Serbia captures fugitive Karadzic

As old as I am and as long as I live, I will never be able to understand how over the centuries, this ethic hatred is just waiting to emerge.

The slaughter of men, women and children is absolutely abhorrent to me. I am told by either side in Australia that I do not understand what it is all about. What is to understand except this was ethnic cleansing.

I hope he is found guilty and hanged.

 

As old as I am and as long as I live, I will never be able to understand how over the centuries, this ethic hatred is just waiting to emerge.

The slaughter of men, women and children is absolutely abhorrent to me. I am told by either side in Australia that I do not understand what it is all about. What is to understand except this was ethnic cleansing.

I hope he is found guilty and hanged.

Have had the point of view from both sides of the conflict put to me by ex pats from the region - they will try to justify any atrocity as a fair act of war as long as it gets their community one rung up on the ladder

God they disgust me

 

I spent a few weeks working with children in Mostar just as things were dying down, and heard some stories too unpleasant to repeat here. One boy's uncle had campaigned in Germany for Croatian independence, and been assasinated by Tito's secret police, so Yugoslav unity came at a price.
In Mostar itself, the priest who organised our trip had lost his nephew, a gardener in an old people's home on the Muslim side of the bridge, whose mutilated body turned up a few days after he failed to come home. There were Muslim children on the camp, but when I asked the Father about the piles of overgrown rubble which dotted the street he lived on, he replied 'oh, just Mussleman house'. He showed us the spot near the cathedral where two girls who had been on the camp the year before were killed by shelling as they left confirmation classes. Later, I was told that the Croat forces had used the underground fuel tanks at the airfield to keep prisoners in, and hadn't realised that locking them in would cause suffocation.

It seems that there is nothing less 'civil' than a civil war. With no rigidly defined sides, it was a case of 'if you are not for us, you are against us'. Also, the whole country was militarised, so that some people who would never have been accepted into the national army suddenly found themselves being given weapons, without the training and discipline that would normally be expected. The ethnic violence wasn't inevitable - Sarajevo before the war was a happy and thriving city with a diverse population. It was the usual story of political leaders wanting greater power, and using fear and nationalism as means to achieve their goal.

IMHO its' better to let Karadzic, Mladic and those responsible for atrocities on all sides languish in jail, as a reminder to anyone else who might be tempted to copy them. After a war where killing prisoners seems to have been fairly commonplace, isn't it time to show that there are other ways of dealing with them? I suspect the families of his victims may not agree however.

 

I must say I am puzzled with virtually every post of this thread. First of all, you presume to know something about the situation and you dare making conclusions based on SKY or BBC reports or even CNN which is hilarious. Those media are famous for the art of news fabrication. Not to mention how terribly one sided.

Using logic could help. The process against Karadzic is a political farce. No one believes he killed or raped anyone himself but the West is accusing him of having ordered and planned mass murders, ethnic cleansing or even genocide (look up a definition of genocide and then try comparing it to anything that happened in Bosnia and Hercegovina). As he could not have committed those awful crimes himself the indictment talks about a certain joined criminal enterprise of virtually every Serb leader political, military or police from all Serbia, Srpska republic and Srpska Krajina republic. This is an political indictment against the leadership of all Serbian states, consequently against Serbian nation.

It might not been seen as such had the western authorities indicted Muslim, Croatia and Albanian political and military leaders of same crimes. Then we could discuss the necessary reconciliation between the parties. One of the posters mentioned crimes of Muslims and Croats in Mostar area. There were many more crimes by all three parties in Bosnia Herzegovina war, but their commanders get liberated like Naser Oric, regardless of the fact that his troops had killed over 2500 Serbs from nearby villages of Srebrenica over 3 years time. Hague tribunal let Ramus Haradinay go free even if he personaly took part in killings in Kosovo and Metohija in 1998 and 1999 and if his people killed several witnesses of prosecution.

This way, punishing one side and awarding all others does not help at all. It just brings national frustration to Serbs who then consider themselves victims of the world. The only consequence possible out of all this is rising of nationalism in Serbia.

The Balkan region is an old European area with a lot of history and importance for the word's civilization. Democracy itself was invented in the Balkans, more precisely in the Greek polis of Athens under Pericles and certainly not by Robin Hood and his jolly gang. So, talking about uncivilized Balkan nations is stupidity of worst kind. Especially coming from subjects of imperialistic powers such as UK and its older brother (how ironic) USA.

Radovan Karadzic never commanded any units on the ground. He was Srpska's president. A civilian authority. His orders are printed and a book of them has been published in English language. None of these orders have any part calling on troops to kill, plunder, rape, burn etc. Why couldn't it be, that the responsible ones of the crimes of war were those who actually commited them? Folx on the spot, perhaps out of vengeance? Maybe they were lunatics, like any other criminal?

This way, judging from Hague indictments, one could conclude that Muslims, Croats and Albanians who committed their crimes were just crazy local soldiers or low/middle rank officers with no political background which abolishes their countries and nations of any collective guilt, while Serbs had genocidal plans against every other nation. This is in conflict with comment sense.

Don't even get me started on Tito. One could not make a movie Tito didn't like in order not to be imprisoned. Tito passed a law forbiding serbs who were cleansed out of Kosovo and Metohija during WW2 to return to their homes. This is how Kosovo and Metohija begun to get Albanian majority.

 

Just to add my two penith

I spent 6 months of my life in Bosnia and a further 6 months in Kosovo. After what I saw I wouldn't wish anything of what I saw on anyone and can totally appreciate why people migrate to the UK and other Western countries whether that be legally or illegally.

As for the leaders......I don't claim to know them personally or there politics or what they did or knew on a personal level. However I will say this:

If they didn't know then they were not fit to be a leader and should be held accountable for the actions of those below them. If they did know then they should be held accountable for their own in actions.

Either way they can't win in my book. Being a leader of men has responsibility and it now time for him to stand up and be counted.

As for CORPORAL PUNISHMENT I'm not a very big fan of killing people and it solves very little. Just a short term quick fix.

It is far more effective to deprive someone of their basic human right to freedom. Trust me on this there is nothing more soul destroying than being made to sit in a cell for the rest of your life thinking about what it is you did wrong.

Death is a easy way out for these people. For those of you in the UK why do you think people like Shipman, Huntley and the like continuely try and succeed to kill themselves? Because the pain of loosing ones freedom is too great even in the UK's so called prisons.

Let him and the others spend the rest of there lives in a cell.

 

As for the leaders......I don't claim to know them personally or there politics or what they did or knew on a personal level. However I will say this:

If they didn't know then they were not fit to be a leader and should be held accountable for the actions of those below them. If they did know then they should be held accountable for their own in actions.

Either way they can't win in my book.

Does the same go for George W. Bush and Tony Blair in your book? Or, there were no civilians killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Serbia?

 

Does the same go for George W. Bush and Tony Blair in your book? Or, there were no civilians killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Serbia?

Of course it does...............I don't know them personaly either

 

Lads, As with the other thread I'm beginning to sense that the subject at hand is starting to go into areas that could get pretty heated. And because this forum is about WW2, not Current affairs, if it starts getting nasty the plug will be pulled. so be nice or else you'll need a different subject to discuss!!

 

Black Swans could've captured this idiot in Sarajevo, right before the siege.
Right on the hilltops, then then the damn serbs started firing..