BRAVO Jonas!
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http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/05/28/george-jonas-the-west%E2%80%99s-balkan-hypocrisy/
George Jonas: The West's Balkan hypocrisy
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National Post George JonasMay 28, 2011 – 7:30 AM ET
Stoyan Nenov/Reuters
Graffiti of Bosnian Serb wartime general Ratko Mladic is displayed in a suburb
of Belgrade.
Between 11-22 July, 1995, the Bosnian Serb army, under the command of Lt. Gen.
Ratko Mladic, overran a town named Srebrenica in an ostensibly UN-protected
area. After taking a small contingent of Dutch UN troops hostage, the General's
troops, aided by a paramilitary unit called "Scorpion," proceeded to massacre
8,000 Muslim men and teenage boys.
The 69-year-old man captured on Wednesday by Serbian commando units in the
village of Lazarevo went under the name of Milorad Komadic, but made no attempt
to deny being the indicted war criminal Ratko Mladic. Appointed to his post in
1992 by the infamous Bosnian Serb leader (and now also indicted war criminal)
Radovan Karadzic, the former Yugoslav career officer and Serbian patriot led
his troops in the Balkan wars of the 1990s with considerable military prowess
and panache, and an inhumanity remarkable even by the region's notorious
standards.
The apprehension of Mladic took 16 years following his indictment because
three-quarters of his countrymen regarded him as a hero. Their number declined
over the years, but still amounts to a majority. To understand why, one cannot
view July 11-21, 1995, in isolation, only as one date on a continuum of gore.
To avoid going too far back in history, one could start with April 10, 1941,
about a year before Mladic was born.
On that day Croatian fascists under the tutelage of the Third Reich broke away
from Yugoslavia to set up the Independent State of Croatia. Like many of
Hitler's local clients in the Balkans and Eastern Europe — Ion Antonescu's Iron
Guard in Romania or Ferenc Szálasi's Arrow Cross in Hungary — the infamous
Ustashi of Ante Pavelic tried massacring and expelling Serbs from Croat
territory long before the term "ethnic cleansing" was invented. The communist
partisans of Yugoslavia resisted them, with Allied support. The 69-year-old war
criminal arrested on Wednesday was three years old in 1945 when the Ustashi
captured and murdered his partisan father.
Excuse? Not in a million years. Only context.
One is less certain how to put into context the Allies aiding and abetting war
crimes. After the war the victors, especially the British, repatriated tens of
thousands of captured Croatian Ustashi to Josip Broz Tito's tender mercies.
According to Nikolai Tolstoy's account in his 1986 book The Minister and the
Massacres, the soil was heaving for days over the Yugoslav countryside as
ex-Ustashi prisoners were shot and thrown into mass graves half-alive by
communist partisans. Even if those drowning under their country's soil included
mass murderers, as they probably did, the massacres facilitated by the Allies
would still fit the definition of war crimes.
A generation later, when communism finally imploded, the West's bias for
multicultural models of nationhood, coupled with our prejudice against
ethnically (or religiously) based nation-states, made us reluctant to support
Croatian, Slovenian and Bosnian ambitions for independence in 1990-91. Though a
prompt and unequivocal Western endorsement of self-determination might have
averted bloodshed altogether, not wanting to see Yugoslavia break up into its
ethnic/religious components, we needlessly prolonged the conflict through a
vapid UN arms embargo imposed on all factions in September, 1991 — which
naturally gave an edge to the better-equipped Serbs. Thanks to our
humanitarian-pacifist folly, the savage war had an extended run, especially on
the Croatian front, probably costing thousands of lives.
The United States, slow to protest against the illegitimate ambition of federal
Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic to forcibly hang on to three nations that
wanted to separate, came down on him like a ton of bricks for his far more
legitimate ambition to preserve Serbia's territorial integrity against the
secessionist guerrillas of Kosovo. Washington, which resisted recognizing
genuine, if splinter, nations such as Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia until April,
1992, was quick to launch stealth bombers to ensure the autonomy of ethnic
Albanians seven years later. As a multicultural thug Milosevic was a protected
species; as a nationalist thug, NATO declared an open season on him.
In the end, the West's policy didn't even amount to a defence of a
multicultural ideal. As events unfolded, NATO's bombers were raining
destruction on Serbia's bridges and factories (the Serbs claimed 5,700 civilian
casualties; NATO estimated 1,500) not to forestall the ethnic cleansing of
Albanians from Kosovo, but to ensure the ethnic cleansing of Serbs. By the
spring of 2004, an estimated 200,000 Serbs had been driven from the province. In
another four years, in 2008, Kosovo declared its independence. Canada took its
time welcoming it — we became the 31st country to do so. Perhaps we hesitated
recognizing what we went to war for because we recognized that we should have
hesitated going to war for it.
The Serbs were puzzled. They considered themselves our friends. Why the West
felt obliged to choose sides between Serb and Albanian ethnic national
ambitions in Kosovo, and if it did, why it chose the side of its wartime enemy
(Albania had been fascist Italy's protectorate) against its wartime ally's,
remained a mystery to most. Some concluded it was the flower-child generation
taking over the West in the 1990s, naively hoping it could offend the Muslim
world in the Middle East and appease it in the Balkans.
After the fall of Milosevic the U.S. put the lid on it by bribing (in effect)
Serbia's new government to extradite the former strongman to The Hague. By the
time Milosevic was shipped to the war crimes tribunal few Serbs supported him,
but even among those who would have gladly tied the knot around the
ex-communist dictator's neck, many regarded selling Milosevic to a UN court a
disgrace. (The chief architect of the $1-billion deal, Serb prime minister Dr.
Zoran Djindjic, was assassinated in March, 2003.)
Snitches disdained an American reward of $5-million for Mladic, but after
Milosevic's extradition, the Butcher of Srebernice found it prudent to reduce
his defiant excursions to restaurants and weddings. His old boss, Karadzic, who
always looked like a faith-healer, was captured while masquerading as one in
2008. By then, pro-Western Boris Tadic had been president of Serbia for four
years, eager to take his country to Europe, which made the surrender of
Serbia's mass-murdering hero a pre-condition of Belgrade being allowed to apply
for EU membership.
Serbia succumbed this Wednesday. When the commandos arrived at the modest house
owned by one of Mladic's relatives, he offered no resistance.
Will Mladic's trial serve justice? Not if it's used to deny the legitimacy of
ethnic patriotism and selectively criminalize wartime conduct. Not if it's used
to put the agenda of international tribunals ahead of reconciliation in
conflict areas. But if NATO's Javier Solana were seated next to Mladic in the
dock, along with other architects of the West's "humanitarian" bombing and
reverse ethnic cleansing campaigns in the Balkans — say, America's Bill
Clinton, Britain's Tony Blair, Germany's Gerhard Schroeder and perhaps Canada's
Jean Chretien — it could be an eye opener. Don't hold your breath, though.
National Post
Posted in: Full Comment, World Politics Tags: bosnia, George Jonas, Ratko
Mladic, Serbia, war crimes
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