Oh, What An Evil Web ...

UNPROFOR's two principal missions - support for humanitarian assistance and the safe area concept. To succeed in humanitarian operations, the UN had to be seen as impartial. This was made almost impossible by its parallel mandate to deter attacks against the safe areas. The safe areas resolutions were essentially anti-Serb. That may have been proper, given that the Serbs were the worst abusers of human rights inside Bosnia (with the Croats often a close second, but the new mandates of 1993 had changed UNPROFOR's role radically, in effect making the UN the apparent protector of elements of one side in the war. William Shawcross - Deliver Us From Evil - Bosnian Endgame

"I'm news in Sarajevo again" Maj.-Gen.Lewis MacKenzie said, perhaps rather ruefully. "I'm very sensitive to the fact that in Sarajevo today they're reading that MacKenzie said 'Muslims were killing Muslims'." Amazing, what the Internet can do in providing news around the world in a flicker of time. Newspapers in Sarajevo spread the word resulting from his interview with the lawyer defending former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.

"There's more than enough blame to go around for all sides", Maj.-Gen. MacKenzie wanted to add to what has already been published with respect to his statements. And, unequivocally, he would testify, if he were asked, that Mr. Karadzic was indeed guilty of war-time savagery, using heavy artillery against civilian targets. Much of Sarajevo was reduced to rubble by the time his mission there was ended.

And Bosnian Muslims were not sorry to see him depart, since it appeared to be well known that he spread blame almost equally on all combatants. Still, the root of the civil war, as far as Maj.-Gen. MacKenzie was concerned was American interference, in encouraging Bosnia's Muslim leader to break a signed, Bosnian Muslim, Serb and Croat peace agreement in the greater interests of standing behind a Muslim European country, freshly declared.

On February 28 the Serbs struck back. Attack helicopters blasted towns with gun and rocket fire, and policemen in black uniforms dragged people out of their houses and shot them on their doorsteps. Twenty-six were killed. Witnesses said the Ahmeti men over the age of fifteen were separated from the women and children, savagely beaten, and then executed in their courtyard with shotgun blasts to their heads. One had his eyeballs dug out. Journalists who later visited the house reported that the ground was littered with teeth and hair and that a human jawbone hung from a nearby bush. Sebastian Junger - Kosovo's Valley of Death

Maj.-Gen. MacKenzie spoke of the Serbs being the much stronger and equipped military, and the Bosnian Muslims, realizing this, placed their hopes for intervention on international support, without which they would face certain defeat. No strategy therefore, appeared to be too atrocious in support of their ultimate need; international condemnation of the Serbs, and sympathy for the plight of the Muslims.

In a meeting with Muslim leader, President Izetbegovic he recalled the president saying, "'Look, Gen. MacKenzie, I've been told that when I have 10,000 dead, I'll get intervention. How am I doing?', he was asking me every day, sarcastically." President Izetbegovic, while unwilling to reveal the source of the assurances of intervention, claimed that it was a "senior diplomat".

"I arrived in Kosovo two weeks after the massacre, on a frigid March night. For obvious reasons, the Serbs weren't granting entrance visas to journalists, but Herald knew a dirt road border crossing into Montenegro where the guards couldn't have cared less what the Serbs wanted. From Montenegro we could easily cross into Kosovo. ... Guns were coming in over those mountains. Albania was awash with weapons, and the KLA was completely dependent upon help from across the border. The Serb military reportedly had shoot-on-sight orders for anyone in the high peaks, and soldiers regularly ambushed Albanians moving weapons into Kosovo over mountain tracks ... the Serbs have massed a tremendous number of heavy weapons ... far more than needed to stop arms smuggling.... Sebastian Junger

"It wasn't a black or white situation. The Serbs were 60 percent to blame and the Bosnian Muslims 40 percent. To achieve international sympathy there was circumstantial evidence that mortar rounds landing amongst Bosnian Muslim civilians were fired from Bosnian Muslim territory and not from the Bosnian Serb side", explained Maj.-Gen. MacKenzie. No sacrifice of their own, evidently, too great to achieve the greater purpose.

And the Serbs were brutally invested in beating the Bosnian Muslims. So much so that they overlooked the fact that the international community was very curious about what was happening. And then, with media reports instructing that community about just what was occurring, its scale, its ferocious inhumanity, blame was completely heaped on the Serbs. Every time a Serb shell hit a marketplace, the world opinion of Serbs descended.

Throughout 1994, crisis followed crisis. There was the bombing of the Sarajevo marketplace in February, which led to more calls for NATO air strikes and the imposition of a heavy weapons exclusion zone around Sarajevo; prolonged Serb sieges of the safe areas of Gorazde and then Bihac, which resulted in limited NATO air action against the Serbs; the destruction of much of the beautiful medieval town of Mostar in gratuitous shelling, principally by Croats of the Muslim areas (it is worth repeating that Croat conduct in this war was often at least as horrible as that of the Serbs); the tensions with Russia, Serbia's principal backer in the Security Council; and the worsening relationship Between Europe and the United States ... William Shawcross

And then, finally, on February 18, 2008 the Serbian province of Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia with ethnic Albanian leaders promising to treat fairly with Kosovo's Serb minority to establish a multi-ethnic, democratic nation. Serbia was enraged, Russia little less so, but gradually the world recognized the move.

"From today onwards, Kosovo is proud, independent and free" claimed Prime Minister Hashim Thaci as he addressed parliament.

What else? Oh, right. Serbia's parliament has apologized to the Bosnian Muslims for the 1994 Srebrenica massacre. Are Bosnian Muslims appeased? Well, not really, they insist that Belgrade must apologize for having committed the much graver , atrocious crime of genocide. And the Bosnian Serbs, well they are most definitely not at all pleased.

"The parliament of Serbia strongly condemns the crime committed against the Bosnian Muslim population of Srebrenica in July 1994, as determined by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling", read the text.

As for the United States, the world's perennial meddler in the affairs of other states, other countries, regardless of where they are in the world - it's business as usual. Sometimes the business is very good, sometimes it is very, very obnoxiously horrible.