Anyone who drove through rural Croatia and Bosnia in Yugoslavia in the 1980s would probably have been enchanted by this corner of Europe, with its lush green hills and orchards, its picturesque farmhouses and villages and its distinctive barn, mounted of pillars topped with shaped stones to stop mice and rats clambering up to eat the harvest.
Within a few years, this beautiful countryside and many of its town and cities, with their historic mosques and churches, would have been torn apart and no less than 100,000 of its inhabitants buried in the ground. What happened in the former Yugoslavia was a crime that brings shame, not simply on the petty warlords who oversaw the butchery, but upon the wider Europe, fat and comfortable in its prosperity and complacently believing that the savagery that had been visited on the continent by Hitler’s Nazis, half a century before, could never happen again.
Memories are long in the Balkans and forgiveness, perhaps understandably, is in short supply. But at least when those who were responsible for some of the very worst crimes are found guilty and punished, there is some sort of satisfaction, some sort of closure.
Thus there will be a widespread welcome for the guilty verdicts and sentences handed down by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague on Wednesday. Mico Stanisic, the former interior minister in the Bosnian Serb republic and Stojan Zuplianin, a former police chief in Bosanska Krajina, were both convicted of crimes against humanity, including murder, torture, unlawful detention, ethnic cleansing and looting in Bosnia in 1992. Each man was sentenced to 22 years in jail.
In delivering their verdicts, the judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) said the two had taken part in a “joint criminal enterprise with the objective to permanently remove non-Serbs from the territory of a planned Serbian state.”
To look at the two men as they stood in the dock, it was hard to believe that they could have been responsible for such savagery. Zuplianin, with his bushy white moustaches looks like a favorite uncle, not a mass killer. And he probably was a devoted family man, cherished by his young relatives. But then as the parade of Nazi killers from the death camps showed after the World War II, the face of the deepest evil is often notable for its banality, the sheer quality of being so commonplace.
There can be no question that Zuplianin and Stanisic knew perfectly well that what they were doing in Bosnia in 1992 was a terrible crime. But they were driven on by the hatred so extreme, that they were able to throw aside decent human feelings and treat fellow human beings as vermin, to be abused and exterminated without pity.
The rest of Europe will doubtless be relieved that two more trials have been completed and as the list of prosecutions diminishes, it can try and put the appalling events in the former Yugoslavia behind it. There remain however the two big cases, the prosecution of the former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic over atrocities committed during the conflict, including the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. These are not men who simply carried out orders, with more or less enthusiasm. These are two monsters who actually gave the orders, formulated the policy of ethnic cleansing, envisaged a greater Bosnian Serb state allied to Serbia proper, and having made their evil plan, willed the means, which involved the murder of tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children.
If the conviction and sentencing of these two individuals bring a degree of closure to Bosnians and Croatian, it should not permit European states to then brush the whole disgusting business under the carpet. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, the continent vowed very publicly to learn the lesson and draw closer together, into what has now become the European Union. Shame at the Holocaust made anti-semitism taboo and indeed turned modern Germany into one of Israel’s staunchest supporters.
Yet has Europe taken a similar lesson from an anti-Muslim hatred that drove the Bosnian Serbs to perpetrate the Srebrenica massacre? Many would argue it has not. Islamophobia is all too prevalent throughout many EU member states. Extremist politicians spouting bigoted nonsense already win plenty of votes. Mainstream parties dismiss them but argue their right to their opinions, however hateful. They are wrong. It is not the memory of the Nazi death camps at Belsen and Sobibor that should now be at the front of their minds, but the savagery in Bosnia and Srebrenica.
Editorial: Europe must remember Bosnian Serb savagery
