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Wed. Jul 06, 2005

Ever Again

Each year, the “anniversary” rolls around (though there is hardly cause for celebration). Each year, the futile rage I felt a decade ago becomes a bit more than just a scarred memory. Each year, I remember in detail why the UN is dead to me. And each year, something happens or something is said that reinforces and validates all those old feelings.

On the possibility of genocide, people once said “Never Again.” Each year, I’m reminded the reality is “Ever Again.”

Serbs are slowly accepting that cooperation with the United Nations war crimes tribunal is inevitable but are not yet ready to admit to the war crimes committed in their name in the 1990s, a survey showed on Monday.

The agency conducting the poll said a video of Serb paramilitaries killing six Muslim captives from Srebrenica in 1995 had produced short-lived condemnation when it was broadcast in early June, but had not made a lasting impression.

“Seven days after the video it was as if nothing had happened.”

Serbiana: Survey shows Serbs not ready to face war crimes yet

“As if nothing had happened.” Ever again. A decade later, they’re still identifying and burying the dead: “The final number of the victims of genocide in Srebrenica to be buried on July 11 in Potocari is 583.” And the UN War Crimes Tribunal has announced that they won’t finish until the end of 2010 “partly because 50 per cent more people were now awaiting trial” for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia.

But you can always make an ugly situation uglier. And some as yet unknown plotters had planned on just that:

Optimism that the tenth anniversary of Europe’s worst post-war massacre might reconcile Bosnia’s Serbs and Muslims dimmed yesterday when bomb-making materials were discovered close to the memorial site.

Following a tip-off, Bosnian Serb police found nearly 80lbs of explosive, a fuse and a detonator near the cemetery where many of the 7,000-8,000 men and boys murdered by Serbs are buried.

The immediate suspicion was that they were to be used to blow up VIPs and mourners due to gather there on Monday to remember one of the blackest days in recent European history.

Telegraph: Bomb scare revives vivid memories of Srebrenica massacre

You can’t quite say that nothing has changed. Technology has. This plot was discovered by European security officials reviewing satellite photos of the memorial site. But in the important ways, it is ever again…

But psychological healing was not much in evidence. Several Serbs said they believed the materials had been planted further to discredit their people.

On hearing that it was European peacekeepers who had sounded the alarm he said: “Then it’s obvious that Eufor set the explosives.”

In Belgrade, where responsibility for the crime ultimately lies, the authorities permitted large billboards to be displayed commemorating the massacre.

They showed the latex-gloved hand of a forensic investigator holding the decaying fingers of a corpse and the words, “Srebrenica 1995-2005: To See, To Know, To Remember.”

There were 27 of them and they first appeared at the weekend. By Monday all had been defaced with such slogans as “there will be a replay” and the name of General Ratko Mladic, author of the butchery.

All quite depressing, and to my mind, a continued spreading of the ugliest stain on Western Civilization in recent memory. But this simply makes my head explode:

Shashi Tharoor, Under-Secretary-General for Public Information and Communications, said he hoped that the tragedy of Srebrenica, the worst massacre in Europe since World War II, had taught the global community an important lesson on the need to respond resolutely to systematic attempts to terrorize, expel or murder an entire people.

“As the Secretary-General Kofi Annan stressed in his 1999 report on the Fall of Srebrenica, the international community as a whole must accept its share of responsibility for its response to the ethnic cleansing campaign that culminated in the murder of some 7,000 unarmed civilians in Srebrenica,”

UN: On 10th anniversary of Srebrenica massacre, UN recommits to rehabilitation

What Under-Secretary-General for Public Information and Communications fails to comprehend is that the international community did (haltingly, belatedly) respond to the atrocities. By sending in the UN.

Now you can blame UN members for being unwilling to commit enough troops to a full fledged peacekeeping mission. It would later be up to NATO to do that … by the default of a vacuum, and the mass graves signifying the failure of the UN. But in lieu of enough troops to do it right, what plan did the UN come up with to deal with the crisis, using what they had?

“Safe havens.” Remember those? I believe there were seven of them, and they were the UN’s way of saying “we don’t have enough forces to protect you in your village. But if you come to one of these centralized protectorates, you will find ‘safe haven.’”

In reality, they just made it easier for Mladic and his butchers by rounding all these unarmed civilians in one place for ease of ethnic cleansing, and then did not have the will to expend one bullet to defend them in the “safe haven” they’d created.

And the international community is supposed to accept a “share of responsibility” for that? Perhaps in the collective sense of, “we were fools to expect the UN to handle this.” But they did lay it in the hands of that body, and those hands did worse than nothing. With their “safe havens,” they accommodated genocide.

It’s why the UN is dead to me. Long before 9/11. Long before the runup to the Iraq war. If there is a place on this planet wounded by violence, the UN arrives and creates an infection.

But never mind my heated rhetoric. Maybe Mr. Under-Secretary-General for Public Information and Communications should simply listen to his boss: “UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said the UN’s failure to prevent the atrocity would ‘haunt our history forever’.”

Or spend some time reviewing an official report:

The official Dutch report into the Srebrenica massacre says the Dutch Government and the United Nations must share responsibility for Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II.

UN peacekeepers from the Netherlands failed to prevent the killing of thousands of Muslims in the Bosnian town when it was overrun by Serb forces in 1995, at the height of Bosnia’s civil war.

The United Nations had declared the town a safe area but it fell to the Serbs without the 110-strong UN contingent firing a shot and up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys were then executed.

“They had a mandate to help us, but no will to do so,” said Sabra Kulenovic, who lost 28 family members in the killings.

“When we saw the peacekeepers running away from their positions, then we knew we had to run too,” she said. “Right before the massacre, I saw one Dutch soldier sitting and crying. It seemed that he knew what would happen to us. But they failed.”

BBC: Srebrenica blame ‘must be shared’

You also can’t pin it just on those 110 Dutch troops on the ground. They were outnumbered by 15 or 20 to one. They called for support, and were denied. They asked for permission to defend themselves (yes, that was the way the UN forces operated), and were told to beat feet.

So some of them cried. And then they followed orders. Their only alternative was to ignore that final order, and go down fighting. While a brave choice, it would have only added another 110 to the body count. Followed by much official indignation, and copious issuance of paper rhetoric.

Because there is a small kernel of truth that Mr. Under-Secretary-General for Public Information and Communications is desperately spinning. No one had the will. As I’ve said before, there is plenty of blame to spread around:

“A Republican President was willing to send our troops to Somalia, but nothing for Bosnia. His Democratic successor wasn’t much better, at least, not for several more murderous years. Jews stood by and watched genocide happen again. And did nothing. Muslim nations watched their Bosnian brothers and sisters be slaughtered. And did nothing. The nations of the Great Civilization of Europe watched blood be splattered all over their patio furniture by the ongoing genocide in their own backyard. And did nothing.”

“For three years. Until a quarter million were dead.”

I wrote that over a year ago, and it’s been a decade since Yugoslavia broke up into a kettle of ethnic cleansing. And still the international community does nothing.

Rwanda.

Darfur.

The list goes on.

Ever again.