July 24, 2008
Mr. Cohen, Your writing is smooth yet still more biased, as it was before your move to that idyllic French village where you "parked Bosnia somewhere in a corner of my mind". Unfortunately, you forgot to park your bias there as well. We talked once about your "first hand" war experiences in Bosnia. It proved difficult or impossible to navigate through your myths and the truths in your writing. Something tells me that you have not yet sufficiently checked the facts in dealing with all of the Bosnian war's truths. Not much throughoness of thought! You never mentioned Bosnia's Muslim forces leader, Oric, and his beheading and torturing of the Serbian residents around Srebrenica. Events before media-labeled " Srebrenica massacre" when the Serbian forces were sufficient to take the offense. Did you write about it in your book? Naturally I will admit to my bias and declare that I do not wish to read your book as I'm sick and tired of the continuation of the spreading of lies. Some 3,000 or more Serbian families that lived around Srebrenica before the breakup of Bosnia cannot forget. They do not forget the horrors of having Srebrenica-based Muslim forces come and slaughter their family members. While you used a form of literary license to indicate the numbers of Bosnian casualties as 100,000 (when an equally horrific but more accurately documented number of 92,000 is the real number), my memory recalls that the range of 100,000 to 250,000 was the number that you stuck with for the longest time in your writing. You have not changed. Perhaps you could have informed Richard Holbrook that to talk about 300,000 dead was a bit over the top even today. While you write about those terrible numbers, you never bothered to trip over any dead Serbians and there were many. They numbered over 27,000. War is horrorific for all and your ilk never cared about, wrote about, or mentioned the full truth. But let us get back to Mr. Karadzic. While you were positioned to make fun of him and blame him for 32 months of fighting without "declaration of war" (which I must say at this point reminds me of Mr. Bush's adventure in Iraq), some of us know that Karadzic did not have anything to do with the start of that conflict. Check your facts: The war did not start because of Karadzic, but much more so because of America's and Germany's insistence to the Muslim's President Izetbegovic to pull his signature of the Lisbon's peace agreement reached by all 3 of Bosnia's sides (Serbs, Croat and Muslims). And let us not forget the Vatican's and the German's (again) un-timely recognition of Bosnia's independence from the interanationally recognized state of Yugoslavia. Karadzic happened to be the ethnic-Serb president at the time of the war and yet is tha enough to blame him for everything? Neither Serbs. Bosnian Muslims, nor Croats spared each other during that war. Crimes were committed by each side, but only Karadzic was indicted. Why not Muslim's or Croatian presidents, or others we can add to the list of contributors? I wonder when you will start pressing for President Bush's indictment for what is happening in Iraq for the last 5 years? The number of civilians killed in Iraq has clearly passed of those of dead Muslim's in Bosnia in this current and unnecessary war. There are thousands of sad stories there. Will you choose to speak to these? Perhaps you could take a lead from Carla Del Ponte and start writing a new book about ethnic Albanians butchered Kosovo Serbs for their body parts and profited from them just as from drugs and others. While watching your crows, read Carla Del Ponte's book "The Hunt: Me and My War Criminals". Take a trip because after all she mentions the name of the village in Albania where the Serb's organs were harvested. You would be in your friend's territory I would think. You can clearly tell my bias in this issue, I don't mask it. As for the new western oriented Serbian government in Belgrade led by Boris Tadic: shame! It is a fact that throughout Serbia's history there were traitors against the national interest, and this now appears to be one of the biggest (since perhaps the delivery of Karadjordjevic's head to Istanbul.) Sincerely, Boba Shaw 505 N Sycamore Ave Fullerton, CA 92831 714-680-4227 Op-Ed Columnist Karadzic and War's Lessons By ROGER COHEN Published: July 24, 2008 After covering a war, a friend said, buy yourself a house. I did. I came to this French village where church bells chime the rhythm of the days, married here, raised children and parked Bosnia somewhere in a corner of my mind. I had to forget. I had to write a book, so the horror would never be forgotten, in order to forget just enough to go on. There is always a measure of guilt in survival when so many have died. There are faces, in death and bereavement, that can never be eclipsed. It's peaceful here. I'd been out watching crows in the stubble when I returned to discover Radovan Karadzic had been arrested in Belgrade, 13 years after the end of the war, to face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. The years fell away, fear resurfaced, and I've been unable to sleep. I find myself back in Pale with you, Dr. Karadzic, back in that two-bit ski resort you parlayed into the Bosnian Serb capital and bestrode with your killer hairdo, back asking you questions you never could answer. Objectivity and neutrality are not synonymous. The head is useless without the heart. War teaches that better than journalism school. The unseeing eyes of young Sarajevan women penetrated by shrapnel had taught me the rights and wrongs of the war long before I met you. Still I wanted to look you in the eye. Unhinged would be a kind description. You talked of your "love" for Sarajevo, the ethnically mixed city your boozy forces kept shelling. You told me, 32 months into the fighting, that you were ready "to declare a state of war." I stared in disbelief and asked about Ruzdija Sestovic. Names dispel a numbing when the death toll rises toward 100,000. Sestovic had been seized from his home in eastern Bosnia on June 20, 1992, by masked Serbian forces and had disappeared. He was one of thousands of Bosnian Muslims to meet this fate in the sharp bust of Serbian violence that opened the war and "cleansed" wide swathes of the country of non-Serbs, many processed through murderous concentration camps. Pits of bones form the bitter harvest of this genocidal Serbian season. "Ethnic cleansing was not our policy," Karadzic responded with nonchalance. "It happened because of fear. Fear and chaos. I was not informed on a daily basis of what was happening in the first months of the war, although we got some information from our troops and police. But the fate of men like Sestovic was beyond our control." An international court in The Hague will now examine that contention of the former Bosnian Serb leader. I don't doubt the outcome. Justice is important — for Bosnia and for amnesia-afflicted Serbia with its everyone-was-guilty evasiveness. But justice won't change the faces brought back to me now across the years. Nermin Tulic, an actor, his legs blown off b y a Serbian shell on June 10, 1992, telling me how he wanted to die until his wife gave birth to their second daughter and his dad told him a child needs his father even if he just sits in the corner. I took that away from the war: the stubbornness of love. Amra Dzaferovic, beautiful Amra, telling me in the desperate Sarajevo summer of 1995 that: "Here things are black and white, they are. There is evil and there is good, and the evil is up in the hills. So when you say you are just a journalist, an observer, I understand you, but I still hate you. Yes, I hate you." I took that away from the war: the fierceness of moral clarity. Pale Faruk Sabanovic watching a video of the moment he was shot in Sarajevo and saying: "If I remain a paraplegic, I will be better, anyhow, than the Serb who shot me. I will be clean in my mind, clean with respect to others, and clean with respect to this dirty world." I took that away from the war: the quietness of courage. Ron Neitzke, noblest of American diplomats, handing me his excoriation of the U.S. government and State Department for "repeatedly and gratuitously dishonoring the Bosnians in the very hour of their genocide" and urging future Foreign Service officers to be "guided by the belief that a policy fundamentally at odds with our national conscience cannot endure indefinitely — if that conscience is well and truthfully informed." I took that away from the war: the indivisibility of integrity and the importance of a single dissenting voice. Nobody labored with fiercer lucidity to inform America's conscience about Karadzic's crimes than Kurt Schork, the Reuters correspondent killed in Sierra Leone in 2000. I wish he were here. Schork would be smiling — and chiding me for being careless with my Bosnian lessons in the onward rush of life. The precious is no less important for being unbearable. *Blog: www.iht.com/passages* ------------------------------
