By Peter Anderson
SYDNEY — The war in the former Yugoslavia has taken a tragic toll and nowhere more than in Bosnia-Hercegovina where it is estimated 100,000 Muslims have lost their lives as a result of Serbian aggression. Taken together, the Muslim dead and wounded add up to half a million, and one million are refugees or displaced.
Bosnian Muslims were not only militarily unprepared; they were also psychologically unprepared for the Serbian assault, according to Dr Matko Marusic, a Croatian medical academic here recently to give his account of the situation in the warring republics.
"Bosnian Croatians were prepared for the war and still barely succeeded in defending territories where they were in a majority. They have been preserved through their fight. Unfortunately, the Muslim population, which makes up 43% of the Bosnian population, was defeated by Serbs: not just militarily, the Serbs are exterminating Muslims", he told Green Left.
While Serbia was occupied by the Ottoman Turks earlier and it is closer than Bosnia to Turkey, there are today no Muslims in Serbia because they were eliminated one and a half centuries ago. At that time there were 20 mosques in Belgrade; there are none now. Moreover, the call for a Greater Serbia has appeared in Serbian literature and has been supported by Serbian politicians since 1842.
Matko Marusic is head of the Immunology Division at the Zagreb School of Medicine and a key member during the war of the official Croatian Medical Headquarters. In that position he participated in the careful documentation of Croatian war dead.
The purpose of this was not to blame Serbs but to inform families about lost relatives, he said. Five thousand Croatian casualties were verified, of which 40% were civilians and 20% were arbitrarily massacred. Thirty thousand were seriously wounded. Thirteen thousand are still missing after intensive search, presumed dead.
There were clear cases of atrocities, Marusic said, one in which 20 bodies were exhumed from a mass grave in western Slavonia, all of whom had been mutilated before death — penises cut off, eyes taken out, wire around the hands.
While the Serbian-dominated federal army was not directly responsible for the atrocities, he said, it set the stage for them by first conquering a territory and then allowing in the irregular Chetnik forces who were the real guilty parties.
Under the so-called Cyrus Vance agreements signed by Croatian, Serbian and United Nations leaders, all heavy arms were to be removed from the scene of battle, the local militias were to be disarmed, refugees returned from all sides, and civil life restored. But while they were fully aware the war would simply have continued without UN were not satisfied with the UN activity.
"The UN was slow in getting the heavy arms away, so the first phase was late, but it was executed. But the second phase has run into great troubles. The UN cannot use force, and the Serbian forces will not give up their arms. The federal army supplied them and left for them huge reserves."
The UN forces arrived in Croatia to oversee the occupied areas and not to reinforce the borders established by the conflict, but "we are afraid of that possibility", he said.
Marusic did not believe it was realistic to partition Bosnia-Hercegovina into ethnic cantons, as has been suggested. "Neither in Croatia nor in Bosnia have Croats ever wanted to partition Bosnia. Muslims never wanted it; they will not establish the fundamentalist Muslim state the Serbs accuse them of wanting because their territory is too small and they are most numerous in the towns."
On current reports, Serb forces hold 70% of the territory of Bosnia-Hercegovina and Croats 30%.
However, said Marusic, some kind of local autonomy for the different ethnic groups should be established and absolute equality guaranteed at the state level, "and we would very soon have peace in Bosnia".
"Bosnia Serbs would easily be brought to peace if the UN would close the border with Serbia, which supplies all the war material. The solution is relatively simple: close the border with Serbia and make a just solution for internal organisation of the country."
Marusic denied widespread reports of negotiations between Croatian leader Franjo Tudjman and Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic over the question of redrawing borders.
"No, the borders cannot be changed because this is a Pandora's box. We will not accept that Serbs carve up Bosnia. This is part of our involvement in Bosnia; we are involved politically and intellectually. Our people live there, and we will not allow them to be butchered, or discriminated against in peace."
Croatia faces economic problems because "we inherited the communist way of working and the communist economy", he said. But the war itself has destroyed up to 40% of Croatian industry, and some of the lost territories were rich in agricultural terms. Added to this, the expenses of the war and of support to refugees are tremendous.