MY SAY: What about the failures of the great nations?
Professor Tan Sri Dato' Dzulkifli Abdul Razak
Comment
The Edge Malaysia - 06-06-2011
The world was supposed to have ended last week, according to some biblical interpretations. Fortunately, it did not happen, although former Bosnian Serb army chief Ratko Mladic's world ended with his arrest on May 26.
Still, Mladic must count himself lucky that he was taken alive and not shot in the head and ditched in a sea somewhere.This is despite the fact that he stands accused of committing the worst atrocities post-World War II in Europe. He managed to remain free in his country for the last 16 years — some say under active protection — until recently.
Mladic has been accorded the right to defend himself when extradited to The Hague, although not all agree with this, asserting that they do not recognise the International Criminal Tribunal on the former Yugoslavia, just like Israel, Sudan and the US do not recognise the International Criminal Court, for example. The Serbian ultra-nationalists are already protesting.
Meanwhile, the Bosnian victims, mostly Muslims, are gathering to remember their loved ones killed by forces under Mladic's command. None would be more heart-wrenching than the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995 where about 8,000 Muslims were mass-murdered in cold blood during the Bosnian War.
Mladic was supported by a paramilitary unit from Serbia, codenamed "Scorpions", that was officially part of the Serbian Interior Ministry until 1991.
The villages around Srebrenica were under constant bombardment, from land and air, by the Serb forces with the logistical, moral and financial support of Serbia and the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA).
According to the UK Bosnian Institute, about 300 villages were destroyed by the Serb forces around Srebrenica three years before the genocide and in the first three months of the war — April to June 1992. One of the villages is Visegrad, on the western side of Bosnia, which is where 1,500 civilians were killed during the period, according to the Bosnian Institute for Missing Persons. Their bodies were dumped into the Drina river and today many come to throw roses from the Visegrad bridge in remembrance of their loved ones who were killed.
In addition, some 70,000 more were forcibly uprooted from their homes and some systematically killed, including many women, the elderly, children and even babies. Consequently, there was an exodus of refugees and casualties.
Lest it be forgotten, in April 1993,the UN declared the enclave of Srebrenica in the Drina Valley of northeastern Bosnia a "safe area" under its protection. Ironically, the UN Protection Force, represented on the ground by a 400-strong contingent of Dutch peacekeepers, failed to prevent the organised massacre and the expulsion of the enclave's surviving population.
This caused the then Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok to resign in 2002 following a detailed revelation by the Dutch Institute of War Documentation on the massacre, assigning partial responsibility to the Dutch troops. Kok was quoted recently as saying: "This book is never going to be closed because the tragedy was so terrible for so many people."
Indeed, following a 2004 hearing that unanimously ruled the killing as genocide, the presiding judge Theodor Meron had this to say: "By seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide.They targeted for extinction the 40,000 Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general.They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity."
A year later, on the 10th anniversary of the genocide, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan admitted that while the blame, first and foremost, lay with those who planned and carried out the killing orgy and those who assisted and harboured them, the great nations failed to respond adequately. The UN itself made serious errors of judgement.
The case in point is that when the Dutch troops under the UN flag at Srebrenica — seemingly ill-equipped with no heavy weapons — called for air support from the other Nato countries, their request for air strikes was declined until after the crucial struggle for the town was conveniently over. Yet recently, these countries were eager to bombard Libya.
So, while the likes of Mladic have a case to answer in an international court of justice, how about the so-called "great nations" that failed to respond adequately? Or worse, why choose not to recognise the jurisdiction of an international court? What about the costly errors of judgement made by bodies like the UN?
Of late, we have read about many such failures in Iraq and Afghanistan for which there have only been apologies, which is all the great nations are likely to offer when they "fail" yet again.
* The writer is the Vice-Chancellor of Universiti Sains Malaysia. He can be contacted at vc@usm.my