The U.S., Bosnia, and Henry Kissinger's Lie

The U.S., Bosnia, and Henry Kissinger's Lie
By Michael Sells

Mon, 16 Oct 95

On the Charlie Rose Show, Sept 14, 1995, Henry Kissinger argued for what
would be in effect an ethnic-partition and religious apartheid in
Bosnia-Herzegovina. Kissinger urged a dividing up the country between
Croatia and Serbia and, in effect, forcing the Muslims (and any Bosnians
who wanted a state not based on "ethnic-cleansing") into a ghetto in the
center. The basis of Kissinger's argument was his claim that "There is no
Bosnian culture."

Ironically, the person who has done most to disprove Kissinger's remark is
none other than Serb General Ratko Mladic, who has spent four years busily
trying to destroy the vast testimony to Bosnian culture.

He burned down the National Library in Sarajevo with three days of shelling
by incendiary grenades--the largest book burning in modern history. Over a
million books and 100,000 manuscripts and rare books were burned, including
much of the ancient South Slavic heritage of Bosnia.

He selected out and shelled the Oriental Institute manuscript collection in
Sarajevo, with its collection of 5000 Bosnian manuscripts in Hebrew,
Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Adzamijski (Bosnian Slavic written in Arabic
script).

He shelled repeatedly and deliberately the National Museum with its
priceless collection of Bosnian art. A few objects, such as the Sarajevo
Haggadah were saved by courageous Bosnians (Croat, Muslim, Serb, and
Jewish) who risked their lives to save as much of their Bosnian cultural
heritage as possible. One of his soldiers even lined up the Bosnian art
collection of a Sarajevan artist (who was Serb) and "executed" them by
drilling them with machine-gun fire.

Mladic's soldiers selected out artists, writers, teachers, and scholars for
particularly brutal tortures and killings in his concentration camps.

Mladic's army joined irregular Serb militias in dynamiting over 600 mosques
, including the masterworks of European architecture and Bosnian heritage:
the Colored Mosque in Foca (built in 1551) and the Ferhadija Mosque in
Banja Luka (1583). Mladic's men also dynamited Catholic
churches throughout the area of occupation.

In places he couldn't occupy, Mladic deliberately shelled hundreds of other
Bosnian architectural treasures . The famous Ghazi Husrev Beg Mosque in
Sarajevo (1531) was repeatedly targeted. In Mostar, Mladic's army shelled
the cathedral in Mostar, the Karadjoz Bey Mosque, entire historical
districts, as well as the regional archives of Herzegovina. The Jewish
graveyard in Sarajevo was dug up and scattered all over by Mladic's troops.
Mladic's troops annihilated, systematically, the ancient
heritage of Trebinje, another city in Herzegovina. These shellings and
demolitions were not the result of collateral damage. The targets were
selected carefully and the areas around them were left unscathed./1/

Why would General Ratko Mladic spend four years destroying a culture that
didn't exist in the first place?

No possible reason. The idea is absurd. Mladic's four years of frantic
destruction was an attempt to destroy something that very much existed and
very much still exists.

Mladic targeted the vibrant, powerful, and beautiful testimonies to Bosnian
culture so that some day, advocates of religious apartheit in Bosnia, such
as Henry Kisssinger, could declare: "there is no
Bosnian culture." People looking at the parking lots where mosques and
churches and art museums and music schools and libraries and manuscript
collections once stood would say: "I guess Kissinger is right."

And if there is no Bosnian culture, why not divide Bosnia, as Kissinger and
General Mladic wish, between Croatia and Serbia, and herd the Muslims into
a central ghetto? (How many non-Christian ghettoes have survived in Europe
since 1096, the first crusade?)

The same Kissinger-type reasoning was used by advocates of apartheid in
South Africa. There was no "African culture", they said, so why not put
Africans on reservations called homelands and have apartheid?

The same approach was used during the extermination of the American Indian
nations. There was no Native American Culture so why not put the American
Indians on reservations or "ethncially cleanse" those who refuse to go to
the reservations?

There is only one problem with Kissinger's statement and his plan. As with
South Africa and the American Indians, so with Bosnia, cultures are hard to
kill.

You can kill people and you can dynamite mosques or desecrate cemeteries.
You can build the concentration camps and killing centers that are now
being exposed before the world at the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.
After the people have been "cleansed" (killed or driven into refugee
camps) and their monuments have been destroyed, you can, like Kissinger,
claim these the culture never existed in the first place.

But you cannot kill the spirit of a great culture. Present-day South Africa
is testimony to that. The very survival of the American Indian culture is
testimony to that. And the perseverance and survival
of Bosnians, rooted in their ancient and powerful culture that was made up
of a variety of religions and cultural influences powerfully blended into a
great culture, gives the lie to Kissinger.

All the bombs, shells, concentration camps, rapes, and mass-killings of
General Mladic have only served to do one thing: to put Bosnian culture
into the fire and steel it into purer and more resilient metal /2/.

And at a time when extremists of all sides in the U.S. are demanding
apartheit, separation of races and religions, and religious and racial
wars--at a time when some people are saying "American culture doesn't
exist"-- Bosnian culture survives the overwhelming destructiveness of the
Serb army, the betrayal by Croat extremists, the collaboration with the
genocide by the NATO nations which could have stopped it in 1992, and the
lie by the likes of Henry Kissinger.

Bosnian culture is sending us a message.

In the United States, if we want a society where people of different races,
religion, and backgrounds share a common culture and build a united nation,
then we are Bosnians. If we insist that cultures are not made by "ethnic
cleansing" or apartheid and if we insist that division of people into
ethnic, religious, and racial ghettoes is not a solution, we are Bosnians.
If we insist that people of different races, religions, and background can
work together and build a common culture, then we are
Bosnians.

And if we sit back and allow the authors of genocide like General Mladic
and the apostles of apartheit like Henry Kissinger to triumph in Bosnia, we
will not likely be able to save our own culture /3/.
The end
_________________
1. This piece was originally posted on the internet newsgroup
alt.current-events.bosnia on October 14, 1995.

For information on the war on Bosnian culture, see Andras Riedlmayer,
"Erasing the Past: The Destruction of Libraries and Archives in
Bosnia-Herzegovina MIDDLE EAST STUDIES ASSOCIATION BULLETIN, vol. 29 no. 1
(July 1995), pp. 7-11" and "Killing Memory: Bosnia's Cultural Heritage and
its Destruction" VHS videocassette, 41 minutes (Haverford, PA: Community
of Bosnia Foundation, 1994).

Also see Rabia Ali and Lawrence Lifschultz, WHY BOSNIA (Pampleteer's Press,
1993). For a historical overview, see Noel Malcolm, BOSNIA: A SHORT
HISTORY (New York University Press, 1994).

2. For one example of the Bosnian response to destruction, see Sarajevo
Expo 92, an exhibit of seventeen works by major Sarajevan artists created
during the worst period of the shelling of Sarajevo. The exhibit is being
displayed at various places in the U.S. by Aida Musanovic, one of the
artists.

3. This short article is dedicated to the hundreds of Bosnians who have
been killed while risking their lives to save art, manuscripts, and other
testimonies to their cultural heritage.