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.”