BY GUNDUZ AKTAN
RADIKAL- Following the recognitions of Slovenia and Croatia, the European Union also recognized Bosnia-Herzegovina, a country which declared its independence on March 3, 1992. The United States then had to follow the EU, and the Balkan wars flared up.
Serbia was aiming to seize all of the territories where Serbians were living, and then it started to perpetrate ethnic cleansing to expel other groups from the country. The weapons embargo imposed under the September 1991 United Nations Security Council Resolution 713 deprived other groups of arms to fight the Serbian Army. The US chose not to intervene in the region for a long time, arguing that it was an internal European matter.
In the meantime, Europe was split into two. On the one hand, Britain, France and Russia were tolerant of Serbia’s actions, and on the other, Turkey, Germany and Austria were defending the rights of the victims.
In February 1992, the EU established aid corridors in the region’s residential areas with the help of UNPROFOR, a force made up of British and French troops. It declared some of the regions ‘safe zones’ to protect the cities that the Serbian Army was attacking. However, as no armed measures were taken, these efforts were doomed to failure. Brussels then tried to find a solution to the problem with a series of international conferences.
UNPROFOR failed to protect the civilian population. Since the UN refused to lift its weapons embargo, it gave these people no chance to defend themselves. Approximately 2.5 million people, most Muslims, were forced to migrate to other countries. Some 250,000 innocent people were slaughtered and 50,000 women were raped. The Serbian soldiers burned the villages, destroyed the mosques and deprived the people of food and water in concentration camps. Their bodies were buried in mass graves.
From the very beginning, Turkey knew that this wasn’t simply another war. The ethnic cleansing wasn’t the result of the war but it was Serbia’s ultimate aim. It was truly a genocide. Turkey called on the UN Human Rights Commission to convene for a special session in December 1992. The commission decided that Serbians were perpetrating crimes against humanity and the victims were the Muslim Bosnians. The UN General Assembly then agreed that ‘ethnic cleansing’ is a type of genocide.
In June 1993, the World Human Rights Conference approved a resolution calling on the Security Council to put an end to the genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina. However, the secretary of the conference lost the text of the resolution, and then Turkey had to stop the meeting until the text was found!
However, the result was the same. By July 11, 1995, the Serbians had slaughtered 8,000 Bosnians. Then, NATO, led by the US, intervened in the region and overpowered the Serbian troops.
The Bosnian-Herzegovina incidents reminded us of a century-long ethnic cleansing against the Balkan Turks. Now, I’d like to call on French President Chirac to recall these events, and the fact that the perpetrators killed and tortured thousands of innocent people virtually next door. He must think well to remember these events.
And we too, we mustn’t forget this genocide, its perpetrators and collaborators either.