Madam, - Tony Kinsella's interesting views on the contemporary relevance of the nation state (July 28th) are undermined by his astoundingly ill-informed understanding of the Bosnian tragedy. Astounding but not surprising: the most media-saturated war in history was also the most "spun", by politicians and news media alike. Following are some points by way of rebutting his flawed analysis.
Bosnia was from April 1992 an internationally recognised state.
There was - contrary to Kinsella's assertion - everything the international community could do to stop the aggression, even under "Westphalian" rules! As a war of aggression against an independent state and the overtly genocidal agenda accompanying it, the international community was mandated to intervene militarily both on the basis of the UN Charter and on the basis of the Genocide Convention.
It was in order to sidestep these obligations that a parallel narrative using terms such as "warring parties", "ancient ethnic hatreds", "Tito's controlling hand", had to be constructed and fed to a passive public by a compliant media.
The war was not an internecine war. It was launched from Serbia by an alliance of the JNA and Belgrade-based paramilitary forces, in turn activating the Bosnian Serb paramilitaries already armed to the teeth by Belgrade. In late May of 1992 Belgrade officially "disengaged" its forces.
This was always a fiction and recognised as such at the time: it was simply sub-contracting out the war to reorganised military structures, including unlimited supplies and a fully bankrolled officer corps for the remainder of the war and beyond.
The acquiescence of the EU in this charade constituted one leg of a tripartite policy, each one a charade and each dependent on the continued plausibility of the other two. The second leg was the "arms embargo", put in place in order - as its chief apologist Douglas Hurd so memorably put it in an off-guard moment - to prevent "a level killing field".
Was there ever a more cynical dismissal of the right to self-defence? Its main purpose and effect was, under the guise of "neutrality", to allow time and space for the "tidying up" of Bosnia's complex ethnic patchwork - what took a millennium to establish was largely undone in three years. The third leg was the "peacekeeping mandate" - by now so discredited in its own right as to need no further comment. While the primary architects of these policies were the UK and France - and the British role is mercilessly documented in the historian Brendan Simms's classic Unfinest Hour - in truth it was a policy endorsed across most of Europe, including "neutral" Ireland, and North America.
A number of circumstances came together in 1995 to bring this tripartite house of cards crashing down. Srebrenica played a role but only a secondary one. The primary catalyst - driven by undiluted moral outrage - was the imminent reality of the cross-party Dole-Lieberman veto of the arms embargo in the US Congress, thereby forcing the hand of the Clinton administration, and leading ineluctably to military intervention against the aggressor party - ie the Serbs.
The particular political relevance of the Srebrenica massacre - and to ignore this is to dishonour the memory of the needless dead of this massacre and of the entire war - is that by July 1995 the perpetrators had every reason to believe they would get away with it! Their three years' of experience of dealing with the best "mediators" and "statesmen" that the international community - above all the EU - could throw at them, had fostered an arrogance that, in the most news media-saturated war in history, such horror could be carried out with such impunity.
The point of course is that "saturation" doesn't equate with information. In a recent essay in Irish Pages Simms revisited the Unfinest Hour theme from a specifically Irish angle. This essay includes an observation from the late Nuala O'Faolain, writing in the immediate aftermath of Srebrenica, which is a telling indication both of the manipulation of opinion and the news media's failure to confront this over three years: "There's a lot of reporting of this conflict but I for one don't feel I have the grasp of it." - Yours, etc.,
PETER WALSH,
Greystones,
Co Wicklow
Madam, - While not wishing to take anything away from Tony Kinsella's article (July 28th) I would take issue with a particular point. He writes that the term "ethnic cleansing" was used to describe "massacres, pillage and mass rapes to drive non-Serbs from their homes", and continues with the claim of "systematic and repeated rape of Bosnian Muslim women with the intention of impregnating them, so the resulting children would be "pure" Serbs.
When the reports of rapes first appeared, Mr Shacirbay, Bosnian Muslim ambassador to the UN, claimed that they had proof of 60, 80 or even 100 thousands Muslim victims. A UN Commission, headed by Dame Woburn, carried out an investigation on the ground, and reported a figure of some 2,400 confirmed victims of all three ethnic groups in Bosnia. No policy of systematic rape was ever found, nor did it exist. In many cases, the perpetrators told their victims that they would bear a "pure" Serb, Muslim or Croat child, yet both knew that the statement was pure nonsense, since that child would not be accepted by either community as their own.
While justifiably referring to the horrors of Srebrenica, Tony Kinsella ignores another massacre. Indeed, I have yet to read a report by any western journalist on this matter. I refer to the massacre of some 3,000 Serbs, men, women and children in and around Bratunac. They were murdered by the Muslim forces from Srebrenica, commanded by Naser Oric. Mr Oric was indicted and convicted of this crime by the Hague Tribunal His sentence was a mind-boggling two years. Having spent this time in prison while awaiting trial, he was released immediately. So much for the impartiality of the tribunal. - Yours, etc,
ZIVKO JAKSIC,
Rathfarnham,
Dublin 16.