Links
From Srebrenica to Baghdad: How the Balkan genocide 15 years ago got us into Iraq
The genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia, 15 years ago this week continues to haunt European consciences. The massacre is frequently in the news, most recently because relatives of the victims are now asking prosecutors in the Netherlands to charge Dutch peacekeepers with war crimes. For Americans, the anniversary of the massacre will mostly go unnoticed. But it shouldn't"the horrible events of July 1995 in Srebrenica have a lot to do with why Americans are now in Iraq.
Of course, Iraq was on few minds at the time in Srebrenica, a small town in the east of Bosnia and Herzegovina. There Dutch troops stood by at the U.N.-declared "safe zone" while Serbs overran it, killing 8,000 Muslim men and boys with firing squads. It was the worst crime in Europe since World War II, and it happened while the world watched.
Besides the genocide itself, the spectacle of peacekeepers acting as bystanders seemed an atrocity in its own right. Prohibited from using force, the 600 U.N. soldiers depended on NATO planes to give them cover. But NATO policy required the U.N.'s blessing before it could launch attacks"a circular logic that made intervention difficult. Betting correctly that the international community wouldn't use force, the Serbs simply marched past the peacekeepers, separated the males of Srebrenica from the females, and slaughtered them. Soon after seizing the town, the Serbian general responsible for the genocide insisted that the commander of U.N. peacekeepers there raise a glass with him "to long life." He did. The image of the two drinking together seemed to encapsulate all that was dangerous and hypocritical with the United Nations and multilateralism.