The Western Response to the Bosnian Genocide

West Stands Silent as Bosnian Serbs Wreak Havoc

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel p.10A
4 August 1995.

By George Will

Two years ago, when there were reports that a Bosnian Muslim in a Serbian concentration camp had been forced to bite off his father’s testicles, it was comforting to recall the European tradition of fabricated stories — German soldiers amputating the hands of Belgian nurses in 1914, and so on.

Today, with abundant evidence of rape used as a weapon of war, of Muslims’ eyes gouged out and ears and noses sliced off by Serbian “soldiers” (it is disgusting to give that honorable title to snipers killing Sarajevo children), with testimony about heads on stakes and a woman forced to drink blood from her son’s slit throat, it is reasonable to suspend disbelief concerning all reports about the cowardly mob called the Bosnian Serb “army,” which is a proxy for war criminals in Belgrade.

Serbs Kill Bosnian Foreign Minister, Take UN Peacekeepers as Hostages

Gettysburg Times
29 May 1995.

By George Jahn

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Bosnia’s foreign minister and three colleagues were killed Sunday when rebel Serbs shot down their helicopter near the Bosnian-Croatian border. Serbs, defying escalating global condemnation, also seized more U.N. peacekeepers.

Croatian Serb forces claimed responsibility for downing the chopper, the Croatian Serb news agency ISKRA reported. The helicopter had traveled 10 miles from the besieged Bosnian government-held enclave of Bihac when it crashed just across the Croatian border.

Bosnian Serbs, confident U.N. hostages would shield them from a repeat of last week’s NATO air raids on ammunition dumps, seized 33 more peacekeepers, all British, near Gorazde in eastern Bosnia. Five of the captured peacekeepers were later injured in a car accident, Bosnian Serb TV said.

By nightfall, the Serbs held 317 U.N. personnel, the U.N. said, including more than 200 peacekeepers, most of them French, surrounded near Sarajevo and 30 U.N. monitors, some of whom were chained to potential NATO targets.

As the Serbs upped the stakes, frustrated U.N. officials demanded their masters in the world’s capitals tell them what to do: stand tough or back away in the most humiliating retreat of the United Nations’ 50-year history.

Tuzla massacre, Serbs slaughter at least 70 Bosniak civilians

Lodi News-Sentinel
26 May 1995.

TUZLA, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Bosnian Serbs answered a NATO airstrike Thursday with a defiant barrage of shells aimed at government-held cities, including a carnage that killed at least 70 people in this norther city.

Easing Sanctions Against Serbia a Blunder

“It is shocking that the majority of the Security Council members can be so criminally naive and negligent. Have they forgotten that Milosevic was, and still is, a war criminal?”

New Straits Times
12 October 1994

By Fan Yew Teng, Kuala Lumpur

The decision of the UN Security Council on Sept 24 to ease sanctions against Serbia and Montenegro is unwise, premature, and may in fact prolong Bosnian Serb atrocities in Bosnia.

The Security Council says the easing of sanctions is a reward to Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic for cutting war supplies to the Serbs in Bosnia. This is a fallacious position.

First of all, let us not forget so easily and quickly that Milosevic was one of the chief architects of the holocaust in Bosnia and Croatia — a holocaust motivated by the goal of Greaters Serbia which has killed, over the last three years, a few hundred thousand innocent people; in which tens of thousands of women and girls have been raped, and thousands of homes and other properties destroyed, and turned more than a million people into refugees.

US & Allies Devise Plan for Air Strikes Against Serbs in Bosnia

The Milwaukee Journal
8 February 1994.

“All those who are depriving us of this natural right to self-defense will be considered accomplices in this crime.” – Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic

The United States and its NATO allies essentially have completed their military planning for air strikes over Bosnia, but the Pentagon remains leery of such a move because of the serious risks involved, US officials say.

Defense Secretary William Perry, while acknowledging that air strikes were “among the options” being considered by the allies, said Monday, “we’re trying to … minimize the problems and the limitations.”

The Pentagon, acting on a request from the White House, drew up a full-fledged mission plan in August, defense analysts said. It includes a list of aircraft and crews that would be needed and a wide choice of targets, depending on the military objectives.

NATO warplanes bomb Serb targets

By Srecko Latal
30 August 1995.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — In their most massive attack yet on Bosnian Serbs, wave after wave of NATO warplanes bombed Serb targets around Sarajevo early Wednesday in retaliation for a marketplace massacre [the second markale massacre] that killed 37 people.

Jets roared over Sarajevo at about 2 a.m. (8 p.m. EDT Tuesday), and the first explosions were heard 90 minutes later from the southeast, in the direction of the Bosnian Serb stronghold of Pale.

Observers in Sarajevo also could see bright flashes and hear explosions from the direction of Vogosca, a Serb-held suburb a few miles north of Sarajevo. There is a Bosnian Serb munitions factory in the town.

The sky over Vogosca was red and a huge cloud of smoke could be seen in the predawn light. There appeared to be a large fire burning past a frontline hill north of the besieged capital.

President Clinton, vacationing in Jackson Hole, Wyo., called the attack “an appropriate response to the shelling of Sarajevo.”

“I think it is something that had to be done,” Clinton added.

U.S. Official Calls for Intervention to Stop Bosnian Genocide

Is U.S. Allowing Bosnian Genocide?

State Dept. official writes Bosnia’s reality should force intervention

By Jim Abrams
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
4 February 1994

WASHINGTON — Senior State Department officials have been unwilling to level with the American people about genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina for fear of increasing pressure for U.S. intervention, an official says.

Richard Johnson, who headed the Yugoslavia desk at the State Department from 1990 to 1992, says in a highly critical report that policy-makers “have repeatedly rejected efforts by the bureaus to have them make less equivocal statements of genocide in Bosnia.”

Johnson wrote the paper for the National War College where he is studying while on a one-year leave from the State Department.

The paper says, “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 pressures for U.S. action.”

NATO Hits and Destroys 4 Serbian Fighter Jets

The Daily Gazette, p.A1 and A6.
1 March 1994.

Bosnian Serbs put NATO’s long-questioned resolve to test on Monday and received a swift, severe answer: Missiles from U.S. F-16 fighter jets downed four Serb warplanes.

It was the first time that NATO had struck militarily in its 44-year history, and came after repeated threats by the alliance to intervene to back U.N. resolutions aimed at ending the 23-month war.