Holocaust Survivor Accurately Predicted Bosnian

Genocide
By Yahalom Kashny
Chairman of the Bosniak & Jewish Solidarity

16 September 2010.

In initial months of the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbs destroyed more than
1,000 Bosnian Muslim villages and hamlets in eastern Bosnia and took control of almost all
major cities in the area. Only Srebrenica and Gorazde remained in Muslim hands. Before
Muslims fired a shot, they were uprooted from their homes, tortured, many killed, but most of
them herded into enclaves or ghettos, and then starved and terrorized by Serbian forces, until
they finally ‘finished them off’ in July of 1995.

On 11 July 1993, Henry Siegman – a survivor of the Holocaust and executive director of the
American Jewish Congres – warned that Bosnian Muslim people are targeted for extinction.
Nobody listened.

To speed up the process of destruction of Bosnian Muslim people, Western powers passed
Resolution 713 imposing an arms embargo on all of former Yugoslavia. The embargo hurt
fledgling Bosnian Army (ARBiH) the most because Serbia inherited the lion’s share of the
former YugoslavArmy’s arsenal and the Croatian army could smuggle weapons through its
coast.

Two years later, on 11 July 1995, Serb forces overrun Srebrenica and committed genocide.
In 2004, another Holocaust survivor, Judge Theodor Meron, presided over the appellate trial of
Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic. This landmark international judgement confirmed
Henry Siegman’s worst fears.

It established that Serb forces [just as Henry Siegman warned 2 years earlier] “targeted for
extinction the 40,000 Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica.” It also established that summary
executions of 8,000 Bosniak men and underage boys qualify as genocide:

“The Appeals Chamber states unequivocally that the law condemns, in appropriate terms, the
deep and lasting injury inflicted, and calls the massacre at Srebrenica by its proper name:
genocide.”

The World paid no attention to him, but his words still echoe true in many parts of this world,
including Darfur and Chechnya. Here is what he said on 11 July 1993:

“A Muslim people are targeted for extinction, and the West turns away. There is no
rationalizing this brutal immorality.
To compare Bosnia and the Holocaust is to invite angry disagreement from some Jewish
critics who correctly see the Holocaust as a unique evil, an unprecedented descent into
hell. But the uniqueness of the Holocaust does not diminish the force of powerful
parallels that do exist between these two tragedies, and no one should understand these
commonalities better than the Jews.

To be sure, Hitler’s obsession with the total eradication of the Jews of Europe (and of the
world, if he could have had his way) and the crematoria of the concentration camps, the
Nazis’ method of choice for achieving their goal, are not elements in the Serbian
violence against Bosnia’s Muslims. But virtually everything else is, including the cynical
and total abandonment of Bosnia’s Muslims by the West to certain slaughter or
expulsion.

Surely President Clinton and Secretary of State Warren Christopher know what
journalists reporting from the Balkans have known for some time: that the current
negotiations in Geneva to carve Bosnia into ‘ethnic states’ for Serbs, Croats and
Muslims are, like the negotiations to implement the Vance-Owen plan: a ruse, disguising
the real goal of Serbs and Croats to extinguish Bosnia as a state and to kill or drive into
exile all of its Muslim inhabitants.

In the face of this massive calamity-in-the-making–its outcome can hardly be in doubt,

given our perverse insistence on observing an arms embargo that denies Bosnia’s
Muslims arms to defend themselves while the Serb militias are fully supplied–
Christopher’s assurance that the United States will go along with whatever plan the three
parties agree to is cruelly irrelevant and morally obscene.

What we are witnessing is the West’s total abandonment of Bosnia’s Muslims to the
destruction programmed for them. It is as complete and as cynical an abandonment as
that of the Jews in World War II. The notion that America and its allies are helpless to do
anything about this human and political disaster is a palpable lie. It is as believable as
the argument that European countries and America could do nothing to help the Jews in
the 1930s, even while those governments were turning away from their shores shiploads
of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.”