The Muslims of Srebrenica yesterday remembered the cold-blooded murder ten years ago of over 10,000 defenseless men and boys by the Bosnian Serb militia under their commander Gen. Ratko Mladic, a massacre that brought international opinion firmly down against the genocidal Serbs but also brought the most profound shame on the European peacekeepers supposedly protecting the “safe enclave” in the town.
The failure of the UN command in Bosnia to support the 600 lightly armed Dutch troops holding the town against Mladic’s advancing militia remains a stain upon the UN. This was the worst massacre in Europe since the depravities of Hitler’s Nazis. It shocked a complacent continent that had promised itself that such barbarity would never be allowed to happen again.
It seems that a significant number of Serbs still cannot bring themselves to admit that this butchery took place. Thus though Serbian President Boris Tadic was present at the moving Srebrenica ceremony yesterday, many Serbs are actually angry that he went. Serbia’s Parliament in Belgrade meanwhile failed to make a specific reference to the slaughter in the town before the minute’s silence that members stood to observe. Instead the silence memorialized all who had died in the atrocities in and around Srebrenica as well as the dead in last week’s London bombings. However even this fudge was too much for ardent nationalist parliamentarians, who boycotted the session entirely.
A look at the map shows why Mladic and his political boss Radovan Karadzic wanted all Bosnian Muslims either massacred or bussed out the town. Srebrenica commands a salient of Bosnian territory sticking into Serbia itself. With the towns of Potocari and Nova Kasaba (where Serb militiamen also butchered captured Muslims) in Serbian hands and the populations removed, by murder or driving out, a wedge of potentially hostile territory would be removed, it was thought. The UN did nothing to stop them. The tragedy is that by failing to provide sufficient ground forces and air cover, together with supplies and weaponry to sustain them, the heads of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica and hundreds more elsewhere were handed to the Serbs on a plate.
If many Serbs are still so brain-washed or so stupid as to disbelieve the evidence of stills and videos made of the murders and the mass graves and the painstakingly gathered forensic information, then it is hardly surprising that Mladic and Karadzic have been concealed so successfully from UN investigators. Both fugitives are now in their sixties. Were either to die naturally before being brought to trial, the Serbs would find themselves frozen for many years into a shared shame and guilt over Serbian crimes in Bosnia.
The world outside is not conspiring against Serbia as they seem to believe, but rather Serbia is conspiring against the world to deny a terrible truth. Until they admit it, no one will have full closure.
