Many bodies with the hands still bound behind their backs
Karadzic has been found guilty.
A former Bosnian Serb leader was found guilty of genocide and other charges Thursday for his role in deadly campaigns during the Bosnian war in the 1990s, including the massacres of thousands in Srebrenica, as an international tribunal announced a long-awaited reckoning in Europe’s bloodiest chapter since World War II.
Radovan Karadzic was found guilty of 10 charges including genocide in connection with the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Srebrenica enclave near the close of a three-year war.
Extreme nationalism is no more healthy or benevolent than theocracy or racism. All three motivate and justify loathing of The Other, and from there it’s just a step to persecution and, ultimately, elimination.
The court’s ruling placed widespread blame on Karadzic for directing murders, purges and other abuses against civilians, including the 44-month siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, in which Serb gunners and snipers fired nearly daily from surrounding ridges.
Karadzic — both a Bosnian Serb political leader and commander of military forces — claimed he was seeking only to protect ethnic Serbs during the war.
Of course he did. That’s what Turkey claims about the Armenians, too. That’s what Hitler and the gang claimed about the Jews. It’s always self-defense.
Karadzic — who was indicted in 1995 but on the run until his capture in 2008 — was the most senior Bosnian Serb figure to face prosecution at the court, which has spent more than two decades probing the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.
The trial also reopened memories of the horrors of Srebrenica, in which Bosnian Muslims where herded from U.N.-designated “safe havens” into killing fields over several days in July 1995, and their bodies dumped into shallow pits. Investigators later uncovered many bodies with the hands still bound behind their backs, and showing evidence of execution-style slayings with shots to the back of the head.
Only to protect the Serbs.
Following the verdicts Thursday, the top U.N. human rights official, Zeid Raad al-Hussein, said the decisions also send a wider message about the dangers of nationalism and ethnic vilification.
In a statement, he said the trial “should give pause to leaders across Europe and elsewhere who seek to exploit nationalist sentiments and scapegoat minorities for broader social ills.”
What I’m saying. That shit is dangerous.
Donald Trump please note.
That ‘nationalism’ is fully entangled with religion still. Serbs and Croats are only divided by religion. One is Orthodox, the other Catholic. One writes in Cyrillic, the other writes the same language in the ‘western’ alphabet.
During the Serbian genocide of 1941-5, the ‘Independent State of Croatia’ accepted Muslims as ‘Aryans’ for the purpose of killing Serbs and Jews. It’s all monstrous. And a lot of it can be laid at the feet of the Ottomans for their manipulation of the societies they occupied and controlled.
A man of many talents: http://www.skepdic.com/dragandabic.html
Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks (i.e. Bosnian “Muslims”) are essentially the same people http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1529-8817.2005.00190.x/abstract;jsessionid=B8CCC04D225645FBDFAA310FEA0E7479.f02t02
What divides them is – as John the Drunkard points out in #1 – religion. Both the Croats and Muslims collaborated with the Nazis in WWII https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-1980-036-05%2C_Amin_al_Husseini_bei_bosnischen_SS-Freiwilligen.jpg
But the Serbian behaviour during the Yugolslav civil war was utterly horrendous. Predictably there are many on the left (Chomsky, Ramsey Clark et al https://srebrenicamassacre1995.wordpress.com/2005/12/30/the-left-revisionists/) who either downplay the massacre (not “genocidal”) or simply deny it really happened. Strange bedfellows? No. You see NATO and most Western countries opposed the Serbian siege of Sarajevo, as they did later in Kosovo… ironically, in defence of Muslim populations. And with some people, if the West is in favour of a policy, it must be wrong.
But I don’t think it was religion when it was Rwanda massacring their minority population. Again, scapegoating was done for months before the uprising.
Racists in American really do think that they are trying to protect something they value from a threatening Other. The specific adornments aren’t as important as the similarity of fear being stoked and then turned into hostility and violent action.
The violence in the former Yugoslavia had very little to do with nationalism. Serbs Bosniaks and Croats are the same people and speak the same language. The only thing that sets all three apart is religion and religion, as we know, is deadly. It’s really all sickening
@5,
It may not be ethnic nationalism but it’s “nationalism” nevertheless. I visited Sarajevo. The Bosniaks (Muslims) that I met were pretty much secular (though, like everywhere, there’s been a rise in Islamism and there are hijabs now in university where previously there were none) but the animosity between them and the Serbs seeped through in conversation. In fact the Serbs that I met on my stop in Belgrade had similar attitudes. They were entirely secular but resented the Bosniaks. There’s no “religious” animosity but it’s definitely nationalism. As a Canadian I’m also a North American, but if you want to witness my “nationalism” just watch me at a Canada-US hockey game! (And please don’t remind me that the captain of the Montreal Canadiens was born in Connecticut!)