Bosnia's Reckoning

An excellent and thought provoking article from Ed Vulliamy:

It is time to confront a bitter reality: that the estimable and intense focus on Srebrenica, and the massacre’s iconographic centrality in the memory of the slaughter in Bosnia, is double-edged. The fact is that Srebrenica - both the brutality of the killing and calculated betrayal by the so-called ‘International Community’ - was a not an isolated event; it was the culmination of what had been happening, and was allowed to happen by the West, for more than three years before the massacre. Srebrenica involved the avoidable slaughter of 8,000 people over five days, after the equally avoidable mass-murder of hundreds of thousands of others over three years. Srebrenica is the emblem of those other massacres, concentration camps, savage ‘ethnic cleansing’ on a vast scale, organised mass rape, relentless shelling of civilians - women and children - and of hospitals - and the bloody siege of a great capital, Sarajevo, while the ‘international community’ either connived with the Serbs (as in the cases of Paris and London) or else looked on and dithered, forbidding the Bosnians to arm themselves and mount effective resistance to the Serbian juggernaut.