Three Bosnian Muslim generals have pleaded not guilty at The Hague Tribunal to war crimes charges. Their arrest last week by the Bosnian police was greeted more with sadness than anger by the Bosnian population, unlike the fury that has, on occasion, been the reaction to the detention of Serbs and Croats accused of similar crimes.
War is never glorious. It is always cruel and during conflict the men who are thrust to the fore are those who are generally the toughest. There can be a fine line between necessary force and murdering Serb prisoners of war and civilians, which are the crimes of which the Bosnian generals are accused. It is also the job of senior officers to ensure that the troops under their command respect the rights of the captured and the innocent. They cannot connive at savagery by their men. They certainly cannot deliberately give orders that can be interpreted as a license for their troops to commit war crimes. The irony is that Gen. Enver Hadzihasanovic, one of the three Bosnian accused, himself gave the final testimony in the trial of the Serb Gen. Radislav Krstic, convicted last week of genocide at Srebrenica.
Out of the 72 men so far indicted for war crimes, the majority, 40, is Serb, followed by 20 Croats with a handful of Bosnian Muslims. It is only recently that the Serbs, including the Bosnian Serbs, have begun to accept that they cannot shelter accused war criminals. The Croats only really began reluctantly cooperating with the Hague Tribunal authorities last year. Yet as long ago as 1996, the Bosnian authorities assisted in the arrest of two of their own soldiers, who were tried and convicted of war crimes. So far, only one other Bosnian has been accused of war crimes, which makes just six indictments.
The Bosnians accounted for the lion’s share of the 200,000 slain, most of them innocent civilians, either caught in the crossfire or deliberately butchered thanks to the heinous policy of ethnic cleansing. Yet they have demonstrated an extraordinary calm and patience in the face of the outrages perpetrated upon them by both their Serb and Croat neighbors.
The terrible evil, which reached its awful apogee at Srebrenica, ran throughout the conflict. There were hundreds of little Srebrenicas, thousands of individual cases of heartless, brutal murder. Faced with the evidence of the massacre of their defenseless families, Bosnian soldiers must have been filled with a white rage and a desire to strike back at their enemies. That their discipline and perhaps innate sense of right and honor stopped most of them from reciprocating the savagery, says a lot about the tolerant society of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which the Serbs were seeking to destroy.
The Bosnians of all backgrounds, who stayed loyal to their government and country, shared then and still share a vision of a decent, free society. It seems that the white-hot heat of war has tempered and strengthened that tolerant vision. Thus, though senior Bosnian military men, whom some regarded as heroes of the struggle for freedom, have been accused of terrible wrongdoing, the automatic reaction has not been to defend them or seek to justify the crimes of which they have been accused, but to let them take their place before the Hague Tribunal and allow the wheels of justice turn, whatever the outcome.
