Unlearned Lesson of War in Bosnia

By Milenko Srećković

Military interventions of international forces, which opt for one of the parties in religious-sectarian conflicts, only stir up already started wars and increase the number of their victims. For many, that interventionism began during the war in Bosnia.

Mick Hume, editor of the British magazine “LM”, who criticized media reporting on events of those years and opposed demonization of Serbs, believes that Bosnia was a breakpoint, when advocates of intervention – “laptop bombardiers” – managed to involve the West in war against Serbia, in order for them to feel morally superior. [1]

Brendan O’Neill, author of the book “From Bosnia to Beslan: How the West Spread Al-Qaeda”, claims that USA supplied thousands of Mujahideen fighters with arms and sent them to Bosnia. He also adds that supporters of Western military interventions and anti-Western political Islamists share a common origin from this conflict, where they were allies: for both of these fractions that was not a civil war, but exclusively Serbian aggression – and Serbs have been, through calculated media hysteria, equated with Nazis. [2]

Faisal Devji in his book “Landscapes of the Jihad” claims that modern jihad is “is more a product of the media than it is of any local tradition or situation and school or lineage of Muslim authority… [The] jihad itself can be seen as an offspring of the media, composed as it is almost completely of preexisting media themes, images and stereotypes”.

O’Neill believes too that many Mujahideens were encouraged to engage in Bosnian conflicts precisely by biased media reporting of left-liberal Western journalists. Many testimonies of Arab fighters reveal that they went to Bosnia after they saw “reports of American media on rape camps”, or after they read about “genocide” in Bosnia and “camps where Serbian soldiers have systematically raped thousands of Muslim women”. “In Bosnia, both Western elements and radical Islamists became super-moralized, militarized, internationalized. As a result of their joint war against the “evil” of the Serbs, they began to conceive of themselves as warriors for “good” who did not have to play by the old rules of the international order”, says O’Neill.

In the Hague Tribunal, former member of the special unit of Bosna and Herzegovina police that safeguarded Izetbegović’s Presidency, has recently admitted that in Sarajevo was conducted so-called „false flag operation“, in order to accuse the opposing Serbian party of bombing Markala market place and killing of civilians, and to instigate the intervention of international forces. [3] Norwegian professor Ola Tunander, from the Peace Resarch Institute Oslo, confirms too that this was testified to him from a number of sources from NATO. [4]

On recently shut down Facebook page “Vijesti Ummeta”, which served to recruit Balkan Muslims for warfare on the side of Syrian rebels, any news of death of members of Hezbollah and Shiites fighting on the side of regular Syrian army, was celebrated by a long series of readers’ comments. Shiites were presented as a kind of fake Muslims, who should be killed without hesitation. Religious sectarianism already seen in the conflicts on the territory of former Yugoslavia, in Syria turned into sectarianism within one and the same religion.

Valentin Inzko, High representative of EU in BiH, announces military intervention in order to curb recent social protests in Bosnia, while Austrian diplomat Kurz considers abolishing the cantons, allegedly concerned with their excessive costs. Both promote policies that are not in accordance with wishes of the people of BiH, and in no way help to solve severe social crisis because of which protests has started in the first place. It is just too irresponsible and inappropriate coming from these Austrian citizens, on the centenary of Sarajevo assassination and the beginning of WWI.