The
wars in Yugoslavia
could have been avoided
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
March 16, 2005
LONDON - A path being beaten to The
Hague war crimes' tribunal? It has almost become a road,
such is the traffic. Since October, 12 alleged war
criminals have made their own way to Holland to hand
themselves over. They are mostly Serbs, but last week it
was the turn of Ramush Haradinaj, the former prime
minister of Kosovo, accused of crimes against his
territory's Serb minority. This week the Croatian
government will probably be told that it has lost its
chance of being considered for European Union membership
since it hasn't persuaded General Ante Gotovina to turn
himself in. The penny is beginning to drop that you can't
do such dastardly deeds and strut your stuff in your
hometown forever more. Something has profoundly changed
in international relations which augurs well for the
future of international justice and the diminishing of
future conflicts.
One lesson is being learnt, but
another isn't. The conventional wisdom still holds that
Yugoslavia's wars were ethnic conflicts. They were not.
They were wars of thugs. The murderous core of the
supporters of ex-Yugoslavia's president, Slobodan
Milosevic, the Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegovic, the
Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, and the Croatian
president, Franjo Tudjman were not by and large ordinary
citizens incited into violence against their neighbors
but soccer hooligans, street gangs, even criminals, who
were released from jail for the purpose and, on the
Bosnian side, mujahedeen recruited from Afghanistan. They
were recruited by the politicians, first and foremost by
Milosevic, to pursue a nationalist agenda that he
believed could keep him in power at a time when it became
obvious that the Yugoslav army was disintegrating in the
early days of the first war with Croatia, with an
estimated 150,000 Serbian young men either emigrating or
going underground.
The hooligan killers inevitably
attracted opportunists drawn to the fruits of war- the
looting, raping and binge drinking that were their daily
fare. Vladan Vasilijevic, an expert in organized crime,
says that most of the well-documented atrocities in
Bosnia were committed by men with long criminal
records.
In the absence of an alternative
political leadership, rank and file citizens fell in
behind them- or at least tolerated them- especially as
revenge killings from the other side began to take their
toll. Both Milosevic and Tudjman were adept at using
their secret police to direct and coordinate the killings
in pursuit of ethnic cleansing. Some of these groups
evolved into semi-coherent paramilitary outfits like
Arkan's Tigers and Vojislav Seselj's Chetniks. Arkan,
(aka Zeljko Raznatovic), one of the most feared war
criminals of the whole war, had been the leader of the
official fan club of Belgrade's Red Star Soccer
team.
Even in Rwanda, where the genocide
was on larger scale and much more thorough, it was a
small minority that did the real killing. Hutu extremists
were substantially in charge of the ruling party, the
government bureaucracy and the police.
If one reckons that there were
50,000 hard core killers (a high estimate) and that each
of these killed one person a week during the 100 day
holocaust, then the 700,000 who died were killed by some
2% of the Hutu population. In other words at least 98% of
the Hutu did not kill.
For all the horror of these recent
cataclysms, they were not Hobbesian wars of all against
all and neighbor against neighbor. They were stirred by
unscrupulous politicians who relied on relatively small
numbers of evildoers to do their bidding.
In most, if not all, societies if
such thugs were licensed they could do similar deeds.
Until quite recently it was quite possible to imagine
Northern Ireland descending into Bosnian chaos if the
British authorities had not been prepared for the long
haul of patient policing and political accommodation.
Even so the "thug" element in the paramilitaries is still
calling many of the shots as we have recently seen with
the IRA-sponsored bank robbery and the murder of Robert
McCartney.
The overthrow of Milosevic, we must
never forget, happened because of people power, not NATO
bombing- the essentially good, silent majority, who were
prepared first to vote and, second, demonstrate when they
saw it stood a good chance of success.
Unfortunately, the Western nations
made a too simply analysis of the situation. They
concluded early on that it was large scale ethnic war and
from there they ended up with a simplistic conclusion-
bombing- that worked only to consolidate Milosevic's
power and, in the case of Kosovo, precipitated the ethnic
cleansing they were supposedly trying to
avoid.
Fortunately, Western policy had
another face, the legal one, which we are now seeing,
enacted in The Hague. But, if only there had been a
standing international criminal court 14 years ago with
the power of arrest and if only the EU had dangled the
carrot of European membership then, the worst of these
so-called "ethnic wars" could have been avoided. The
people would not have allowed them.
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Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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