Bosnian "Judicial Reform", a New Step Towards the Greater Serbia

REPUBLIC OF BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA National Congress of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina (NCR B&H) ONLINE NEWSLETTER, International issue, No. 731 June 15, 2011 CONTENT 1. Despite Mladic’s arrest, the quest for a Greater Serbia lives on 2. Bosnian judicial reform talks kick off 3. The Shame of Serbia 4. Bosnians Commend Congressman Russ Carnahan 5. Bosnian Traditional Flag “Golden Lilies” at Stanford Class 2011 Graduation ──────────── This issue is distributed to 40,064 Bosnian and 3,327 international readers. ──────────── 1. Despite Mladic’s arrest, the quest for a Greater Serbia lives on By Jeffrey T. Kuhner - The Washington Times 7:15 p.m., Tuesday, May 31, 2011 Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb wartime commander, was captured last week. For 16 years he had been a fugitive from justice. Gen. Mladic was wanted for genocide and crimes against humanity. His arrest in Lazarevo, a small town north of Belgrade, Serbia's capital, is supposed to bring closure to the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it won't. Gen. Mladic will be sent to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. There he will stand in the dock alongside his one-time ally, former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic. Gen. Mladic's arrest paves the way for Serbia to now join the European Union. Brussels insisted that the capture of Gen. Mladic was the price Belgrade had to pay to attain EU candidate status. Some Serbs - especially, younger ones - welcomed the news. They believe the path is now open for Serbia's economic modernization and reintegration with its neighbors. For many others, however, the extradition of Gen. Mladic represents another blow to Serbia's national honor. Yet no matter what happens at The Hague, the Bosnian Serb's ghost will haunt the region for decades to come. Along with late Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic and Mr. Karadzic, this evil triumvirate implemented the genocidal plan for a "Greater Serbia" - an ethnically pure Serbian empire stretching from the Danube to the Adriatic. They devised a diabolical strategy they called "ethnic cleansing." The goal: to murder or expel all non-Serbs from large swathes of territory, which would then be annexed by Belgrade. In Croatia, Serb paramilitaries backed by the Yugoslav army waged a brutal war of aggression. Almost one-third of Croatia was conquered, nearly 20,000 civilians were murdered and more than 180,000 Croatians were ethnically cleansed. Entire cities, such as Vukovar, were razed to the ground. Catholic churches were deliberately destroyed; thousands of women were raped; and homes were pillaged and burned. This was only the warm-up, however, for the fighting in Bosnia. Radical Serb nationalists viewed the former Yugoslav republic as the big prize. From 1992 until 1995, Serbian marauders went on a rampage. They carved up nearly 70 percent of Bosnia, systematically ethnically cleansed nearly 2 million Bosnian Muslims and Croatians, and killed more than 100,000 people - many of them women and children. Gen. Mladic was the henchman who executed the policy of genocide and mass murder. He oversaw the shelling of Sarajevo, whose only military aim was to terrorize the civilian population. In July 1995, he ordered and directed the greatest single massacre in Europe since the end of World War II. His forces overran the United Nations "safe haven" of Srebrenica. Serbian troops separated and then executed about 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in front of freshly dug mass graves. Their blood was to consecrate a Great Serb state. If not for a massive American-backed Croatian military offensive, known as Operation Storm, and subsequent U.S. air strikes, Milosevic would have achieved his imperial, neo- fascist ambitions. Gen. Mladic is the Adolf Eichmann of the Balkans. Yet, he remains a hero to many Serbian ultra- nationalists - especially, in Bosnia. The 1995 Dayton Peace Accords may have ended the war. But it gave birth to Gen. Mladic's - and Mr. Karadzic's - Frankenstein monster: The Bosnian Serb Republic. It is one of two subnational entities (the other being the Muslim-Croat Federation) created by Dayton. It has its own parliament, flag, customs office and police force. In other words, the Bosnian Serbs have all the trappings of statehood. Their leaders are now pushing for a referendum to eventually secede from Bosnia and join Serbia. In short, the drive for a Greater Serbia has not ended; only the means have changed. Political demagoguery now trumps military aggression. Bosnia is unstable and fragile. It is a synthetic nation - a product of Western nation-building - doomed to failure. For 15 years, it has been kept together only by U.N. peacekeepers and NATO. Its central flaw is that the majority of its citizens - ethnic Serbs and Croats - don't want to share a state with Bosnian Muslims. The Bosnian Serb Republic, however, will never achieve international legitimacy because it is founded upon war crimes and ethnic cleansing. Most non-Serbs have been prevented from returning to their homes. Bosnian Serb leaders are playing with fire. An independence vote would inevitably trigger a fierce backlash among Bosniaks, likely resulting in another war. Secession would spark a Balkan powder keg. In Serbia, revanchist forces are also on the rise. Led by the odious Tomislav Nikolic, radical nationalists are surging in the polls. Mr. Nikolic is a national-socialist, who rails against economic liberalization and the West. In particular, he demands that Kosovo, the Bosnian Serb Republic and vast chunks of Croatia be absorbed by Belgrade - only he seeks to do it "peacefully." For many Serbs, Gen. Mladic's call for race, blood and empire lives on. The ICTY has been a dismal failure. It has not brought about regional reconciliation or delivered true justice. Milosevic, the butcher of the Balkans, died peacefully as his trial dragged on for years, with no verdict in sight. Like Milosevic, Gen. Mladic (and Mr. Karadzic) will be allowed to grandstand, portraying Serbs as victims of a giant anti-Serbian conspiracy. Gen. Mladic may be sick, old and frail. But, sadly, he is the ugly face - the embodiment - of Serbian nationalism. And it is not dead. Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute. ──────────── Editor's Comment The author of this article hit all the important facts except for one crucial point that he did not address. What is missing is the role of the Bosnian government that was installed by the Greater Serbia project as preparation for the war, ethnic cleansing and genocide. On many occasions, the Bosnian president, Izetbegovic, sabotaged the international community's efforts to help Bosnia. The best known example is when president Izetbegovic sabotaged the defense of the country by refusing to arm Bosnians. When the American House of Representatives and Senate passed the bill for USA to lift the Arms embargo on Bosnia, Izetbegovic urgently came to New York to address the General Assembly of the UN on October 24, 1995. In his speech, he gave up arming Bosnians and in return required the following impossible task: "In order to achieve peace - and what is more - to maintain it, it is necessary to establish a balance in weaponry. This balance can be established on a higher or lower level. We give the preference to the latter, and we demand the reduction of Serbian heavy weaponry." Muhamed Borogovac ──────────── 2. Bosnian Judicial Reform Talks Kick Off 6 June 2011 Meetings on reforms to Bosnia's judicial system are due on Monday and Tuesday, though some officials say the discussions with Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik are only for show. Eldin Hadzovic Sarajevo European Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Füle is to chair the first meeting in Banja Luka on justice reform on Monday. Representatives of all levels of government will take part in the negotiations. Before heading to Banja Luka, Füle will meet with the Bosniak member of the country's tripartite presidency, Bakir Izetbegovic, the Presidency's press officer Dzenan Selimbegovic told Balkan Insight. Talks on judicial reform in Bosnia were arranged after the EU foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, on May 13 convinced Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik to drop his plans to hold a referendum in the Serb-dominated entity, the Republika Srpska. The referendum would have challenged the authority of the country's highest judicial institutions, the State Court and Prosecution. Dodik and other Serb officials maintain that the State Court and Prosecutor are biased against Serbs. After meeting Dodik, Baroness Ashton announced that the EU would establish a commission under Füle to analyze the work of Bosnia's judicial institutions and provide recommendations for reforms. The Bosnian Serb Minister of Justice, Dzerard Selman, has confirmed that a set of their own proposals for reform have been sent to Brussels. "We enter into these negotiations with a resolute stance when it comes to the Supreme Court," Selman said, referring to the earlier attitude by Bosnian Serb officials, that they would not accept the formation of a Supreme Court. Bosnia's Minister of Security, Sadik Ahmetovic, told Balkan Insight that he wasn't expecting much from this meeting, since "it will only set the frame for further negotiations". Ahmetovic noted that Bosnia was obliged to implement judicial and security reforms, as they are anticipated by Chapters 23 and 24 of the country's Stabilization and Association Agreement, SAA, with the EU. "Nothing crucial will happen in these meetings because it's all more or less a show by Dodik, who needs to explain to his voters why he withdrew his decision to hold a referendum in the Republika Srpska," Ahmetovic told Balkan Insight. Bosnia's Security Minister said the completion of judicial reforms might take up to seven years, as it would inevitably depend also on reform to Bosnia's 1995 Dayton Constitution. Bakir Dautbasic, head of Bosnia's negotiating team on judicial reform, told Balkan Insight that besides Füle, the meeting will be attended by Dodik, Selman, the justice minister of the Bosniak-Croat entity, Zoran Mikulic, state security and justice ministers Sadik Ahmetovic and Barisa Colak, and by the head of Bosnia's State Court, Meddzida Kreso, and State Prosecutor, Milorad Barasin. ──────────── Editor's Comment It is important to note here that Serbian Republic did not have any legal grounds to organize a "referendum", neither according to the suspended (but still the only legitimate) constitution of the Republic Bosnia-Herzegovina nor according to the Dayton constitution (which was never legally adopted). The fact that Dodik's Serbs won negotiations to divide the Bosnian judicial system by threatening to organize the groundless referendum, shows us how the British government (this time through Catherine Ashton) was biased in Bosnia, in violation of international laws, to support the Serbian genocidal project. In addition, the leading Bosnian negotiator, Sadik Ahmetovic was caught in a sex scandal last year. Namely, he gave a state scholarship to 16 year old prostitute, forcibly pimped by her grandmother. Needless to say, she never attended the school. That scholarship was the payment for orgies in which many influential officials of Srebrenica took part. The police of the Serbian Republic caught them, but voluntarily stopped the prosecution. The reasons are obvious, they bought and blackmailed Sadik Ahmetovic. The tragedy of Bosnia is that such corrupt individuals decide its destiny. On the Serbian side, we have the same people who committed genocide, rewarded by half of the country, and on the Bosniak side, we have former street criminals as ministers, who sell Bosnian statehood for their personal gains. All of this is happening under UN control. What else can we say except that the genocide of the Bosnian people continues by other means -- by destroying the Bosnian state, which will escalate the process of ethnic cleansing of the remaining Bosniaks from Bosnia. The Bosnian people ask EU and OHR to fight for justice in Bosnia and to save Bosnian judicial system, not merely to mediate between protagonists of the greater Serbia project and so called Bosnian side, represented by puppets of the greater Serbia project. Muhamed Borogovac ──────────── 3. The Shame of Serbia By NATASHA KANDIC OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Published: June 5, 2011 THE arrest of Ratko Mladic on May 26 caught me off guard. I couldn't believe it. I clenched my fists, trying to grip him tightly in my hands. Finally, I breathed a sigh of relief. But then I heard the speech by the Serbian president, Boris Tadic. For him, Mr. Mladic’s arrest represents the closing of a dark chapter in our history and a removal of the mark of shame that has stained the Serbian people for two decades. But there was no mention of the many other perpetrators of genocide during the 1990s or of the responsibility the Serbian state bears for those crimes. Once again, it seems, we might lose the chance to open a painful but necessary debate about the past. Not long ago, for a brief moment, it seemed that all of Serbia would side with “foreign” victims against its “own” perpetrators. That was in 2005, after my colleagues and I uncovered and released a 1995 video showing the execution of six Muslim men from the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. For the first time, the Serbian public saw incontrovertible evidence of the state’s involvement in massacring 7,000 Muslims there. The government was quick to respond by dissociating the state from the massacre. Overnight, the police arrested five men and then declared them a criminal group, denying any connection the unit may have had with state institutions. At the trial, the Serbian court rejected the testimonies of the mothers and children of the six executed Muslims. There was no evidence, the court concluded, that the men were detainees from Srebrenica. That ruling was a mark of shame on all of us. And we can't wash it off by sending Mr. Mladic to the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Mr. Mladic’s arrest brought relief to the families of victims. It offered the Hague tribunal recognition that it is a successful agent of international justice. And it granted Serbia the long-coveted prospect of membership in the European Union. The Serbian government has managed to persuade the world that it values a European future more highly than the criminal heroes of the past. But I am not so sure that Serbia has given up on Mr. Mladic and his fellow generals, who prosecuted a genocidal war in Bosnia. The sympathy that state officials and the news media expressed for Mr. Mladic last week is yet another mark of shame on all of us. The deputy prosecutor offered him strawberries. His wish to be visited by the health minister and the president of Parliament was granted, as was his request to visit his daughter’s grave. The Serbian public was constantly updated on his diet in jail, and we all learned that Mr. Mladic flew to The Hague in the suit he'd worn at his son’s wedding. He was treated as a star. Such adulation of murderers is dangerous in a region where the wounds of war have not yet healed. Nationalism is still strong in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo and Montenegro, and sometimes even stronger than it was during the wars that tore Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s. Recently in Croatia, politicians, the press, the church and civil society groups protested the Hague tribunal’s verdict that two Croatian generals were guilty of war crimes, a ruling that challenged Croatia’s official interpretation of the war. They all acknowledge that some killings took place in 1995, but they deny that the state and former leaders like Franjo Tudjman, then the president of Croatia, were responsible for planning the ethnic cleansing of Serbs. In the eyes of the Bosnian political establishment and victims’ families, justice for the victims of genocide and ethnic cleansing will be served only if Serbia and Bosnian Serb leaders acknowledge their role in the genocide. Yet Bosnian Serb leaders still deny it took place and demand that more Bosnian Muslim leaders face war crimes trials, too. Similarly, little has changed in Kosovo, where the public opposes trying the commanders of the former Kosovo Liberation Army. And in Montenegro, a court ruled that the policemen who handed over Muslim refugees to Bosnian Serb forces in May 1992 weren't guilty of a war crime — a slap in the face to victims’ families. The region desperately needs an honest debate about the past. It is the only way to recognize all victims and to stop the lies we tell about ourselves and about others. Victims’ families, 1,600 nongovernmental organizations, veterans and clergymen have signed on to the initiative for the founding of a regional commission that would compile a complete registry of victims, including dead soldiers, policemen, volunteers and those who were targets of ethnic cleansing. Later this month, a request to establish this commission will be submitted to leaders of all the successor states of the former Yugoslavia. If adopted, it will put an end to the age-old Balkan practice of leaving victims nameless. And we can only hope that it will eventually wash away the stain of the past once and for all. ──────────── 4. Bosnians Commend Congressman Russ Carnahan BAACBH would like to recognize and commend U.S. Congressman Russ Carnahan (D-MO) for his support of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and the Bosnian people. BAACBH was alarmed by the recent events that took place in Prijedor, BiH regarding the Day of Concentration Camp Detainees that takes place on May 9th of each year at the site of the former Omarska concentration camp. Omarska was one of the most notorious concentration camps during the war in BiH. It was one of three camps set up in northern BiH to rid the country of non-Serbs where around 6,000 Bosniaks and Croats were held in appalling and brutal conditions for five months in the spring and summer of 1992. Currently, the biggest steel company in the world, Arcelor Mittal owns the mining complex site in Omarska; however, no memorial commemorating the concentration camp exists to this day. The current Mayor of Prijedor, Marko Pavic, stated that a memorial in Omarska would undermine relations between different ethnic groups in Prijedor. Alarmingly, just a day after the Day of Concentration Camp Detainees, someone in Prijedor spray painted "Death to Inzko, Gypsies and Muslims should be put in concentration camps." In his statement before the U.S. Congress on May 10, 2011, Rep. Carnahan recognized the victims of the concentration camp in Omarska and emphasized that remembering the victims is crucial to the reconciliation process. Congressman Carnahan urged all parties to allow for the memorial to be built at Omarska so that the victims can forever be remembered and so that similar atrocities never occur again. ──────────── 5. Bosnian Traditional Flag “Golden Lilies” at Stanford Class 2011 Graduation Class 2011 Graduates at Stanford are Amer Handan and Ada Kulenovic. They were toddlers when Bosnian government betrayed flag of the Republic Bosnia-Herzegovina and replaced it by the yellow triangle “flag”, to appease Serbian aggressors. However, Bosnians, including the youngest generations, remember the flag of their Republic, do not recognize results of the treason of the country and do not recognize borders in their country created by aggression, genocide and treason. http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1753565363404&set=o.188566434511083&type=1&theater