moderate Bosnian Muslims betrayed by the West;
Western sabotage of a viable Bosnian peace agreement before the bloody conflict even started;
the Western states' (particularly Germany's and parts of the EU) own role in the dismantling of the former Yugoslavia and their accompanying violation of international law;
the Islamic fundamentalist and extremist nature of Bosnia's Western-supported Muslim leadership, as well as the cover-up of that leadership's own war crimes committed not only against Bosnia's Christian populations, but also against their own people in their PR struggle for the "hearts and minds" of the West.
One of the best hidden facts about the Bosnian civil war is that it was preventable, that the leaderships of that former Yugoslav republic's three constituent peoples – the Serbs, Croats and Muslims (of South Slavic, mostly Serb ethnic origin) – agreed to a deal brokered by Portugal's then foreign minister, Jose Cutileiro, the so-called Lisbon Agreement, which provided for an independent Bosnia and Herzegovina cantonized according to ethnic lines.
This was Feb. 23 1992: The situation in Bosnia was admittedly tense but, except for a few minor incidents, no war had broken out. The Bosnian Serbs had already organized a referendum of their own, with a 99 percent vote in favor of remaining a part of Yugoslavia, but were willing to compromise in order to avoid war. What happened next, however, was that the Bosnian Muslim leader, Alija Izetbegovic, reneged on the deal, which practically made war inevitable. As Izetbegovic himself put it at the time, he was willing to "sacrifice peace for sovereignty." Obviously, sovereignty itself wasn't the true goal – radical Islamic domination of Bosnia was.
Izetbegovic could not have made the move on his own, without outside diplomatic support. While that support was clearly coming from the majority of the world's Islamic countries, along with Germany – which had its own stake in the break-up of Yugoslavia into smaller, "more manageable" units – it also came from the then U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmerman, who advised Izetbegovic that he should hold out for a better deal. That better deal came in the shape of a 42-month bloody civil war with tens of thousands killed and hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Another inconvenient truth that remains little-publicized is the fact that Izetbegovic was not even the most popular Bosnian Muslim leader at the time. That honor belonged to Fikret Abdic, who received more votes than Izetbegovic during Bosnia's first multiparty elections in the fall of 1990. For reasons that are still unclear even today – although much points to pressure from the outside – Abdic stepped aside and allowed Izetbegovic to assume the leadership position, even while remaining his political opponent, advocating peaceful ethnic coexistence either within a reformed Yugoslavia or a newly-created, secular (instead of fundamentalist) Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Abdic eventually broke openly with Izetbegovic during the war, forming his own "autonomous region" in Western Bosnia, which is another fact in a sea of obfuscation for the West's information-satiated, truth-starved media audiences. And then – here's the real shocker – Abdic actually formed an alliance with the dreaded "genocidal," "Muslim-hating" Serb forces, with which he mounted joint operations against the 5th Corps of the Izetbegovic-controlled Bosnian Army, (which was ultimately saved by NATO threats that it would bomb Serb and, by extension, moderate Muslim forces if they entered the city of Bihac). It wouldn't be the first – or the last – time that NATO served as the air force for Balkan-based Islamic fundamentalists.
Reaping the rewards of his peace-making efforts, Abdic is presently rotting in a Croatian prison on trumped-up "war crimes" charges, forgotten by the West, while the openly fundamentalist Izetbegovic continues to be celebrated by liberal Western circles for supposed tolerance and commitment to "mutiethnicity," while he and his followers go quietly about their business of establishing a beachhead for radical Islam in the Balkans, as several U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee papers have clearly stated. Not surprisingly, Izetbegovic even has a Western prize named after him, and it was duly presented by none other than Prince Charles earlier this month in London to a "deserving" British Muslim. This would be the same as if the FBI decided to halt its increasingly frequent raids on U.S. offices of Bosnian-based "charities" that raise funds for terrorists and began passing out good citizenship awards to their staffs instead.
What does all this have to do with the Plavsic case and her war crimes "admission?" Quite a bit, since it shoots large holes in the basic premise of the Hague Inquisition's case against former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic and the entire Bosnian Serb leadership – that they "engaged in a criminal undertaking" to "cleanse" Bosnia's Muslim population from its homes, engaging in a "campaign of genocide" to accomplish their sinister goals.
Plavsic's "admission" to "racially and ethnically-based" crimes by virtue of her wartime position in the Bosnian Serb leadership is at odds with the fact that she and the leadership not only agreed to a pre-war peace deal with the Muslims (and Croats) but also actively sought alliance with the faction led by the most popular (and least fundamentalist) Bosnian Muslim leader, Abdic, once Izetbegovic nixed the Lisbon Peace and the war broke out.
That behavior shows that there was no anti-Muslim prejudice as such on the part of the Bosnian Serbs but only an anti-fundamentalist prejudice, which could be excused not just in the post-9/11 world but in the one that preceded that horrible event as well. Yet, such behavior is not only being ignored in the Hague Inquisition's version of history, it is de facto being criminalized at a time when the global "war on terrorism" is gaining momentum by the minute. Why?
To keep some old skeletons from popping out of the closet? Or, worse, to appease needed Islamic allies in preparation for the campaign in Iraq? Are Balkan Christians once again going to be sacrificed and slandered for the sake of a new Middle Eastern military intervention? Are terrorists in Bosnia (and Kosovo and Macedonia) going to be appeased while their brethren in the Middle East are supposedly hunted down?
It happened once in the 1990s, and it looks certain to happen again. In fact, the West's pro-fundamentalist, anti-Christian policy in the Balkans has continued uninterruptedly from the early 1990s to this day, and one of the Hague Inquisition's primary tasks is to cover up that shameful policy. There is little doubt that blowback is only a matter of time, with the caveat that a terror base in the Balkans is much closer to Western borders than one in Asia.
An honest and fair approach to the legacy of the latest Balkan wars would, needless to say, have to start from the beginning. If violations of "international law" are to be enumerated, why not start with Germany's December 1991 recognition of the then-Yugoslav republics of Slovenia and Croatia (soon followed by the Vatican and other Western European states), which was a clear contravention of the 1975 Helsinki Agreement's provision guaranteeing the inviolability of international borders except by mutual consent?
And why not continue with the spring 1992 recognition of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which not only violated Helsinki but hardened the Izetbegovic-led secessionists' resolve to "sacrifice peace for sovereignty?" What about the Clinton administration's pact with the Iranians to arm the Bosnian Muslims once the war began, in violation of a U.N. arms embargo? The list of potential violations that the tribunal will never deal with is long indeed.
For the Hague Inquisition and its supporters, the most important thing about Mrs. Plavsic's "admission," in the words of chief Hague architect Madeleine Albright – who testified during the sentencing hearing – was the fact that she "recognized the tribunal's jurisdiction." Indeed, for proponents of global government, the validation of "international tribunals" is of the utmost importance, much more so than, say, determining whether genuine genocide did indeed take place, which in the now-closed Plavsic case will never be known, at least as far as she is concerned. For, in its zeal to gain legitimacy, the tribunal dropped "genocide" charges against Mrs. Plavsic in exchange for her guilty plea to the "lesser" charge of "persecution as a crime against humanity."
Thus, if Biljana Plavsic did indeed perform genocide in Bosnia during the 1990s, the victims have been sacrificed yet again, this time at the altar of The Hague's political requirements and the globalist agenda at large. What better revelation of global justice's true face, where a charge of "genocide" is only a bargaining chip in a diplomatic game, and not an expression of moral outrage by a civilization seeking to preserve and defend its values. Genocide stands in the category of absolutes. Either it happened or it didn't. If it did, there can be no equivocating with its definition, no compromise with its executioners, no "understanding" for their eventual motives, no mercy when carrying out punishment. If Biljana Plavsic did indeed commit genocide, who has the right to let her get off so lightly?
In fact, Mrs. Plavsic originally pleaded innocent to all charges before the tribunal, and spent the balance of the past 18 months in building her defense. Her decision to change course was as sudden as it was surprising, at least to outside observers. It is almost certain that she was subjected to great pressure to admit "guilt," and that she was even convinced that, as she put it, by admitting the imagined "crimes" in her own name, she would take the onus of "collective responsibility" from her own people.
By cutting the Plavsic trial short and making a deal before all the facts could be established, the International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia showed that it is not interested in justice but in a political agenda. "War crimes" and "genocide" charges are to be pulled out of the hat as a political expedient, not as a serious potential violation of accepted human behavior.
The fact that Izetbegovic's forces, according to U.N. documents, almost certainly bombed their own people – in the Sarajevo breadline and marketplace "massacres" of 1992 and 1995 – in order to gain Western sympathy while pinning the blame on the Bosnian Serbs has gone unnoticed by the tribunal thus far, as have tens of thousands of pages of other incriminating documentation against him.
Still, Abdic, the true Muslim moderate, sits in prison (albeit not in The Hague) on "war crimes" charges, while Biljana Plavsic who – as Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister and high representative for Bosnia, testified before the tribunal – "never participated in leadership meetings where decisions of war and peace were made," has been coached to "admit" "crimes" that she didn't commit. If anyone ever wondered what Stalin's show trials of the 1930s really looked like, there's no need to read books or dream of time travel. They are happening right now, as the new year 2003 dawns, in The Hague, the seat of the future permanent International Criminal Court.
Proponents of "global justice" have always pointed to the ad hoc tribunal for the former Yugoslavia as a "trial run" for the permanent court. The blueprint is now clear: Among all the world's conflicts, choose one that fits the needs of a current agenda, selectively criminalize the actions of the "enemy of the month" without regard to the larger context, then fire away the guns of "international law" to finish off the "perpetrator," who has previously been thoroughly demonized by the cooperative, globally ambitious liberal press. Once the instrumentalization of justice becomes fully legitimized, however, ask not tomorrow for whom the bell tolls anywhere on this earth. It will toll for thee.
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