Also, saying that other people committed war crimes in Bosnia surely does not mean that Serb war criminals are any less guilty, does it? It will be neither fair or just, and therefore it will be detrimental to what America should stand for in the world. Richard Holbrooke, the chief U.S. negotiator in 1995, boasted a year later: “We are re-engaged in the world, and Bosnia was the test.” This “we” meant the United States, not “the West” or “the international community.” Indeed, no nation-state started and finished the Bosnian story as a political actor with an unchanged diplomatic personality. Karadzic’s Arrest: Bosnian Myths Rehashed. The spirit of the media frenzy surrounding the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on July 21 is based entirely on the doctrine of non-equivalence inaugurated in 1992: Serbs willed the war, Muslims wanted peace; Serb crimes are bad and justly exaggerated, Muslim crimes are understandable. Thus the war in the Balkans evolved from a Yugoslav disaster and a European inconvenience into a major test of “U.S. The ancestors of the South Slavs arrived in the Balkans in the sixth and seventh centuries. It will also give further credence to the myth of Muslim blameless victimhood, Serb viciousness, and Western indifference, and therefore weaken our resolve in the global struggle euphemistically known as “war on terrorism.” The former is a crime; the latter, a mistake. The Croats followed two months later with the creation of Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica Bosne i Hercegovine—HDZ BiH (Croatian Democratic Union); in reality theirs was but a local subsidiary of the retired YPA General Franjo Tudjman’s HDZ in Zagreb. Also the claims about the establishment of the Islamic state in the way it has been explained is no more than fallacy. The success of the pro-intervention lobby in the media must be seen in the context of strong support for their agitation from parts of the U.S. administration. The decision by Izetbegovic to treat Tudjman’s bid for independence as the cue for Bosnia’s repeat act was fateful: the moment that the SDA made it clear that it would not remain in any Yugoslavia without Croatia, war was inevitable in Bosnia. If we are to learn anything worthwhile about the Bosnian civil war, it is important to move beyond the self-serving myths about genocide that were primarily used to justify an interventionist policy by the United States and its NATO allies. | In medieval Bosnia there were three churches: the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, and a third Christian Church, called the Bosnian Church, which was independent from both the Catholic and the Orthodox worlds. Karadzic headed the party representing the Serbs of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and they wanted, overwhelmingly, to preserve the status quo. The breakthrough was due to the Bosnian Serbs’ acceptance of an independent Bosnia, provided that the Muslims give up their ambition of a centralized, unitary one. The notion of such cooperation was counter-intuitive to the outside observers of the Bosnian scene, but it made perfect sense in the context of the common desire by all three groups to purge the body-politic of the decades-long layers of communist lies and distortions. Nine months earlier, in June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence, a move that triggered off a short war in Slovenia and a sustained conflict in Croatia where the Serbs refused to accept Tudjman’s fait accompli. In the same vein the Protestant Ulstermen demanded – and were given – the right to stay apart from united Ireland when the nationalists in Dublin opted for secession in 1921. To this day, many accounts of the Bosnian conflict cite the figure of 250,000 (or sometimes even 300,000) fatalities —with the implication that the vast majority of victims were Muslim civilians. When Izetbegovic said that he did not like the Lisbon agreement, Zimmerrmann encouraged him to renege. That study concluded that the number of deaths was 104,732, and that only about 40 percent were civilians—a total that included Serb and Croat as well as Muslim civilians. This was a political program par excellence that non-Islamic groups in Bosnia could not accept; for the Serbs “it confirmed their suspicions that Izetbegović wished to transform Bosnia-Herzegovina into an Islamic state.” The author’s contempt for Western values is evident in his dismissal of the Kemalist tradition: “Turkey as an Islamic country used to rule the world. By the fourteenth century, one of those Turkic tribes, the Ottomans, gained ascendancy in Anatolia and began constructing a major world empire. Of several peace plans offered or mediated by the Europeans, Karadzic was under particular pressure—especially from Milosevic in Belgrade—to accept the Vance-Owen Plan (May 1993) that would have divided Bosnia into ten “cantons.” He initialled its acceptance, but subsequently it was rejected by the Republika Srpska national assembly.
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