By John Davies
Ratko Mladic died yesterday, the butcher of Srebrenica and too many other places to mention. I’ve looked on Facebook and not seen a single comment. I don’t know why this is, but I felt I couldn’t let it pass.
Bosnia, of which I had previously barely heard, played a big part in my life in the nineties. I got involved with Workers’ Aid in 1993 and it sort of swallowed me up. This working class solidarity initiative sent about twenty convoys of aid to Bosnia and Kosova. We started with Tuzla, whose miners had sent material support to the British miners in their great strike of 1984/85.
In Yugoslavia, Tuzla had the highest level of inter-marriage between the three religious groups (not that religion had much sway in many former-Yugoslav towns) and in the final census before the break-up it had the highest percentage of citizens who identified as Yugoslav, rather than Bosnian, Serb, Croat etc. It was the spirit of places like Tuzla that Ratko Mladic and the Serb nationalist leader Radovan Karadzic had to destroy. Mladic’s forces murdered hundreds in nearby Brcko, and threw the bodies into the river Sava. Other towns suffered similar fates, particularly in eastern Bosnia. Tuzla, however, survived – as did its Serb Orthodox church, protected by its citizens, of all faiths.
Seeing the success of the Serb ethnic cleansers, from 1991 Western governments were happy to oversee Bosnia carved up into ethnic statelets, and drew up a series of plans to do just this, all of which failed in the face of determined Bosnian opposition. Western complicity was evident from the beginning. For example, although the CIA knew about Serb death and rape camps in the Prijedor region, it kept shtum for over a year.
The worst of the killing took place in 1992, when Bosnia had very little with which to defend itself – the bulk of the Yugoslav army, with its largely Serb officer corps, had gone over to Mladic. In the face of this huge military disparity, Douglas Hurd, the old-Etonian British Foreign Secretary, opposed the lifting of the arms embargo on Bosnia (as did Owen before him and Rifkind afterwards) drawling that, “we don’t want a level killing field”. This was a patrician, Tory, and thoroughly laughable nod towards pacifist opposition to war in general. It echoed the condescending drivel in the media about Balkan people being predisposed to war and fighting (rather like the Irish – remember them? – or for that matter the ‘fascist Ukrainans’) and of having ‘primitive ethnic hatreds’, the cliché of the hour. But when people are attacked they defend themselves. And un-level killing fields are particularly bloody places.
Although the killing by Mladic’s forces continued it did so at a slower pace, as the Bosnian defences became organised. But as we moved into 1995 everyone who had been paying attention knew that two eastern Bosnian enclaves, Srebrenica and Zepa, were vulnerable. These contained largely Muslim populations and were a demographic anomaly for those planning ethnic division. Srebrenica’s citizens had organised its defence well, with one particular heavy gun commanding a large area. But in 1994 they handed over these defences to the UN military force UNPROFOR, on the understanding that both Srebrenica and Zepa would become designated ‘Safe Areas’ under UN protection. Then, in the spring of 1995, Mladic’s forces surrounded the larger of the two enclaves, Srebrenica.
In July 1995, some days before the massacre which ensued, I attended a large public meeting at Leeds University. On the top table were Tariq Ali and the SWP’s Alex Callinicos. Tariq Ali called for the UN to intervene (it already was, catastrophically) and Callinicos pushed the SWP line of ‘a plague on all your houses’. Far from lifting the arms embargo, imposed at the beginning of the war, so as to allow the defenceless Bosnians to defend themselves, Callinicos argued that the Balkan working class had to pull its socks up and unite. Taking sides was out of the question. The slogan ‘self-defence is no offence’, relevant as far as the SWP was concerned during an attack on an Asian grandmother in Bradford, was deemed out of bounds for her Muslim counterpart in Srebrenica.
The SWP (to be fair, like most of the left) preserved its pristine rhetoric throughout the war, a condescending neutrality maintained while watching over a hundred thousand Bosnians murdered – all whilst mouthing vapid slogans. And UNPROFOR, having taken over control of the military positions defending Srebrenica, handed over those same positions to Mladic’s Serb nationalists. The UNPROFOR Dutch soldiers then helped Mladic separate the men and boys, thus facilitating the murder of about 8,000 innocent civilians.
Many on the left still feel uncomfortable talking about Bosnia and Kosova. Some (including, shamefully, Chomsky) even went as far as to question the reality of what had happened. NATO had bombed the Serbs – surely, the logic went, the Serbs couldn’t therefore be the bad guys. I see a similar skewed binary logic at play now when denying the Russian atrocities in Ukraine and, earlier, the crimes of Assad in Syria.
Ratko Mladic was a monster. You can read first hand accounts of his chilling behaviour at Srebrenica, statements given by mothers describing how Mladic watched and smiled reassuringly as sixteen-year-old boys were taken away to be mowed down in a nearby field. But Mladic was aided by the UN’s complicity, and in the case of Carremans, the Dutch UNPROFOR commander at Srebrenica, they toasted that complicity with slivovitz.
As for the British left, the vast majority of it, they kept their slogans clean.
