It’s late, and I just got home and am squeezing in a few minutes at the computer.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Churchill famously said “jaw jaw jaw is better than war war war,” and he was right. Talking is better than fighting.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The L.A. Times had an excellent article about Srebrenica<\/a> today, as did the New York Times, who focused<\/a> in part on the trauma the events presented to the Dutch soldiers guarding the Muslim enclave.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \nNearly 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.<\/p>\n \nOfficial 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.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The false appearance of strength and the structures of negotiation are not a useful defense against evil. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/815\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}