It’s late, and I just got home and am squeezing in a few minutes at the computer.
There are a lot of things I want to blog about (the backlog is big) but I couldn’t let today pass without mentioning the anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre; the most prominent, but not the only, failure of the ‘peacekeeping’ model.
Much of what I do for a living involves negotiation, and one thing that has been clear to me is that there are people for whom a successful negotiation is the single most important outcome – they cannot accept that negotiations are episodic, and that if one side ‘s desired outcome is a successful negotiation, and the other’s is – anything at all – that it’s often the case that both sides will get when they want.
Churchill famously said “jaw jaw jaw is better than war war war,” and he was right. Talking is better than fighting.
As long as talking is all that is going on, and as long as it simply isn’t a matter of the other side buying time saying “nice doggie” while finding the appropriate stick, or worse, buying time while busily erasing the living evidence of their crimes.
The L.A. Times had an excellent article about Srebrenica today, as did the New York Times, who focused in part on the trauma the events presented to the Dutch soldiers guarding the Muslim enclave.
Mandated to defend the U.N.-declared ”safe haven,” the Dutch battalion stood by as the carnage unfolded, and has been accused by some of sharing responsibility for the worst massacre in Europe since World War II.
Nearly 8,000 people died after Bosnian Serbs overran the enclave 10 years ago Monday. While the Dutch watched, the Serbs separated Muslim men and boys from their families, loaded them into trucks and took them away for execution. The U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague has ruled it was genocide.
Official inquiries have cleared the 370 troops of blame. Overwhelmed, undermanned, under-armed and with orders to shoot only in self defense, they were helpless to stop the onslaught, independent investigators have concluded.
The false appearance of strength and the structures of negotiation are not a useful defense against evil.
I’ve also put up a couple posts on Srebrenica (whose anniversary sadly coincides with my birthday), including a bit of an interesting comparison by Peaktalk back on April 15 of the Dutch commander Karremans in Srebrenica and the Canadian commander Dallaire in Kigali.
Supercena: They were informed that serbs will try to exterminate muslims, like they did in other vilages, but they didn’t care, why should they, it was not their nation.
I can understand why you feel that way, but I’m not sure that you’re right when you say that none of them cared. There were many among the UN peacekeepers in Rwanda who cared when they saw the holocaust coming, and who did everything in their alloted power to stop it – namely, reporting it to their purblind superiors.
The problem is that the so-called “United Nations” is not worth one good nation. It’s an instrument for excusing impotence in the face of evil. Abolish it now, please.
_I am from former Yogoslavia and for this masaker is first of guilty UN forces from Netherland, who escaped from Srebrenica when Serbs came._
AFAIK the Netherland’s troops consulted with the UN command any move they made, as they retreated from the advanced posts in the mountains around Srebrenica. When the Serbs finally tried to go into the city, the far inferior in number and armored equipment Dutch soldiers called for air support, which was denied by UN special envoy Akashi and French General Janvier, probably due to the capture of UN soldiers by the Serbs in other Bosnian cities and their use as human shields. As the F-16’s waited loaded in Aviano, the UN command in Croatia rejected all the Dutch calls for air support, the last one on grounds that was a wrong radio form. Finally a F-16 hit a tank when the city had already fallen.
The Dutch soldiers were shamely arrested and released when and as the Serbs wanted.
I think their biggest fault was to put themselves under UN command.
The false appearance of strength and the structures of negotiation are not a useful defense against evil.
Well, that begs the question: What is a “useful defense against evil”?
Like the current administration, you are framing the issue in completely innaccurate and useless terms. Are we really trying to fight “evil” and “terror”? They exist as part of the human condition. Seems about as “useful” as declaring war on “sadness” or “anger”.
Perhaps our biggest current problem is that those like yourself who support military aggression and Bush’s war (and are running US foreign policy at the moment) really don’t seem to have a firm grasp on the reality of human nature and how we are all cut from the same cloth, biologically speaking.
But if it makes you all feel better inside to bash the UN and bang drums, go ahead. Just don’t delude yourselves into thinking this is a sustainable approach to anything.
Astral, What are you trying to say exactly? Are you saying that any action for self-defense is futile? And that since evil can’t be defeated once and for all time, that any action to do so is fultile? Do you consider yourself a nihilist?
Perhaps you really are more suited for the Astral plane. Here’s wishing you a happy journey.
>>There were many among the UN peacekeepers in Rwanda who cared when they saw the holocaust coming, and who did everything in their alloted power to stop it – namely, reporting it to their purblind superiors.
Those UN “peacekeepers” who followed orders and abandoned the victims in Rwanda to their fate are not Men. When Men are ordered to walk away from a genocide in progress, they tell their “superiors” to go to hell, and affix their bayonets for when they run out of ammo. The UN guys assigned to Rwanda are some of the most pathetic creatures on the planet. I pity them even more than I do the victims of the genocide.
#1 The first of the shamefull sould be the US who saw weeks in advance the Serbian troop build up and didn’t warn the UN troops.
#3 You have the UN or the US. US will do what is in its peoples bets interest so i’m rooting for the UN who sometimes does things which are in my best interest.
Inventing events again, “a”?
Check Voorhoeve on Google news if you don’t believe me.
“General Janvier defends himself”:http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/peacekpg/lessons/serb.htm and blames the evil anglosaxons.
Could you imagine what would it happen in Iraq if these guys were on charge of the operations?
_US will do what is in its peoples bets interest_
The US is doing things that are in my best interest, but I am not American.
You call the Associated Press article in the New York Times “excellent”? I disagree. It was hard to read it, I was so angry.
It made out the (allegedly unhappy) accessories to a genocidal massacre to be the victims. “Most of them feel abandoned, rejected, falsely accused,” she said. Falsely accused?? Falsely accused!? This is the suffering I’m supposed to feel sorry for?
What about the victims of this massacre? They’re not getting therapy, because they’re dead!
The victims were lied to by the U.N. They were collected in the killing area, as if for “resettlement in the East”. They were, as far as possible, disarmed, because they were to be protected like sheep. (I think you of all people should understand this, Joe. Remember your fundamental human right? It was never more relevant.) Then their shepherds handed their blue helmet and arms, and all those people under their protection, over to the wolves.
Every man present had a sacred, absolute individual duty to die rather than consent to that. They did not. The cooperated with a Nazi-style genocidal massacre, in which the U.N., that spawn of Hell, was utterly and comprehensively implicated.
Then the terror began, an unforgivable atrocity. Everybody who saw that coming and did nothing should die and be cursed by every god and be annihilated and be no more forever.
They feel falsely accused!?
This is the first (and last) time I ever harassed my member of parliament (John Howard) with letters – begging him to do something anything, successful or not, promising anything I could think of, to vote for him for the rest of my life, anything I could think of no matter how lame, because the whole world could see what was coming. And I just got a polite reply about how little Australia could do. (This is why, before 11 September 2001, I had little but contempt for John Winston Howard.) That is wretched. It’s pathetic. It was barely acting at all. But I did something, not nothing.
These men were right there, with guns. It was their absolute duty to fight and die, no matter who said what. And they handed over their guns to genocidal killers.
They feel falsely accused!?
Damn them all! Them and the whole United Nations, in its evil entirety, damn them all in perpetuity.
David, you’re right, that was sloppy writing on my part – I didn;t mean to imply that the New York Times article was also “excellent,” and in fact had edited that word out of the description.
A.L.
_Could you imagine what would it happen in Iraq if these guys were on charge of the operations?_
Peace?
Oops, sorry – not Joe, Armed Liberal. (I was barely seeing straight when I dashed off that reply.) Other than that, I resile from nothing.
Nobody has a right to give over their guns to those who they know will use those guns (and the blue helmets, to deceive the victims!) in a genocidal massacre. And then feel “falsely accused”.
I am still angrier about this than I know how to explain.
To refer back to my thread on what makes a hero, one of the answers given was training, especially military training. At the time I didn’t argue – it ill befits a civilian to argue with soldiers about that. But fundamentally, no. Those soldiers had all the training you could want. That’s not the point. The point is, you have to take in the situation as it really is, respond to it morally, and ACT! Without right action, which those so-highly-trained soldiers did not demonstrate, everything else is trash.
There are many things that go wrong in the world, and we can’t all be having hysterics over them all the time. We have to get on with our lives. Baby needs to be fed on time, tragedy in the news or no. But there comes a time, and you may not even know how you know, when you know that this – situation – is addressed, among other people, to you.
They were right there, with guns in their hands.
And there were a lot of other people much guiltier than them, who stood in perfect safety, who had only to speak the truth and say what was necessary, but who instead were silent, or lied, or gave wrong orders.
… Arrgh!!
A.L. – sure. I know your heart was in the right place – It’s not you I’m angry at.
I remember at the time, a Holocaust thing, where I couldn’t trust myself to speak. How could people say “Never again!” when it was happening again? But there was an actual Holocaust survivor there. You can’t say anything, and anyway it wasn’t him I was really angry at.
But there are a lot of people who really are guilty and who shouldn’t be allowed to forget Goradze and Srebrenice and other horrors of our times.