Dear Mr. Halil Altan,

My colleague, Tuba, has asked me to send you a possible article on Bosnia-Herzegovina for you newspaper. Below is such an article, reviewing the past, and offering a warning about the future.

Sincerely yours,

Michael Sells
Chairperson, Department of Religion
President, Community of Bosnia Foundation

Work Phone 610-896-1027

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When the Berlin wall came down, it would have seemed inconceivable that genocide would occur, in the heart of Europe, in front of NATO, the largest military alliance in human history, on the fiftieth anniversary of the holocaust. It is still inconceivable. Yet it has happened. The danger is growing that it will resume.

For those who follow the Bosnian tragedy through the media, an eerie quiet has descended since last December. With some improvement in Sarajevo and Central Bosnia, many might be lured into thinking that the situation was on its way to a constructive resolution. But the calm is ominous. Throughout the 70% of Bosnia occupied by the Serb army, "ethnic-cleansing" continues. Non-Serbs are rounded up, beaten, stripped of every possession, and, if lucky, dumped across the border into Bosnian territory. Young men are taken to a slave-labor camp at Lopare. Many young women are seized by soldiers and disappear. Last fall the International Red Cross, in a stunning move, appealed to the major Western powers to stop this "ethnic cleansing." The appeal was ignored. The 70% of Bosnia occupied by the Serb army and known as the Republika Srpska is now approaching 100% ethnoreligious "purity." Throughout the entire region, armies are preparing to resume the war.

The Legacy of General Rose

The area around the far Northwestern town of Velika Kladusa in the Bihac enclave has become a headquarters for the occupying Serb army from Croatia. The disregard by the Croatian Serb army for both the internationally recognized border of Bosnia and for the "Safe Area" of Bihac prompted the Croatian government decided to ask UNPROFOR forces to leave. The UNPROFOR forces, which were supposed to be overseeing the disarmament of both sides, were in fact protecting the Serb army in Croatia and allowing it to engage in aggression against Bosnia.

This key turning point is the legacy of the British UN general Sir Michael Rose. When the Croatian Serb army invaded Bosnia-Herzegovina in late 1994, Rose refused to call in the NATO protection was mandated by numerous UN resolutions. By refusing NATO protection he gave a green light to the invasion. Since that time the Croatian Serb army has shelled UN peacekeepers, killing one Bangladeshi soldier, blockaded the Bihac pocket from UN convoys, and continually shelled civilians areas. According to recent UN reports, the civilians in Bihac are close to starvation. Meanwhile, according to U.S. sources, the Serbian regime in Belgrade has been sending large helicopter missions to the area around Srebenica, in Southeast Bosnia, where tens of thousands of Bosnians are confined to a ghetto and surrounded by the Bosnian Serb army.

Preparing for the Final Battle

General Rose's destruction of the NATO-UN protection of "safe areas" and international borders was carried out in response to British policy. Britain and France have continually thwarted all efforts to put limits on the three major Serb armies. Given its weapons and strategic advantage, the Serb military has no incentive whatsoever for a just, negotiation solution. All armies are busy preparing for a resumption of the war this spring. Because of the European backed arms embargo against Bosnia, the Bosnians will again be at a massive military disadvantage.

The declared goal of Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic is to annihilate all traces of Bosnian Muslim culture which Karadzic calls "Ottoman." A second goal is to divide Bosnia with Croatia, placing the Bosnian Muslims and those Bosnians who want a secular, multi-religious state within a tiny ghetto based, in Karadzic's words, "on a few districts around Tuzla."

The policy of Croatian President Franjo Tudjman remains unclear. Will the federation between Bosnia and Croatia hold? Or will Croatia revert to the stance of 1993 when Croatia and Serbia attacked Bosnian positions simultaneously? As long as Europe is tying the hands of Bosnia with an arms embargo, Tudjman may decide that it will be easier to carve up Bosnia with Milosevic than to fight the Serbian war machine with a poorly armed ally. The human costs of such a partition-policy will be beyond measure. Even if the Croat-Bosnian coalition holds, the future may hold more genocide.

Resumption of Ethnic Cleansing?

As defined by the UN convetion of 1948, genocide is the perpetration of acts such as killing, torture, or attacks against civilian populations in order "to destroy, in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." The "ethnic cleansing" program of the Serbian armed forces is clearly a case of genocide. From April to August of 1992, the Yugoslav Army (JNA), irregular groups of Bosnian Serb soldiers, and irregular militias from Serbia, occupied most of the territory now controlled by the Serb army, including many Muslim-majority cities that had been centers of Bosnian Muslim culture for five centuries. The major crimes against humanity centered in cities such as: Zvornik, Vlasenica, Visegrad, Foca, Gacko, Trebinje, Sanski Most, Banja Luka, Prijedor, Doboj, and Brcko. A network of death camps (Omarska, Susica, Keraterm, Brcko) was established, along with a wider network of concentration camps (Manjaca, Trnopolje, and camps in or near all the cities mentioned above). Killing-centers and rape-centers were established in Zvornik, Foca, Rogatica, and Visegrad. Artistic and architectural monuments were systematically annihilated, including two masterworks of South Slav civilization, the Ferhadiyya mosque of Banja Luka and the Colored Mosque (Aladza djamiya) of Foca. All mosques in Zvornik were destroyed and a new Church was dedicated to celebrate Zvornik's status as 100% "ethnically pure." In Sarajevo, the all major museums and libraries were targeted with incendiary and phosphorus grenades, including the library of the Oriental Institute, the largest collection of Hebrew and Islamic manuscripts in S.E. Europe, which was annihilated on May 17, 1992. In August of the same year, the National Library in Sarajevo was destroyed by the Serb army in the largest book-burning in history.

The crimes were known by the French, British, and U.S. governments, and by the U.N., but information on the genocide was repressed for four vital months, as diplomats and world leaders continued to talk, misleadlingly, of "civil war." The genocide was revealed only after the accounts of Omarska death camp by Pulitizer Prize winning journalist Roy Gutman forced the issue on the world's attention in August,1992. That genocide is overwhelming documented in the 8 U.S. State Department Reports on War Crimes in the Former Yugoslavia and in the two volumes of Helsinki Watch reports on War Crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

If war resumes and the "enclaves" (i.e. ghettos) of Srebenica, Zepa, and Gorazde fall, the events of 1992 leave little doubt as to what will be the fate of the inhabitants. That would happen, as was the case in Zvornik and Foca, away from the media and the TV cameras.

But will Britain and France really allow Sarajevo to fall? As opposed to the rest of Bosnia, what happens in Sarajevo appears on CNN. In pressing the Bosnian government to give up most of Bosnia to the armies of aggression, Britain and France have threatened a UN withdrawal and the fall of Sarajevo, but have been unwilling to carry out their threat, most probably fearing the CNN factor.

The first sign of whether Europe decides to allow Bosnia to be totally extinguished as a culture will occur if and when the press is ordered out of Sarajevo. For the historian looking back upon the history of besieged non-Christian enclaves in Europe since the attacks on the Rhineland Jews during the first Crusade in 1096 through the holocaust, the unthinkable is too close for comfort. After the record of the past two and a half years, little hope can be placed in the politicians and diplomats of the EC or the UN; if Bosnia is to be saved, it will be the common people around the world who will have to raise their voices and demand its rescue.

Michael Sells