“I know what the speed of light is, but we haven’t learnt about the speed of darkness yet”, wrote Dino, a twelve-year-old boy from the war zone of Zenica town in central Bosnia as quoted by Miljenko Jergovic, a poet and journalist writing for the daily Oslobodjenje, a leading newspaper of Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina in one of his war-time collection of short stories Sarajevo Marlboro (Penguin Books 1997).

On 23 November 2017, The Statesman on its ‘World’ page published the headline news of conviction and sentencing to penal servitude for life of former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratco Mladic for committing genocide and other atrocities in the 1990s Bosnian war. The news-item detailed that the man known as the “Butcher of Bosnia” led forces during the massacre of Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) in Srebrenica and the seize of Sarajevo. The United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia at The Hague, Netherlands convicted him on 10 of the 11charges on 22 November after conducting a prolong and meticulous trial process since 2012 after his arrest in 2011 in rural northern Serbia.

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An earlier international news item published on 17 July in a Kolkata daily reported from The Hague that The Netherlands is liable for about 300 of more than 8,000 deaths in the 1995 Srebrenica Massacre, a district Court in The Hague had ruled a day before, pinning some of the blame for Europe’s worst massacre since World War II on the Dutch state on the charge of utter failure and cowardice on the part of UN’s Dutch Battalion peacekeepers posted in Srebrenica, eastern Bosnia.

Twenty-two years ago, on 6 April 1992 while the cold blazing Balkan sun was preparing for its westward sojourn, an assembly of demonstrators estimated at over 50,000 gathered in front of the Bosnian Parliament in Sarajevo for voicing their sole demand for peace and harmony in Bosnia & Herzegovina. The demonstrators belonged to all three major Bosnian nationalities – Serbs, Croats, and Muslims.

Directly across the street, from the upper floors of the ultra-modern Hotel Holiday Inn built for the 1984 Winter Olympics, lethally-armed Serbian militiamen fired randomly on the assembly of demonstrators resulting in heavy casualties amid an impending war situation. Incidentally, in the wake of the disintegration of Titoist Yugoslavia (1945-1989), on 6 April 1992 itself Bosnia was recognised as an independent state by the European Community.

The Sarajevo massacre of April 6 contained many elements that would recur in the Bosnian war in the coming months and years. The victims were unarmed civilians who aspired for the preservation of a multi-ethnic Bosnian society which had deep roots and traditions dating back many centuries. The perpetrators were nationalist extremists, organized and heavily armed by political and paramilitary leaders fully intent on destroying Bosnia’s multi-ethnic society and replacing it with the national supremacy of a single ethnic group of Serbs.

The Sarajevo massacre silenced the voices of peace and mutual tolerance while the spine-chilling slogans of ethnic hatred and national divisiveness triumphed by sheer force. The years 1992 and 1993 will be remembered as the years in which a European country was destroyed. It was a land with a political and cultural history unlike that of any other country in Europe. The great religions and powers of European history had overlapped and combined there – the empires of Rome, Charlemagne, the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarians, and the faiths of Western Christianity, Eastern Christianity, Judaism and Islam. These facts alone would be sufficient impetus for studying the history of Bosnia as an object of unique interest.

Importantly enough, the war that engulfed this country in 1992 had added two melancholy reasons for examining its history more closely. The first is the need to understand the origins of the conflict and the second is the need to dispel the curtains of misunderstanding, willful myth-making and abject ignorance under which all discussion on Bosnia and its history underwent an effective process of shrouding.

The war that began in Bosnia following the Sarajevo Massacre in 1992 encompassed death, brutalities, atrocities, and terror on a magnitude unknown in Europe since World War II. With the awakening of the western media, the daily images of warfare coupled with the reality of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in the area and the prospect of deepening involvement of NATO and the United States, were hauntingly reminiscent of the Vietnam War of the 1960s.

Bosnia in any case was no Vietnam – it was not a far-away land about which the Western world knew nothing. The reasoning on “collective ignorance”, so persuasively advocated by both critics and supporters of US intervention in Vietnam was simply not valid for the land of the former Yugoslavia. Prompted by the warming effects of the Cold War, the US Congress appropriated many millions of dollars for funding research centres and exchange programmes so that Americans could know more about the lands where communism held sway.

On 12 April 1993, a Serb shell killed fifty-six people at a market place in Srebrenica, a valley-town with high concentration of Muslims in eastern Bosnia and the graphic scenes of such carnage flashed around the world. Days later, the UN Security Council passed a resolution establishing a “safe haven” around Srebrenica, to be enforced by the UNPROFOR, a contingent of 7,600 Dutch troops, and a month later the safe havens concept was extended to four other vulnerable towns of Bosnia.

While the “safe havens” held throughout 1993, which might have been remembered as a brilliant expedient had the peace plan succeeded, the towns of Srebrenica, Gorazde, and Bihac became potential killing zones in early 1994.  After forty-five years of conflict resolution and prevention, the imposing world edifice designed by FDR and Churchill seemed to have degenerated into a shield of fearful pacifism. “The UN was interested in peace, not justice,” as journalist David Rieff writes in Slaughterhouse, his mordant account of the early years of the war in Bosnia. And this peace-at-any-price mentality had the effect of aligning the UN with the Serb at that stage, although in later years “Justice is the Key” became the official slogan of the UNMIBH.

The Serb assault on Srebrenica began on 6 July 1995 while the 600 lightly-armed Dutch UNPROFOR protecting the enclave went on issuing desperate requisitions for air support, but in vain. On 11 July this “safe haven” fell under heavy Serb devastations. Within a week or so, the Bosnian Serbs expelled 23000 women, children and the elderly most of whom died as cattle and systematically killed about 7,400 Muslim men and boys – by far the greatest atrocity in Europe since WW II.

Srebrenica shattered any remaining illusions about the aims of the Bosnian Serbs, and yet weeks more would pass before the allies would act. On July 21, the allied leaders held an emergency meeting in London, agreeing that NATO, which itself had been apprehensive of adversely provoking the Serbs, would no longer cast a veto in UN over bombing decisions. In early August, after the Serbs laid siege to other safe havens, the USA announced that it was prepared to attack the militias, with or without allied support. On 28 August, a Bosnian Serb mortar shell landed in a market place in Sarajevo, killing 37 people. This was the trigger. The NATO bombing campaign, Operation Deliberate Force, began on the 30th and continued until the Bosnian Serb leadership, already reeling under a renewed Croatian onslaught, signed a draft of a peace agreement two weeks later.

The Bosnian war was eventually halted in November 1995 after three years and nine months as a result of marathon talks in Dayton, Ohio brokered chiefly by then Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke. The Dayton Peace Agreement succeeded where earlier peace plans had failed because of the determination of the US negotiating team and the backing they received from the allied countries and as after years of humiliation, there was a real threat that European troops (in particular the British and the French) who constituted the backbone of the UN peacekeeping force in Bosnia would be withdrawn in event of failure and also as there occurred a fundamental shift in military balance.

While the Dayton Peace Agreement succeeded in ending the fighting in Bosnia with the help of 60,000 strong NATO-led Implementation Force (IFOR) replacing the UNPROFOR which was eventually replaced by the Stabilization Force (SFOR) that started working for post-war peace and nation-building with the UN Civilian Police Force (CIVPOL) under the mandate of the IPTF, it was another piecemeal solution that failed to address the other conflicts in the region such as Kosovo.

The reigning “Balkan Logic” of war and peace would certainly remind all UN peacekeepers of the terribly bitter-sour observation of Milan Kundera – “The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget the Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.” [The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Faber & Faber).

(The writer is Deputy Superintendent of Police, Central Detective Training Institute Kolkata, former Assistant Commissioner of Kolkata Police and former Human Rights Officer, United Nations Mission in Bosnia & Herzegovina.)