On Indifference

At the time when Sri Lankan government forces were mopping up the Tamil resistance by forcing all of the residents of Jaffna and other towns into concentration camps, Disney's Frozen was in theaters. Tamils were holding a protest downtown across from the movie theater. I wanted to hear what they had to say but we couldn't to miss the movie.

In the 1990s heavily armed Chetnik forces acting as proxies for the Milosevic government in Serbia were slaughtering and raping the civilians of Bosnia in the hopes of creating a racially pure Serb state in support of the mission of a "greater Serbia" (Make Serbia Great Again).

After peace was imposed by American airpower and formalized by the Dayton accords Bosnia was forgotten by those who chose to think about it and never known to those who had ignored it during the crisis.

Joe Sacco was there from 1992 to 1995. He spent time in Gorazde and wrote about it in his graphic novel.

While it is easy to judge the misdeeds of the "International Community" during this war. We can never know the pressures and limitations that the leaders on the ground, in UN and in the national governments in the west, experienced at the time. We can judge President Clinton harshly for taking nearly no action until after thousands were killed over many years. We can also recognize that he had very little public support for taking action in Bosnia. Just as there was very little support for taking action in Rwanda at the same time. The public saw the reports in Time and Newsweek. Yet the public had no appetite for intervention.

Despite these barriers. We should recognize an especially duplicitious act of cowardice on the part of the UN coalition. The Peacekeepers had declared a town called Srebenica to be a "Safe Area". The Peacekeepers demilitizarized the town, taking away the few guns that the townspeople had been using to defend their town prior to the UN arriving. The Peackeepers promised, and were backed by American airpower, to protect Srebinica. The UN abandoned Srebenica to its fate. Over 8,000 men were murdered within a week. The undefended women and children were left to their fate.

Ultimately the outrage at Srebenica and the lack of leadership beyond virtue signaling forced the US to take decisive measures and to include Gorazde in it's comprehensive peace deal that was brokered in Dayton, Ohio. The public was bombarded with information on rape and violence for years prior to the Dayton accord. What would have been the difference if the public was moved to act? If people cared would the tragedy have been averted?

And here we are...