Bosnian Genocide (1992-95): Bosniaks Suffered Racial Genocide

The following article was first published on 5 June 1993 by New Straits Times under the title “Vicious
Game Goes on in the Balkans.”
By: Mazian Nordin
A rabbi once told a story about a prisoner being informed by the Nazi concentration camp commandant
that his life would be spared if he could tell which was the commandant’s glass eye. The Jewish
prisoner made the correct guess, and was forthwith asked: “How did you know?”
And he replied: “Because in that eye there is just a hint of compassion.”
It is but one of the innumerable stories from the holocaust in World War II. None such has yet been
heard from the Bosnian Muslims, victims of racial genocide being perpetrated by the Serbs.
Neither Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic nor his principal negotiator Radovan Karadzic has a
glass eye.
After 14 months of war, they now control 70 percent of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Some 200,000 civilians
have died, thousands of Bosnian women raped and two million more driven from their homes.
The victims’ agony continues as Britain, France, Russia and Spain hustled the United States to accede
to the establishment of a Greater Serbia. To add insult to injury, the United Nations Protection Force
(UNPROFOR) will disarm Bosnians but not the Serbian and Croatian aggressors.
Rejected by the European allies was America’s earlier intention to intervene militarily and arm the
Bosnian Muslims. For them, the contest of arms must remain one-sided. Discarded too was the Vance-
Owen peace plan accepted earlier by Bosnia but not the Serbs.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the agreement has been described in Western newspapers as a “victory for
appeasement” and a surrender to the aggressors.
Revealing is the following report in a British newspaper: “In Washington, Daniel Moynihan, a
maverick Democratic senator, accused the United States and its allies of legitimising genocide and
weakening the moral basis of international order as it has not been seen since the 1930s. In Sarajevo,
President Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia likened the plan to the native American Indians being put in
reservations to make way for a European-dominated country.”
The word “maverick” meaning “an unorthodox or undisciplined person” (as in the Oxford dictionary)
is exquisitely used to describe a long-serving and respected senator from New York.
One is tempted to ask whether the same noun was used to describe the opponents of British Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain when Britain and France appeased Nazi Germany over the annexation of
Czechoslovakia. Also in the Oxford dictionary is the world “anschluss” meaning “annexation of Austria
by Germany.”
Dangerous precedents had been set then, and the dismemberment of Bosnia by heavily-armed Serbia is
perhaps in the natural order of things for countries with power but without will, as one journal put it
recently.
A report on recent European history in a British journal chronicled Austria’s annexation of Bosnia-
Herzegovina in 1908 after conducting a policy of divide and rule in the province between the Serbs and
Croats.
And so the game goes on with different players in a different century. Next on the Serbian agenda are
Kosovo and Macedonia.
Much has been written about the “killing fields” in Cambodia. We now wait to see whether the same
will be written with equal vehemence about the killing fields in Bosnia.
We also wait for the reaction of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) which in its summit in Jakarta
allowed the defunct Yugoslavia to fly its flag and Bosnia was only accepted as an observer.
Inexplicable is NAM’s deafening silence in the face of continued “ethnic cleansing” by the Serbs and
Croats.
What of the United States, the world’s only superpower and ultimately the only one able to stop the
savagery in the Balkans?
A passage from Alexis de Tocqueville, the French writer best known for his classic Democracy in
America, will suffice: “America is great because America is good. If American ceases to be good, she
will cease to be great.”