The Srebrenica video

[Wezil]

Originally posted by Hueij
Ouch... Sebrenica is sort of a national trauma in the Netherlands. It was Dutch troops that were supposed to protect the citizens of Srebrenica. 8000 people executed and our guys assisted Mladic with getting them on the busses that would take them to...

I don't blame the Dutch for Srebrenica any more than I blame Canada for Rwanda. Both were colossal failures of the UN.

[Mr. Harley]

Sorry folks but Che actually has much of his history correct, reference both the Croats and Moslems.

First, the CROATS started the war. The borders of the Yugoslav provinces were largely artificial, and Tito had been pacifying various constituencies with paper transfer of borders, similiar to what happened in the Crimea. The problem was that one area that the new Croatian pseudo-Nazi government claimed was 80% per cent Serb.

But the new Croats put in a monetary unit that had only existed during the puppet Nazi-sponsered governement, during which Croat para-militaries helped the Nazi kill 800,000 (that is from memory) Serbs. Understandably, this made the Serbs in that area nervous, especially when Croat was made the official language in an 80% Servian area and all their schools were being switch go Croatian. So they said we are going back and joining Yugoslavia.

The new Croat government said - Oh, but that's different and started the shooting. They also started the first killings of Moslems in Bosnia, as they supported Croat seperatists in that region. The Serbs ended up turning to their own strongmen. That is a very human, and very stupid, thing to do.

That also led to the Moslem's in Bosnia setting up a new government, that from my understanding (previous posts are fact) gave them de facto political control from their plurality. They engineered it so that Serbs and Croats, even if they could engineer a majority coalition, would have to bring in the Moslems. All well and good, except for the facts the Serbs and Croats didn't get the same minority rights. They were a bit pissed about that, and that helped scare them into the Serb and Croat nationalist camps.

At which point the Moslems started to get pissed on by armed forces from both Croat and Serb sides (back to hard facts by the way) - actually, the attacks had already started, but the increased substantially with increased polarization and recruiting by nationalists from the Croat and Serb factions. The Moslems then brought in Muslim jihadists, who came from places like Afghanistan, who now engaged in atrocities against Serbs and Croats.

Fact - the Croats strong men started it, led by Franjo Tudjman. Tudjman did a much better job of public relations than Milosevic, who evidently did not understand the role perceptions and media can play in modern conflicts, IMHO.

Fact - the Croat and Muslim atrocities got substantially less play in American media, see my last statement.

Fact - the Serbs only brought in Milosevic after the Croats started their offensives against Serbian area in Croatia.

Fact - all three sides have people before the Hague tribunal. It looks - please note this is not hard fact - that there are fewer atrocities attributalbe to the ethnic Muslim minority, but there is a dearth of hard facts and analysis, i.e. atrocities per soldier/guerilla/militia member. The largest atrocities are Croat or Serb, with the Serbs looking worst for deaths, and very possbly the Croats worst on ethnic cleansing, i.e. total number of non-Croats displaced out of areas now controlled by Croatians. Please note the Western media bias, as noted above, makes the number of exterminations of Croats versus Serbs hard to determine due to an utter lack of unbiased sources and resources to investigate, especially Croat atrocities.

[chequita guevara]

Carla del Ponte is also in danger of being removed from her job as proescuter because the Western Powers see her as being too "zealous," i.e., she's prosecuting too many Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Albanians.

[Mr. Harley]

Thanks Che, I'd missed that report. I had thought she has apparently been fairer than any other Western European or US governmental official I've seen reference this conflict. Also note that is was Clinton who stuck our nose, at NATO's request, into the wasp nest without bothering to deal with issues like Tujman's atrocities and ethnic cleansing.

[chequita guevara]

Well, Tudjman was committed to free markets, while Yugoslavia was still trying to be socialist. If you note, both the Dayton Accords and the treaty foisted on Yugoslvia following the end of the airial war required that Kosovo and Bosnia be changed to free market economies, regardless of what the inhabitants of both regions might want. Things are pretty bad in Bosnia. There is no free speech there. Any media critical of the NATO occupation has been shut down by NATO.

When del Ponte first took her office, she noted she inteded to prosecute war criminals from all sides, including NATO. She was very quickly informed that she would lose her post if she tried to prosecute NATO war criminals (and there are many).

[Mr. Harley]

Che, I know about how bad the UN representative there is - his name escapes me, but talk about an absolute dictator! However, do you know of any documented UN atrocities? I am not talking about soldiers engaging in crime that leads to courts marshall, or the arguable bombing of that government radio station when we started bombing Serbia - I mean clear-cut atrocities.

[Bereta_Eder]

You talked about Croatia and brought up another face to the yugoslav war. You spoke very well and mentioned the ustaze and the nazi affiliations in the re-formation of the new croat state. I have nothing to add and will not make it any more melodramatic even thought the semiology of the nazi past of croatia and those crimes played a big role.
The only thing I'll add is the country who recognized first the Croatian state as a separate country and thus expediated the conflict. That country is no other than Germany. And at that time it was pointed out many times that this would only act as a catalyst to the disindegration of yugoslavia and worsen the conflict.
And a last thing. Who is the biggest foreign investor in croatia today? Yep, Germany again.
There many other faces to that conflict who have not seen the light of day including the financial interests of Greece with Milosevic government in the Kosovo mines.

[Mr. Harley]

paiktis22 has added a very accurate analysis of the German involvement in the Balkans. Germany and the Vatican were the first two countries that recognized Croatia, and did so with no requirement that Croatia any laws governing minority rights. Those two governments bear at least part of the blame for what happened afterwards.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by shawnmmcc
Che, I know about how bad the UN representative there is - his name escapes me, but talk about an absolute dictator! However, do you know of any documented UN atrocities? I am not talking about soldiers engaging in crime that leads to courts marshall, or the arguable bombing of that government radio station when we started bombing Serbia - I mean clear-cut atrocities.

Most of it occured during the Kosovo War. For example, a factory that built cars also had a corner of the factory that built armored cars or tanks of some such. The few thousand workers at the plant sent a letter to Clinton telling him that they intended to continue occupying their plant and not to bomb it. We bombed it. We knew civilians were in there, and we bombed them.

We bombed their bridges, water supplies, electirical facilities. All of these are war crimes. The most clear cut war crime, however, was bombing the buildings that had been built to permanently house the Serbian refugees from Bosnia and Dalmatia. The offices of the section of the Serbian Socialist Party that handled refugee resettlement was also bombed.

I don't have the book in front of me now, but in Death of a Nation by Michael Parenti (which should be taken with some salt), Parenti rquotes a Spanish fighter pilot who talked about how his colonel refused to allow his pilots to drop antipersonel mines into Pristina and antoher large city (Nish, IIRC). The colonel was removed and the mission went ahead.

Then, of course, there was the deliberate bombing of the Chinese Embassy

[chequita guevara]

I would add that Croatia has become a much better place for minorities to live today. Most of their Tudjman era laws and such have been removed, but that didn't happen until after he died in 1999.

[Bereta_Eder]

If you consider that the hundreds of thousands of refugees that the croat army ethnic cleansed haven't been allowed to come back yet despite explicit promises from the croatian gov. of today, I don't know if that is true. Again here there is also responsibility of the international community for not pressing ahead with this. Even though Croatia was reprimended by getting its EU petition cancelled but that was because of reluctance to turn in people accused of war crimes.

[BeBMan]

To the JNA - it was dominated by Serbs, esp. in the higher ranks. Otherwise it is hard do imagine why JNA forces would participate in atrocities committed by irregular (Bosnian) Serb forces, as in Vukovar (I think there are cases about that on the ICTY site as well).

Croatia: IIRC first they were in the defensive and lost a part of their territory. The biggest crimes against Serbs took place during 1995 when Croatia launched two big counter-attacks. But I have to say I find the discussion who started what rather irrelevant when we're facing atrocities of big scale from all sides.

Fact - the Serbs only brought in Milosevic after the Croats started their offensives against Serbian area in Croatia

Not sure what you mean by "brought in", but if we can believe wiki here, he was President of Serbia before Tudjman was pres in Croatia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milosevic

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by BeBro
Croatia: IIRC first they were in the defensive and lost a part of their territory. The biggest crimes against Serbs took place during 1995 when Croatia launched two big counter-attacks. But I have to say I find the discussion who started what rather irrelevant when we're facing atrocities of big scale from all sides.

This is correct, but these were also the largest military operations during the war, so that's to be expected. I wouldn't venture to say who started the fighting in Croatia, but I know that immediately after independence, Croatian nationalists began committing attrocities on Serbs, Jews, Roma, anti-indpenendence Croatians, etc.

The point being, all sides in this conflict had bad guys. The Serbs were demonized from the beginning of the conflict, even though until Srebrenica, they hadn't pulled away from the rest of the pack.

I'm sure we all remember the storeis of rape camps with 30,000 Bosnian Muslim women raped repeatedly. No rape camp has yet been discovered, nor have the thousands of rapes come to light. When pressed, anti-Serbs will bring up the case of a Bosnian Serb irregular commander and his unit that repeated raped 26 women. This is bad. This is very bad. It does not, however, indicate that there was a policy of raping Muslim women by anyone except this one particular unit.

When shawnmmcc brings up Milosevic not understanding PR, he only scratches the surface. Both Croatian and Bosnian hired PR firms in NYC to conduct a propaganda offensive in the West, one that was overwhelmingly successful. Whenever Western attention seemed to die down, a Serbian attrocity would be engineered, either by shelling the Serbian suburbs of Sarajevo in hopes of provoking a response, or by shelling Sarajevo themselves in order to blame the Serbs.

[Mr. Harley]

Sorry - me bad. I should have clarified. The Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia only turned to Milosevic after those majority/pluralities refused to grant them the same freedoms that those groups had seized. From the same source.

The prescence of large Serb minorities in Croatia (580,000) and Bosnia (1.6 million) led to wars in each, in which the Serbs demanded the same right of self-determination given to their Croat and Muslim neighbors and demanded that their sections of Bosnia and Croatia remain in Yugoslavia

Note the phrasing here. Now this article claims an initial organizing factor of Milosevic, but I watched it unfold and it appeared that the Serbians in those regions did not turn to Milosevic until after they were marginalized and refused equivalent rights that the Croats and Muslims had already demanded.

Was Milosevic a player in Serbian politics prior to 1990? Yes, and a major one. Did his power increase, with his becoming the de facto strong man in Serbian areas, due to the conflicts in the Balkans. Absolutely. That is why I used the phrase "The people turned to Milosevic." You could argue semantics, and I would be the last person to say that is not important, but however you phrase in Mislosevic became essentially a dictator in a large part due to his successful playing on the Serbian fears as a result of actions taken by Tujman, and the Bosnian Muslims. I also said that was a stupid thing for the Serbs to do.

[chequita guevara]

Apparently, the borders of Yugoslavia were artificial, but the parts of Yugoslavia were inviolable.