Next July it will be ten years since the most odious crime was committed on European soil since the depravities of the German Nazis. The 1995 massacre at Srebrenica of captured Bosnian men and boys by Serb militias was an outrage which shocked the world.
Everyone wanted to know how the UN Dutch peacekeepers, who were supposed to be guarding the town as a safe haven for its citizens and the Muslims who had fled their homes in the region, could have been persuaded to abandon the helpless people they had been ordered to protect. The Dutch have grappled with this question themselves. There have been many reasons advanced for their terrible failure. Their soldiers were poorly armed and briefed. A few weeks before, Serb militiamen had taken other UN troops hostage. The Dutchmen were heavily outnumbered. Had they used force to defend the Bosnian town, they would have easily been overrun and many of the civilians might have been killed. The Serbs were promising to look after the Bosnians in the town.
They seemed so reasonable and convincing.
We still wait to hear from the mouth of the Serbian commander, Ratko Mladic, whether if the Dutch commander had stood firm, he really would have pressed home an attack against the UN soldiers.
Mladic and his political boss Radovan Karadzic are both still on the run having been indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for genocide and war crimes. They might have feared immediate reprisals for killing UN troops. In the end it was news of the Srebrenica massacre that finally strengthened the will of the international community and brought on the NATO air attacks which quickly blasted the Serbs to the peace negotiations in Dayton. That the two key Serbian instigators of Bosnia’s agony remain at large, hidden within the Serbian community remains the very greatest scandal. It has seemed that as long as they could conceal the two leading criminals, the Serbs felt themselves able to pretend that these wicked acts were not real, that somehow they had never really happened.
Well this June, Bosnian Serbs took an important step toward reality when their regional government finally admitted that the massacre had been committed by Serbs. This week they have gone a step further by publishing a report in which Serbian investigators have found that more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims fell victim to Mladic’s butchers. The final pretences about this deed of the utmost savagery have been abandoned. Serbs need no longer live the lie. Now they can grapple with the guilt of this odious crime.
There is however one more step that they must take to mitigate the horrors that were perpetrated in their name. That is to deliver up Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic for trial at The Hague.
As long as these two men avoid answering for the terrible crimes with which they are charged, all Serbs, not just those in Bosnia, will remain in the dark shadow of guilt. No civilized society can protect men who have done what they are alleged to have done.
They must be given up.
