No, this has naught to do with Israel. Or Jews. I have in the past slammed the Dutch, Europeans, and United Nations several times for their abysmal two-facedness and reprehensible record regarding Jews and Israel. Not this time.
This time I speak of their abysmal two-facedness and reprehensible record regarding Muslims and the Balkans.
SREBENICA
In 1993 General Morillon (a Frenchman, currently member of the Euro parliament) told the besieged town of Srebrenica that they were under the protection of the UN, and he would never, never (!) abandon them. He left the army within the year.
In April of that year, the UN Security Council officially declared that Srebrenica was a UN safe area, and that it would be safeguarded from attack.
By spring of 1995 the situation was desperate: the Serb terrorists were determined to capture Srebenica and expunge the Muslim inhabitants, the UN had done nearly nothing to ensure the safety of the sixty thousand people in the town despite looming disaster, supplies were running low, and the Dutch peacekeepers were becoming keenly aware of the apathy of their NATO colleagues about the situation.
NOTE: I should mention at this point that the Dutch had become overly friendly with the Serbians during their time in the Balkans - Lieutenant Colonel Karremans (now hiding out in Spain, where no one particularly cares about his role in the debacle), in command of the Dutch at Srebenica, seems to have had a drinking-buddy relationship with Serb terrorist commander Ratko Mladic, to whom he looked up, and from whom he accepted favours.
There have also been well-attested incidents of ethnic Dutch soldiers hazing (abusing) fellow soldiers of Moroccan and Turkish ancestry in the Dutch army - including one incident in which they poured gasoline over a companion and threatened to burn the damn' heathen. Certainly they did not look upon the Muslim Bosniaks in an overly kind fashion, and an argument can well be made that the bigotries of small town Holland affected their concern for their charges in Bosnia.
JULY 1995
Between July tenth and July twenty first, Dutch forces witnessed several incidents which indicated that Serbs neither respected the inviolability of people in the UN safe area, nor intended to honour the assurances of safety and civilized treatment of the refugees that they had given the Dutch - there were numerous murders, rapes, and incidents of brutal torture. There is consequently no way that any of the Dutchbat soldiers and officers could then, or can since, claim ignorance of what was going to happen.
On the 21st of July 1995, after surrendering the Bosniaks to the Serbian terrorists, Karremans and company left the area of Srebrenica for safer climes. Apparently the four hundred Dutch soldiers did not develop any psychological problems despite what befell the refugees they abandoned, as not long after they were happily carousing in Sarajevo. Since their return to the Netherlands, however, the Dutch government has kept them mostly under wraps, claiming that they are 'traumatized'.
Which conveniently keeps them out of the light, and away from the somewhat disinterested eyes of the Dutch press.
Now the survivors of their compassion are seeking justice. And suing the Dutch government.
Article from the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7457239.stm
Quote: "They allege the Dutch state was liable for its troops' failure to protect some 8,000 Muslim civilians killed when Bosnian-Serb forces overran the town."
And: "Lawyers for the plaintiffs argue that the UN Dutch battalion (Dutchbat) allowed the killings by handing over Muslims to the Bosnian-Serb forces, and that the Dutch state was liable because it had command of the military."
It took the Dutch seven years to conclude that perhaps something went disastrously wrong. Now let us see how the Dutch courts deal with the issue, and who will get splattered - there is more than enough blame to pass around.
The Dutch, the Europeans, and the United Nations; all bear guilt for the slaughter of eight thousand Bosniaks.
On a related note, if it weren't for the US, the Serbians and their Greek and Russky volunteers would've pogrommed Bosnia and Kosovo right off the map. The Europeans were ready to sit back and watch it happen, the UN would've done nothing more than pass the usual resolutions, and a majority of the international community would've ignored the issue in return for their own flaws being overlooked.
I sometimes think that when we bombed Belgrado in 1999 we should've dropped a couple of stray thousand-pounders on the other European capitals.
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4 comments:
The Dutch to be tried by same belgian court that tried Sharon for Sabra and Shatilla?
The Code Napoleon as interpreted by neither the Dutch nor the Belgians is capable of impartiality. I do not know whether that is a flaw of the code, or of the character interpreting.
I need not remind you who really gave the orders, and whose brother had recently been 'expunged'. But by the Belgians, that was not relevant (they maintain a peculiar definition of relevance over there).
Hmm! Interesting analysis. The Europeans are a bit too biased as compared to Americans but with the passage of time, Europeans did export their disease across the ocean to the West
Biased?
I'm afraid all people are biased - it's the natural reaction to whatever is different, or foreign, or offends one's own blinkered sensitivities.
Here in America we are perhaps better at opening our minds to the other - we are all "other" here. And we're more willing to experiment with the othernesses of other cultures and peoples.
In Europe the tendency is to consider bias part of culture - whatever is not of one's own, is, almost by definition, repulsive.
[As the Flemish say "wat Wals is, vals is; sla dood" ('whatever is Wallon (=foreign) is treacherous; expunge it').]
Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, Africans, and almost everybody else, also do this.
The massacre of Tutsis was because they differed too much from acceptable "Hutu-ness". The Chinese are notoriously racist (without even considering it a bias - it's so 'natural'), and do not understand in the slightest why their minority nationalities are still so stubbornly different - don't they want to be civilized (=Chinese)?.
The Indonesians slaughtered over a million Indonesian Chinese (many of centuries residence in the country) during the 1965-67 period - they were too 'foreign', too 'Chinese', too 'not us'.
Indians and Pakistanis? Religious discord, Muslim fanaticism, Hindu Nationalism, regional rivalries, caste disputes, class superiorities, and clannishness. Noticed primarily when slaughter ensues.
By the same token, the educated classes in almost all cases recognize shared values across the borders of bias. Naturally - they do not stand to lose much from equitable treatment of others. Especially not if the social structures favour their kind.
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