Never again, and yet...

The city had been under siege for months when the Bosnian Serbs began shelling it.
Since 1992, the beginning of the Bosnian War, they had undertaken a vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing to rid the eastern part of Bosnia, the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska, of all Bosniaks (Muslims). The latter then accounted for two-thirds of Srebrenica’s population (of less than 6,000 in 1991). By March 1993, 60,000 displaced Bosniaks had found refuge in the city.
Designated a UN safe area in 1993, and thus under the protection of the international community, refugees continued to swarm into the city as the Serb offensive progressed in July 1995.
The Bosniak forces were ill equipped and demoralized, and their renowned commander Naser Oric had left the city in April.
Some six hundred Dutch troops had arrived in January 1995 in order to protect the population and were stationed at Potocari, an abandoned factory five kilometers north of the city. Yet, under their UN mandate, they were not even able to defend themselves, and only authorized to shoot over the heads of the Serbs, and not directly at them. UNPRFOR (UN Protection Force) Commander General Bertrand Janvier asked the UN for additional troops or their withdrawal to allow for major NATO air raids on Serb positions. His requests were denied…
On July 9, thirty Dutch soldiers were captured when advancing Serb forces attacked their observation post.
As the shelling continued, Colonel Karremans, the Dutch commander, requested NATO air support, but the bombing raids were interrupted after the Serbs threatened to kill their Dutch hostages should they continue.
By then, 5,000 Bosniaks had found refuge inside the base of Potocari.
As the Bosniak forces abandoned their last positions, the city fell on July11. General Ratko Mladic, commander of the Bosnian-Serb army, entered the city and issued the defeated Bosniaks an ultimatum: they were to disarm in exchange for their safety. Allah can’t help you but Mladic can, he told them.
Some 15,000 Bosniak forces fled with their weapons into the hills and headed for Muslim territory some sixty kilometers away.
The Serbs proceeded to separate the men from the woman and children. All Bosniak males between the ages of 12 to 77 were to be interrogated in order to identify potential war criminals, the Serbs explained. I first knew what would be happening the moment they started separating men from women and children. I knew that whenever they separated men from women, they most of the time kill the men, recalled Emir Suljagic, now a journalist in Sarajevo who was in Srebrenica at the time.
Those who tried to hide in their homes were hunted down like dogs and slaughtered, according to evidence presented at The Hague at the trial of Serb general Radislav Krstic, in March 2000.
Though General Mladic had promised Bosniak women that they would soon be reunited with their male family members, buses arrived to take them to territory under Bosniak control. Thousands of male Bosniaks were never to be seen alive again…
Two days later, on July 13, Dutch troops were ordered by the Serbs to expulse the 5000 refugees that were under their protection at Potocari.
The Dutch complied, in exchange for the release of fourteen Dutch troops held by the Serbs... My husband was seized in Potocari. He was taken away along with 3,000 others. I never knew anything more about what happened to him until 2005, when his body was identified. I buried him in Potocari. I still know nothing about what happened to my son, Nura Begovi told The Guardian. Her son had fled the city and into the hills.
As the refugees were leaving the Dutch base, there were Dutch soldiers either side, fully armed, with machine guns. They told the people: Empty your wallets, empty your bags, empty your purses, Hasan Nuhanovic, an interpreter present at the scene, told The Guardian. Their fate was thus foretold, and they were being robbed before being killed, the booty Serb spoils of war, no doubt. Listen, the day before, Serb soldiers had shot at least nine men and boys lined up against the wall of that white house outside the base. They were shot in the backs of their heads. The Dutch soldiers saw it, it's written in their report, he added.
Bosniaks were then taken away, some 60 truckloads. Bound and blindfolded, they were executed and dumped in mass graves. Those who had fled in the hills were shelled by the Serb artillery. All in all, General Mladic’s army murdered over 8,000.
Executions occurred also at night and, according to Jean-René Ruiz, a French police officer who collected evidence of the atrocities afterwards, some of the victims were buried alive. The streets were filled with corpses, including those of children.
One soldier approached a woman in the middle of a crowd. Her child was crying. The soldier asked why the child was crying and she explained that he was hungry. The soldier made a comment like, 'He won't be hungry anymore.' He slit the child's throat in front of everybody, he told CNN.
The Dutch have been accused, if not of complicity, at least of apathy during this ordeal. Some decry their callousness and cruelty in their dealings with the Bosniaks. According to spiegelonline, one woman told the Rotterdam newspaper NRC Handelsblad how shocked she was by one peacekeeper's behavior when her son was kidnapped. "I will never forget this soldier's face: He just stood there and watched. But the worst was that he laughed.
In 2002, the government of Dutch Prime Minister Kok fell, after a report issued by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation concluded Dutch troops had acted with negligence and that the massacre could have been prevented had more vigorous measures been taken.
Furthermore, other Western military forces were present in Srebrenica as well, such as the British SAS, but did not intervene. One British soldier later wrote a book on Srebrenica under the pen-name of Nick Cameron. I had visions of swarms of angry aircraft diving and destroying the attacking Serb targets at will. There was nothing . . . we waited and waited, he wrote. According to Cameron, this is what his commander later told him: We never intended to fight for this place. That was never the plan. Cameron came to the conclusion that the whole UN thing was to get Srebrenica finished with…His book was subsequently banned by the Minister of Defense.
As a result, the Mothers of the Enclaves of Srebrenica and Zepa, an organization that represents 6000 family members of the victims, sued both the Dutch government and the UN for their failure to prevent genocide, the term the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) used to describe the atrocities that took place in Srebrenica. By seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the 40,000 Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general.... The Appeals Chamber states unequivocally that the law condemns, in appropriate terms, the deep and lasting injury inflicted, and calls the massacre at Srebrenica by its proper name: genocide. Those responsible will bear this stigma, and it will serve as a warning to those who may in future contemplate the commission of such a heinous act, said Judge Theodor Meron of the ICTY.
Hassan Nuhanovic, the former UN interpreter, brought a similar case against the Netherlands for its failure to prevent the Serbs from killing members of his family who had found refuge in the UN Safe Area under Dutch protection. Both cases are still pending.
In 2004, the Bosnian Serbs officially took responsibility for the massacre, and issued an apology in a formal report on the events of July 1995, the report makes it clear that enormous crimes were committed in the area of Srebrenica in July 1995. The Bosnian Serb Government shares the pain of the families of the Srebrenica victims, is truly sorry and apologizes for the tragedy, the authorities said.
The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), founded by Bill Clinton, is still in the process of identifying bodies exhumed from some 70 mass graves through DNA testing. Every year, on July 11, the day the massacre is commemorated, all those bodies that have been identified during the past twelve months are buried.
As of July 2009, 6186 victims had been identified by the ICMP.
Approximately 8100 Bosniaks were killed in Srebrenica in July 1995.
And yet, Radovan Karadzic, the former leader of the Bosnian Serbs, who has been charged with eleven counts of war crimes and genocide, called the Srebrenica massacre a myth.
It is going to be easy for me to prove that I had nothing to do with it. It is a myth, he said at his trial at the ICTY in The Hague on Tuesday.
In fact, he accused the Bosniaks of provoking the Serbs in order to entice Western powers to intervene on their behalf. This cunning strategy was particularly obvious concerning Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital under siege for four years and continuously shelled between 1992 and 1996 and in which 10,000 people were killed (including 1,500 children. 56,000 were wounded), contended Mr. Karadzic.
The Markale Market bombings, which killed 68 people in 1994, and another 37 in 1995 were in fact, the work of the Bosniaks themselves, according to Mr. Karadzic. They killed their own people, he claimed.
They shelled their own people and killed their own people from snipers. You see that it was staged. Perhaps it was corpses that were planted, he added.
The real victims of the war were not the Bosniaks, but the Serbs, who were only trying to protect themselves…
According to the official Serb version of the events, the goal of the Muslims was 100% power as it was in the Ottoman Empire…there were fundamentalist goals to change the destiny and appearance of the whole region, he said
Serbia was defeated in Kosovo by the Turks in 1389, and was occupied until the 19th century.
Hence, the Serbs had no choice but to fight these fanatics if they were to survive.
I stand before you not to defend the mere mortal that I am but to defend the greatness of a small nation... which for 500 years has had to suffer and demonstrated a great deal of modesty and perseverance to survive in freedom. I will defend that nation of ours and their cause, which is just and holy. And in that way I will be able to defend myself too, and my nation, because we have a good case, he concluded.
Perhaps Mr. Karadzic will have the chance to elaborate on exactly what is just and holy about ethnic cleansing and mass murder.
Although negating the humanity and sufferings of one’s victims and emphasizing one’s own is a classic defense in such cases, the evidence confirming war crimes and genocide is so overwhelming that Mr. Karadzic’s line of defense seems futile.
The war is now justified as a small and valiant Christian nation’s attempt to contain militant Islam, the Serbs’ version of the War on Terror. Yet this war of self-defense resulted in the death of 100,000 people (66% of which were Muslims; as were 83% of all civilian casualties in the war) and the displacement of 2.2 million others.
I think Karadzic believes what he is saying...it's the war on terror...and for him, it is necessary to demonize, call them bad guys. It is despicable when he says it, but it is also being said in a simplistic ‘war on terror’ context today in the US and elsewhere that makes it seem plausible. The Bosnian Muslim identity was never very Islamic, but Karadzic doesn’t see it that way. He sees them as Turks that dominated the Balkans for 500 years, James Swithart, formerly of the European Desk at the State Department in the 1990s, told The Christian Science Monitor.
In the post 9/11 world, it is convenient and perhaps cunning to portray ethnic cleansing and genocide as a campaign of self-defense designed to protect the Serbs, and implicitly all of Europe against Islamic fundamentalism.
Yet, Serb intentions were clear from the outset and belie Mr. Karadzic’s attempt to rewrite history.
On the opening day of his trial, last October, a taped phone conversation that took place in 1991, a year before the Bosnian War began, was presented to the court.
There are 20,000 armed Serbs around Sarajevo... it will be a black cauldron where 300,000 Muslims will die. That people will disappear from the Earth, Mr. Karadzic said. There are 3-400,000 armed Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina … It will be a real bloodbath, he added.
The Serbs were not defending their nation, but clearly intent on eradicating the Bosniaks.
Historical grievances were also involved.
General Mladic considered the conquest of Srebrenica as an opportunity for the Serbs to avenge themselves on the Turks. The latter had defeated the Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389. Kosovo then became part of the Ottoman Empire.
In the end, genocide is always based on an ideology that views the other as inferior and unfit to live in a civilized society. Muslims can't live with others. They will overwhelm you with their birthrate and other tricks. We cannot allow that to happen, he once claimed.
The decision to murder thousands of Muslims at Srebrenica was taken by Mr. Karadzic himself. According to evidence provided by the prosecutor Alan Tieger, he notified the Bosnian Serb parliament that he had signed directive number 7, authorizing the mass executions. I was in favor of all decisions made and I support them. The time had come, Mr. Karadzic told the assembly, according to Mr. Tieger.
As far as the prosecutor is concerned, the only regret he had about the entire operation was that some Muslim men got away.
The trial was interrupted after Tuesday’ session. Mr. Karadzic filed an appeal asking for more time to prepare his defense. An appeals chamber is considering this request.
Late last month however, General Zdravko Tolimir also went on trial for genocide and his participation in the Srebrenica massacre. In 2004, General Radislav Krstic, one of General Mladic’s aides, was sentenced to 35 years in prison for genocide and other war crimes.
In 2007, four members of a Serb paramilitary group called the Scorpions were convicted by a Serbian court and received jail sentences for their participation in the Srebrenica massacre.
A video presented at the 2005 trial of former President Slobodan Milosevic (who died in detention in 2006, before the end of the trial) showed the four men executing six Muslims.
The video, discovered by Belgrade human rights activist Natasa Kandic, caused quite a stir in Serbia.
No longer could the Serbs dismiss Western accusations of war crimes and genocide as anti-Serb propaganda.
Here was irrefutable evidence that Serbs had committed terrible crimes. Recognizing their responsibility in the tragic events of the decade could not be deferred…
Yet, Mladic is still on the run, hiding somewhere in Serbia and the authorities in Belgrade have been unable or unwilling to arrest and transfer him to The Hague.
Many suspected criminals of all extraction are still free, yet the noose is tightening.
Last Monday, the former Bosniak President, Ejup Ganic, was arrested at Heathrow.
He was indicted last year by a Serb court in Belgrade for his participation in the killing of 42 Serb soldiers in 1992.
Serbia has asked for his extradition…
The Balkan wars are from over, and all the aggrieved parties are clamoring for justice.…
Everything that happened here happened under the eyes of the world, General Mladic said after the fall of Srebrenica.
Forty years after Auschwitz, human beings were once again being slaughtered on European soil because of who they were.
Never again, we had said then, and yet…
It took three years of war, the shelling of Sarajevo and its Markale Market, the 8000 dead at Srebrenica, the Tuzla massacre (in May 1995), Serb concentration camps at Omarska, Trnoplje and Keraterm for NATO to act decisively at last.
Air strikes targeted the Bosnian Serbs in September 1995.
Negotiations thus began, and the Dayton Peace Agreement was signed November 21, 1995. The Serbs were not through, however. Their war on Kosovo in 1998-1999 would necessitate another NATO intervention…
There can never be genuine peace or reconciliation until those responsible for so much mindless violence and suffering are brought to trial for what they have done.
Mr. Karadzic is at The Hague
Why is not General Mladic?
(the photograph of the Srebrenica Memorial is by AFP)