Word: serb
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Time's Belgrade stringer Dejan Anastasijevic has spent the last 12 years covering the wars and turbulence of the Balkans at close quarters, suffering harassment from the government of former president Slobodan Milosevic for his efforts to report on the actions of Serb security forces in Bosnia and Kosovo. Anastasijevic later testified for the prosecution during Milosevic's ongoing war-crimes trial at the Hague. On the 10th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, he offers this assessment of his country's reckoning with the crimes committed in its name...
...basic details of the massacre all well-known in the wider world, and have recently been reprised in great detail during the ongoing trial of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic at the Hague. On July 11, 1995, Serb forces overran the small eastern Bosnian town, which they had kept under siege for more than three years. Less than a week later, over 8,000 Bosnian Muslims taken prisoner, many just teenage boys, were dead, their bodies dumped in deep forests surrounding the enclave. Even today, some two thirds of the victims remain unaccounted for, buried in mass graves...
...Srebrenica enclave had been put off limits to Serb forces by declaring it a UN-protected area, which drew refugees from other parts of war-torn Bosnia. But the 450 lightly armed Dutch troops protecting the town could do little to save anyone, and even helped round up the refugees who were later killed by the Serbs...
...politicians from the region and beyond assemble in Srebrenica to mark the anniversary with the usual "never again" vows, one simple fact speaks louder than any of their words: General Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military leader who was the chief architect of the war crime at Srebrenica, remains at large - presumed to be hiding in Serbia, under the protection of elements of the military and police who see him as a war hero. Unfortunately, millions of Serbs share this view, remaining in dogged denial over the deeds of the fugitive general and, even more importantly, over Serbia...
...truth that many Serbs continue to avoid is that Mladic, Radovan Karadzic and other Bosnian Serb warlords could have never have accomplished their ethnic cleansing campaigns, the brutal siege of Sarajevo, and the Srebrenica massacre, without troops and equipment from Serbia. Thousands of Serbian police and military officers, thinly disguised as "volunteers", were put on Mladic's disposal by former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, and they were more than willing executioners...