Byzantine Blog

Uncle Sam and John Bull Love to Stoke Fires (Away from Home)

The ongoing spitting contest, led by the UK and US mainstream media and the Western political apparatchiks, competing who is going to spew more vitriol and throw more napalm over the still-smoldering ruins, while issuing the most damning verdicts to yet-to-be-tried President of Republic of Srpska Dr. Radovan Karadzic, is yielding quick results: old hatreds are fully resurrected and Bosnia-Herzegovina is rapidly sliding back to the 1990s, when Western mainstream talking heads' chorus played exactly the same vile role, inflaming, exasperating and prolonging the carnage in the Balkans.

Bosnian Muslim leaders have once again eagerly jumped on the Western tsunami of malice, to announce that "this is only the beginning" (another one), and to demand the abolition of the Serb republic in Bosnia-Herzegovina, being that Uncle Sam and John Bull keep assuring them Bosnian Serbs deserve to be exterminated -- a threat most certain to push the region closer to another round of bloodshed.

Sarajevo's Victim-Based Politics

Republic of Srpska Premier Milorad Dodik is well aware of the flammable muck poured around him. In the interview given to Belgrade daily Politika, he noted the worrisome escalation of the war rhetorics, bullying and overt attacks against the Serb republic after the arrest of Republic of Srpska first president.

"The main pillar on which the Bosnian Muslim policy rests is to create an impression in the world that Bosnian Muslims were the only victims of Bosnia-Herzegovina war. And once you get the halo of a victim, you then have the right to everything: you have the right to revenge, to make mistakes, the right to hate, to demand whatever pops into your head... While it is non-disputable that many Bosnian Muslims lost their lives in the war, there were also victims among the Croats, and a great number of Serbs were also killed. So, it is impossible to make a victim out of one nation alone, because that is simply not true. The Serbs and Croats [in Bosnia] were not killed by the humanitarian organizations, but by the exponents of the Bosnian Muslim ideology who are even today figuring prominently on the Sarajevo political scene. This ideology is advocating that everything that even reminds of Republic of Srpska must immediately be condemned to extinction," Dodik said.

He added that the "fate of Republic of Srpska will not be decided by Haris Silajdzic, Sulejman Tihic, Zlatko Lagumdzija and the likes, who are allegedly seeking 'justice', while in fact all they want is a showdown with Republic of Srpska".

"Sarajevo is simply boiling out of desire for revenge," Bosnian Serb premier warned.

Bosnian Muslim Leaders Want to Turn Karadzic Trial into a Trial of Republic of Srpska

Q: Theories that the arrest of Karadzic and Mladic will lead to calming down tensions and reconciliation in Bosnia-Herzegovina have been proven wrong. Why have the events moved in a direction opposite of the expected?

MD: I have already partly responded to that question. Still, I'll remind that Sarajevo political circle is using every opportunity and every instance to exploit the past events for the final showdown with Republic of Srpska and the Serbian nation. That is why Karadzic's arrest also resulted in heightening the political tensions. Even though he is not convicted, Karadzic has already been declared by the Bosnian Muslim politicians and their media a "Bosnian Osama bin Laden" [?!], "Durmitor butcher"... What if he gets released? Someone will say that is impossible. Why would it be impossible when Ramush Haradinaj and Naser Oric were released? It is well known that Karadzic accepted the Lisbon Peace Agreement [in February 1992, before the Bosnian civil war had started] and that he requested from us, the MPs, to support that agreement. [Bosnian Muslim war leader] Alija Izetbegovic accepted it too at first and then rejected it. According to the Agreement architect, José Cutileiro, that is what definitely pushed Bosnia-Herzegovina into the war.

Q: Why are the Bosnian Muslim politicians, first and foremost, trying to turn the trial against Karadzic into a process of abolishing Republic of Srpska?

MD: Because Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina is not the accomplishment of their war aims. And because Bosnia, since Dayton until today, has not found its inner functioning mechanism. So, the fact Bosnia-Herzegovina functions at all is exclusively the result of the engagement of the Western powers which, at times, was extremely rigid, domineering and marked by the threats and punishments of a score of Serbian politicians. All that was done to preserve Bosnia-Herzegovina and to have it form even the most basic logistic framework for functioning. Yet, such politics failed to produce a favourable result. Bosnia-Herzegovina today is still a divided society, not only in the sense of the legal and territorial entities, but mentality-wise: in the way of life, the perception of truth, visions of the future... As it is, this is not the Bosnia-Herzegovina Bosnian Muslims want. And that is why they wish to turn the Karadzic trial into a trial of Republic of Srpska.

John Laughland: Idiot's Guide to Bosnia-Herzegovina War

The Plight of the Bosnian Serbs, by John Laughland (Brussels Journal)

The arrest of Radovan Karadzic in Serbia on Tuesday has provided yet another occasion for all the tired old propaganda about the Balkans wars to be taken out of the cupboard and given one last airing. In particular, the war is presented as one between a Serb aggressor and an innocent victim, the Bosnian Muslims, and the former is accused of practising genocide against the latter. Even if one accepts that crimes against humanity were committed during the Balkan wars, it should be obvious that both these claims are absurd.

...As Lincoln was an Aggressor in American Civil War

First, the Serbs were no more the aggressors in the Bosnian civil war than Abraham Lincoln was an aggressor in the American Civil War. The Yugoslav army was in place all over Bosnia-Herzegovina because that republic was part of Yugoslavia. Bosnian Muslims (like Croats) left the army in droves and set up their own militia instead, as part of their drive for independence from Belgrade. This meant that the Yugoslav army lost its previous strongly multiethnic character and became largely Serb. It did not mean that Serb forces entered the territory of Bosnia, or even that the Serbs attacked the hapless Bosnian Muslims.

The accusation of aggression is intended to introduce by the back door an allegation which in fact has vanished from modern international criminal justice. Although the crime of waging an aggressive war was pronounced to be the supreme international crime at Nuremberg, it has been dropped from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia which will presumably try Karadzic once he is extradited to The Hague, and even the new International Criminal Court (also in The Hague) does not for the time being have jurisdiction over it.

The accusation has the effect of condemning the Bosnian Serb war effort at its very origins (in terms of ius ad bellum) independently of any condemnation for the way the war was fought (ius in bello). In fact, the Bosnian Serb war effort was no more or less legitimate than the Bosnian Muslim war effort. The Muslims wanted to secede from Yugoslavia (and were egged on to do this by the Americans and the Europeans) while the Bosnian Serbs wanted to stay in Yugoslavia. It was as simple as that.

Few Simple Facts

In my view, it is not possible to adjudicate such matters using the criminal law since, as political questions, they transcend it. But the fact that the Muslims blatantly cheated by holding the vote on an independence referendum at 3 a.m. after the Bosnian Serb deputies in the Bosnian parliament had all been told to go home, and the fact that the Bosnian Muslim president, Alija Izetbegovic, remained in office throughout 1992 long after his term had expired and long after he should have handed over to a Serb, meant that the Bosnian Serbs had excellent grounds for believing that the Bosnian Muslim secession was quite simply a coup d’état.

In any case, once the Muslims had seized power in Sarajevo, the Bosnian Serbs sought not to conquer the whole republic but instead simply to fight for the secession of their territories from Muslim control. Of course atrocities were committed against civilians during this period, especially ethnic cleansing. But the same phenomenon is observed, I believe, and by definition, in every single war in which a new state is created, whether it is the creation of Pakistan in 1947 or the creation in 1974 of what later became the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. If the Muslims had the right unilaterally to secede from Yugoslavia, why should the Bosnian Serbs not have had the right unilaterally to secede from the new state of Bosnia-Herzegovina which had never before existed and a state, and to which the Bosnian Serbs had no loyalty whatever?

Redefining Genocide to Suit Muslim/Western Political Agenda

Second, the Bosnian Serbs are accused (and two have been convicted) of committing genocide against the Bosnian Muslims in the massacre perpetrated at Srebrenica. Let us leave aside for a moment the Serb claims that the numbers of people killed in that summer of 1995 has been artificially inflated for propaganda purposes; let us also leave aside the undoubted fact that the Bosnian Muslims were using the UN safe haven of Srebrenica as a safe haven from which to conduct constant attacks against the Serb villages surrounding the town, during which many atrocities were committed against Serb civilians. (The commander of the Muslim forces, Nasir Oric, was released by the ICTY in February.)

What is clear is that the Srebrenica massacre cannot possibly be described as genocide. Even the most ardent pro-Muslim propagandists agree that the victims of the massacre there were all men. The Bosnian Serbs claim that they were combatants (although that is certainly not an excuse for killing them) but the point is that an army bent on genocide would precisely not have singled out men for execution but would have killed women too. The Srebrenica massacre may well have been a crime against humanity but it is impossible to see how it can be categorised as genocide.

The Ulterior Motives and the Ultimate Outcome

Unfortunately, there is a very clear political reason why it has been so categorised. The Muslim president of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Haris Silaijdzic, said carefully on CNN the day Karadzic was captured that Karadzic’s trial was only the beginning of the process by which justice would be done in Bosnia. He said that there were hundreds of thousands of Muslims who had been ethnically cleansed by “Karadzic and Milosevic” and that their project therefore remained in force. The clear implication of what he was saying was this: if the very existence of the Bosnian Serb republic (the autonomous region within Bosnia carved out from the republic during the civil war) is found, in a court of law, to have been had as its president a man, Karadzic, who is convicted of genocide in the process of creating it, then its status would be illegitimate and it should be abolished. The Muslims continue to claim control over the whole of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina, while the Serbs merely want the preservation of their considerable autonomy within it.

In other words, far from bringing peace to the Balkans, it is quite possible that a conviction of Karadzic for genocide will reopen the Dayton settlement and egg the Muslims on to claim control over the Serb republic too. Under such circumstances, it is inevitable that the Bosnian Serbs would try to proclaim formal secession from Bosnia, just as the Kosovo Albanians did from Serbia.

Recommended: Save Serbia -- Kill Yourself, Tadic Boris!, Belgrade football match (YouTube); May the DOS c..ts know: if the General goes, the Undertakers [Partizan Club fans] will each get the gun and kill you all one by one ("Neka znaju picke dosovske, djenerala ako uhapse, grobari ce svi puske uzeti, sve cemo vas redom pobiti!"), Belgrade football match (YouTube); And a Special Message for the Hague "judges", YouTube