Yugo report - intro

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I am glad to see the Croatian wing of the Balkan Peace Team, has finally
posted from Krajina to yugo.antiwar. On the activities of such brave
people among others, further peace may depend. Now it it urgent that
Croatia knows it will be held accountable. Previously the problem was
how to get the Greater Serb nationalists to heed any accountability.

Not for balance, but in order to be concrete and detailed to get
beyond the symbolic level of debate we initially had on Yugoslavia,
I will also refer to the report just published of the outgoing United
Nations human rights investigator, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who claimed
"significant direct and circumstantial evidence" of atrocities -
including mass executions - by Bosnian Serb soldiers after they
seized the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica in July. The report
cites testimony from survivors describing how Serbs gunned down
hundreds and possibly thousands of Muslim men in fields and buried
them in mass graves."

The mass graves reported last week found in Krajina were numbered in the
scores of deaths. It is not clear from the reports I am posting what
became of people the Croat army took for questioning. One question is
what was the official policy of the armed forces on both sides and what
was condoned unofficially, to be quite cold blooded about it.

Mazowiecki resigned in disgust at the London conference condoning the
fall of the safe area of Srebrenica. As an interventionist in this debate,
one thing I continue to blame countries like Britain for, is condoning
that, knowing at some level that Croatia was poised for attack and
could use the fall of Srebrenica as an excuse to relieve Bihac and go on
to take back Krajina by force.

We will see whether their cowardly retreat from Gorazde just taking place,
really does mean that NATO will use air power to stop further deaths of
hundreds if not thousands in that "safe" area.


Chris B, London.


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