevent genocide in Srebrenica and that it has also violated its obligations under the Convention by having failed fully to co-operate with the International Criminal Tribunal.

Chomsky’s denial that genocide took place in Bosnia, even after it has been established in international law that it did, and even after LM’s lies about Serb camps were exposed as such in a British court, marks him down as a revisionist in the mould of Irving; the general thrust of Brockes’s exposure of him was therefore bang on target. In pandering to him, the Guardian has besmirched its own reputation and insulted the survivors of the genocide. Ironically, it was Guardian journalists such as Vulliamy and Maggie O’Kane who were in the forefront of bringing the genocide to light in 1992. That the Guardian – with this proud record – should have chosen to betray Brockes, its own journalist, by apologising on her behalf to an unabashed genocide-denier, means that this newspaper is now collaborating in the revisionist re-writing of the history of the Bosnian war.
 

Interestingly, Serbia’s General Momcilo Perisic – who participated in Srebrenica genocide – is using old trick for his defense blaming victims for killing themselves. If this was not sad, it would be funny.