“BOSNIA”: Crimes and Non-Punishments?
by Maurice LAZAR
The apathy of Western societies before the spectacle of the mass massacres that mark the end of this century after having punctuated it offers matter for reflection. Whatever the patience of the arguments advanced to explain it, the extreme weakness of the reactions of the social bodies and of public opinion before tragedies such as those of Bosnia, Rwanda, and Chechnya raises formidable questions if one ventures to push them too far.
Take the case of Yugoslavia, and more precisely of Bosnia, chosen because of the good knowledge of the subject (dozens of works, hundreds of articles, good press coverage, very many reports and televised debates), the proximity of the terrain (2 hours by plane from Paris, in the heart of Europe), and the immediate and important involvement of the “international community” in the conflict (the European Community intervened diplomatically even before the outbreak of the war).
the Serb leaders as principal culprits,
Despite divergences of interpretation about the origin of the Yugoslav crisis, the respective responsibilities of its protagonists, the solutions to be implemented to settle it, the very great majority of observers and the international bodies very quickly agreed in designating the Serb leaders as the principal culprits in the unleashing of the war and the atrocities perpetrated above all against civilians, which are the hallmark of this kind of war.
This accusation, leveled as early as the summer and autumn of 1991, was confirmed by the International Criminal Tribunal created by the U.N. Security Council to try the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the former Yugoslavia. The prosecutor of this tribunal requested the indictment of a majority of Serbs. Among them are the two highest officials, one political, the other military, of the self-proclaimed Republic of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.
without diminishing the charges that weigh equally on the other extremists, Croat or Bosniak
This in no way diminishes the charges that weigh on the Croat extremists of Bosnia-Herzegovina who have the support of the authorities in Zagreb, nor does it exclude any Bosniak crime or abuse, which would be absurd. It is not a matter of establishing some moral gradation of the wrongs and merits of peoples considered as collectively responsible, but of observing that it was easy to identify, from the very beginning of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the factors and the mechanisms of a violence that immediately manifested itself in its barbarity. Vukovar, a Croatian town of 50,000 inhabitants, was besieged and destroyed by the artillery of the Yugoslav federal army and emptied of its majority non-Serb population, part of which was massacred, in the autumn of 1991, before the recognition of Croatia’s independence.
Faced with this unleashing of violence, the chancelleries quickly rallied to the idea that one must above all not “add war to war” — a message that was very rightly interpreted by the potential destroyers of Bosnia as a green light to all their enterprises, including the most abominable.
200,000 dead, on the Bosniak side alone (that would represent more than 2,500,000 for a country like France), more than half of the population torn from their homes, innumerable wounds, mutilations, rapes, destructions of towns and villages, of places of worship and of culture. To the enormity of this human and material disaster, doubled by the political disaster signified by the officialization of apartheid in the very heart of Europe, the so-called civilized world answers only with scraps of embarrassed justifications from the politicians and with silence, barely pierced by a few cries from public opinion. The largest protest demonstration organized in France could not gather more than 5,000 people.
If the inaction of the democratic governments is finally explicable — is not the policy of the dead dog drifting with the current the one they most commonly practice? — the weakness of the reactions of the citizens, of the peoples, and of their usual representatives is of a nature to trouble minds installed in the moral comfort of a peaceful and restful humanism. If one comes to consider, if not as normal, at least as impossible to avoid and to combat, the large-scale murders committed a stone’s throw from home, what remains of the certainties born of the victories against fascism and Nazism?
In the burning topicality of these massacres and of an “ethnic” cleansing carried out before our eyes, one cannot help wondering about the meaning of the renewed condemnations and commemorations of past massacres. Are they only the signs of a belated regret for those who let it happen and of an identity recognition for those who survived? Can the violations of human rights and the large-scale organized killings give rise only to ceremonies of memory?
Bosnia is not comparable to Auschwitz, but must one forget the lessons of the past?
The Jews have no special vocation to distinguish themselves by particular stances and commitments. They have no duties different from those of their fellow citizens, each abstaining or taking sides according to his convictions and his conscience. There is nonetheless an opinion which, although professed by eminent Jewish personalities, would be ill-advised if it aimed only at keeping a prudent reserve. It is the one according to which “Bosnia is, after all, not Auschwitz.” That is true, but should one then rise up actively and violently against horror only when it reaches the summit of Auschwitz? Or would not the lesson of the past be that one must never wait too long to combat any force that carries within it the exclusion and the death of the other? Very concretely, and to set a precise objective for action in this direction, would there not be grounds, for all those who live in the memory of the genocide and the crimes against humanity committed more than 50 years ago, to demand that there be immediately arrested and handed over to the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague all the individuals sought by it, at their head the Karadzic’s and the Mladic’s, who can mock, smiling and sure of their impunity, all the powerless indignations of this world. Would the crimes of today be more excusable than those of yesterday?
M.L.