GORAŽDE STILL STANDS Colonel Richard Westley, OBE, MC on thwarting genocide in Bosnia
“THIS IS THE PATH THAT YOU WANT TO TAKE BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA ON, THE SAME HIGHWAY OF HELL AND DEATH THAT SLOVENIA AND CROATIA WENT ON. DON’T THINK THAT YOU WON’T TAKE BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA INTO HELL, AND THE MUSLIM PEOPLE MAYBE INTO EXTINCTION”
– Radovan Karadžic
The brutal Bosnian War had rumbled on for four years, reducing the once-cosmopolitan heart of the former Communist Yugoslavia, with its Ottoman-era mosques and lush green mountains, into fractured statelets of competing national aspirations. Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) desired independence, fearing a Serb-dominated rump Yugoslavia following the violent breakaway of Slovenia (1991) and Croatia (1992). Bosnia’s Catholics (Croats) feared Serb dominance too, but while some allied with the Bosniak government in Sarajevo, others felt the pull of their newly emancipated ‘homeland’.
Bosnian Serbs jumped at Islamist shadows and estrangement from their kin in Belgrade, drawing into the protective embrace of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) and the nationalist government of Serbian president Slobodan Miloševic.
In one of the acrimonious final sessions of Bosnia’s federal parliament, Radovan Karadžic, leader of the far right Serb Democratic Party, warned his Bosniak counterpart of the price his people would pay for independence: “This is the path that you want to take Bosnia and Herzegovina on, the same highway of hell and death that Slovenia and Croatia went on. Don’t think that you won’t take Bosnia and Herzegovina into hell, and the Muslim people maybe into extinction.” With carefully premeditated barbarity Serb militias began to carve off chunks of territory. Armed with JNA weapons and artillery, and led by JNA officers like the infamous General Ratko Mladic, they outmatched Bosnian government forces – a desperate and lightly armed coalition of police, territorial army and untrained volunteers.
Sarajevo was encircled by Bosnian Serbs and exposed to the longest siege in modern history as snipers and artillery pounded the city from the hills, while huge swathes of eastern and northern Bosnia were subjected to the chilling newspeak of ‘ethnic cleansing’ as Bosniaks were driven from their homes by a deliberate policy of violence, rape and murder, designed to reconstruct Bosnia’s hinterland as an ethnically pure extension of Serbia proper.
Flinching from commitment but unable to remain silent while Europe’s first genocide since World War II unfolded, United Nations Security Council Resolution 819 (16 April 1993) and United Nations Security Council Resolution 824 (6 May 1993) declared six Bosniak holdouts – Sarajevo among them – UN Safe
