By Eddy Jokovich
The war in Bosnia-Hercegovina has now passed its third year. It has been three years of a public and inept display of international conflict resolution and mediation by the "great" powers and the organisations that purport to support social justice, liberation, and the freedom and security of all nations and communities.
Ever since the fateful day in Sarajevo on April 6, 1992, when militiamen faithful to the Bosnian Serb "leader" Radovan Karadzic gunned down a group of civilian demonstrators calling for the integrity of Bosnia as a multicultural and independent state, the international community — notably the United States, United Nations and European Union — has veered away from opportunities for a lasting peace and just resolution, and engaged in selective practices that are devoid of coherence, consistency or logic.
In contrast to the 1991 Gulf War, when, in order to protect their capital interests in the region, the US and the EU used the UN to provide every reason and excuse to justify a military intervention, on the issue of Bosnia every excuse has been provided to justify a lack of action at all levels.
Of the 60 resolutions passed by the UN General Assembly directly concerning Bosnia (most of which have been platitudinous statements registering "concern at the atrocities committed in Bosnia-Hercegovina"), not one has been implemented by the Security Council. Resolution 781, the "No-Fly Zone" ban on military flights over Bosnian air space, has been violated on 1100 occasions.
The only "success" of the Security Council has been the implementation of resolution 713 in 1991. This, at the behest of the president of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, imposed a military arms embargo over the entire former Yugoslavia.
At the time of the independence of Bosnia in 1992, resolution 713 denied the Bosnian government the means to defend its territorial integrity, allowing the dominant armed force, the Serb-led Yugoslav People's Army, to proceed with its ambition of creating a "Greater Serbia", linking large tracts of "Serb" territory in Croatia and Bosnia to Serbia proper.
This is the resolution that has been implemented with diligence and alacrity, and is still enforced in defiance of subsequent calls from the UN General Assembly and the US Congress to lift the embargo, and the fact that the continuance of the embargo contradicts the UN's charter of individual and collective self-defence against military aggression.
Entwined amongst these resolutions have been a host of moribund "peace" plans and conferences: the Washington plan, the Five-Nation Contact Group, the Owen-Stoltenburg plan, and the precursor to these, the Vance-Owen plan, unveiled in June 1993 by Cyrus Vance and David Owen, representing the UN and EU respectively.
The "peace" plan, prescribing a three-way "checkerboard" partition of Bosnia between the Croatian, Serbian and Muslim "factions", was pushed by the US, UN and NATO ad infinitum even though it violated established apartheid and racial discrimination conventions, and would only lead to more "ethnic cleansing". Bosnia, an indivisible multicultural society, could become divisible only through fratricidal, door-to-door, village-by-village warfare.
The mere announcement of the "peace" plan led to an immediate escalation of evictions and pogroms by Serb and Croat nationalists, on the assumption that the allocation of territories to those groups where a national majority existed represented an official sanction for the removal of other nationalities and cultural communities.
When asked for the justification of the Vance-Owen plan, Owen simply retorted that he was "being a realist" and that the Bosnian government had better "accept the reality" of military defeat and partition of its country.
This sense of realism needed to be fabricated, and there is no shortage of self-seeking revanchist revisionists in Bosnia. Their claims have ranged from the notion that Bosnia has never existed as a country, but merely as an administrative construct of Tito's Yugoslavia (a statement that ignores the fact that Bosnia has existed since the 14th century), to Bosnia being a future breeding ground for Islamic fundamentalism on the doorstep of a "modern, civilised" Europe.
The latter claim, far from fact, is the fabrication that has been taken most seriously and conveniently by the Western powers. The Bosnian government, representing Croats, Serbs and Muslims alike, is conveniently reduced to the "Muslim faction", which fits in neatly to Western depictions of Islamic fundamentalism. It is even more convenient for the nationalist Serbs who claim that they are fighting on behalf of all Europe by revisiting the era of the crusade against Islam.
Such claims fulfil the requirements of propaganda produced for the appeasement of the "great" powers. They include the reduction of Bosnians to a people "like cats and dogs" (Radovan Karadzic); or UN negotiator Peter Carrington stating that "there is very little that can be done to stop people when all they want to do is kill each other"; or US President George Bush in 1992 saying that the war in Bosnia is best left alone as "a blood feud ... a complex, convoluted conflict that grows out of age-old animosities".
The paranoia has extended to other aspects of the "peace" process. The UN Security Council vetoed the appointment of Professor Cherif Bassiouni as chief prosecutor on the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal on the basis that as an Egyptian Muslim he would prosecute unfavourably against non-Muslim perpetrators of war crimes. This assumes that Muslim legislators have a regard only for the laws of the Koran, and cannot be trusted to apply the principles of international law according to the virtues of the West.
The reality is that peace negotiations in Bosnia have been carried out in deference to accused war criminals. The former US diplomat, Lawrence Eagleburger, himself embroiled in the clandestine arms trade to Yugoslavia immediately prior to its ultimate disintegration, stated in 1992 that Karadzic and Milosevic were largely responsible for the pogroms in Bosnia, and should be tried at the War Crimes Tribunal.
These same accused war criminals have been calling the shots at the "peace" negotiations, yet the only officially recognised and representative body throughout the negotiations, the Bosnian government, has been harangued into submission at every point, harassed and humiliated by the United Nations, and denied its rightful and legal existence as an independent state.
Through the bravado and hype of the new world order, this period ostensibly was to see the appearance of a new moral and ethical fabric. A rare opportunity for constructive diplomatic relationships has resulted in a resurgence of the diplomatic decay that was evident in the late 1930s, which ultimately led to a world war.
Sadly, through the case study of Bosnia in the 1990s and the appeasement of Croatian and Serbian nationalism, the greatest lessons that have been learned are that aggressors in any part of the world where Western economic interests are not jeopardised can continue their territorial acquisitions and "ethnic cleansing" without any fear of retribution from the international community.