bosnet-digest V5 #27 (fwd)

["Bryan A. Alexander" <bnalexan@xxxxxxxxx>]

I.  IFOR's character made explicit:
II.  Now we get a safe post-inervention myth, recovering some information
while it's safer.

Bryan Alexander
Department of English
University of Michigan
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 1996 01:45:06 -0500
From: owner-bosnet-digest@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: bosnet-digest@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: bosnet-digest V5 #27


bosnet-digest            Thursday, 18 January 1996     Volume 05 : Number 027
...
I.
     "The buses would go in day and night. They were filled with people.
      They always came back from the mine empty. We heard shooting day
      and night. At first we heard single shots, then we began to hear
      lots of automatic fire. This went on for over two months."

      --Ljubija resident telling the NY Times what happened
        near a death camp run by Serb militia

                                                            January 16, 1996

                       THIS WEEK IN BOSNIA-HERCEGOVINA

     MASS-EXECUTION SITE REVEALED. Serb forces are destroying evidence of mass
murder by bringing bodies from other mass-grave sites to an abandoned mine in
Ljubija, northwest Bosnia, 12 miles south of Prijedor, several U.S. newspapers
reported this week.
     "Everyone seems to be in a hurry to cover their killings," one British
officer told the New York Times. "There are bodies all over this place. We go
in to houses and find floorboards ripped up and holes in the basement. They
are working very hard."
     Corpses "are often mangled in old mining equipment, doused with chemicals
and reburied under tons of debris in the open pits," the Times reports. Some
victims are believed to be Muslim men slaughtered in a wave of ethnic cleansing
this fall, after a cease-fire was signed. Others were murdered earlier in the
war.
     "There were certainly thousands killed at various camps around the
Prijedor area" Graham Blewitt, a prosecutor with the UN war-crimes tribunal in
the Hague, told the Times. Human-rights workers believe up to 8,000 bodies are
buried at the site.

     The site is only a mile from a British military camp, but Serbs have been
destroying evidence unimpeded. "Our job is to separate forces, not look for
mass graves," Lt. Col. Benjamin Barry, commander of British forces, told the
Times.
     "Investigating mass graves is not part of my job," NATO commander Admiral
Leighton Smith told Reuters. "Establishing an environment in which others can
do their job is part of my job."
     Blewitt hopes investigators can examine the mine in the spring.
     NATO spokesman Col. Mark Rayner says that IFOR would be willing to escort
war-crimes investigators to such sites if formally asked, and "other
operational commitments allow."

II.
     `WE COULD HAVE STOPPED IT.' That is the chilling conclusion of a
five-part
television documentary, "Death of a Nation," according to NY Times columnist
Anthony Lewis.
     "It was not `ancient hatreds' that produced ethnic cleansing, rape and
concentration camps. It was men: ambitious men who stirred up extreme
nationalist emotions as a way to power. It was one man above all, Slobodan
Milosevic of Serbia. `Death of a Nation' makes that unarguably clear," Lewis
writes.
     "Milosevic sent a secret  envoy to Moscow before attacking Croatia, and
the Soviet military said its intelligence showed that the West would not
respond," Lewis continues. "It was good intelligence. (Serb nationalist
leader) Karadzic, speaking to an interviewer, confirms what critics of U.S.
and European policy have maintained -- that we could have stopped it. `I
knew,' he says, `that if the West put in 10,000 men to cut off our supply
corridor, we Serbs would be finished....
     "For me, the most chilling is the voice of Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb
general, telling his men on the hills overlooking Sarajevo: `...Target Muslim
neighborhoods - not many Serbs live there. Shell them 'til they're on the edge
of madness.'"

...
Opinions expressed/published on BosNews/BosNet-B do NOT necessarily
always reflect the views of (all of the members of) Editorial Board,
and/or moderators, nor any of their host institutions.

              Murat Erkocevic  <ErkocevicM@xxxxxxx>
              Dzevat Omeragic <Dzevat@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
              Davor  Wagner  <DWagner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
              Nermin Zukic  <N6Zukic@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

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End of bosnet-digest V5 #27
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