February 27, 2007
Court Declares Bosnia Killings Were Genocide
By Marlise Simons
THE HAGUE, Feb. 26 — The International Court of Justice on Monday for the first time called the massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995 an act of genocide, but determined that Serbia itself was not guilty of the enormous crime.
Nonetheless, it faulted Serbia, saying it “could and should” have prevented the genocide and, in its aftermath, should have punished the Bosnian Serbs who systematically killed close to 8,000 men and
boys in July 1995.
The ruling resulted from a civil lawsuit Bosnia had brought against Serbia, the first in which one country sued another for genocide.
The 15 international judges who held nine weeks of hearings and deliberated for nearly 10 months relied in part on evidence presented in criminal cases heard by the United Nations Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which has found two Bosnian Serb officers guilty of genocide for the Srebrenica massacre.
In the end, the lawsuit resolved Monday may have been the most complex case handled in the 60-year history of the World Court, which the United Nations set up to resolve legal disputes between
states.
The ruling appeared to give some satisfaction — and frustration — to both sides. It freed Serbia of the stigma of being a genocidal nation and absolved it from having to pay war reparations, as demanded by
Bosnia.
At the same time, Bosnia obtained what it said it wanted from the outset: a recognition of Serbia’s guilt.
[...]
In a statement after the session, Judge Higgins noted that the findings did not completely satisfy either side. “That does not mean, of course, that the court has been seeking a political compromise,” she
said.
All the same, the ruling, even if strictly based on the law, hews close to the political wishes of Western
countries that want to pull Serbia into a wider Western European community, rather than see it isolated as a pariah state, possibly accused of genocide, with its extreme nationalists growing in strength.
[...]
Lawyers for Bosnia had tried to convince the court that the pattern of atrocities across many communities in Bosnia demonstrated the intention to commit genocide, not only by killing, imprisoning
and deporting the population, but also by destroying evidence of their presence.Andras Riedlmayer, a historian testifying for Bosnia, said the Serb campaign to purge 26 municipalities of Bosnia of non-Serbs had destroyed or damaged 958 mosques and close to 300 Roman Catholic churches and monasteries.
But the judges ruled that demonstrating a pattern of conduct or of atrocities was “too broad” to qualify for the definition of genocide. The crime of genocide required showing convincingly there was a specific plan or the specific intention to destroy the group or part of it, they ruled.
In essence, they did not answer the question often asked in The Hague: when does ethnic cleansing become genocide?
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
"A problem from hell"
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
They said it, not me...
As waves of mourners rolled through the streets of Istanbul this week in honor of slain ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, many liberal Turks were swept up in a sense that an unprecedented chance for ethnic reconciliation was at hand.
But just two days later, a darker reality was setting in: Many Turks are rejecting the appeals for solidarity and democratic reform as ultranationalists — some inspired by hardcore Islam — become ever more strident and daring.
A large proportion of the tens of thousands who joined Dink's funeral procession were urban intellectuals, hardly representative of a nation of more than 70 million people where conservative Islamic values are deep-seated and the military is the most trusted institution.
In fact, many Turks support the views of nationalists who are becoming increasingly vocal in their condemnation of Western values they feel are being imposed on them by the European Union, which is considering Turkey's membership bid.
Dink had been forced to stand trial by nationalists angered by his calls to recognize the killings of Armenians in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire as a genocide. He was gunned down Friday in front of the offices of his bilingual Armenian-Turkish newspaper — allegedly by a teenager who had been incited to the crime by ultrarightists.
During his funeral procession on Tuesday, mourners chanted "We are all Armenians," urged liberal reform and called for the repeal of the law used to convict Dink on charges of "insulting Turkishness."
However, most Turks interviewed by The Associated Press on Thursday said the marchers did not represent the country and said they were against making concessions to Armenians on the sensitive issue of the killings.
"They should speak for themselves, they cannot speak on behalf of Turks," said Filiz Un, 32. "I am sorry for him as a human but they cannot pretend that all the Turkish public is behind them."
Turkey's expulsion and killings of Armenians during World War I — which Armenians say claimed 1.5 million lives — is a dark chapter rarely discussed publicly in Turkey or taught in its schools.
Turkey vehemently denies it was genocide and is battling Armenian diaspora groups that are pushing European governments and the United States to declare the killings genocide.
A headline in the right-wing newspaper Tercuman said that those who aren't proud to be Turkish "should clear off and leave." The article ran a day after a threat against Nobel prize-winner Orhan Pamuk by a handcuffed suspect charged with inciting the murder of Dink.
Turkey's largest nationalist party responded to the mourners' chants by posting its own slogan — "We are all Turks" — on a digital display outside a local party branch in the Mediterranean resort of Antalya.
..."There is a fault line passing right through the middle of society," wrote Turker Alkan, a columnist for the center-left Radikal newspaper. "Those who cannot reconcile Hrant Dink's murder with humanity, consciousness and moral values are on the one side; those who don't really oppose the murder because of their nationalist sentiments and their religious beliefs are on the other."
Selami Ince, news editor of the Istanbul-based Alawite television, Su TV, explained that few of the marchers at the funeral were Turks with roots in the Anatolian heartland.
"Unfortunately, they do not represent the Turkish public," Ince said. "The Turkish public has not filled the streets with demands of democracy and freedom. They were leftists, Armenians, Kurds and those intellectuals who favor multiculturalism."
....full article here: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/01/26/europe/EU-GEN-Turkey-Nationalist-Backlash.php
Sunday, November 12, 2006
"Never Again"
"The Holocaust, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur….
And every time a U.S. president, a British Prime Minister, a U.N. Secretary General says, "Never again."
Yet it happens-again, and again, and again….Why?
Because, our leaders say, We didn't know.Yet they did know-recent studies have shown that the British knew conclusively what was going on at Auschwitz…yet buried that knowledge in their files because it would have forced them to change their war plans.
Everyone knew what was going on in Cambodia, post-the Vietnam War, as the Academy Award-winning movie "The Killing Fields" demonstrates … yet the powers that be declined to admit it, for fear they would have to do something.
In Carla Garapedian's powerful new film, "Screamers," Pulitzer prize-winner Samantha Power says President after President, Democrat and Republican, have known about genocides as they were happening … but have chosen not to act.
In Iraq, Reagan did not want the horrors of Saddam Hussein's massacre against the Kurds to come out, because then he would have to do something to stop him. In Bosnia, world television coverage of the genocide convinced the international community to step in…but only after 200,000 had been murdered.
In Rwanda, Bill Clinton did not want the true horrors to come out …because then he would have to do something.
And now, in Darfur, George Bush has finally declared the desolation of the Southern Sudan a "genocide"-yet refused to do what it takes to stop it.
Why? Because, once again, as in 1915, when the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, first reported the wholesale extermination of the Armenian population by the Ottoman Turks in Anatolia, it was denied so the United States would not be forced to act. That reaction gave Hitler his impetus for the Holocaust: "Who remembers the Armenians?" he declared in 1939, before ordering the murder of 6 million European Jews.
In "Screamers," Garapedian traces the history of modern-day genocide-and genocide denial- from the fertile "Holy Mountains" of Anatolia to the current atrocities in Darfur . This documentary is as shattering as it is powerful, which includes interviews and live performance footage with System Of A Down, the multi-platinum, Grammy-Award winning rock band, all of whose members are Armenian-American. The film is laced with seven of the band's songs from "Holy Mountains" to "P.L.U.C.K." to the #1 hit "B.Y.O.B." that illuminate the band's views on political and social issues."