الغرضون
21-07-2005, 12:38 PM
Blood and Honey: A Balkan War journal
Yugoslavia's wars, Milosevic's legacy
By Michael Moran
Senior correspondent
MSNBC
December 2000 - A decade ago, when nationalist leaders in Croatia and Slovenia began talking seriously about splitting from Yugoslavia, few could have imagined the horrors to come. Europe, after all, had just witnessed four decades of communism swept away with relatively little bloodshed. But Yugoslavia’s complex ethnic mix would make no such transition. For Yugoslavia, the passions of 1989, which led to political and economic reforms in other nations, brought instead an explosion of suppressed ethnic hatreds, and a decade of ferocious warfare.
Photojournalist Ron Haviv spent much of the last decade capturing the disintegration of Yugoslavia on film. Like many who covered the destruction of the Yugoslav state, Haviv witnessed enormous tragedy and endured the uncertainties and randomness that made the Yugoslav wars the most dangerous conflicts to cover since World War II. His still photography brings home the agony of civil war.
Born out of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire after World War I, Yugoslavia was always one of the world’s most diverse nations. Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, Hungarians, Montenegrins and a host of others lived within its borders. Among them were Roman Catholics, Serb and Greek Orthodox, Muslims, Jews and a variety of subsects, not to mention a good number of communists who dismissed religion as mere superstition.
Yet Yugoslavia, having escaped the orbit of the USSR after World War II, also was the most western and arguably the most humane of the communist nations of Europe. It welcomed Western tourists, dabbled in capitalism early, kept the Soviets at arms length and exported as much to the West as to the East during the Cold War. A tremendously successful Winter Olympics held in multiethnic Sarajevo in 1984 seemed to symbolize a forward-looking, stable state. With the Berlin Wall’s collapse the following year, Yugoslavia appeared well placed to make a swift transition to democracy and market economics.
Frozen resentments
Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians were forced to flee by Yugoslav forces; their only crime was their ethnicity. Photojournalist Paolo Pellegrin recorded their flight from their homeland.
The rise of Milosevic caused deep dismay in Slovenia and Croatia, the most prosperous and western-oriented of Yugoslavia’s republics. After 1989, when it became clear the Yugoslav communist party would have to accept multiparty elections, Croat and Slovene nationalists took the lead in seeking to break from Yugoslavia. After electing nationalists as its republican leaders, tiny, homogeneous Slovenia went first in the spring of 1991, leading to a short, successful war of secession that Yugoslavia chose not to pursue. However, when Croatia followed suit in the summer of 1991, Yugoslav troops went on the offensive, citing the rights of the large Serb minority that lived within Croatia’s republican borders.
The wars that followed caught Europe and the rest of the world by surprise. They also exposed the shortcomings first of the European Union, which struggled unsuccessfully to head off conflict; then the United Nations, whose intervention proved insufficient to halt civilian slaughter, and finally the United States, which sat on its hands for half a decade before intervening and forcing a military solution to the Bosnian war in 1995.
Belgrade endgame
Even then, Milosevic was not finished, turning his attention once again to ethnic Albanian nationalists in Kosovo. Brutal guerrilla attacks by the Kosovo Liberation Army on local Serbs and equally brutal reprisals from Serbia escalated into a third war in April 1999, when a U.S.-led NATO air force opened an air war against what remained of Yugoslavia. When it was over, Yugoslav forces withdrew and left Kosovo under U.N. and NATO stewardship. Thousands on both the Serb and Albanian sides had died.
Milosevic himself held on long enough for one final miscalculation: In the fall of 2000, he called a general election, misreading his own people and assuming he’d easily retain power. Instead, he was defeated by a respected Serb intellectual, Vojislav Kostunica. Milosevic’s attempts to invalidate Kostunica’s victory led to unrest and finally his own overthrow on Oct. 8, 2000, more than a decade after East Germans managed the same feat without bloodshed. A final toll in Yugoslavia’s wars may never be known. To this day, international teams are struggling to exhume bodies from the many mass graves that scar its landscape.
Of blood and honey
Haviv’s work is presented here in three parts, focusing on the Serb-Croat war of 1991, the Bosnian war of 1992-95 and the Kosovo war of 1999. It is just a small taste of the thousands of images he took during the past 10 years, many more of which can be seen in his new book, “Blood and Honey: A Balkan war journal,” (T.V. Books, L.L.C, 2000, ISBN: 1575001357).
MSNBC.com Belgrade correspondent Zoran Stanojevic, himself a Serb, contributed an audio feature to our report, giving fellow Serbs an opportunity to speak out about the fall of Milosevic as well as the actions taken in their name during his leadership.
Several other journalists who worked on this project, including MSNBC.com International Correspondent Preston Mendenhall and myself, also covered the
Yugoslav conflict at various times during the past 10 years. Between 1990 and 1993, I made repeated trips to Yugoslavia and from a distance witnessed one of the events chronicled by Haviv in this feature, the destruction of Osijek.
Mendenhall, then an NBC News producer based in Moscow, flew in and out of Bosnia during the long siege of Sarajevo. Later, as a London-based correspondent for MSNBC.com, he was in Belgrade as NATO air forces began their bombing campaign in April 1999.
Mendenhall’s reports so annoyed the Yugoslav government that he was ejected by the Belgrade government two weeks into the war.
Michael Moran is senior correspondent at MSNBC.
Ron Haviv is a freelance photojournalist, represented by VII, who works for publications including Newsweek, Time, and The New York Times Sunday Magazine.
© 2005 MSNBC Interactive
الغرضون
21-07-2005, 12:41 PM
The Betrayal of Srebrenica
Bianca Jagger
The European, 25 September-1 October, 1995. Copyright Bianca Jagger 1997. Posted with the permission of Ms. Jagger
More than two years ago, on 11 July 1995, the United Nations "safe area" of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia was overrun by Bosnian Serb troops. Some 8,000 civilians, women, children and virtually the entire male population were systematically massacred during four days of carnage. They have been delivered to their executioners by the international community. It was the worst massacre on European soil since the Third Reich.
When the Serbian onslaught rolled through Srebrenica, it made a mockery of United Nations Security Council Resolution 819, passed in April 1993, establishing it as a "safe area' after an earlier brutal offensive. Resolution 836 "guaranteed" protection for Srebrenica by "all necessary means, including the use of force", stipulating that "all military or paramilitary units would either withdraw from the demilitarized zone or surrender all their arms." The battered conclave was put into the care of the UN's Dutch battalion in February 1995.
Instead of a safe area, Srebrenica under relentless shelling became a nightmare zone. The town was teeming with refugees, many living on the streets. As the Serbs prepared their final solution to the siege, they blocked most UN aid convoys into Srebrenica, cutting off food shipments, medical supplies and even the supply of shoes. The Serbs confiscated cooking salt from UN aid convoys, replacing it with industrial salt to poison the townspeople.
The title "safe area" became an obscenity. In June 1993 I denounced the safe areas as "legitimised concentration camps, unprotected from aggression and cut off from help and supplies", and the so-called experts frowned at me.
After the fall of Srebrenica there was one lonely voice which refused to be an accomplice to the cover up: Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the former prime minister of Poland, who had been appointed by the UN as envoy for human rights and had advocated the establishment of safe areas. In his letter of resignation shortly after the massacres, he wrote: "One cannot speak about the protection of human rights with credibility when one is confronted with the lack of consistency and courage displayed by the international community and its leaders . . . the very stability of international order and the principle of civilisation are at stake over the question of Bosnia. Crimes have been committed with swiftness and brutality and, by contrast, the response of the international community has been slow and ineffectual."
The man who oversaw the slaughter was General Ratko Mladic, commander of the Bosnian Serb army. Today he is an international fugitive from justice, wanted for genocide, as is the political leader accused of giving him his orders, Radovan Karadzic. These men have been treated by American and European diplomats as legitimate partners in the peace process rather than as perpetrators of genocide.
In issuing the indictment against Mladic, Judge Fouad Riad at the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague said: "The evidence submitted by the prosecutor, consisting of more than 30 eyewitness statements, provides reasonable grounds for believing that Ratko Mladic personally supervised the takeover of Srebrenica with great attention to detail."
The judge's ruling put the facts of the carnage beyond doubt or denial. After Srebrenica fell to besieging Serbian forces in July 1995 a terrible massacre of the Muslim population appears to have taken place.
"The evidence tendered to the prosecutor describes scenes of unimaginable savagery, thousands of men executed and buried in mass graves, hundreds of men buried alive, men and women mutilated and slaughtered, children killed before their mothers' eyes, a grandfather forced to earth the liver of his own grandson. These are truly scenes from Hell, written on the darkest pages of human history." Judge Riad splits the massacre into three stages:
Massacres in the woods, as Srebrenica's population fled the advancing army. "The fate which befell the column of people who set off to reach Tuzla on the night of 11 July 1995 and the morning of 12 July was an appalling one. The column was ambushed by Bosnian Serb soldiers on the Bratunac-Milici road, attacking with artillery shells, anti-aircraft guns, automatic weapons and the like.
"Hundreds of Muslims were killed and many more were wounded. Many were driven berserk by the assault and eye-witness accounts described how people were so horrified that they committed suicide to avoid capture. Many who were captured or surrendered, among them the wounded, were summarily executed. One eyewitness described how more than 100 captive Muslim men, women and children were slowly slaughtered by a group of Serbian soldiers using knives. Witnesses also saw hundreds of Muslim men buried in bass graves, some buried alive."
Mass executions at Karakaj. "Thousands of Muslims from the column surrendered to Serb military forces under the control of Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, having been assured that they would not be harmed. The captive men were then taken to large assembly points, including a football stadium, where they were addressed by Mladic, who gave the same assurances, and thence to an assembly point in a school complex near Karakaj where Mladic was again present. Here, too, many were summarily executed."
"According to testimony of the few witnesses who survived, the men were the next day, on or about 14 July 1995, taken in trucks to at least two nearby fields and then shot where they stood. Mladic is placed at the scene of the killings by more than one survivor."
Summary executions at Potocari, the Dutch UN compound. "Most of the Muslim men, women and children who went to Potocari could not gain access to the UN compound and spent the nights between 11 and 13 July 1995 in nearby factories. During this time, and under the direct supervision of Mladic, men were separated from the women. Many were apparently summarily executed in the fields and rivers surrounding the compound. The witness statements described a frenzy of terror that led many to take their own lives. There is evidence that women were raped and killed.
"As a result of the Bosnian Serb attack on Srebrenica, the Muslim population of the enclave was virtually eliminated. The two suspects are Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic." The judge concluded: "The evidence discloses, prima facie, the commission of crimes against humanity. The policy of 'ethnic cleansing' has genocidal characteristics."
More than two years have elapsed since the fall of Srebrenica, and despite the scale of the carnage, the veracity of shocking testimonies to it and the warrants for the arrest of Mladic and Karadzic, there has been no effort by the international community to capture them. Indeed, there has been extreme reluctance to do so, with western diplomats and politicians continuing to deal with them. Furthermore, there has been no blame attached tot he UN leaders and troops who delivered the men of Srebrenica to the slaughter or to the man who masterminded the bloody four-year war across former Yugoslavia, President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia.
A remarkable set of documents obtained from inside the United Nations shows that Milosevic and the UN high command were acting as a close-knit cabal during the massacre at Srebrenica.
They were in constant touch with each other, even meeting in the Serbian capital of Belgrade to force "agreements" about the safety of their own soldiers and equipment while women were being raped and murdered, and the men of the town systematically shot and dynamited to death.
The UN Dutch battalion was even giving the Bosnian Serbs the fuel to drive the buses that brought the victims to the execution sites and the bulldozers which ploughed the corpses of their victims into the ground.
Before the fall of Srebrenica, a pivotal deal between the UN and Mladic had already been cast in stone. General Bernard Janvier of France, supreme United Nations military commander of former Yugoslavia and based in Zagreb, had met with Mladic at the Hotel Vidakovac in the town of Zvornik on the Bosnian-Serbian border on 4 June 1995.
The meeting took place at a time when the Bosnian Serbs held a number of UN soldiers hostage. The two men struck a deal: if the Serbs released the hostages, many of whom were French, and stopped shooting at UN troops, the UN would in return cease to grant permission for NATO air strikes against them.
"We were the supplicants," one of Janvier's aides said. "Janvier proposed the meeting. Janvier proposed the deal." It was the latest in a miserable litany of acquiescence and capitulation to the Serbs by the United Nations, among which was the setting up of the doomed safe areas themselves.
The three-point agreement drawn up between Janvier and Mladic said:
"1 The Army of Republika Srpska will no longer use force or threaten the life and safety of members of Unprofor [The UN Protection Force].
"2. Unprofor commits to no longer make use of force which leads to the use of air strikes against the targets and territory of the Republika Srpska.
"3 The signing of this agreement will lead immediately to the freeing of all prisoners of war."
The UN hostages were, indeed, freed by the middle of June. But Janvier's bond with Mladic drew the wrath of his immediate inferior, General Rupert Smith, UK Unprofor commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina, based in Sarajevo. There was a meeting at the Dalmatian port of Split in Croatia on 9 June, chaired by Yasushi Akashi, the UN secretary-general's special envoy to former Yugoslavia, to try to resolve the differences. Akashi himself had established a consistent record of stifling attempts at intervention against the Serbs, using his close contact with Belgrade to do so.
Smith observed: "We have been neutralized." He argued that "if we hit them, they [the Serbs] will be more co-operative". Janvier disagreed. "I insist we will never use force to impose our will on the Serbs, he said, admitting that "the Serbs are controlling the situation."
The strategy was that the UN should, rather than defy the Serbs, placate them by abandoning the safe areas to the mercy of the executioners. "What would be most acceptable to the Serbs, he said bluntly, "would be to leave the enclaves. It is the most realistic approach and it makes the most sense from the military point of view, but it is impossible for the international community to accept."
But he was wrong only on the last point. Such a betrayal was utterly acceptable to the international community. By striking a treacherous deal with Mladic, General Janvier, who represented the United Nations, had already condemned Srebrenica to the sword.
Bosnian Serb Troops began their final, bloody push into Srebrenica in the afternoon of 11 July 1995. The first official UN document to mark the offensive is a full record of a meeting held the "Blue Sword Crisis Action Team", the UN high command for the entire region, in Zagreb that day. The meeting was led by special envoy Akashi.
His senior military commander, General Janvier, was there, as was the chief of staff, brigadier General Steren, as well as the Nato liaison officer, British Air Commodore Rudd, and three other senior military officers.
The meeting started with the news that the Bosnian Serbs were attacking the Dutch UN battalion, and that Nato planes were "forming a strike package en route to Srebrenica." General Janvier's deal with Mladic seemed to be in trouble. But two minutes after this bulletin, Akashi told the meeting about a telephone call he had with Milosevic, who in theory, had nothing to do with the war since May 1992.
Akashi explained to Milosevic the difference between "close air support" for his UN soldiers and "air strikes" against the Serbs, apparently insisting that this Nato action was not an air strike and that the Janvier-Mladic deal was intact.
Milosevic replied on behalf of Mladic, saying that Mladic would not recognize the difference. At 2.40pm, Nato planes struck two targets, a tank and an armoured personnel carrier, missing the tank. Janvier then stepped in and ordered the Dutch soldiers to withdraw from their observation posts and retreat to the battalion compound at Potocari near Srebrenica.
Extraordinarily, the phone rang. Milosevic was on the line, apparently outraged by the timid air strike. Akashi explained that the Nato action was in response to an attack on his men and, that if the Serbs withdrew, there would be no more strikes.
Then, suddenly, Akashi started to talk to Milosevic about a Dutch soldier killed by the Bosnian army the previous week, saying he hoped these latest developments would not jeopardise the peace process.
The Bosnian Serbs were, by now, tearing into Srebrenica while Akashi was stating Milosevic's position to the meeting: that the Serbian troops were advancing only in response to "terrorism" by the Bosnians.
At 8.08pm that evening, the town taken and the slaughter under way, Akashi wrote to Kofi Annan, head of UN peacekeeping in New York, now UN secretary-general. For the first time, Akashi acknowledge that "Serbs harassed the column of Bosnians leaving Srebrenica for Potocari". There were "exploding shells so close to the column of the displaced" that they created "panic". What he referred to here was not panic; it was what Judge Riad called the massacres in the woods, the ambushing of civilians with shells and mortars as they fled the safe area declared by his own UN.
It has since emerged that even during the morning of the day Srebrenica fell, intelligence documents were reporting that Mladic intended to exterminate the entire population of the town. Two-thirds of the population of 40,000 had fled to the Dutch base at Potocari. The Dutch had been given orders from Unprofor "to protect the refugees" and escort them to "safe areas". The Serbs, however, insisted on the horrific separation of these people by sex in full view of the UN Dutch battalion commander and soldiers.
On 12 July, a column of between 12,000 and 14,000 able-bodied men and boys set off across the frontlines. More than half of them were ambushed or executed en route. During the days that followed, the rest were bused to a place of execution and summarily murdered. On the 12th, a letter form the Dutch commander on the ground, Colonel Ton Karremans, detailed two meetings he held with Mladic on 11 and 12 July. At the first meeting Mladic, "in a most threatening way", said he would use "all his assets" to "outgun" the Dutch compound if it continued to harbour refugees. At a second meeting, he demanded the removal of all Bosnian troops from the collapsed enclave. A debriefing by Dutch Brigadier General van der Wind, delivered in October that year to the Dutch government, told how Mladic set out his conditions for the evacuation of refugees. He insisted on the separation of women and children from the men. Karremans is reported to have "objected to the screening, but also to no avail; that is to say, the process of separation was not only accepted by the Dutch battalion but that they participated in the screening as early as 12 July.
The debriefing continued: "In order to prevent excesses with regard to transport, the battalion commander decided to co-operate in the evacuation. When the first buses arrived, they were stormed by a large number of refugees who wanted to board as quickly as possible. Dutchbat [Dutch battalion] personnel then formed an orderly pathway to the buses."
Next day, the 13th, General van der Wind's debriefing report states that "the transports were resumed at 06.30hrs". Extraordinarily, the report notes that "a list of men of fighting age was drawn up on the initiative of the deputy battalion commander [Major Franken.] This was done partly on the compound itself." Approximately 60 men refused to give their names. Ultimately, there were 239 names on the list. At approximately 19.30hrs on 13 July the last refugees left Potocari, with the exception of a few who stayed behind. In fact, these individuals were handed over by Dutchbat to the Bosnian Serbs -- they were never seen again.
The report notes that the "events which occurred from 6 to 13 July were particularly hectic, confusing, and disorganised" This was the official UN description of the carnage summarised in Judge Riad's chilling verdict.
الغرضون
21-07-2005, 12:51 PM
Case Study:
The Srebrenica
Massacre, July 1995
Summary:
In the Bosnian silver-mining town of Srebrenica in July 1995, one of the most notorious modern acts of gendercide took place. While the international community and U.N. peacekeepers looked on, Serb forces separated civilian men from women and killed thousands of men en masse, or hunted them down in the forests.
Who is responsible?
Chuck Sudetic writes of the Srebrenica massacre that "the men who carried out the executions were reportedly under orders handed down by General [Ratko] Mladic and Radislav Krstic, a colonel in the Bosnian army who was promoted to general and named commander of the army's Drina corps by Mladic within a few days of the killings. Among the units that took part in the killings was the Tenth Commando squad, which answered directly to Mladic's headquarters ... Men from Srebrenica, Bratunac, Kravica, Milii, Visegrad, Bajina Basta, Loznica, Zvornik, and other towns also participated." (Sudetic, Blood and Vengeance, pp. 317-18.)
In 1996, the International Criminal Tribunal indicted Mladic and Krstic for crimes of humanity committed at Srebrenica. Joining them on the list of indicted war-criminals was Radovan Karadzic, leader of the self-styled "Republika Srpska" or Serb-controlled territories in Bosnia. Karadzic was intimately involved in planning the "endgame" in the Bosnian war, for which Srebrenica was to serve as a centerpiece. In July 1999, the Tribunal found that these mass murderers had been operating under "a direct chain of military command" from Belgrade and the Serbian President, Slobodan Milosevic. For the first time, the Tribunal defined the Bosnian war as "an international conflict," recognizing both Bosnian independence and Serbian aggression . As yet, however, Milosevic remains unindicted for the atrocities he directed in Bosnia.
The United Nations must shoulder a large share of responsibility for allowing the massacre to take place under the noses of its troops. In November 1999, the UN released a highly self-critical report on its performance, stating that "Through error, misjudgment and the inability to recognize the scope of evil confronting us, we failed to do our part to save the people of Srebrenica from the Serb campaign of mass murder." (See Barbara Crossette, "U.N. Details Its Failure to Stop '95 Bosnian Massacre", The New York Times, November 16 1999.)
The blame surely extends to the member states of the United Nations -- perhaps especially to its most powerful member, the United States. As The Economist magazine has noted,
The received version [of events] ... is that Bill Clinton and Al Gore vowed to "bomb the Serbs" and end the war when they were shocked to learn that thousands of Muslims had been massacred at Srebrenica. But, the reader cannot help asking, was news of this impending massacre -- the worst in Europe since 1945 -- really not available to America's two most powerful figures beforehand?
At earlier stages in Bosnia's war, when Muslim strongholds like Gorazde or Bihac had been on the verge of falling, America had worked (without the promise of ground troops) to galvanise its allies -- insisting that battle-plans be drawn up, and threats of bombing be issued, so as to warn off the Serbs. Yet in the final days and hours of the advance on Srebrenica, which American intelligence could monitor closely, Washington fell strangely silent. Srebrenica duly fell, with consequences which were unspeakable in human terms, but not inconvenient diplomatically.
Perhaps it is conspiratorial to assume that America's tardy reaction to Srebrenica reflected calculation rather than negligence. But the question needs asking ... ("Inside Out," The Economist, September 8, 2001).
full report at:
http://www.gendercide.org/case_srebrenica.html
Bosniaنفس الموقع ولكن يناقش مأساة البوسنة
http://www.gendercide.org/case_bosnia.html