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NEWS & LETTERS, August - September 2008
Karadzic and the legacy of Bosnia's partition
The belated arrest of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic forces the world to again confront the legacy of the thoroughgoing effort to destroy independent and multiethnic Bosnia-Herzegovina in the wake of the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Time will tell if this opportunity will be taken, or if instead the prosecution of Karadzic by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague will serve as a symbolic closing of the books on the complicity of the world powers in the genocide carried out by Bosnian Serbs and Croats to achieve their aims.
Karadzic was an obscure psychiatrist and amateur poet who clambered his way into political power in the chaotic early period of Yugoslavia's fragmentation. He, along with military leader Ratko Mladic and their patron, Slobodan Milosevic, turned Bosnia into a land of horrors as they sought to annihilate the country's historic ethnic, cultural and religious diversity and transform it into an ethnically homogenous greater Serbia, divided with a greater Croatia. Concentration camps and mass graves appeared throughout Bosnia. Sarajevo, the capital city, was besieged from the mountains that surround it. No tactic was too bestial to use, including systematic rape of women as a means of the psychological and cultural destruction of a people.
The Bosnians stubbornly resisted the attempt to destroy them, despite an arms embargo enforced by the world powers reminiscent of the one levied on republican Spain in the 1930s. The actions of the UN consistently served to facilitate the aims of the Serbian chauvinists. International diplomatic interventions pressured the Bosnians to submit to the dismemberment of their country. Only the Bosnians and their sympathizers the world over, feminists and human rights activists prominent among them, kept the hope alive.
By 1995, Milosevic had fallen out with his Bosnian Serb allies. The world powers, foremost among them the U.S., were anxious to force the Bosnians into a rotten compromise despite the small but not insignificant military gains they had achieved. The massacre at the nominally UN-protected town of Srebrenica in July 1995, in which over 8,000 of the male Muslim inhabitants of the town were murdered and which was carried out by Karadzic and Mladic, proved to be both the zenith of the war's depravity and the beginning of the end of the conflict. After the U.S.-aided Croatian military defeated the Serb enclave in Croatia, the Bosnians were forced by the U.S. to negotiate with Milosevic and the Croatian leader Franjo Tudjman in Dayton, Ohio.
The resulting agreement created the reality that still burdens Bosnia more than a decade later: a de facto partition of the country into 1) a Serbian entity and 2) a Bosnian Muslim (or Bosniak) and Bosnian Croat federation. Economic development, the return of those forced from their homes by the violence, and the rebuilding of interethnic trust have all failed to materialize.
The ascendancy of Serbian moderates permitted Milosevic to be sent to the tribunal in 2004, although prime minister Zoran Djindjic was assassinated not long after by those seeking revenge. Serbia's current president, Boris Tadic, wants to see Serbia admitted to the European Union. With the moderate nationalists in power, the discovery of Karadzic, hidden in plain sight as an alternative healer in Belgrade, followed with suspicious rapidity, as if the police knew all along where to look.
The world powers are anxious to close down the tribunal, even though Karadzic's co-leader, Mladic, remains at large.
The people of Bosnia-Herzegovina deserve to be freed from the Dayton Agreement's yoke of partition achieved through ethnic cleansing. Hopefully, Karadzic's arrest may begin a process in which the need for that development is recognized by the world.
--Sympathizer
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