Bosnia's 1995 Massacres Still Cloaked in Denial

Michael Pugliese debsian at pacbell.net
Thu Jul 6 22:46:18 PDT 2000


www.tenc.net

has a rant on General Radislav Krstic and the ICTY http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/sinclair/why.htm and some new Arianna Huffington too.

Michael Pugliese

Thursday, July 6, 2000, L.A. Times

Bosnia's 1995 Massacres Still Cloaked in Denial

Balkans: Serbs' refusal to acknowledge the horrors has sparked calls for a truth panel. Muslim victims' kin plan to mark anniversary.

By PAUL WATSON, Times Staff Writer

SREBRENICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina--Five years after more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims were massacred in Europe's worst atrocity since World War II, a wall of Serbian denial still surrounds this town.

Bosnian Serbs, who have controlled Srebrenica since July 1995, insist that the mass murder of Muslims never happened--even though overwhelming evidence shows that it did.

U.S. peacekeepers patrolling the town may be called on to stop more violence Tuesday when about 5,000 people, mostly widows and mothers of the victims, plan to hold a memorial service marking the anniversary of the massacres.

They want to visit Potocari, the nearby site where Dutch peacekeepers charged with guarding the town surrendered to the Bosnian Serb army in 1995. In the days that followed, the Serbian soldiers loaded Muslims onto buses and drove the men and boys to their deaths.

Calling the planned ceremony "manipulation of the dead," Bosnian Serb veterans in this eastern Bosnian town have warned Muslims to stay away and avoid "undesirable consequences."

"The veterans association in Srebrenica does not see any reason for organizing such a gathering as it is known that on July 11, 1995, nobody was hurt in Potocari, let alone killed," the group said in a June 26 statement.

The refusal of most Bosnian Serbs, Muslims and Croats--and even foreign governments--to accept their share of the blame for Bosnia's horrors has prompted a movement to create a truth and reconciliation commission similar to the panel that exposed apartheid-era crimes in South Africa.

Jakob Finci, head of a new Bosnian organization pressing for an independent commission to hear testimony from victims and the accused, argues that ongoing U.N. war crimes trials in The Hague will not leave Bosnia-Herzegovina with a shared history of what happened.

"We have these days at least three different histories in our country, and we are teaching our children three different histories," Finci, a leader of the nation's small Jewish community, said in the capital, Sarajevo. "And as long as you are teaching your child that your neighbor is your enemy, it's hard to believe there will be anything else but a new war in 20 or 30 years' time."

Nearly 100 activists and experts from Bosnia and other areas of the former Yugoslav federation, such as Serbia and Croatia, gathered Feb. 4 in Sarajevo to discuss the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission. They agreed unanimously that such a government-backed panel is essential to healing the region's deep wounds.

South Africa's panel, headed by former Anglican Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, riveted that nation with emotional testimony from apartheid-era victims and murderers. Some killers broke down as they acknowledged on live television the gruesome details of what they had done, and then faced their victims' families and asked for forgiveness.

Opposition to a Truth Commission

All but the worst offenders in South Africa won amnesty from prosecution by telling the truth and apologizing, but Bosnians trying to set up a similar commission here say it wouldn't offer any protection to war criminals.

Bosnians are due to vote for a new government in November, and Finci hopes that he can persuade it to set up the panel. But he faces opposition inside and outside Bosnia from powerful politicians and commanders who stand to lose if the full truth ever comes out.

In a country so deeply divided, it also will be tough to find commissioners with enough support from all three main ethnic groups to navigate the minefield of Bosnian history and reach the truth.

"If there aren't 10 people with the trust of all Bosnians, then there is no reason for this country to exist," Finci said.

Finci is also up against the very survivors who could be called to testify but might see the process as a way of diminishing the guilt of Serbian and Croatian forces that tried to carve up this nation during a 3 1/2-year war that came after Bosnia's decision to break away from the former Yugoslav federation.

One of those survivors is Munira Subasic, who heads a group called Mothers of Srebrenica and Zepa Enclaves. She saw her husband and 17-year-old son loaded onto one of the buses at Potocari five years ago and will not rest until every Serb she holds responsible is in jail.

"If Bosnia--especially eastern Bosnia--is cleansed of evil, meaning that all the war criminals are arrested and brought to justice, then ordinary people could live together, and we wouldn't need any commission," she said through a translator.

Subasic's organization is one of 14 Muslim groups planning to send 107 busloads of people to Tuesday's memorial in Potocari.

Bosnian Serb police say they can only provide security for 15 buses, each carrying about 50 people. Wolfgang Petritsch, the Austrian diplomat who helps administer Bosnia as the international community's high representative, is pressuring the ceremony's organizers to stick to the smaller number.

But Subasic insists that no one has the legal right to block visitors--especially survivors of massacres for which she holds the international community partly responsible--from visiting Potocari.

"If there is a man who can say to one mother, 'You can go,' and to another mother, 'You cannot,' he should try," Subasic said.

Charlie Powell, Petritsch's representative in Srebrenica, suspects that the Muslim nationalist Party for Democratic Action is seeking to provoke a confrontation to boost support before the November elections.

But Muslims are angry that foreign promises to reverse "ethnic cleansing" have delivered little in large areas of Bosnia. In Srebrenica, only four Bosnian Muslim civilians have dared to move back; Muslims made up about 70% of the area's population before the war.

War crimes investigators and exhumation teams have found 4,700 bodies here, but only 80 have been positively identified, says Kathryne Bomberger, an American and deputy chief of the International Commission on Missing Persons' office in Sarajevo.

The rest of the corpses are stored in a morgue in the northeastern Bosnian town of Tuzla. A new program using DNA testing is expected to start by year's end, at a cost of $10 million over the next five years, to help with identification.

Many of the victims were buried in mass graves that held up to 800 corpses, says Amor Masovic, who heads the Muslim-run state commission for tracing missing persons.

"You can find in one hole 100, 200 or 500 bodies," Masovic said. "Then you find victims with tied hands. You find a man with five or six bullets in his body, or a man who has been shot at close range."

A total of 10,701 people were reported missing from Srebrenica after the town fell in 1995, but dozens of their names later showed up on voter rolls during postwar elections, raising suspicions that the death toll was exaggerated.

But war crimes investigators have amassed detailed evidence of systematic massacres here. The International Committee of the Red Cross estimates that 7,079 people were killed, while Masovic's commission puts the figure at about 8,400.

"The truth is probably somewhere in the middle," he said.

Even when Bosnian Serbs here are willing to concede that the thousands of bodies dug up from mass graves are real, a common explanation is that Muslims killed their own people to prevent them from surrendering to a Serbian onslaught against this area, which the United Nations had declared a "safe haven" during the 1992-95 war.

"They didn't want to stay here even though the [Bosnian] Serb army offered them security," said the secretary of the veterans group, who refused to identify himself.

Like many Bosnian Serbs, he wants to know why journalists rarely ask about the massacre of Serbs at places such as Zalazje, where Muslim commander Naser Oric and his men allegedly killed 120 people July 12, 1992.

Bosnian Serb on Trial in Srebrenica Killings

Radislav Krstic, deputy commander of the Bosnian Serb army's Drina Corps, is on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague on genocide and other charges stemming from the Srebrenica massacres.

Prosecutors say Krstic helped supervise as Bosnian Muslims were loaded onto 50 or 60 buses and driven to various places where they were slain, though Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic had assured the U.N. that they would be safe.

Mladic also is wanted for war crimes and has been spotted several times over the past year in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and the rump Yugoslavia, whose president, Slobodan Milosevic, also has been indicted on war crimes charges.

It will be another 16 years before The Hague tribunal finishes its current caseload from the former Yugoslav federation, panel President Claude Jorda told the U.N. Security Council last month.

A truth and reconciliation commission wouldn't compete with the tribunal but would complement it, Finci says. Without the restrictions of a criminal trial, the panel could hear 8,000 to 10,000 witnesses from all sides of the war in 18 months of proceedings, he says.

Although it's clear that the main victims of Bosnia's war were Muslims, he says, the problem here is that everyone wants to be seen as a victim. "We have nobody willing to face the guilt," Finci said.



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