How Delayed Justice Is Not Justice at All — the Arrest of War Crimes Criminal, Ratko Mladic, and the Still Fresh Memories Awakened in Former U.N. Spokesperson, Kelly Moore, Who Was in Bosnia During the Slaughter

© 2011 Peter Free

 

27 May 2011

 

 

In the United States, it is easy to forget History’s soul-rending cruelties

 

For that reason, I think, it is psychologically grounding to listen alertly for witnesses’ voices.  Else we lose the bonds that bring sanity to our nation’s course in the world.

 

 

Yugoslavia, not so long ago —

 

Ratko Mladic’s first name, in American slang, gives a hint as to his untempered, vicious criminality — “rat company.”

 

Yesterday, Kelly Moore, a former United Nations spokesperson for its Bosnian Mission during the Yugoslavian Wars, wrote hauntingly about the memories that Mladic’s arrest for war crimes roused in her.

 

Extracts include:

 

It is perhaps fitting that I had breakfast this morning with a friend I met while working in Sarajevo during the war that ravaged Bosnia more than 15 years ago. The first thing she told me was that Ratko Mladic, one of the engineers of the Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing that killed tens of thousands and left millions homeless in Croatia and Bosnia, had finally been arrested.

 

First my mind rewinds to the summer of 1992.

 

I interviewed countless Bosnians and Croatians who had fled the fighting.

 

After showing me their bullet wounds and knife cuts and photos of the men they left behind -- dead, alive, missing, detained -- they would ask me why my country would not let them buy weapons to defend themselves.

 

At the time, the United States and our allies (shamefully) participated in an arms embargo "on all sides," even though the Serbs were clearly the aggressors.

 

The atrocities continued for another three years.

 

Srebrenica had been declared a safe haven by the United Nations Security Council, along with five other Bosnian Muslim towns.

 

The only problem was that no one stepped up to provide the additional troops that would actually make the safe havens viable. One by one, they (predictably) collapsed.

 

The few hundred Dutch soldiers who were tasked with protecting Srebrenica were doomed to fail. With the Serbs knocking on the door, the only option to save the town was to bomb the Serbs from the air.

 

When we found out that the request for close air support had been denied, reportedly by the French, the room fell silent. I went to bed that night knowing that thousands of people would be dead by sunrise.

 

© 2011 Kelly Moore, The Deed Is Done, Huffington Post (26 May 2011) (paragraphs split)

 

 

“Is there a hidden lesson in this story, Pete?”

 

Yes.

 

The United States often takes the coward’s way out in coping with unpleasant foreign affairs. Embargoes are one of our favorite ploys.  They seem so non-violently even-handed.

 

What embargoes invariably do is punish, starve, and often kill the people they are allegedly supposed to save.

 

Embargoes are a hypocrite’s way of denying reality, while clothing himself in False Justice’s glow.

 

Years later, if convenient, we pretend to clean up the mess we contributed to by arresting a generally aged criminal in order to sponsor a show trial — a theater that soothes no one, resurrects nobody, and heals nothing.

 

The arrest’s only benefit is to smooth our slightly ruffled complacence.

 

 

The moral? — Listen

 

Listen to the witnesses.

 

Only then can we begin to assess our contribution to humanity’s eternal fall.