Remembering the Bosnian War Twenty Years After
The late-April 2012 sentencing by the ‘Sarajevo War Crimes Tribunal’ (S.W.C.T.) of Rasema Handanovic (39), a former member of the ‘Muslim Forces’ of Bosnia, to five-and-a-half-year-imprisonment because she participated in the massacre of twenty-six Croatian civilian and military-prisoners in the village of Trusina, Herzegovina, in April 1993, has received widespread media coverage, and has rekindled popular memories of the ‘Bosnian War’ twenty years after it was initiated principally with a confrontation between the Serbian forces and the Bosnian Muslim civilian population – the Bosniaks – in eastern Bosnia. The war officially continued from 5 April 1992 to 14 December 1995 in south-eastern Europe on the Balkan Peninsula and concluded with the internal partition of Bosnia and Herzegovina in accordance with the ‘Dayton Agreement’. The belligerence, which was the worst in Europe since the 1939-45 Second World War, killed approximately a hundred thousand people while displacing over two million.
The Bosnian War was a complex phenomenon, initially (1992-94) marked by an uneasy alliance between the three states Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia, and Croatia, which were p0itted against Republika Srpska, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and Autonomous Province of Western Bosnia. In 1994-95 occurred a realignment between the belligerents with ‘North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’ (N.A.T.O.)-forces joining the united armed forces of Croatia and Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina to bomb Republika Srpska and A.P. Western Bosnia into submission. Whereas the First and Second World Wars have had been chronicled in millions of authentic and elucidating historical works, general readers, especially in India, scarcely have well-documented records of one of the more important internal events which tested the interrelationship among different southern European ethnic groups. The Bosnian War, which would see reported ethnic cleaning and genocides by both the Serbs and Croats in their respective territories, including the ‘Lašva Valley Ethnic Cleansing’ of Bosniak Muslim civilians by members of the Croatian Defence Council (H.V.O.) and Croatian Army (H.V.) cadres (May 1992-April 1993), and ‘Srebrenica Massacre’ of 11-22 July 1995, in which the Army of Republika Srpska (V.R.S.)-personnel under General Ratko Mladić (b. 1943) and ‘Greek Volunteer Guards’ (G.D.G.) were reported to have had summarily executed 8,373 Bosniaks, had been commemorated in different works of superior fiction, including publications by Semezdin Mehmedinović, Eve Ensler, Scott Simon, Steven Galloway, Frederick Forsyth, Jack Kersh, and Joe Sacco, among others. Zlata Filipović’s Zlata’s Diary (1993) earned her the sobriquet of ‘The Anne Frank of Sarajevo’. But no work or film can precisely capture the horrors of the approximately fifty-thousand Muslim and Catholic Christian women who were understood to have been intermittently raped after being detained at different eastern Bosnia and Grbavica camps, most notably at the ‘Karaman’s House’, Foča. The ‘Manjača Concentration Camp’ allegedly operated by the Yugoslav National Army (J.N.A.) personnel and Republika Srpska authorities between 1991 and 1995, and the Dretelj, Heliodrom, Keraterm, Omarska, Trnopolje, and Uzamnica Camps, can easily be compared to the different concentration camps the Nazis had set up for incarcerating the Jews at such places as Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Bergen-Belsen.
The principal leaders during the Bosnian belligerence were Slobodan Milošević (1941-2006) (President of Serbia), Radovan Karadžić (b. 1945) (President of Republika Srpska), Ratko Mladić (the V.R.S. Chief of Staff), Vojislav Šešelj (b. 1954) (paramilitary leader) and Fikret Abdić (b. 1939) (acting president of A.P. Western Bosnia), who were pitted against Franjo Tuđman (1922-99) (President of Croatia), Janko Bobetko (1919-2003) (Croatian Army general), Alija Izetbegović (1925-2003) (President of Bosnia and Herzegovina), Sefer Halilović (b.1952) and Enver Hadžihasanović (b. 1950) (the two chiefs of staff of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina ‘À.R.Bi.H’), Mate Boban (1940-97) (President of the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia), and Milivoj Petković (b. 1949) (H.V.O. Chief of Staff). Later, Leighton Smith (b. 1939) supervised the N.A.T.O. bombing campaign against Republika Srpska.
With the 1989 dissolution of the former socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, a Muslim-majority-nation, achieved independence in 1991, and it was followed by the establishment of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia. The continual existence of the Yugoslavian military personnel in Bosnia and Herzegovina as V.R.S. servicemen in spite of the Yugoslavians’ official exit from the country mobilised the Croatians to form the defensive H.V.O. while the alarmed Bosniaks reorganised themselves as À.R.Bi.H. cadres. These defensive measures infuriated the Serbs, who were known to have been massacred during the Second World War by the Croat-supported Nazis, to attack the Bosniaks. During the infamous ‘Siege of Sarajevo’ – Sarajevo being the capital-city of Bosnia and Herzegovina – thirty thousand former Yugoslavian and Republika Srpska military personnel surrounded the city from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996, and in the ensuing gun-battles, approximately 6,110 Bosniak soldiers and 10,000 civilian residents of the besieged capital were estimated to have been killed, and over 56,000 city-dwellers grievously injured. On 5 February 1994, a single 120-milimetre-mortar-shell landed in the centre of a crowded Markale (market-place) killing 68 civilians and wounding 144 marketers. The war, which perplexed most of the citizens of the fighting-nations by its real objectives, could be ended only after the direct intervention of the ‘United Nations’ Protection Force’ (U.N.PRO.FOR) and N.A.T.O. troops from April 1994 onwards.
The Bosnian War, which ended with the ‘International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia’ (I.C.T.Y.) trying principally the Serbian politicians and military officers, has been commemorated in several award-winning Hollywood films, latest in Angelina Jolie’s “In the Land of Blood and Honey”. Importantly, the confrontation alarmed the Indians against relying on European aid too much for many of the European countries, since the 16th century, are engaged in assaulting one another over imperialistic and allied interests. The Indian Army could also understand the destructive force of snipers in modern belligerence for Serbian snipers often wrecked havoc in the war. Twenty years passed away since the Bosnian War was declared, Europe is still seething in tension, including the uneasy relationship between the Balkan countries, and chances of the re-eruption of violence, unless the international community demonstrates utmost strictness in handling and condemning unjustified warring all over the globe, cannot be ruled out.
– Reported by: Pinaki Roy; Balurghat, 4 May 2012.
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