http://socialistworker.org/2008/07/25/which-war-crimes
Which war crimes get prosecuted?
Paul D'Amato explains why some atrocities are decried, while
others--especially when the perpetrators are the leaders of powerful
governments--go unpunished.
July 25, 2008
TO GREAT fanfare in the Western media, the Serbian government recently
arrested Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serb nationalist
cause during the war in the former Yugoslavia in the early to
mid-1990s, on war crimes charges.
Karadzic and Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic, who is still
at large, have been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), located in the Hague, in connection
with the siege of Sarajevo, during which up to 11,000 people were
killed, and the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of
Srebrenica.
That Karadzic is responsible for war crimes should not be in question.
Under his political leadership, Serbian nationalists engaged in
terrible atrocities--including the shelling of cities and towns,
massacres of civilians, rapes and herding people into concentration
camps--to drive people out and create an "ethnically pure" swath of
Bosnia and the Krajina region of Croatia that they hoped to annex to
Serbia.
But this fact alone does not close the case. As with all war crimes
tribunals in history, there is selectiveness about what is considered
a war crime and who ends up on the dock.
After the Second World War, some Nazis were put on trial in Nuremburg
(though because of U.S. Cold War interests in establishing a strong
German state and utilizing former Nazis as spies and scientists, the
trials were wound up quickly). But as a court of the victors, no
Americans were tried for the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki or for the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden.
Throughout the Balkans conflict, Serbs were systematically demonized
in the Western press, while atrocities and ethnic cleansing committed
by Croats and Muslims were either omitted or played down.
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ON FIRST look, the ICTY offers an image of impartiality. In addition
to indicting Slobodan Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic, it has also
indicted Milan Babić, president of the Republika Srpska Krajina;
Ramush Haradinaj, former prime minister of Kosovo (recently
acquitted); Rasim Delić, who served as commander of the main staff of
the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina from June 1993 until September 200;
and Ante Gotovina, former general of the Croatian Army (currently on
trial).
However, of the 161 individuals indicted by the ICTY, from common
soldiers to generals, police commanders and political leaders,
three-quarters are Serbs or Montenegrins. This is not surprising
considering the court was established by the UN Security Council,
under pressure from the U.S.--making it, again, a "court of the
victors."
While it is true that the conflict in the region developed out of the
ambitions of Slobodan Milosevic for a greater Serbia, uniting the
Serbs of Serbia with those living in Bosnia and Croatia, Croatia's
nationalists under Franjo Tudjman were no less ruthless in their
efforts to create a "greater Croatia," based on the ethnic cleansing
of Serbs from the Krajina and Serbs and Muslims from parts of Bosnia.
Croatian paramilitaries massacred hundreds of Muslim civilians in the
town of Ahmici, to give just one example. After shelling the town to
force townspeople to flee, Croatian forces sprayed them with machine
gun fire across an open field through which the people were forced to
run, a scenario similar to the atrocities committed by Serbian forces
in many Bosnian villages during the war.
Indeed, as Bosnia came under attack from Serbian and Croatian
paramilitaries, Muslim nationalists, with (eventually) military aid
and air support from the U.S. and Europe, engaged in similar acts of
ethnic cleansing as their Serbian and Croatian counterparts.
Journalist Misha Glenny, in his excellent book The Fall of Yugoslavia,
offers an example:
Wherever they could, the Muslims used the considerable sympathy which
they enjoyed in the outside world as a cover to undertake military
operations.
In December and early January [1993], they launched an intensive
offensive from Srebrenica with the aim of regaining control of
Bratunac, to the east on the river Drina. The Serbs were caught
unawares by the attack, and the Muslims moved swiftly through Serbian
villages, slaughtering a large number of civilians on the way. Because
the atrocities were being perpetrated by the Muslims, they received
relatively little attention in the world media.
They also provoked a fearsome counter-attack by the Serbs, who had
soon driven the Muslims back to Srebrenica. Politicians and
journalists were quick to condemn the Serbs for this operation, but
they entirely neglected to point out that it had been provoked by the
original Muslim offensive.
But what really throws the impartiality of the court into question is
that no individuals--military or political leaders--from NATO
countries that intervened in the war have been indicted. Yet there can
be no doubt that the United States and NATO forces committed war
crimes in the former Yugoslavia--first, in the Bosnian war, and later,
in the air war against Serbia in 1999 during the conflict over Kosovo.
>From the start, there was the complicity of the Western powers in
creating the conditions that made war and ethnic cleansing inevitable.
As Phil Gasper wrote:
In the end, Germany's recognition of Croatia's independence--without
any guarantees of the Serb minority's national rights in Croatia--made
the outbreak of war and the disintegration of Yugoslavia inevitable.
The same holds true for Bosnia. Germany and the U.S. recognized
Bosnian independence even though the majority of Bosnian Serbs and
Croats--about 51 percent of the republic--had rejected it. By doing
so, they put their seal of approval on Bosnia's descent into war.
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THEN THERE is the direct complicity of the United States in the
greatest single act of ethnic cleansing that took place during the
war--Operation Storm in August 1995.
By 1993, the U.S. was finally able to strong-arm its reluctant
European war partners into adopting a new policy (the old one being an
arms embargo on Bosnia)--NATO air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs,
combined with arming the Bosnian Muslim army. The policy was called
"lift and strike."
Peter Galbraith, U.S. ambassador to Croatia, brokered a new
alliance--after the two sides had been fighting for months in central
Bosnia--between Croatia and the Bosnian Muslims.
To "level the playing field" further, a group of retired U.S. generals
helped Croatia to devise a military plan, with U.S. and German
military aid, to overrun the Serb-held Krajina region. A private U.S.
mercenary company, Military Professional Resources Inc., provided
training to the Croatian Army.
The August 4, 1995, Croatian offensive, dubbed "Operation Storm,"
drove upwards of 200,000 Krajina Serbs from their homes. Human rights
observers reported the burning of homes, looting and massacres of
elderly Serbs too old to flee the region. Croatia was completely
"cleansed" of its historic Serbian population, and in the following
weeks, U.S. air support for Muslim and Croatian forces allowed them to
seize 20 percent of Bosnia back from the Serbs.
According to Mark Danner, writing in the New York Review of Books:
During two weeks beginning at the end of August, NATO pilots flew
3m400 sorties, destroying Serb antiaircraft batteries, radar sites,
ammunition depots, command bunkers, bridges. Meanwhile, the Croats and
Bosnians pressed their combined attacks in northwest Bosnia,
conquering town after town. Indeed, NATO planes had in effect become
the Croatian and Bosnian air force, ensuring that they would succeed,
in just over two weeks, in changing the balance of power in Bosnia.
Bill Clinton praised Operation Storm, saying that he was "hopeful
Croatia's offensive will turn out to be something that will give us an
avenue to a quick diplomatic solution." The three-pronged
offensive--the Croat invasion of Krajina, a Muslim attack in central
Bosnia and punishing air strikes--pushed all sides to the negotiating
table in 1995 to sign the Dayton Accords.
Today, Ante Gotovina, the Croatian general who led Operation Storm,
along with two other generals, is currently facing trial on war crimes
charges associated with that operation. But Bill Clinton and the U.S.
generals who helped plan it and gave the green light for it remain at
large.
Finally, the 11-week NATO air assault on Serbia during the Kosovo war
in 1999 is a war crime that the tribunal won't touch.
The U.S. claimed that it went to war to help Kosovar Albanian refugees
under attack by Serbian forces. However, the NATO bombing produced
another several hundred thousand Kosovar refugees and later helped
facilitate the cleansing of the Serb minority from Kosovo.
U.S. and NATO planes conducted several thousand sorties, destroying
Serbia's power grid, factories (372 industrial sites), railways,
bridges, schools and hospitals. Between 1,200 and 1,500 Serb civilians
and as many as 5,000 Serbian military personnel were killed. At one
point, NATO planes destroyed a bridge filled with fleeing refugees,
killing 87 people. After blowing up Belgrade's TV station with a
cruise missile, killing 16 people, NATO officials justified it by
claiming that the station had been a source of "propaganda."
Directing and encouraging ethnic cleansing, playing one nationality
off of another, bombing civilian infrastructure and murdering
civilians--these acts engaged in by the U.S. and its NATO allies took
place under the pleasant halo of "humanitarian intervention."
The perpetrators of these great "humanitarian" deeds will likely never
see the inside of a jail cell or face criminal prosecution for their
crimes against humanity without a massive alteration in the balance of
forces in the world between the powerful and the dispossessed.
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Serbian News Network - SNN
[email protected]
http://www.antic.org/
