GENOCIDE ALL AROUND
by: Mike Sweet
The Hawk Eye (Burlington, Iowa)
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News
March 7, 2010 Sunday
Mar. 7–One of the world’s true monsters was back on stage last week.
Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb political leader who waged
a genocidal war on Bosnia’s Muslims and Croatians in the 1990s,
denied he did anything wrong as his trial resumed before the U.N.’s
International Criminal Tribunal in Holland. The trial has been on
hiatus for months to let the former psychiatrist, who possesses the
conceit to be his own lawyer, prepare his own defense.
Karadzic told the court the 1992-95 breakup of Yugoslavia into six
countries was a "just and holy" war for the Orthodox Christian Serbs
determined to create a Serbian empire. He blamed Muslims for starting
the war. But it was the Serbs who wouldn’t let go of the past and
accept a future in which they were not dictators or mass murderers.
Neither of Karadzic’s assertions is true. Truth is putty to evil
men like him, his still-at-large co-conspirator Gen. Ratko Mladic,
and their mentor in the genocide business, Serbian President Slobodan
Milosevic. Milosevic died in a U.N. prison before his trial ended.
Decent people everywhere believe justice will be served when Karadzic
and Mladic follow Milosevic’s example.
Mladic unfortunately is still free under the protection of powerful
Serbs who do not find it contemptible to butcher unarmed people.
Karadzic was arrested only two years ago. He had been on the run 14
years, living the good life, protected by Serb officials and ordinary
people whose broken moral compass points to him as a national hero,
not a mass murderer.
Karadzic faces 11 charges, including two counts of genocide. One of
the latter charges stems from ordering the 44-month siege of Sarajevo
starting in 1992. Some 12,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed
by Serb snipers and artillery firing from the mountains surrounding
the beautiful city that had hosted the 1984 winter Olympics. The world
that watched the games in peace a decade earlier spent 44 months doing
nothing to intervene as the daily slaughter was broadcast on TV news.
So there is blame to share for the many left to die.
It took a second, horrific act of genocide for the world to stop the
killing. That charge stems from Karadzic and Mladic ordering the murder
of 8,000 unarmed Muslim men and boys near the city of Srebrenica in
July of 1995. Serb police and soldiers bused their trussed victims to
mine shafts, wells and open graves, shot them and tossed them in. Not
since self-righteous Nazis and Russians went at it had Europe seen
mass murder on that scale.
Karadzic denies the slaughter occurred and said his prosecution is
based on "false myths and false victims." Secure in his twisted
delusions, he said it would be "easy for me to prove that I had
nothing to do with it."
>>From their graves, the rotted corpses of his victims call Karadzic
a liar. Justice dictates the court does the same.
The other case of genocide making headlines involves Turkey’s fury
at a U.S. Congressional committee’s narrow approval of a non-binding
resolution declaring Turkey, a modern U.S. ally, committed genocide
when 1.5 million Armenians died back in 1915.
Armenian-Americans long have been after Congress to pass such a
denouncement. Another committee did so once before in 2007, but the
entire House has never weighed in, perhaps because it isn’t Congress’
business.
The Turkish government is furious at the vote. It vehemently denies
its long dead leaders committed genocide, though historical evidence
and the magnitude of the death toll suggests otherwise.
The pertinent question is why Congress is sticking its nose into a
90-year-old dispute with lingering repercussions? Especially after
Armenia and Turkey agreed last fall to resolve their differences.
It’s one thing to intervene in an ongoing genocide, where lives can
be saved. It’s another to weigh in on a bitter century-old feud that
angers a modern ally, changes nothing from the distant past, but can
send a better future off the rails.
Ponder this: What would the reaction be if Turkey’s government
declared that the European-American treatment of Indians in the Western
hemisphere, including the U.S., was genocide? Like the Armenian affair,
it was genocide.
As it is with Turkey’s non-Armenian population, denial is hard to
cast off.
In one country after another, from North to South America, many people
who aren’t of Indian descent still refuse to accept their immigrant
ancestors’ culpability in the deaths of millions of Native Americans.
They don’t want to be reminded of it, especially by a bunch of
sanctimonious politicians who have their guilty failings to deal with.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
