“THE DARKEST MOMENT IN THE U.N.’S HISTORY” - July 12, 2008

Emil Hacha, the third president of Czechoslovakia, probably wasn’t the first one in the world’s history, who discovered that there is no heart and sense of morality in the international politics. During the night of March 14/15, 1939, he was sitting in the front of Adolf Hitler’s office, left alone for hours, to eventually be informed that he needed to give away the control over his own country to the Nazis in order to save lives of his fellow countrymen from an immediate bombardment of Prague. One can imagine what must have been going on through his mind, when he was signing a document handing over his motherland to the Nazi aggressor. My primary school’s history teacher made a conclusion of this incident, when she told us to always remember and never be mistaken that there is “no heart and no sense of morality in the international politics”. She kept repeating that sentence all the time, whenever we were discussing world's history.

Yesterday, while attending a press conference at the headquarters of the United Nations about the Srebrenica massacre, I came to believe that my history teacher actually might have been precisely accurate.

A LONE CONFERENCE WITH NO STATEMENT BY THE SECRETARY GENERAL

On July 11, 2008, a conference was organized at the U.N.’s headquarters in commemoration of the 13th Anniversary of

the assault on the U.N. safe area of Srebrenica, which resulted

in extermination of approximately 8,000 men and children protected, at that time, under international law and by the NATO and U.N. military forces. The conference featured two prominent former diplomats, Mr. Muhamed Sacirbey of

Bosnia-Herzegovina and Mr. Diego Arria of Venezuela, and one active ambassador, Mr. Christian Wenaweser of Liechtenstein. Additionally, official statements for the conference were submitted by Dr. Danilo Türk, the President of the Republic

of Slovenia, and by Mrs. Bianca Jagger, a human rights activist.

No official statement commemorating the Srebrenica massacre

on its 13th anniversary was ever released by the U.N. Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon.

MO AND THE DAYTON’S FRANKENSTEIN

The first speaker was Mr. Muhamed Sacirbey, a writer and contributor to our magazine. Mo is a former minister of foreign affairs of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a proud although troubled country, which is located in the South East Europe. Mo, however, prefers to be remembered as BiH’s Ambassador to the United Nations, a position he held, with some pauses, between 1992-2000.

I was a young boy climbing up the trees to pick up apples and cherries for my family’s dessert, when Mo was making his diplomatic career in the United States and Europe. In many ways he has lived something what is called and referred to as an American dream. He came to this country as an immigrant, but through his hard work and wit he managed to climb the highest mountains of achievement. Not only he was admitted to the Harvard University to study history but was also offered a scholarship, which he promptly rejected. Can you imagine saying “no” to Harvard? But he did so and went to study history and law at the Tulane University. He also played in the football team over there, what strengthened his character and made him a tough competitor for the next of his life. Mo is charismatic, but also utopian in some sense. He believes that justice should always be done regardless of political connotations. He is one of those idealists, who always stand on a principle they believe in, and do not relent even under extreme pressure. He is like Nelson Mandela - he would prefer to lose freedom than to lose his believes.

Mo started with saying that the newly discovered historical

evidence indicates that the Western powers, including the

United Nations, were conducting secret negotiations with

Serbia prior to the fall of Srebrenica in 1995. The result of

those negotiations was that the Western powers acquiesced to

Serbia’s demand that the mentioned enclave, including also the

towns of Zepa and Gorazde, was given to the Serbs to meet

their precondition of starting the peace talks with the West. In

Mo’s opinion, all the evidence of Serbs’ previous military actions

in Bosnia between 1992-1995, reasonably led to the conclusion that such a deal might have likely resulted in a genocide on a large scale. Mo frequently used a word “trade” in a sense that lives of 8,000 people were exchanged for a political convenience.

At the time of the massacre, Mo was BiH’s Ambassador at the U.N., and it is clearly evident that this tragedy haunts him ever since. It seems that he blames himself for not being able to prevent it and for naively believing that the U.N.’s and NATO’s commitments to protect Srebrenica were truthful.

But not all of Mo’s statements persuaded me. When asked, why he signed the Dayton Peace Accords on behalf of BiH in November of 1995, which de facto created a political and legal Frankenstein that handicapped and paralyzed Bosnia ever since, he would not have a clear answer to offer. Mo pointed out that at the time he was signing the Dayton Accords, there weren’t any judgments by the ICJ and ICTY officially declaring Srebrenica a genocide. However his explanations are not entirely consistent with what other historians and politician claim. According to Madeleine Albright it was Mo, who called Stuart Seldowitz of the U.S. Mission to the U.N., in July of 1995, to inform them that there were mass murders taking place in Srebrenica. The same allegations are repeated by Samantha Power in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book “America in the Age of Genocide”. According to Samantha Power, it was Mo, who brought the information of Srebrenica genocide to the international attention back in 1995. At the time Mo was signing the Dayton Peace Accords, he knew that the genocide already happened although it was not yet confirmed by any independent sources or officially declared by any international body. As a result of the Dayton negotiations, further damage to Bosnia was done and an unsustainable Frankenstein was created. In my view, Dayton Accords merely froze the problems, but not eliminated them.

Mo now focuses his endeavors on bringing to justice those accountable for the inhumane “trade” of Srebrenica. And this is what I call “utopian”. People tried to do the same thing with Henry Kissinger and his alleged involvement in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile. There was even an internationally distributed movie “The Trials of Henry Kissinger”, but the idea of Kissinger’s accountability failed. Also today, two of the most responsible, in Mo’s opinion, persons for the Srebrenica “trade” are doing fine. One is a foreign minister of one of the European countries, the other one is seriously considered as the next U.S. Secretary of State.

Watch parts of Mo’s speech here.

THE BIGGEST COVER-UP IN THE U.N.’S HISTORY

Perhaps the most condemning and shocking statements came from Mr. Diego Arria of Venezuela. Mr. Arria is a very accomplished diplomat, politician and public servant. He came to prominence in his home country back in 1973, when he became the Governor of Caracas. Then, in 1977 he was named a Minister of Information and Tourism. In 1978 he ran for the president of Venezuela. Later on he was appointed an Ambassador to the United Nations. Between 1992-1993 he was the President of the U.N. Security Council. This position, as he said, enabled him to form close friendships with many diplomats from other countries, but also produced many new enemies and opponents dissatisfied with his human rights activism at the Security Council’s forum.

One of the journalists, who attended the conference

remembered Mr. Arria back from the 90's, and was curious

about what happened that he suddenly disappeared from the

public spotlight at the U.N. Mr. Arria replied that he was involved in the Bosnian genocide issues since the beginning,

knew many nuances and circumstances not known to the public

and relentlessly pressed the Security Council to take decisive action. As a result, the governments of France and Great Britain, implied enormous political pressure on Venezuelan government to terminate Mr. Arria’s mandate at the United Nations, what they eventually achieved. When he asked the representatives of those nations within the Security Council, why they did so, he was told not to be surprised because “business is business”.

Mr. Arria was recalled by Venezuela as its ambassador, however his human rights endeavors didn’t go unnoticed. He was later on offered and accepted, a position of the Assistant Secretary General and became a special advisor to Kofi Annan, a spot which made him independent of any political pressures but which also limited his capacity for shaping the debate about the genocide issues.

Mr. Arria remembered his visit to Srebrenica as a special envoy of the U.N. Security Council in April of 1993. He said that his delegation was taken away all cameras in order to be unable to take any pictures showing grave human rights violations in the region (he said that he didn’t relinquish his own camera and took several pictures, which some he forwarded to the Reuters agency). When he later on testified before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia during the Naser Oric's case, he was offered an evidence to comment on, which included movie clips from his Srebrenica visit of 1993. Amazingly, he said, the parts which showed dead bodies, wounded people and extremely inhumane conditions where simply cut out of the video. He asked an American prosecutor, what happened with those parts documenting the grave atrocities he witnessed and received a reply that there never were any, that those being shown were the only clips from his Srebrenica visit submitted into the ICTY’s evidence.

The most moving part came when he described his conversations with the population of Srebrenica. Mr. Arria told them not to be worried, not to be afraid and that the international community and the Security Council will protect them and no harm will be done to the Bosniaks by the Bosnian Serbs. He was so convincing in his words that they believed him and stayed in Srebrenica, being confident of international help and assistance. “If I wasn’t so convincing when talking to them, they would have never believed me and would have fled Srebrenica [...] They would be still alive today”.

To his credit, Mr. Arria is not the first champion of human rights, who was misled by the international powers. Probably, he never had a history teacher at his primary school, who would keep repeating to him at every occasion that there is “no heart and no sense of morality in the international politics”. If he did have such a teacher, perhaps he would have said to the Bosniaks in Srebrenica that they better pack their belongings and flee to some safe place because nothing what the United Nations is doing is safe anymore.

Mr. Arria said explicitly that the United Nations, its former Secretary General Boutros-Ghali, the U.N. Secretariat and the permanent members of the Security Council knew beforehand that there was a military assault on Srebrenica being planed and they deliberately decided not to act and protect the Srebrenica population. Additionally, they knowingly prevented the Bosniaks from defending themselves. As for the evidence supporting his allegations, he pointed out to dramatic reports by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees from the time of the massacre, which were withheld and suppressed by Boutros-Ghali and provided to the Security Council with unreasonable delay or some other documents, which were never submitted to the Security Council and surfaced only 10 years after during the case of Naser Oric before the ICTY.

When one commits a crime as a regular citizen, one is captured, put to trial, convicted and sent to prison. Unless the crime happens within the United Nations. In Mr. Arria’s opinion, the United Nations is the only place in the world where one can direct the murder of thousands of people and get away with the crime. Those within the United Nations responsible for the gravest atrocities are never punished.

According to Mr. Arria, the Srebrenica massacre was the biggest cover-up in the United Nations’s history and it’s most shameful episode.

Watch parts of Mr. Arria’s speech here.

NO JUSTICE WITHOUT THE CAPTURE OF KARADZIC AND MLADIC

The third speaker was Mr. Christian Wenaweser of Liechtenstein. Mr. Wenaweser is an experienced and eloquent

diplomat, who established his name in the fields of international criminal justice and the U.N. reform. In January 2004, he was appointed a Vice-Chairman of the Open-Ended Working Group on Security Council Reform and has since played a central role in the intergovernmental consultations on the issue. He is also in charge of a special Working Group on the Crime of Aggression, which is mandated to draft proposals on the definition of the crime of aggression for the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Mr. Wenaweser refrained from making any direct or indirect accusations in the context of the Srebrenica genocide, however he stressed that the massacre was a shock to the international community comparable to that of the bombings of the Canal Hotel in Baghdad in August of 2003, when the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Sergio Vieria de Mello, and other members of the U.N. staff, were killed.

He called Srebrenica “the darkest moment in the U.N.’s history”. In Mr. Wenaweser’s opinion, it is important that the international community does everything it can to bring to justice those responsible for conducting the killings, namely Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. Without the capture of those two, it will be hard to establish all the facts and political circumstances surrounding the Srebrenica tragedy or to compensate the victims.

Watch parts of Mr. Wenaweser’s speech here.

SOULS HAVE NO ETHNICITY

Speaking as the last one was Imam Bayram Mulic, who stressed that the Srebrenica massacre has far going moral obligations imposed on the international community. No victim can be left without help or be refused justice. From the standpoint of morality it does not matter that the victims were Muslims because they had the same right to life as members of other nations and religions. People’s souls have no ethnicity and the Srebrenica massacre has to be treated as a crime against humanity rather than a simple crime in the context of racial hatred between the Orthodox Serbs and the Muslim Bosniaks.

INTERNATIONAL ECHOS

While the conference was totally ignored by the U.N. Secretariat, which didn’t even issue a short statement commemorating the massacre, it did gain support from two prominent internationalists. Dr. Danilo Türk, former U.N. Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs and the acting President of the Republic of Slovenia, submitted an official statement commenting on the 13th Anniversary of the Srebrenica tragedy.

Read President Türk’s statement here.

Additionally, words of support were provided by Mrs. Bianca Jagger, a human rights activist, who is also a Good Will Ambassador for the Council of Europe.

Perhaps the best way to finish this report is to quote President Türk’s own words, who says: ”Let us learn something from the past mistakes. Let us not forget the victims of Srebrenica. Let the UN do what the World expects from it.”

There are many things to be learned from the Srebrenica tragedy. For the potential victims, people around the world, who presently ask for international assistance the lesson is “do not trust and do not count on the United Nations”. For future diplomats the lesson is that there is no idealism and no morality in the international politics - the reality shows that people’s lives do not matter much, when it comes to the high political stakes.

The saddest conclusion is - paraphrasing Mr. Arria’s words - that even within the international journalist community, and within the community of the United Nations itself, there is a tendency to put every conflict in the context of the clash of civilizations, by paying the most attention to victims’ religion, identity or civilizational alliance. It leads to a presumption that some of the victims are less worthy to be rescued or provided justice than others. As a result, lives of 8.000 Muslim Bosniaks become less valuble than, for example, the lives of 8.000 Frenchmen or Americans. Can you imagine what would be already done in this case if the Srebrenica victims were not Muslim Bosnians, but the Germans, Americans or Italians? Could you imagine Karadzic and Mladic not being captured already?
 

Sebastian Aulich