In his book, entitled Norway - A Triumph in Bigotry Frederick Delaware reveals a side to the Norwegian character that the outsider rarely sees. This work includes a compelling insight into the similarities between the Norwegian and Serbian propaganda apparatus when used against that most unfortunate of species: the defenceless Muslim. (Revised and updated 2008). Copyright © FED Unique Productions and Frederick Delaware (2004 and 2008)
NORWAY
My tribute to the Muslim dead of Bosnia had blamed their sickening plight on a certain 'attitude' deeply ingrained in Western thinking. I deliberately compared the unspeakable atrocities befalling those people to the foundation of thought portrayed, for example by the form of words used in the Norwegian press coverage. A Norwegian artist I met in London in 1998 called Olaf Storø told me that Norwegians are brought up from a young age to consider anyone who is not Christian as "heathen" (and by "heathen" he specifically included Muslims and Jews and all other non-Christian faiths).
I thought this rather ironic in that firstly the Vikings were the classic heathens before Christianity reached them and secondly today Norwegians are for all practical purposes Christian in name only. They are at best 'pick and choose' Christians and at worst devout atheists; Scandinavians as a whole are like this.
Olaf Storø's remarks are clearly borne out by my extensive research on Norwegian attitudes. That the Norwegian newspaper 'Bergen News' referred to a known but unnamed Muslim man simply as 'the Muslim man' eighteen times and launched an attack on him which no British editor would ever contemplate, proves my point amply.
In a similar fashion, Verdens Gang, Norway's biggest tabloid, clearly linked the word 'Muslim' with perversion and their perceived general defect in Muslims. Perhaps a few degrees short of the 'general depravity' that the Jews were labelled with in 1930's Germany, but much closer to the Serb propaganda onslaught during the Milosevic regime against the Muslims of Yugoslavia. The Norwegians had let their mask slip and those twelve front page articles, reproduced verbatim elsewhere in this book, over a period of nine years is no aberration; the message in those articles must reflect popular sentiment.
I felt that the fact the Bosnians were Muslim, created, to a significant extent, the apathy of the governments of Europe and America which led to nothing effectively being done to prevent the slaughter of the Muslims in Bosnia. Peter Maass, the heroic journalist on the Washington Post, himself a Jew, wrote a book on his experiences in Bosnia - 'Love They Neighbour - A Story of War'. His analysis is as close as you will get to the truth of the matter of Bosnia's betrayal and the underlying causes for the carnage inflicted on the blond and blue-eyed Muslims.
I give you the following extracts from his book, but before I do, I would like to pay my own tribute to Peter Maass, who I have corresponded with on Bosnia and Kosovo and spoken to, by saying that no greater friend in the world could the Muslims of Bosnia have had than him. He is quite simply a wonderful man.
"Just as David Owen did the dirty work for British Prime Minister Major and French President Mitterrand, Major and Mitterrand were doing the dirty work for Clinton. This was helpful. Clinton could criticise the Europeans obliquely, and his aides could criticise them directly, but he never stood in their way, he implicitly encouraged them and let them take a well-deserved beating for being appeasers. The leading-edge role of Europe's leaders deserves far more attention than I can give it in this book. Why did Major follow the politics of Chamberlain rather than the politics of Churchill? Why did Mitterrand follow the politics of Pétain rather than the politics of de Gaulle? There are specific reasons.
Major, an uninspiring leader, had shallow support in his own Tory party and was focused on domestic affairs, while Mitterrand, at the end of fourteen years in office, was a tired old man fighting cancer of the prostate. There are other reasons, too, many others, but they are less important than the general observation that nations, like individuals, have the ability to be brave and the ability to be cowardly, and, when the war in Bosnia broke out, the leaders of Britain and France tapped the cowardly vein in the soul of their nations, lulling their people to sleep with soothing lies. It could have been otherwise, and perhaps next time, with a new set of leaders, it will be.
Dust in our eyes. Bill Clinton wanted us to forget about Bosnia, to write if off as an infinitely complex place in which nothing was as simple as it might seem, only the high priests of politics could figure it out, for the war was a matter of tribal rivalries and those Balkan people "have been fighting each other for centuries", blah-blah-blah. This was rubbish, and Clinton knew it. What people on this planet have not been fighting other people for centuries? Not the French and Germans, not the British and French, not the Koreans and Japanese, and not, for that matter, the citizens of the United States; if you consider the Civil War and the war against Native Americans and perhaps toss in the recent riots in Los Angeles and Liberty City, not to mention Harlem or Watts or the startling murder rate in Washington, D.C., Americans have been fighting one another for centuries.
The point is this: if you can understand the intricacies of a draw playing football or the wild-card play-off system, as most Americans can, then you can understand Bosnia. Beginners might need fifteen or twenty minutes of instructions to grasp the basics of either subject. Unfortunately, most Americans got two-minute television stories or six-hundred-word newspaper articles that created more confusion than comprehension - on the one hand this, on the other hand that - and influential government officials, with their evasions and contradictions, made things cloudier, intentionally. In essence, Americans never had the chance to learn the rules of the game, and they were told by their government not to bother, because the game was too complex for ordinary mortals to understand.
I want to explain that in May 1993, after Clinton used the Europeans as an alibi for his own inaction, the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Russia, Spain and American met in Washington and put on another show of resolve. They put aside the troublesome question of rolling back the Serbs and decided, instead, to protect a few bits of territory held by the Bosnians. They created six "safe areas". The message to the Serbs was clear: Take everything else but not our little safe areas. Yet, illustrating that appeasement increases rather than fulfils an aggressor's appetite, the Serbs kept attacking the safe areas, restricting the amount of food delivered to them, and the world powers did little.
"Mr. Clinton is going to be a great president", cheered Radovan Karadzic. The United Nations troops dispatched to the safe areas were not, it transpired, allowed to use their weapons to defend the safe areas. The troops could fire back only if their own lives were in danger, rather than the lives of the Bosnians whom, we erroneously assumed the troops were there to defend. On occasion, the world powers forgot to pretend they were serious, and in one case, hundreds of U.N. troops were sent to protect the Bihac safe area without weapons. Obviously, if you had the terrible misfortune to live in a United Nations "safe area", you lived in one of the most dangerous places on earth.
It was not much of a surprise that U.N. soldiers surrendered their weapons when Serbs finally called the West's bluff in 1995 and mounted an earnest assault on the safe areas of Srebrenica and Zepe, capturing them. I want to explain that Bill Clinton's rare displays of resolve were deceptions, no difference from fakes in dodgeball, shifting left before leaping right. In February 1994, a Serb shell landed in a Sarajevo marketplace, killing 68 people, a number of little consequence in a war that had killed about 200,000, but camera crews recorded the carnage in the safe area, and this led to international outrage. I want to explain that President Clinton threw dust in our eyes by saying, for example, that he had tried hard to get our allies to agree to lift the arms embargo against the Bosnians and carry out air strikes against the Serbs, but in fact he hardly tried.
He sent Warren Christopher on a famous trip to Europe in May 1993, but Christopher did not argue or cajole when he stopped in Paris, London and Moscow, he merely listened and nodded his head, and then returned to Washington to say that, despite his supreme efforts, our European allies refused to budge, so the embargo would, regrettably, stay in place, and the F-16s would, regrettably, stay in their hangers. President Clinton passed on the message to the country. More than two years later, his real agenda became clear when Congress called his bluff and approved a bill to lift the embargo; Clinton vetoed it. I can recall the precise day when, finally, I fell spiritually sick.
It was April 22, 1993. In Washington D.C., the Holocaust Memorial Museum was being inaugurated in an outdoor ceremony that featured an emotional speech by President Bill Clinton, who looked bravely into an unseasonably cold wind and hit all the right notes, as he usually does.
"The nations of the West must live forever with this knowledge: Even as our fragmentary awareness of these crimes grew into indisputable facts, we did far too little. Before the war started, doors to liberty were slammed shut. And even after we attacked Germany, rail lines to the camps, within miles of militarily significant targets, were left undisturbed. Mass deaths were left to occur, enshrouded in our denial .. The evil represented in this museum is incontestable. It is absolute. As we are its witness, so we must remain its adversary. We owe that much to the dead, as we owe it to our consciences and our children.So we must stop the fabricators of history and the bullies as well. Left unchallenged, they would still prey upon the powerless, and we cannot permit that to happen again."
Elie Wiesel was on the stage with Clinton. A few months earlier, Wiesel had visited a Serb prison camp in Bosnia, and the haunted faces of the Muslim inmates reminded him of the doomed souls jailed with him at Auschwitz fifty years before. He saw many parallels, too many. And so, when he reached the speaker's podium, Wiesel, a writer of extraordinary conscience, had no choice but to turn his perpetually sad gaze away from the crowd and look into the eyes of William Jefferson Clinton, perhaps the only person in the world who could turn things around.
It was not the polite thing to do, but it was the right thing to do. "Mr. President, I cannot not tell you something," Wiesel said. "I have been in the former Yugoslavia last fall. I cannot sleep since for what I have seen. As a Jew I am saying that we must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country. People fight each other and children die. Why? Something, anything must be done!" This is when you start to feel the spiritual sickness. It can be held at tolerable levels if you convince yourself that your efforts as a journalist or aid worker or diplomat might make a difference.
You soldier on. But the sickness takes over if you sense futility, if you can no longer look a Bosnian in the eye and say, in honesty, that the reason the world doesn't react is because it doesn't know what's happening or doesn't understand. When you conclude that the world does know, and does understand, and still doesn't react, your time is up. When that happens, you do unusual things. Canadian diplomat Louis Gentile, who worked in Banja Luka for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, wrote an unusual letter to The New York Times on January 14,1994. It was a diplomat's primal scream: The terror continues, terror of attacks by armed men at night, rape and murder, children unable to sleep, huddling in fear behind boarded up doors and windows.
The latest victims were three Muslim residents of the Banja Luka suburb of Vrbanja on December 29. In broad daylight, four armed men (two in uniform) entered the home of a couple 58 and 54 years old. The man was shot in the head and killed, his wife was shot in the hand and then beaten to death with a blunt instrument. A Muslim neighbour, who had the courage and misfortune to inquire what was happening when the murderers left carrying a television set, was shot in the heart at point-blank range . To those who said to themselves after seeing Schindler's List, "Never again": It is happening again. The so-called leaders of the western world have known what is happening here for the last year and a half.
They receive play-by-play reports. They talk of prosecuting war criminals, but do nothing to stop the crimes. May God forgive them. May God forgive us all. Geneva is what Europe aspires to be, and Sarajevo is what Europe recoils from. They would seem to have nothing in common, these two cities, except that when you are in one of them, you cannot imagine that the other exists. The truth, more complex than appearances, is that they are similar, underneath their contrasting garments, like a millionaire and a beggar. There is much virtue to be found in Sarajevo, even beauty, and much vileness in Geneva, even evil.
All of this dawned on me when I turned down further assignments in Bosnia and was dispatched to Geneva, where, instead of soldiers tearing Bosnia apart, diplomats were doing the same thing. These diplomats were not Serbian or Croatian but American and British and French, and instead of preventing a crime, they acted as accomplices. The men with pens were every bit as fascinating and repulsive as the men with guns. Bosnia was a circle, always leading you back to where you started, to the weaknesses of humans. It also, thank God, let you see the strengths of humans.
George Kenney quit his State Department job in the summer of 1992, and was followed a year later, in the summer of 1993, by three more diplomats, including Marshall Harris, the desk officer for Bosnia, whose letter of resignation became front-page news. "I can no longer serve in a Department of State that accepts the forceful dismemberment of a European state and that will not act against genocide and the Serbian officials who perpetrate it," Harris wrote to Secretary of State Warren Christopher on August 4, 1993. "I can no longer in good conscience allow myself to be associated with an administration that . is driving the Bosnian government to surrender its territory and its sovereignty to the victors in a war of aggression. Accordingly, I hereby resign". The others who resigned - Stephen Walker, the Croatia desk officer, and Jon Western, who compiled war crimes evidence in the Intelligence and Research Bureau - made similar statements about President Clinton's policy.
A few months after them, another diplomat, Richard Johnson, who headed the Yugoslav desk, let his dissent be known through a private report entitled The Pin Stripe Approach to Genocide, in which he wrote, "My thesis here is a simple one: Senior U.S. government officials know that Serb leaders are waging genocide in Bosnia but will not say so in plain English because this would raise the pressure for U.S. action".
Izetbegovic's [Bosnia's President] greatest defect was his naïveté. Whilst Serbs and Croats were obtaining weapons and organising themselves for war, Izetbegovic was calling for peace and trying to keep Yugoslavia together. His effort to prevent the federation's breakup undercuts, yet again, the Serbo-Croat contention that he always wanted to set up an Islamic state in Bosnia. When the Yugoslav National Army (JNA in Serbian) ordered the disbanding, in January 1991, of all Territorial Defense units (similar to our National Guard), Izetbegovic fully complied, despite the objections of some of his supporters. Izetbegovic had been duped; while the JNA, whose officer corps was dominated by Serbs, disarmed Territorial Defense units in areas of Bosnia inhabited largely by Muslims, it secretly supplied more weapons to units in areas inhabited largely by Serbs. When Bosnia's secession became unavoidable, Izetbegovic believed that Western countries would use their diplomatic and military muscle to prevent an attack by Serbia. Here, too, he was naïve. I am thinking of a remarkable gathering, the International Conference for the Protection of War Victims, held in a large convention centre in Geneva.
The keynote speaker was U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whose appearance was the culmination of dozens of lofty speeches by ministers and ambassadors who arrived at the conference centre in spotless Mercedes limousines. Warren Zimmermann, the former ambassador to Yugoslavia and, at the time, still a loyal bureaucrat, represented the United States and, like every other speaker, condemned atrocities and genocide and insisted that war criminals be brought to justice and punished severely. "Our governments meet this week here in Geneva to say enough! No more! This barbarism must stop!" And so on. It was difficult to figure out whether such speeches should be met with applause or laughter, for just a few hundred yards away, at the Palais des Nations, Charles Redman was meeting with Radovan Karadzic, leader of Bosnian Serbs, and Slobodan Milosevic, leader of Serbia, both identified by international human rights groups as the worst war criminals in Europe since Nazi Germany.
Curiously, Karadzic and Milosevic were treated with great respect during their frequent visits to Geneva, where, instead of arresting them, the United Nations arranged complimentary limousines for them and picked up the tab at their five-star hotels; It seemed an odd way to fight barbarism. Back at the International Conference for the Protection of War Victims, on the other side of the Avenue de la Paix, the ministers and ambassadors wrapped up their speeches. You could almost hear the champagne glasses clinking against each other. Was I too involved in Bosnia, am I biased, extreme in my judgements? No. There were many other people, respected and well-known, who came to similar conclusions. Richard Nixon said: "The siege of Sarajevo can have a redeeming character only if the West learns two things as a result. The first is that enlightened peoples cannot be selective about condemning aggression and genocide . the other lesson is that because we are the last remaining superpower, no crisis is irrelevant to our interests." George Schultz, secretary of state in the Reagan administration, said: "The Serbs have made suckers out of the United Nations. They have said, 'We're negotiating so don't use force on us because you might upset the negotiations. Meanwhile, they're throwing the book at the Muslims, murdering them and raping them and so on. We should be prepared to conduct military strikes on gun emplacements, on supply lines, on weapons caches and ammunition depots and not just near the front lines but way back into Serbia."
In Los Angeles, a rainstorm is reason enough to keep children indoors, so on rainy days, when I was a boy, my seventh grade exercise class would be held in a small gymnasium, where, inevitably, our coach would let us play dodgeball for the fifty-minute period. Dodgeball was the most elemental of adolescent games. One boy would stand against the wall, was to duck the balls, and to do this, you would jump in the air, fling yourself to the left, to the right, up in the air again, fake a move to one side, then hit the ground, roll to your right, hop back on your feet, skip to your left, dodge to the right, hit the ground again and so on, until you got zinged, which, within a minute, was likely to happen, because only a young Nureyev could stay on his toes that long; everyone else was doomed to run out of energy and then, boom-boom-boom, three balls would slam into you. The image of dodgeball is what comes to mind when I think of the way President Clinton reacted to Bosnia. The image may not be exact, perhaps inadequate, but it's the best I can come up with.
Clinton was the boy against the wall. Month after month, year after year, he engaged in an array of acrobatics, ducking to his left, then his right, laying low on the ground, rising up again, jumping to one side, then the other, faking left before going right. These weren't physical movements, but political ones. Saying the fighting was a civil war, then saying it was a war of aggression; blaming the United Nations for getting in the way of NATO, then blaming NATO for getting in the way of the United Nations (even though he could dictate policy to either organisation); portraying Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karazic as war criminals, then sending high-level envoys to meet them, demanding that the arms embargo against Bosnia be lifted but refusing to anything about it, and then, later, opposing the lifting of the embargo!"
I am mindful of the Conservative Party's links with Serb interests which the Major government pandered to, particularly in the form of Douglas Hurd's business ventures. However, this was something Margaret Thatcher would never have let get in her way in punishing the Serbs, had she still been in power. Indeed, when I met a Serb woman, Sacha, in Paris at the height of the bombing of Belgrade in June 1999, she told me Milosevic would never have started on his murderous campaign if Mrs. Thatcher had still been Prime Minster. At the outbreak of hostilities in 1991, Britain and her European partners were capable of handling the conflict themselves. Just after John Major became the Prime Minister, Dr. Zaki Badawi, Principal of the Muslim College in London called on Douglas Hogg, the Foreign Office Minister, to request of the British that one or two sorties - a small bombing campaign - be conducted over Belgrade on the basis of 'a stitch in time saves nine'. Hogg replied to the effect that bombing Belgrade didn't work in World War Two and that the Nazis couldn't overcome the strongly resisting Serbs, so now the British would fare no better. But Badawi countered that. It was now the 1990's with high powered precision bombing to hand and he wasn't asking for anything more than a short sharp shock to stop Milosevic in his tracks.
Hogg's arguments proved vacuous when in 1994 limited NATO bombing of Belgrade quickly helped bring Milosevic to the negotiating table at Dayton. On 19th September 1991, in the Hague, at a meeting of the European Foreign Ministers in joint session with the Western European Union (WEU) - a military forum - Douglas Hurd rejected a proposal that a robust peace-keeping force of 20,000 to 50,000 men be sent to Bosnia, citing the reason as the British experience in Northern Ireland. Mark Stuart in his authorised biography of Douglas Hurd, 'The Public Servant', states: "Nevertheless, the tantalising possibility remains that an intervention force, or more realistically, the earlier use of air power, might have prevented later atrocities". However, as the Serb and Croat aggression in dismembering Bosnia gained momentum, military intervention was something that the Europeans could only do with the help of the Americans. In practice, however, because of that 'attitude' towards the Muslims, and the fact that there was no threat to America's interest (as there was for oil in the case of the Gulf War), in spite of huge media sympathy for the Muslims in Britain, continental Europe and America, their governments didn't want to contribute troops to Bosnia; public opinion was, however, in favour of arming the Muslims and instituting air strikes against the Serbs.
Still Douglas Hurd was totally against the lifting of the arms embargo against the Muslims, and in 1994 he visited Washington to beg the Americans not to lift the embargo. Hurd was consistent to the end with his perverse attitude to the Muslims. After the Dayton peace Accords in 1995, Hurd went the following year to Belgrade in his capacity as Deputy Chairman of NatWest Markets when "he tried to persuade President Milosevic to sign contracts with NatWest to privatise Serbia's electricity and oil sectors", (quoted in Mark Stuart's 'The Public Servant'). Hurd also gave similar assistance to British Telecom's plans for Serbia's phone system. This, the man who Boris Johnson described in his Daily Telegraph article of 31st March 1999 as: "There was once a British Foreign Secretary (tall, urban, white quiff) who described him [Milosevic] as the only Balkan leader who made any sense".
I believe Hurd's involvement contributed much to the insane misery of the Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo, and so I provide another quote from Mark Stuart's work 'The Public Servant':- "It is perhaps significant that before he left the Foreign Office, he [Hurd] ordered that an official account of the conflict be written, to remain confidential for thirty years. This was partly intended to act as a corrective to the over-emotive accounts which he suspected might be written in the future. But surely it also indicates a high level of lingering doubt as to whether his own policies were right?" The Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr. Muhathir, on receiving the Prime Minster, John Major, in September 1993 at an official reception, pointed his finger at him and directly accused him of being responsible for the slaughter of the Muslims in Bosnia. Major became angry and wanted to leave the reception, but the British Ambassador persuaded him to stay.
The Bosnian Muslims consulted Dr. Zaki Badawi, the eminent Muslim scholar and were advised by him not to declare 'independence' in order to avoid being massacred, on the grounds that no-one would come to their aid. Why not? We come back to the 'attitude problem' shown towards the Muslims of Bosnia - Muslims, many of whom drank alcohol, ate pork and barely followed the tenets of Islam! But nevertheless, who were Muslims in name and to some extent were practising Muslims.
Muslims who the Serbs and Croats had lived with, married and intermingled with for centuries before and who all of a sudden were 'the Muslim fanatic, enemy'. Milosevic and Tudman had been Communist Party leaders in the former Yugoslavia, but after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, these two undemocratic dictators, were both free to indulge their natural instincts of ultra-nationalist fascism in order to stay in power. Communism was on the way out. But tell the people you rule that they have suffered horrendous injustices at the hands of the Muslim 'fanatics' in centuries gone by and couple this with reintroducing and considerably magnifying, as the case may be, Serb grievances against Croat and Croat grievances against Serb, particularly from World War Two, and the people rise up to support the leader and keep him in power. The unarmed Muslims were caught in the middle; the Serbs and Croats attacked them from all sides, the Bosnians unable to defend themselves.
They didn't even want outside help, only the right to be given heavy weapons to defend themselves. But no - the fear of the Muslim 'fanatic' pervaded all thought of the Clinton administration and Major government. Thoughts which were immune to the Serb strategy of ethnic cleansing based on the 'ethic' of rape warfare devised by Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic and joyfully practised by the rank and file of the Serb army. What a way for the Serbs to take revenge for the atrocities committed on them by Hitler during the Second World War! How sick in logic! Beverly Allen, the American lecturer from Syracuse University, in her book 'Rape Warfare - the Hidden Genocide in Bosnia Herzogovina and Croatia', relates the words of a Zagreb psychiatrist describing the condition of the non-Serb women who survived genocidal rape:- "Another common trauma, she said, is the damage done to their throats! They have been strangling for weeks and months on end as a result of having repeatedly been forced to swallow vast amounts of urine and sperm".
The 'Christian' Orthodox Serbs, prompted by Milosevic's hunger for power, propagated 'the fact' that the Muslims are 'not like us'. 'Christian' Europe pondered and prevaricated. The truth was ignored on the altar of prejudice. Muslims believe in the same God of the Christians; Muslims revere Jesus. Why, the Christian King of Abyssinia gave refuge to the Prophet Mohammed and his followers when they faced persecution at the hands of the pagan Quyresh of Mecca. The Muslims protected the Jews when 'Christian' Europe was persecuting them in centuries past. But nevertheless, still the Muslims were labelled with the lie of the Serb propaganda drive, a tool later at work in Kosovo. The 'Christianity' of the Orthodox Serbs was of a type every bit as evil as the 'Christianity' of the Maronite Christians of Lebanon whose Phalange Militia butchered the Palestinian innocents of the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982.
The complicity of the Serb Orthodox Church was very well illustrated by the Serb journalist, Gojko Beric, whose superb book 'Letters to the Celestial Serbs' published in English in 2002 I came across, ironically, at Beirut Airport in June 2003, after visiting the Sabra and Chatila camps.
Beric's work is unique - it is written by an honourable Serb, employed by the Sarajevo newspaper Oslobodenje. He wrote:- "I hated Karadžic and the Serb fascist rabble more than my Bosniak [Bosnian Muslims] and Croat neighbours would ever imagine, much more than they themselves hated them". His condemnation of the Serb and Croat peoples is absolute and his book makes essential reading.
I make no apologies at all for including extracts from 'Letters to the Celestial Serbs' in the following pages as without them the picture I want to paint on the Muslim disaster will not be complete.
On the Christian aspect of the war Beric makes the following points (written in April 1997):-
Regarding Pope John Paul II's visit to Sarajevo in 1997, 'It is natural that the Pope's visit should arouse greatest emotion among the war-depleted Bosnian Croats, while the Croats of western Herzegovina are torn between fanatical love for the Holy Father and - which is irreconcilable with true religious belief - unconcealed hatred of the Bosniaks. To the Serbs in Republica Srpska, who are living in self-imposed isolation and economic and social misery the Pope's visit means nothing. Contempt for the Vatican is one of the constants in their favourite conspiracy theory'.
* * *
' Unprecedented hatred found expression in the destruction of places of worship and the obliteration of entire graveyards, most of them Muslim. There is not a single mosque left now in Republica Srpska, and barely any in the areas under Croat control. Eye witnesses claim that those who razed the mosques with the greatest ferocity were soldiers wearing Orthodox or Catholic symbols and invoking God'. [A similar practise to the Christian Phalange killers of the Palestinian Muslim civilians in the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila in 1982].
'Not only did Patriarch Pavle not once convincingly condemn Serb atrocities in Bosnia, he openly took Karadžic's part. He passed over in silence the slaughter of Bosniaks in Zvornik, Bijeljina, Visegrad and Foca, the death of eleven thousand civilians and children in Sarajevo, and the existence of Serb-run concentration camps. He did not react to the ethnic cleansing of entire regions that had belonged to the Bosniaks and Croats, and was disappointingly restrained in referring to destroyed mosques, even those of the greatest historical and cultural value. And what was the Patriarch's message to the enemies of the Serbs? "May the Lord bestow repentance upon them, and shed light on their minds and hearts", said the Patriarch. But who should repent on account of the two hundred thousand killed and butchered Bosniaks? They themselves, presumably. Nor did the Catholic Church gain any moral credit for the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina; it would be truer to say that it lost moral credit. Its condemnation of the atrocities against Croats was loud and specific but Croat malefactors were referred to in the pulpit only sporadically and allusively in the context of sermons on the general principles of Christianity'.
* * *
"The major victim among the three confessional communities in Bosnia was the Islamic Community. This has enabled hojjas and imams to take upon themselves the leading role in the homogenisation of the Bosniaks. Taken unawares by the aggression, with Serb knives at their throats, the Bosniaks saw their only salvation in turning en masse to religion".
* * *
In March 1999 Beric continued his theme in his chapter 'The Patriarch's Travels':
'So far as I have heard, the Patriarch has never even made any reference to the twenty or thirty thousand Orthodox [Serbs] who remained in Sarajevo during the War, and who suffered and were killed alongside their Muslim neighbours. Perhaps this is because the Patriarch regards them as apostates, traitors to their faith, who should pay the penalty like any other apostate. I have reached this conclusion from the fact that the only official figure of the church in Sarajevo during the War was the ascetic monk Avakum Rosic. Do you remember this unfortunate fellow? He looked twenty years older than he was, and when journalists used to ask him for his views on the shelling of Sarajevo, he always had the same answer: "God sees all and knows all!"
'I don't know if Patriarch Pavle will ever come to Sarajevo. Perhaps he lacks the moral fibre for such a gesture and is too old to be able to find it. He has never explicitly condemned Serb atrocities against this city and its population, although he has had countless opportunities. I noted in November 1997, the Patriarch blessed and signed a Declaration calling for the Hague Tribunal proceedings against Radovan Karadžic to be lifted. This is too many sins for one Patriarch'.
'And this is why I think that the Patriarch's duty before he joins God, is to come in contrition to Sarajevo'.
* * *
Beric, in effect, subscribes wholesale mental illness to the Serb and Croat populations as a whole and for this aspect I quote the following extracts:-
'The Bosniaks were appalled and bewildered by the brutality which the Serbs unleashed against them, the more so since both demographically and maritally the Bosniaks and Serbs were more intermixed than with the Croats. That brutality was to remain a deep and painfully mystery to them ….'
't is easy to say now that everyone in Bosnia is vicious because they all hate each other equally. But if you set fire to someone's house, butcher his family and rape his wife, the least you can expect from the poor fellow is that he will hate you'.
'Ethnic cleansing, concentration camps with thousands of wretched inmates, mass killings of civilians and children, women raped in their thousands, robbery, plunder, arson - these were the planned objectives of this war. Wasn't this facism? I know that historians don't think so. They can wait years before formulating their judgement on something. I couldn't wait, for both moral and professional reasons. I know that every historian will say that the use of historical analogy is extremely problematic. I have already read views such as this: "If Miloševic is a new Hitler, then you must show us the evidence, in the form of his racist laws and camps with gas chambers; you must point to his Himmler and his Eichmann! That's their affair, which puts no obligation on me. And anyway, Hitler didn't sign any kind of decree on the "final solution" to the Jewish question, yet he killed six million Jews. A similar fate was intended for the Bosniaks [Muslims] in this war.
As a human being and a direct witness of these events I have just one word for the scoundrels who committed the evil deeds in this region: fascists!'
* * *
'And why do the Serbs not want to live with the Bosniaks and Croats? To put it briefly: because there are many malefactors among the Serbs. It would be most accurate nowadays to compare the Bosnian Serbs with a hit-and-run driver who has caused a regular massacre in the road, and then cowardly turns tail and runs from the scene of the accident, afraid of witnesses and the punishment he deserves. That is what it's about'.
'Thanks to Miloševic and Tudman, this country will never again be what it used to be. People who for centuries lived together, though they belonged to different religions and nations will never again be brothers. At school their children are already being taught a subject called hatred. Enemies are distributed in equal measure throughout the new school textbooks, so that each of the three peoples is the enemy in the eyes of the others. There will be no shortage of hatred for the next fifty years.'
'Geography, too, has been changed to a certain extent: for thousands of displaced Bosnians and Herzegovinians, their native towns have become unattainably foreign.'
'Given that no sentence of the courts could eliminate this damage, nor alter its nature and extent, the fate of those who bear the principal guilt has become relevant only from the point of view of moral catharsis.'
* * *
'Six years ago, during the siege of Sarajevo, I wrote that Miloševic was merely the cap on the head of the Serb mentality. If the head doesn't want a new cap, there is nothing that can be done about it. Since then Miloševic has won an easy victory over the Serbs at the polls another four or five times. Although he has become officially the gravedigger of the Serbian people, they are still chanting "Slo-bo, slo-bodo [freedom], showing a degree of faith in him that even the Nazis did not accord to Hitler. A prisoner who shouted this kind of paeon to his gaoler would be sent to a mental hospital. But how can one cure almost an entire nation of this bizarre mental illness? ……'
'As long as the gadget known as television is at the service of the Greater Serbia idea, the mental hygiene of the Serbs will remain at 19th century levels. But even if Miloševic should leave the scene, I don't see who will liberate the Serbs from their centuries-old mythological captivity, since they feel so comfortable in it.'
* * *
When Tudman was on his death-bed in December 1999 Beric wrote:-
'I don't believe the Croats are less nationalist than the Serbs, nor that they care much about real democracy, which implies above all respect for human rights and freedoms. Like the Serbs, they are living in a morass of xenophobia and hatred. So far as that's concerned, the Croats would have gone on voting for Tudman as President for as long as he wanted. If they're not grieving for him as much as expected, that's because he has reduced them to the level of beggars'.
On the role played by the international community Beric is spot on:-
'The wheels of return sank into the mud right from the start, when the international community entrusted the implementation of the provisions of the Dayton Accord to the very same people who had begun and conducted the war of extermination in Bosnia. This is as if the allies, back in 1945, had entrusted the Gestapo with arranging for the return of Jews to Germany and Central Europe. Closing their eyes to the presence of war criminals and conducting negotiations with them on the reunification of Bosnia - Herzegovina, was a really futile exercise'.
The abysmal French contribution is also condemned by Beric and this is why I personally will never accept that the French were ever truly on the side of the people (Muslims) of Iraq when they furiously protested against the US and British war on Iraq in 2003 on the grounds that the Iraqi people would be the biggest losers.
Writing about the French UN commander General Philippe Morillon's men in Bosnia Beric states:
'The Vice-President of the Bosnian Government Hakija Turajlic, was returning from Sarajevo Airport in a UN armoured personnel carrier when armed Serbs stopped his escort. Colonel Patrice Sartre agreed to open the rear door of the APC, which allowed a Serb gangster to fire an entire clip into the helpless man, who was at that very moment under official UN protection. The French soldiers behaved like cowards, completely beneath the dignity of their profession, without firing a single bullet in reply. On his return to France, Colonel Sartre received the Légion d'honneur! By not putting up any resistance against uniformed gangsters he had carried out his duties, in exactly the same way as the UN performed its duties in Bosnia'.
The same cowardice as exhibited by the Dutch battalion at Srebrenica. This fact was confirmed to me by a survivor of the massacre of the Muslims there, one by the name of Emir Suljagic. This tall dignified young man gave a talk to the Bosnian Institute in London on 7th July 2003. He told me afterwards that the Dutch "should have and could have" prevented the atrocity but that their "cultural mentality" made them back off. Adam LeBor in his biography entitled 'Miloševic', states:- 'Without air support or proper reinforcements Dutchbat certainly could not have held off General Mladic's men for long. However, the question remains if Dutchbat had resisted would General Mladic have been prepared to kill 110 UN soldiers?'
LeBor also importantly confirms:- 'The US certainly knew about the Serbs preparations to take Srebrenica: U-2 spy planes were patrolling the area, and a stream of satellite intelligence was also being fed back to Washington'. …. 'Certainly if there was some kind of diplomatic understanding between the West and Belgrade over Srebrenica, it went horribly wrong over the fate of the inhabitants. … One cause of Mladic's hunger for a blood meze [Arabic word for a long feast of many small dishes] was that [Muslim] soldiers operating out of Srebrenica had attacked his home village of Visnice, and burnt down its houses. The suicide of Mladic's daughter Ana, a medical student in her early twenties, had certainly hardened his heart. Encouraged by their commander, the Bosnian Serbs soldiers descended into a frenzy of blood lust'.
The poison of Russian hatred even warped the thinking of none other than Alexander Solzhenitzyn. Beric writes of him thus:-
'A letter by Alexander Solzhenitzyn, sent from Moscow of 8 April 1999 and headed 'Law of the Jungle', has seen the light of day in the Paris Figaro. "After flouting the United Nations and trampling on the UN Charter, before the eyes of the world and for the coming century NATO has proclaimed the old law of the jungle: might is right. Surpass in violence the opponent you condemn, a hundred times over if your technology permits. And they expect us to live in this world in the future! Before the very eyes of the world the destruction of a wonderful European country is taking place, and civilized governments are applauding. As people leave their shelters in desperation to form human chains, risking their lives to save the bridges over the Danube, is this not worthy of the heroic deeds of Antiquity? I cannot see what there is to prevent Clinton, Blair and Solana from exterminating them with fire and flood down to the very last man".
Beric continues:-
'Solzhenitzyn sees things this way, but Günter Grass and certain other European writers see it quite differently. The author of Gulag expresses profound disagreement with the bombing of Serbia, while the author of Tin Drum regards it as essential.'
'I would not particularly reproach Solzhenitzyn with rebelling against violence and defending a "wonderful European country" if he had done the same seven years ago, when the regime of that ' wonderful European country" - with the selfless support of Solzhenitzyn's Serb fellow writers - launched a war against multi-ethnic Bosnia-Herzegovina. At that time Solzhenitzyn said nothing, and never condemned the conversion of cosmopolitan Sarajevo into the largest concentration camp in Europe since the Second World War, though he had himself been a camp inmate and the victim of violence'.
* * *
Once more, I can only see hatred of Muslims at the core of the Russian policy in Chechnya. How the Russians are being made to pay for their bloody-mindedness, by way of the Chechen suicide bombers. Let us not forget that Cherie Blair wife of the British Prime Minister not so long ago, in the presence of Queen Rania of Jordan on her visit to London, sympathised with the desperate acts of the Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel, because they have "no hope".
* * *
Before she was indicted to the Hague, Biljana Plavšic was for a short time the president of Republika Srpska. A woman of whom Beric writes:'The Bosniaks will remember her for the kisses she showered upon Željko Ražnatovic Arkan [the Serb warlord] after the massacre and 'liberation' of Bijeljina, where the streets were still littered with the corpses of the civilians who had just been killed'. Plavšic stated to the Belgrade newspaper Duga: "I always kiss heroes". Beric continues: 'In Karadžic's HQ Plavšic was reputed to be the major advocate of ethnic cleansing and expulsion of the non-Serb population. "She is even more evil than Krajisnik", said Carl Bildt'.
'Of course, even a devil with horns, tail and hoofs is not as black as he seems. Proclaiming herself a nationalist who was not a thief, and who was ready to take on like a man criminals and corrupt politicians, Plavšic earned several plus points in the West. She succeeded in dismissing the intractable General Mladic, and ended up being welcomed with full state honours by France's President Jacques Chirac, on the steps of the Élysée palace. Did poor Jacques really not know he was kissing the hand of a mass killer?'
* * *
Significantly for me Beric mentions George Orwell in one of his Celestial letters written in July 2000. Its importance lies in the way the nationalism spoken of can apply anywhere - even to Norway and their intense dislike for Muslims:
'In his essay 'Notes of Nationalism', George Orwell remarks on a common characteristic of all nationalists: an inclination for the individual to identify himself with a single action, setting it above good and evil, and recognising no other duty except to represent its interests. A nationalist not only fails to condemn atrocities committed by his side, but is possessed of an exceptional capacity not even to hear anything about them. As an example of this ability Orwell cites the behaviour of the English during the Second World War. For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. And those who are loudest in denouncing the German concentration camps are quite often unaware ….. that there are also concentration camps in Russia. Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English Russophiles. Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own anti-Semitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness ….'
As for Izetbegovic, Beric states:-
'The fall of communism created in him the illusion that it was possible to put an equals sign between life in Bosnia and his religious political philosophy. But he failed to see what was most important: that the freedom that had been seized was to be short-lived, and that war was already looming.
Izetbegovic was not for the dissolution of Yugoslavia, nor did he want war. He rejected the very possibility, even when it had become inevitable.
"You can sleep peacefully, there won't be war", he assured his citizens on television, but at the same time he wasn't ready to sacrifice the sovereignty of the country for the sake of peace. When he woke up one morning it was war, right there outside his window and the windows of the rest of us'.
'His critics among the Bosniak intellectual and political elite now claim that war was not inevitable. But if we have agreed that Bosnia-Herzegovina was the victim of an aggression preceded by political and military plans drawn up in Belgrade, I fail to see how war could have been avoided in 1992. A full year earlier Miloševic and Tudman had reached agreement in Karadordevo on the partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Bosniaks were not the ones who could have prevented the war. They could have remained in Miloševic's Yugoslavia under a fascist regime, but for them that would have been the equivalent of going to hell. And even in that case, part of the country, the part over which Tudman claimed rights, would have disappeared for good.'
'Izetbegovic had difficulty coping with the winds of war. He behaved like the captain of a ship on stormy seas, who saw hope coming from heaven rather than the helmsman's skill. True to his ideological and religious convictions, he was reluctant to organise a civil resistance to the fascism by which the country was being attached from without and within. He was badly affected too, by the hypocritical attitude of the West to the genocide against the Bosniak people, which reinforced him in his conviction that the Bosnian Muslims, albeit in the heart of Europe, belonged to another world'.
* * *
I felt tremendously sorry for Izetbegovic, who passed away on 19th October 2003 aged 78. I see a bit of myself in him and I hope God blesses him in the next life. Just imagine what it must have been like for Izetbegovic to have to sit at the same table with Miloševic and Tudman at the Dayton Peace Accords, knowing just how evil his adversaries were; overwhelmingly conscious of the affront to decency that the Americans had imposed on him by forcing him to negotiate in person with two devils. No wonder Izetbegovic said he was depressed and always looked sullen at these talks, hardly able to look his enemies in the face. He could never have imagined that Miloševic would later be a prisoner in the Hague, so hypocritical was Bill Clinton's policy at Dayton. At least Izetbegovic lived to see Miloševic arraigned before The Hague War Crimes Tribunal secure in the knowledge that the Serb madman will almost certainly spend the rest of his life in prison before he gets hellfire in the next life. And Izetbegovic outlived Tudman (who died in December 1999) knowing that Tudman too will probably see hellfire on Judgment Day.
Zaki Badawi, mentioned earlier by me in this book, told me that Izetbegovic should have let Bosnia remain a part of Yugoslavia under the authority of Miloševic, which he advised Izetbegovic to do.
Badawi thought that this would have limited the aggression against the Muslims to much lower levels than to the disastrous levels that Badawi predicted, if the Muslims instead declared independence. Badawi thought that Miloševic could live with the Muslims as part of Yugoslavia but would never accept an independent 'Muslim' state next door. However when I spoke to Noel Malcolm, author and Balkan expert, at the October 2003 Bosnian Institute meeting he was much more pessimistic and told me he thought even without an independent Bosnia, Miloševic would still have pursued his policy of ethnic cleansing against the Muslims.
Vojislav Koštunica is now President of Serbia and is seen by Beric as just a continuation of the evil that Miloševic, his predecessor, represented:-
'Koštunica himself, meanwhile, is controversial too. His visit to Pale has not been forgotten, nor his consistent support for the policies of the war criminal, Radovan Karadžic, Miloševic's key man in the war to create Greater Serbia. Koštunica has never condemned the siege and shelling of Sarajevo, nor has he found it necessary to comment on the mass war crimes committed by the Serbs in Bosnia……'
'Miloševic has been defeated but Serbia remains the greatest Balkan sanctuary for thousands of the war criminals who killed, raped and looted their way through Croatia and Bosnia'.
* * *
Please let me present to you the report I sent to the Bosnian Embassy in London on 28th November 1996 after attending a speech by the former Norwegian Foreign Minister and colleague of David Owen, Thorvald Stoltenberg:-
28th November 1996
Dear Mr. Karabdic,
Report on Talk by Thorvald Stoltenberg at Norway House at 7 pm, Wednesday 27th November 1996
Mr. Stoltenberg who I shall refer to as "TS" in the rest of this letter told the audience that he lived with his family in the former Yugoslavia in the 1960's and said that he himself would not have predicted at all that by the 1990s war would have broken out. TS blamed the outbreak of the war on the recognition by the EU of Croatia as a separate state and TS praised Lord Carrington for his foresight in predicting that the break up of Yugoslavia in this way would lead to war.
TS also blamed the war on "historical differences" between the various factions and was proud to quote the example of a delegation of American Jews that visited him and told him that he, TS, was wrong to refer to the centuries of history for the Serbs as being a relevant factor in the 1990s conflict but should look only at the facts of the matter since 1991. TS replied that there was no greater supporter of Israel than himself and that Jews themselves always carried their history with them as did the Serbs and that they, the American Jews, should recognise that the Serbs were exactly the same as the Jews. TS then said that the Jewish Delegation apologised to him and recognised that the Bosnian war was based on the grievances that the Serbs had in their past history going back centuries.
TS said that when he met Izetbegovic, Karadzic, Milosevic and Tudman he promised all of them that he would do his very best to be fair and impartial, not in the sense of being impartial to the atrocities, which he condemned, but impartial in the negotiations towards an overall settlement. TS also made reference to the fact that each of the aforementioned leaders criticised him for not being impartial towards the other leaders in turn. That when negotiations were in progress over which villages were to be included in the smaller Bosnian state the 1991 census was looked at and where the Muslims were found to be in a majority of a particular village the Serbs countered by arguing that the Ustashe had during the war got rid of many Serbs who at the time formed the majority of the village and thus TS must consider making the village a Serbian village and to stay outside the new Bosnia. Regarding the bombing of the Serbs TS said to me after he had finished his speech "You know better than I do that this was ineffective and would be useless because of the UN hostages that were taken by the Serbs." I replied that the whole policy of the UN was flawed in that it was easily predictable that the UN soldiers would make easy targets for hostage taking and that the wrong approach was adopted from day one in that the humanitarian effort was bound to be a disaster without the collateral efforts of strong military action against the Serbs.
I told him that the Serbs must have thanked God for the policy of the UN in putting in their under-equipped soldiers who were just easy targets for the Serbs. I remarked also that TS mentioned nothing about the arms embargo against the Muslims in his speech. TS replied that he would mention it now to me, and told me that the war would have gone on for ever if both sides were being continually supplied with arms, and besides he said that arms were getting through to the Muslims in any case. I was beginning to upset the audience by this time because their guest, TS was certainly showing his disquiet in the answers that he gave me and indeed at one stage asked (sarcastically) if I would like to give a talk myself.
I replied that from the start the Muslims had practically no arms to defend themselves properly and indeed had surrendered their arms earlier to the JNA who had redistributed them to the Bosnian Serbs. I said that the Bosnian state based its existence on a multi-religious and multi-ethnic format and it certainly was not the case that the Bosnian Muslims were Islamic fanatics and cruel fundamentalists, as portrayed by some Western opinions. TS definitely gave the wrong impression to the audience about the Muslims, also for example by emphasising the request of a Muslim General to a Bosnian Serb General for the latter to supply the Muslims with ammunition and arms to attack the Croats in exchange for money to which the Bosnian Serb General replied that the Bosnian Serbs would attack the Croats in return for payment by the Muslims, to which the Muslim General said okay.
TS said that he himself felt the prospects for continued peace were good because the Bosnians were sick of war and I replied to him, that of course they were sick of war because they hardly stood a chance in the first place and if they had been given arms to defend themselves then they would have done much better. TS said that many people did not believe that there were good prospects for peace but he said that the last elections in Bosnia were not free and fair and that the elections in 1998 had to be free and fair for the chance of a proper peace. On the more positive side, TS said that Karadzic's version of the facts were quite out of touch with reality and that he thought Karadzic who each night slept in a different bed (to avoid assassination I suppose) should give himself up voluntarily to the Hague War Crimes Tribunal and face the music with his able American Lawyers to defend him. TS said that Karadzic knew that for the rest of his life he would be hunted and TS said the same applied to Mladic but TS said that he didn't think trying to capture Mladic was worth "losing the life of one EU soldier".
TS said he got very angry with people who criticised the European soldiers in the UN force for not being braver because he said they were doing a fantastic job already. TS said that the shelling of Sarajevo was "totally unacceptable" and also mentioned the stance of Carl Bildt who asked for the indictment of Tudman to the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague for ordering his Croat forces to shell Serb villages. TS said that this request from Bildt annoyed the rest of the world and nearly cost Bildt his job as EU Negotiator. TS heavily criticised the USA and Clinton for speaking but doing nothing during the height of the crisis by not putting in any of their own ground troops which omission contributed most dramatically to the prolongation of the crisis.
TS also mentioned Boutros-Boutros Ghali's request for 34,000 troops to be put into the "safe areas" whereas only a small proportion of this amount was offered by the contributing states. Overall TS was talking to a largely ill-informed and an ignorant audience composed of mostly middle and upper-class Norwegian and English people who form the core of the Anglo-Norwegian Society. Their reaction to my questions to TS and the questions they themselves asked him confirmed my opinion of the audience's basic ignorance of the facts of the whole situation. At the end of the lecture TS moved to shake my hand and said to me "I was glad of your intervention" but I thought to myself how could he be glad when he didn't like what I had to say. I gave him a copy of Peter Maass' book on Bosnia - "Love They Neighbour - A Story of War".
Peter Maass is a Jew - a correspondent for the Washington Post and a complete and total friend of the Muslims of Bosnia.
Yours sincerely,
* * *
Noel Malcolm in his book 'Bosnia - A Short History' describes the former Norwegian Foreign Minister's peace plan with Lord Owen, which would have given the Serbs 53 per cent of the Bosnian territory, the Croats 17 per cent and the Muslims 30 per cent, as follows:- 'However, the fact that the Owen-Stoltenberg plan had conceded the basic principle of rewarding aggression, together with the fact that the international negotiators seemed willing to make more and more concessions and alterations to satisfy Serb demands ensured that the Serb leadership would not regard these proposals as a final settlement either'. Noel Malcolm reports on Lord Owen's appointment (as replacement for Lord Carrington) as EU negotiator whereupon he then "immediately dropped his support for threats of military action [against the Serbs] and began treating the Serbs as an equal party in the negotiations with equally valid claims". Owen and Stoltenberg were just two of the well-oiled cogs in the big (fait accompli) 'We can't help the Muslims' machine.
And to think Stoltenberg tried to hoodwink the Jewish delegation into believing the Serbs had a right to rely on their history when they had a policy of genocidal rape against Muslim women to further the 'justice of their cause'. Fuck the past history of the Serbs if that's what they proceed to do in the 90's. As for the help of Europe - well the British people were far, far wiser than John Major and Douglas Hurd. The 'common man' could see the injustice of it all - but not the PM and his Foreign Secretary. The Dutch people and their government were lone voices in Europe calling for early and direct punishment of the Serbs, although to their eternal shame the Dutch soldiers, as former B.B.C journalist and later Member of Parliament Martin Bell also believes, betrayed their steadfastness by their cowardice in letting the Serb army in, to "lead away" and then execute the Muslims of Srebrenica.
The various charities in the countries of Western Europe did their bit and many citizens of those countries gave money - for the Muslims to be fed, then shot. But as for the collective will necessary in Europe's governments for decisive early action, it just wasn't there because of that often denied, but in fact fully operational 'attitude' towards the Muslims. Certain fanatical elements in the Middle East had given many people in the West the idea that all Muslims were capable at the touch of a button of extremist and brutal behaviour. But to allow this myth to justify not helping the Muslims of Bosnia betrayed Western governmental ignorance, self-delusion, self-interest and utter cowardice.
There was no oil in Bosnia and certainly the Serb Army was far superior to the Iraqi Army in the Gulf War and may have given the U.S. Army more of a fight. The Americans were scared, using as an excuse their Vietnam complex. Say the Muslims of Bosnia were not Muslims at all, but Jews? Would America then have stood by? Even Israel wanted to help the Muslims of Bosnia at one stage. Ironically, in general the 'Islamic' governments of the world did little to help their 'brothers' in Bosnia, which reflected a 'couldn't care less' attitude by those governments (but not, I stress, their people) towards human rights in Bosnia.
The point is that the UN and NATO were supposed to lead the fight against genocide and oppression. The Holocaust situation that was beginning to develop for the Bosnian Muslims was one of those events that the world would 'never let happen again' so we were told. To their eternal credit, Margaret Thatcher, the ex-Prime Minister, and Paddy Ashdown, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, had called for the hounding of the Serbs from day one. Clare Short of the Labour Opposition Party went on television in 1995 to ask that the Serbs be bombed. But these were lone voices, out of power - their pleas falling on deaf ears.
John Major and Douglas Hurd, in their overwhelming arrogance, thought they knew better and were not opposed at all by the Labour leadership who had no real appreciation of the situation in Bosnia 'because it was too complex to understand by outsiders'. This view was confirmed to me in 1998 by the Labour MP Keith Darvill. I had attended a Labour Lawyers meeting on 'Human Rights in Europe' at the House of Commons in 1995, chaired by John Wadham of Liberty. Would you believe that not a soul at the talk mentioned human rights in Bosnia, except me? When I addressed Dougie Henderson MP, 'the fittest man in the Commons' over the Bosnia debacle and asked what the Labour Party would have done had it been in power, Henderson was lost for words.
He didn't have a clue and just said we should look forward now and not look back to the past. It came as a great surprise to me, after Labour won the 1997 election, to see this same Dougie Henderson pictured in an Islamic weekly magazine voicing his support for the Muslim community of Britain in their fight for greater social justice. Maybe by then he'd read the book by Peter Maass - 'Love Thy Neighbour' that I gave him as he walked out of our meeting to register his vote in the House. Henderson went on to become the Armed Forces Minister in the Labour Government during the Kosovo crisis in 1999. David Mellor, Paddy Ashdown, the Saudi Ambassador and the Eastern Adriatic Department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, on behalf of Robin Cook, replied to my letters on the subject of Bosnia, after the Dayton Peace accords. But it was all academic.
The damage had been done and really, little else mattered. So very easily it could have been prevented, yet because of that 'attitude', disaster was almost inevitable without Margaret Thatcher leading the rest of Europe in her own inimitable way. She attacked the Falklands against the advice of many and see what she brought:- democracy for Argentina. Without Thatcher, the Bosnians had had it. Brave individuals (like Thatcher) can prevent catastrophe. Again, quoting from Peter Maass' book:- 'Margaret Thatcher wrote 'Feeding or evacuating the victims rather than helping them resist aggression makes us accomplices as much as good Samaritans'. She also said, "I am ashamed of the European Community, for this is happening in the heart of Europe. It is within Europe's sphere of influence. It should be within Europe's sphere of conscience. There is no conscience".' The most basic function of the European Union is to prevent just the kind of calamity that befell the Bosnians, but the European governments couldn't or wouldn't agree on a damn thing and the Bosnian Serbs and Serbian Serbs would have been raising toasts to European democracy every night of the conflict. With all the sophisticated weaponry at their disposal, the Europeans cocked-up big time with their amateurish humanitarian programme. Mrs. Thatcher compared the west's inaction as "being a little like an accomplice to slaughter". Of course, it was the governments of Europe that turned cowardly and I think this situation was a defining moment in the European morality: the Muslims didn't matter enough.
The European governments knew the slaughter would continue yet did nothing to intervene militarily; intervention was a non-starter, ruled out altogether. As for humanitarian aid, Mark Stuart in 'The Public Servant' says:- 'But there are real doubts whether the humanitarian effort actually achieved anything. Rosilyn Higgins, an expert on the UN, believes that it was a mistake to establish a UN operation dedicated to the provision of humanitarian aid without a ceasefire. By choosing not to stop the violence via a military intervention force, she believes that the UN prolonged the suffering. . Larry Hollingworth, then the co-ordinator UN convoys, claimed that only one fifth of aid was getting through, whereas Hurd put the figure at nearly half.' The British Army was used and abused by its government but regrettably even some of the British Generals took the piss out of the Muslims.
Suffice it to say that the British soldier had to obey orders in the First World War by going over the top to die almost immediately and the British soldier today is also being ignored by its government over Gulf War Syndrome. Thanks indeed. Times may have changed since World War One but that same pig-headedness remains to varying degrees in the politicians and generals of today who give the orders. Why have an air force if it's not used? Why join the army if you're not prepared to die? The appeasement of Milosevic at the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995 allowed the nightmare to continue for the Muslims in Kosovo in 1999.Again, Clinton was not prepared to sacrifice the life of one U.S. soldier to prevent the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians.
This message to Milosevic caused the acceleration of the purge of the Muslims which eventually came to a halt because of the bombing of Serbia. I repeat those words: "the bombing of Serbia", for that is what should have happened in 1992. Unfortunately, the Americans have never truly cared for the suffering of others, even with their obvious military ability to help out. For three years, from 1939 to 1941, they let Europe and the British face the Germans alone and only declared war on Japan (but not Germany) after Pearl Harbour was bombed. I believe that but for the Jewish Holocaust lobby in America, Americans in general would not back Israel. If there had been a Muslim lobby of similar stature in the USA, the Bosnia and Kosovo exterminations would not have taken place. How ironic that on September 11th 2001, America experienced the horror of totally unbearable suffering through the attacks on New York and Washington. A taste of Bosnia came its way.
The celebrated American writer, commentator and professed atheist, Edward W. Said, explained much, in his book 'Covering Islam' published in 1997:-
'For most of the Middle Ages and during the early part of the Renaissance in Europe, Islam was believed to be a demonic religion of apostasy, blasphemy and obscurity. It did not seem to matter that Muslims considered Mohammed a prophet and not a god; what mattered to Christians was that Mohammed was a false prophet, a sower of discord, a sensualist, a hypocrite, an agent of the devil.
Nor was this view of Mohammed strictly a doctrinal one. Real events in the real world made of Islam a considerable political force. For hundreds of years, great Islamic armies and navies threatened Europe, destroyed its outposts, colonised its domains. It was as if a younger, more virile and energetic version of Christianity had arisen in the East, equipped itself with the learning of the ancient Greeks, invigorated itself with a simple, fearless and warlike creed and set about destroying Christianity. Even when the world of Islam entered a period of decline and Europe a period of ascendancy, fear of 'Mohammedanism' persisted. Closer to Europe than any of the other non-Christian religions, the Islamic world by its very adjacency evoked memories of its encroachments on Europe, and always, of its latent power again and again to disturb the West. Other great civilisations of the East - India and China among them - could be thought of as defeated and distant and hence not a constant worry.
Only Islam seemed never to have submitted completely to the West, and when, after the dramatic oil-price rises of the early 1970's, the Muslim world seemed once more on the verge of repeating its early conquests, the whole West seemed to shudder. The onset of 'Islamic terrorism' in the 1980's and 1990's has deepened and intensified the shock!'
And so I return to that little corner of North-Western Europe - Norway and its press. Look for it and with some investigation the picture is clear. The big lie is still alive and well, being promoted by certain evil sections of Norwegian society.
Wholesale perversion of the truth was practised by the Nazi press and the Serb and Croat press, and so also by the Norwegian press, with their perverted filth. These mass media campaigns often get their readers to believe them and sometimes the roller-coaster that is created becomes impossible to stop. Serbs and Croats, having been under the yoke of Communism for 50 years, were backward, inward-looking people, immature and uncivilised in their behaviour; easily persuaded by their tyrannical leaders. The Norwegians are from an isolated part of Europe with a small population of just over 4½ million. On close observation, you will find them very insular in their way of thinking and xenophobic. The Serb, Croat and Norwegian peoples have demonstrably shown their anti-Muslim credentials and when I say 'peoples' I mean a sizeable number, for there are always some for whom basic common sense and tolerance prevail.
Other parts of Europe do have strong anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black sections, giving rise to prejudice, religious and social, often on largely economic grounds. France, with its vast Arab and African population saw the rise of the right-wing nationalist, Monsieur Le Pen; Germany with its large Turkish workforce sees the rise of neo-Nazism, and Britain with its older established black West Indian population and newer Asian influx (although Britain is the least intolerant society in Europe towards its immigrants), is in a constant state of tension. However, Norway and the former Yugoslavia did not have poor immigrants in large numbers, causing economic and social strains on the system. No, their problem with these 'strangers' comes more from ideological prejudice, much of it just hype, a lot of it ignorance but nevertheless very harmful, when absorbed by its populace.
John Major's inaction contributed significantly to Balkan immigrants seeking refuge in the UK and Western Europe. These desperate people would have stayed in their homes if the chaos had been stopped in its tracks as it could have been.
Copyright © FREDERICK DELAWARE: 2004 and 2008
OBITUARY