Bosnian Serbs admit to massacre
In July 1995, several thousand Muslims were liquidated in a way that represents grave violations of international humanitarian law.
- Vedran Persic
These atrocities took place about 125 miles from where I was living in Kosovo at about the same time I was there. Even though it was (relatively speaking) right next door, it might as well have been a world away.
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) -- Bosnian Serb officials have acknowledged for the first time that their security forces carried out the massacre of up to 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica, according to an investigative report Friday.
An official commission examining Europe's worst massacre since World War II "established participation of (Bosnian Serb) military and police units, including special (police) units" in the deaths, international administration spokesman Vedran Persic told The Associated Press, quoting from the panel's report.
During the height of the three and a half-year Bosnian war, Serb troops overran a U.N.-declared safe zone in Srebrenica and slaughtered up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys in what the U.N. war crimes tribunal has declared an act of genocide.
Had any of us known what happening nearby (news of any sort was tough to come by in Serbia), perhaps we could have made a difference. Perhaps not. It is something I will always wonder about. I still find it stunning that those who professed "never again" after Hitler killed 6 million Jews stood stock still while Bosnian Muslims were being liquidated in a similar, albeit smaller scale, fashion.
Former Bosnian Serb soldier Drazen Erdemovic, who confessed to playing a role in the Srebrenica massacre, testified at former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's war crimes trial last year how his battalion alone killed up to 1,200 people....
The victims had sought protection in the U.N. compound, but the vastly outnumbered and lightly armed Dutch U.N. peacekeepers were no match for the Serb forces.
He said that after Srebrenica fell, Serb forces rounded up an estimated 30,000 refugees who had sought safety at a U.N. base. As Dutch peacekeepers looked on, the women were deported to Muslim-held territory and the boys and men were taken on buses to execution sites and shot.
"I was personally ordered to do it," said Erdemovic -- who pleaded guilty to murder as part of a deal in 1996 and served a five-year sentence. "This could not have happened if it had not been allowed by the main staff" of the Bosnian Serb military command, he said.
During my time in the former Yugoslavia, the presence of evil was never far away. I could not get through my days without being acutely aware of the presence of overwhelming evil in virtually every aspect of life. My only "protection", if you could call it that, was my American passport. Even so, I knew that no document was going to protect me if the Serbian (not so) secret police or the "milicija" decided that I had committed the transgression of "assisting the enemy".
Those who do not understand history really ARE condemned to repeat it, eh?
