Currently viewing the tag: "Bosnia"
The real dilemma concerns what must be excised from international genocide and mass atrocities agendas in order to produce the kind of lessons learned that are palatable to powerful international actors. When truth telling aligns with the interests of power, it invariably softens its demands. If you bring together people from key international decision-making institutions to discuss a historical event that can only be deemed a colossal failure, the lessons will inevitably be focused on how the different actors did not coordinate their efforts behind a single, guiding ethos or policy. This is invariably true and it evenly distributes blame. It is also invariably true of many international failures, mistakes and faux-pas: it may even describe the “international community” rather than a problem within it.
Continue Reading →The defense of former General of the Bosnian Serb army, Ratko Mladic, began in May 2014 at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Among the arguments his lawyers have already made and are expected to return to is that he suffers from “deception of memory.” As The Independent reported:
His [Ratko Mladic] […]
Continue Reading →It is no accident that a museum would provide the context for an unexpected and powerful human rights intervention. And, although Wiesel’s provocation cannot be understood absent the particular circumstances of Holocaust memorialization and contemporary genocide, the inherent potential of museums to spark new forms of human rights activism is not limited to this framework. In the years since 1993, museums are increasingly testing the waters of engagement on human rights issues.
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On October 8 an international coalition of NGOs and leading activists on the right to truth and memorialization submitted a letter to the mayor of Prijedor, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, demanding steps be taken to publicly memorialize non-Serb victims of the area’s early 1990s atrocities. Prijedor holds an especially infamous place in the history […]
Continue Reading →The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) is in danger of negating one of the basic reasons for its existence. Its recent decisions to acquit senior Serbian architects of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia imply that the Tribunal does not, after all, rise above the traditional impunity enjoyed by state actors […]
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The conventional wisdom is that those who profit most from conflict have a financial stake in its perpetuation and are therefore often labeled as “peace spoilers.” This is no doubt true in many cases. However, as evident in Bosnia, a different dynamic is also possible; one in which war profiteers can become stakeholders in peace. Many of those who did well from war—through theft and diversion of aid, sanctions evasion, arms trafficking and other forms of smuggling—were in the most privileged position to take advantage of the post-war rebuilding process.
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