AN ALGERIAN MUSLIM

Serb Genocide of Bosnian Muslims Concerns All Human Beings

By Aicha Lemsine

Is Europe fated to be the scene of periodic pogroms and genocidal massacres which outrage humanity and the Creator? "Never again!" was the promise made by the world powers with the creation of the United Nations in 1945. After World War II and the tragedy of the Holocaust, this was supposed to be a new beginning, a fresh start.

Now, 50 years later, another group of fascists has stolen a page from the Nazis' book and taken a second shot at a "final solution"—this time directed against Muslims rather than Jews. While the conflict is cloaked in the guise of a "humanitarian tragedy" (the inference being that all people in the region are affected equally), in truth the Bosnian Muslims are being targeted by the Serbs because of their religious identity. Why, for example, have the Christian populations of Croatia and Slovenia (where fighting first erupted following the disintegration of Yugoslavia) been spared the horrors of "ethnic cleansing" by the Serbs, while the Bosnian Muslims bear the full weight of the Serb onslaught? Once again Europeans are horrified at the massacre of a minority ethnic group living in their midst while the continent's leaders try to put the best face on their cowardly compromises and moral vacillations.

Three years after Neville Chamberlain let the German Nazis have all of Czechoslovakia, the evil nature of Nazi aggression was clear and the U.S. was in the war against Germany. Three years after the Europeans decided to turn a blind eye toward the turmoil in Bosnia, the evil nature of Serbian aggression is clear as well. This time, though, the United States is still on the sidelines, its president refusing to commit to any real American involvement. Fifty years ago the U.S. helped to save Europe; now Americans are watching it slowly unravel in a paroxysm of violence and brutality.

The United Nations and the European Community badly misled the Bosnians by promising three years ago to protect them. At the same time, these international organizations have prevented the Bosnian people from defending themselves by enforcing since September 1991 an arms embargo on all of the former Yugoslavia while still tacitly allowing Serbia to ship heavy weapons, small arms, motorized transport and even men to their Bosnian Serb allies in the war in Bosnia, which began in April 1992.

The Serb regime in Pale has impressed some American commentators with its "military superiority." These pundits advise the Bosnian government in Sarajevo to face facts, hoist the white flag and accept the inevitable Serb victory.

David and Goliath With a Difference

In fact, the Serbs' military reputation was won by heavily armed thugs facing a Bosnian army starved of weapons. Bosnian Serbs have shown themselves adept at executing prisoners, raping women, shelling children and old people, harassing U.N. peacekeepers under strict orders not to fire, and that's all. The Bosnian Serbs are not troops to be feared by a comparably equipped army, much less the overwhelming military force NATO could assemble. The military conflict in Bosnia is not an evenly matched civil war but a replay of David and Goliath, except this David is denied his sling and stones.

The United Nations has taken much of the blame for the lack of forceful action, but even those inside the U.N. understand the source of the organization's shortcomings. In July 1993, in an interview with the Washington Report, U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali told me with regard to Bosnia, "If all of the member-states of the U.N. do not commit themselves to the idea of peace and security, we risk a void where the decisions will be made by a few large states...The member-states must play a role that is more dynamic and less bureaucratic."

In other words, the U.N. is anchored by 10 or so major states, connected to well over a hundred other largely powerless states (including most of the Arab and Muslim nations), all of them blowing helplessly in the wind. The Serbs have been able to confound U.N. officials, block U.N. relief missions, defy U.N. resolutions, kidnap U.N. peacekeepers and humiliate the entire organization with impunity!

What is needed is international leadership, and the world is looking toward Washington for it. The United States alone has the power to enforce world peace or, conversely, allow the globe to be engulfed at any given time in a dozen tiny brush fires of ethnic and territorial wars of attrition. The U.S. has spent the last 50 years as the "arsenal of democracy," ensuring the continued existence and power of the West in the face of the Soviet threat.

Now the world turns again to America, because the proper use of power is to protect. "It's not our fight," some Americans protest. When one is talking about the massive extermination of a people, that is everyone's fight!

As for the proper American response, most of the plans on the table fall far short of what is necessary to roll back Serb aggression and to protect civilian lives. The arms embargo certainly should be lifted, but there remain questions about how that should be done. Some politicians in Washington suggest waiting up to three months between the time the U.N. begins to pull out (or gets kicked out by the Bosnian government) before junking the arms boycott. What's going to happen over those 12 weeks when the Bosnians are stripped of protection (thin though it is) and remain deprived of the arms needed to defend themselves?

Bosnian Serb military commander—and indicted war criminal—Ratko Mladic has an answer. He's promised to press forward on all fronts, liquidating Bosnians as he goes, until there is little or nothing left of Bosnia-Herzegovina. There will be thousands more dead, wounded, missing and homeless Bosnians for the world's conscience to absorb.

But it doesn't have to happen that way. The arms embargo should be lifted effective immediately, and rather than run away, the international community should stay on the ground and support the Bosnian government militarily, economically and diplomatically, just as it should have been doing for the past three years.

Otherwise, Bosnia will be the first step toward a larger global conflagration. World Wars I and II were the result of poor choices, lost opportunities and clouded political vision on the part of European leaders. There certainly have been enough similar mistakes by this generation of world leaders when it comes to Bosnia. They have been given a three-year reprieve, but unless they act soon—and decisively—presidents and prime ministers from Washington to Moscow and London to Paris will be faced with an even more desperate situation as the conflict of Bosnia spreads beyond the borders of that troubled land.

Ethnicity, Religion or Humanity?

Criticism of the U.N., the U.S. and the Europeans has been widespread, and rightly so, but some groups which claim human and civil rights as their brief have decided not to add their voices to those calling for action. A late July press conference called at Washington, DC's National Press Club by the American Task Force for Bosnia (ATFB) and its director, Khaled Saffuri, brought together 23 civic and religious organizations active on the Bosnian issue. The number of participating American-Muslim organizations, including the American Muslim Council, Muslim Public Affairs Council, the International Union of Muslim Women, Mercy International, the Union of Supportive Shurists and Solidarity International for Human Rights, will come as no surprise.

What was surprising was that there were three times as many American-Jewish groups as American-Arab organizations present at the conference. The Arab American Institute and the National Association of Arab Americans were at the meeting, and both have been very active on Bosnia. Yet there is a discouraging tendency among some individual Arab Americans and Arab-American organizations to shy away from Bosnia and claim it is not "their issue" since it is Muslims who are being killed.

Unfortunately, it is not a new trend. In the wake of the Gulf war, which badly split the Arab-American community between those who proclaimed solidarity with Iraq and others who supported the American- and Saudi-led coalition, the bombing of the World Trade Center put Arab-American groups back on the defensive. As the media pondered the implication of "Islamic terrorism" finally reaching our shores, some individual Arab-American leaders were quick to put as much distance as possible between themselves and those Arab Muslims with whom they share a common culture. The tense 48 hours between April's Oklahoma City bombing and the announcement of Timothy McVeigh's arrest saw similar posturing as media speculation focused on a presumed Muslim connection.

Now the human drama unfolding in Bosnia serves again to reveal the sad moral and intellectual stance of some Arab-American leaders who would prefer to restrict their notion of "human rights" to their ethnic group and let the non-Arab Bosnian Muslims twist in the winds of war. These men and women are caught between pursuing a narrowly defined domestic American agenda, concentrating solely on their own ethnic and/or religious community, or getting involved with humanity as a whole. One hopes they make the only sensible—and morally sound—decision.

The veteran French peace activist Abb? Pierre recently declared, "The sadness of the Bosnian Muslims goes beyond a question of religion to one of all of humanity. In Bosnia-Herzegovina it is the future of liberty and of tolerance that is being massacred. It is not simply Muslims who live in Bosnia, but also Christians, Jews and atheists who live together—often in the same building—in respect and friendship. It is this Bosnia that should be the cause of everyone, not just the Muslims."

Aicha Lemsine is an Algerian journalist, author, and vice-president of Women's WORLD, the World Organization for Rights, Literature and Development.

Republic of Bosnia & Herzegovina

Thursday, December 25, 2008