http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/print.asp?page=story_18-3-2005_pg3_4&ndate=3/18/2005%2012:53:34%20PM
Daily Times (Pakistan)
Friday, March 18, 2005
VIEW: The Yugoslav wars could have been avoided âJonathan Power
Most of the well-documented atrocities in Bosnia were committed by men
with long criminal records. In the absence of an alternative political
leadership, citizens fell in behind them â or at least tolerated them
A path being beaten to The Hague war crimes' tribunal? It has almost
become a road, such is the traffic. Since October, 12 alleged war
criminals have made their own way to Holland to hand themselves over.
They are mostly Serbs, but last week it was the turn of Ramush
Haradinaj, the former prime minister of Kosovo, accused of crimes
against his territory's Serb minority. This week the Croatian
government will probably be told that it has lost its chance of being
considered for European Union membership since it hasn't persuaded
General Ante Gotovina to turn himself in.
The penny is beginning to drop that you can't do such dastardly deeds
and strut your stuff in your hometown forever more. Something has
profoundly changed in international relations which augurs well for
the future of international justice and the diminishing of future
conflicts. One lesson is being learnt, but another isn't.
The conventional wisdom still holds that Yugoslavia's wars were ethnic
conflicts. They were not. They were wars of thugs. The murderous core
of the supporters of ex-Yugoslavia's president, Slobodan Milosevic,
the Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegovic, the Bosnian Serb leader,
Radovan Karadzic, and the Croatian president, Franjo Tudjman were not
by and large ordinary citizens incited into violence against their
neighbours but soccer hooligans, street gangs, even criminals, who
were released from jail for the purpose and, on the Bosnian side,
mujahideen recruited from Afghanistan.
They were recruited by the politicians, first and foremost by
Milosevic, to pursue a nationalist agenda that he believed could keep
him in power at a time when it became obvious that the Yugoslav army
was disintegrating in the early days of the first war with Croatia,
with an estimated 150,000 Serbian young men either emigrating or going
underground.
The hooligan killers inevitably attracted opportunists drawn to the
fruits of war â the looting, raping and binge drinking that were their
daily fare. Vladan Vasilijevic, an expert in organised crime, says
that most of the well-documented atrocities in Bosnia were committed
by men with long criminal records.
In the absence of an alternative political leadership, citizens fell
in behind them â or at least tolerated them â especially as revenge
killings from the other side began to take their toll. Both Milosevic
and Tudjman were adept at using their secret police to direct and
coordinate the killings in pursuit of ethnic cleansing. Some of these
groups evolved into semi-coherent paramilitary outfits like Arkan's
Tigers and Vojislav Seselj's Chetniks. Arkan, (aka Zeljko Raznatovic),
one of the most feared war criminals of the whole war, had been the
leader of the official fan club of Belgrade's Red Star soccer team.
Even in Rwanda, where the genocide was on a larger scale and much more
thorough, it was a small minority that did the killing. Hutu
extremists were substantially in charge of the ruling party, the
government bureaucracy and the police.
If one reckons that there were 50,000 hard core killers (a high
estimate) and that each of these killed one person a week during the
100 day holocaust, then the 700,000 who died were killed by some two
percent of the Hutu population. In other words at least 98 percent of
the Hutu did not kill.
For all the horror of these recent cataclysms, they were not Hobbesian
wars of all against all and neighbour against neighbour. They were
stirred by unscrupulous politicians who relied on relatively small
numbers of evildoers to do their bidding.
In most, if not all, societies if such thugs were licensed they could
do similar deeds. Until quite recently it was quite possible to
imagine Northern Ireland descending into Bosnian chaos if the British
authorities had not been prepared for the long haul of patient
policing and political accommodation. Even so the "thug" element in
the paramilitaries is still calling many of the shots as we have
recently seen with the IRA-sponsored bank robbery and the murder of
Robert McCartney.
The overthrow of Milosevic, we must never forget, happened because of
people power, not NATO bombing â the essentially good, silent
majority, who were prepared first to vote and, second, demonstrate
when they saw it stood a good chance of success.
Unfortunately, the Western nations made too simple an analysis of the
situation. They concluded early on that it was large scale ethnic war
and from there they ended up with a simplistic conclusion â bombing â
that worked only to consolidate Milosevic's power and, in the case of
Kosovo, precipitated the ethnic cleansing they were supposedly trying
to avoid.
Fortunately, Western policy had another face, the legal one, which we
are now seeing, enacted in The Hague. But, if only there had been a
standing international criminal court 14 years ago with the power of
arrest and if only the EU had dangled the carrot of European
membership then, the worst of these so-called "ethnic wars" could have
been avoided. The people would not have allowed them.
The writer is a leading columnist on international affairs, human
rights and peace issues. He syndicates his columns with some 50 papers
around the world
Serbian News Network - SNN
[email protected]
http://www.antic.org/
