Why bosnia

Yet, more than two years of trying to convince the NATO allies of this fact had led nowhere. At each and every turn, London, Paris, and other allies had resisted the kind of forceful measures that were required to make a real impact on the Bosnian Serb leadership. In their informal discussions, Vershbow and Drew suggested that the only way to overcome this resistance was to equalize the risks between the United States on the one hand and those allies with troops on the ground on the other.

This could be achieved either by deploying U. Since the president had consistently ruled out deploying American ground forces to Bosnia except to help enforce a peace agreement, the only way significant military pressure could be brought to bear on the Bosnian Serbs would be after UNPROFOR had been withdrawn.

In June , she once again made her case, presenting Clinton with a passionately argued memorandum urging a new push for air strikes in order to get the Bosnian Serbs to the table. As Clinton well knew, the U. Instead, the emphasis should be on keeping the U. He could accept that there was no consensus for anything beyond continuing a policy of muddling through, or he could forge a new strategy and get the president to support a concerted effort seriously to tackle the Bosnia issue once and for all.

Having for over two years accepted the need for consensus as the basis of policy and, as a consequence, failed to move the ball forward, Lake now decided that the time had come to forge his own policy initiative. A consensus soon emerged on three key aspects of a workable strategy. Second, if a deal was to be struck between the parties, it was clear that such an agreement could not fulfill all demands for justice.

A diplomatic solution that reversed every Bosnian Serb gain simply was not possible. Third, the success of a last-ditch effort to get a political deal would depend crucially on bringing the threat of significant force to bear on the parties. The last three years had demonstrated that without the prospect of the decisive use of force, the parties would remain intransigent and their demands maximalist.

Lake asked Vershbow to draft a strategy paper on the basis of this discussion. The national security adviser also told the president about the direction of his thinking. He specifically asked Clinton whether he should proceed along this path with the knowledge that in a presidential election year the United States would have to commit significant military force either to enforce an agreement or to bring about a change in the military balance of power on the ground.

Clinton told Lake to go ahead, indicating that the status quo was no longer acceptable. The strategy proposed a last-ditch effort to reach a political solution acceptable to the parties. In order to provide the parties an incentive to accept this deal, the strategy also argued for placing American military power preferably alongside allied power, but if necessary alone in the service of the diplomatic effort.

In presenting the parties with the outlines of a possible diplomatic deal, the Unites States would make clear what price each side would have to pay if negotiations failed. He sent his national security adviser to persuade key European allies as well as Moscow that the new U.

The president told Lake to make clear to the allies that he was committed to this course of action—including the military track—even if the United States was forced to implement it on its own. That same day, Serbian media reported that the Bosnian government had bombed its own citizens in order to blame the Serbs. In the following three and a half years, Serbian authorities and media used similar tactics to deny, trivialise or justify many other genocidal massacres in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

They were successful to a certain degree. The International Court of Justice ICJ , the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ICTY and later domestic courts also contributed to this ever-growing wave of genocide denial by repeatedly issuing rulings that narrow the scope of the genocide both in terms of time and territory.

State officials, politicians, journalists and civilians, both in Republika Srpska — the Serb-dominated entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina — and Serbia, however, continued to reject even this very limited interpretation of genocide, routinely claiming that a genocide never took place at all in Bosnia. In , the Republika Srpska parliament rejected a report, issued by a special investigative commission established by a previous Republika Srpska government, which acknowledged that Bosnian Serb forces had committed the crime of genocide in The report accused the ICYT of staging politically biased trials of Bosnian Serb political and military leaders, and of wrongly classifying the Srebrenica massacres as genocide.

Denying the Bosnian genocide and glorifying the war crimes committed in the country, sadly, is not an infliction limited to Republika Srpska, Serbia or even the Balkans. Many respected individuals and institutions around the world are also putting their support behind genocide deniers or even engaging in genocide denial themselves.

The 42 members of the house of representatives are directly elected via a system of proportional representation. The state government is in charge of security and defence so enacting through legislation the decisions of the presidency , customs and immigration, fiscal and monetary policy, and facilitating inter-entity coordination and regulation.

At an entity level, both the Federation and the Republika Srpska have significant autonomy. The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina has a directly-elected member house of representatives. The Republika Srpska has an member national assembly. At both state and entity levels, delegates to the upper houses have the primary duty of ensuring that there is agreement between constituent nations, and representatives of minorities, when confirming legislation.

Both entities have a Prime Minister and 16 ministries. The Federation is furthermore divided into 10 cantons, each with its own administrative government and relative autonomy on local issues such as education and health care. Murat Tahirovic, president of the Association of Genocide Victims and Witnesses, argued that the state court should have learned its lesson from the cases of former Bosnian Serb military policeman Mirko Vrucinic , former Bosnian Serb Interior Minister Tomislav Kovac , former Bosnian Serb Army general Novak Djukic and former Bosnian Serb battalion commander Radovan Stankovic , who all left the country to evade war crime verdicts or indictments.

Serbian passports. Photo: BIRN. The state prosecution has said that Savcic has Serbian citizenship as well as Bosnian, but lawyer Senka Nozica, who has represented war crime defendants for many years, said that dual citizenship cannot be considered grounds for remanding people in custody as a flight risk under the current legislation.

She believes that the problem is practically impossible to solve because there is no political will to do it. Simic however argued that holding two passports should be a sufficient reason for the Bosnian court to decide that a suspect can be remanded in custody because of the possibility that he or she might abscond. He was remanded in custody last week for breaching trial regulations by speaking to media outlets about the anniversary of the Srebrenica massacres last month and about recent legal changes banning the denial of genocide and crimes against humanity.