Supreme Court rules against exposing Israel’s role in Bosnian genocide

Israel’s Supreme Court last month rejected a petition to reveal details of Israeli defense exports to the former Yugoslavia during the genocide in Bosnia in the 1990s. The court ruled that exposing Israeli involvement in genocide would damage the country’s foreign relations to such an extent that it would outweigh the public interest in knowing that information, and the possible prosecution of those involved.

The petitioners, Attorney Itay Mack and Professor Yair Oron, presented the court with concrete evidence of Israeli defense exports to Serbian forces at the time, including training as well as ammunition and rifles. Among other things, they presented the personal journal of General Ratko Mladić, currently on trial at the International Court of Justice for committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Mladić’s journal explicitly mentions Serbia’s ample arms ties with Israel at the time.

The exports took place long after the UN Security Council placed an arms embargo on various parts of the former Yugoslavia, and after the publication of a series of testimonies exposing genocide and the creation of concentration camps.

The Israeli State Attorney’s reply and the court’s rejection of the petition are a de facto admission by Israel that it cooperated with the Bosnian genocide: if the government had nothing to hide, the documents under discussion would not pose any threat to foreign relations.

Between 1991 and 1995 the former Yugoslavia shattered, going from a multi-national republic to an assemblage of nations fighting each other in a bloody civil war that included massacres and ultimately genocide.

The Serbs waged war against Croatia from 1991-1992, and against Bosnia from 1992-1995. In both wars the Serbs committed genocide and ethnic cleansing of Muslims in the areas they occupied, leading to the deaths of 250,000 people. Tens of thousands of others were wounded and starved, a multitude of women were raped, and many people were incarcerated in concentration camps. Other parties to the conflict also committed war crimes, but the petition focuses on Israel’s collaboration with the Serbian forces. The horrendously cruel acts in Yugoslavia were the worst Europe had seen since the Holocaust.

One of the most notorious massacres was perpetrated by soldiers serving under Serbian General Ratko Mladić around the city of Srebrenica in July 1995. Serbian forces commanded by the general murdered about 8,000 Bosnians and buried them in mass graves in the course of a campaign of ethnic cleansing they were waging against Muslims in the area. Although the city was supposed to be under UN protection, when the massacre began UN troops did not intervene. Mladić was extradited to the International Court of Justice at The Hague in 2012, and is still on trial.

At the time, prominent Jewish organizations were calling for an immediate end to the genocide and shutting down the death camps. Not so the State of Israel. Outwardly it condemned the massacre, but behind the scenes was supplying weapons to the perpetrators and training their troops.

Attorney Mack and Professor Oron have gathered numerous testimonies about the Israeli arms supply to Serbia, which they presented in their petition. They provided evidence of such exports taking place long after the UN Security Council embargo went into effect in September 1991. The testimonies have been crossed-checked and are brought here as they were presented in the petition, with necessary abbreviations.

In 1992 a former senior official of the Serb Ministry of Defense published a book, The Serbian Army, in which she wrote about the arms deal between Israel and Serbia, signed about a month after the embargo: “One of the largest deals was made in October 1991. For obvious reasons, the deal with the Jews was not made public at the time.”

An Israeli who volunteered in a humanitarian organization in Bosnia at the time testified that in 1994 a UN officer asked him to look at the remains of 120 mm shell — with Hebrew writing on it — that exploded on the landing strip of the Sarajevo airfield. He also testified that he saw Serbs moving around in Bosnia carrying Uzi guns made in Israel.

In 1995 it was reported that Israeli arms dealers in collaboration with the French closed a deal to supply Serbia with LAW missiles. According to reports from 1992, a delegation of the Israeli Ministry of Defense came to Belgrade and signed an agreement to supply shells.

The same General Mladić who is now being prosecuted for war crimes and genocide, wrote in his journal that “from Israel — they proposed joint struggle against Islamist extremists. They offered to train our men in Greece and a free supply of sniper rifles.” A report prepared at the request of the Dutch government on the investigation of the Srebrenica events contains the following: “Belgrade considered Israel, Russia and Greece its best friends. In autumn 1991 Serbia closed a secret arms deal with Israel.”

In 1995 it was reported that Israeli arms dealers supplied weapons to VRS — the army of Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb Army. This supply must have been made with the knowledge of the Israeli government.

The Serbs were not the only party in this war to which the Israeli arms dealers tried to sell weapons. According to reports, there was also an attempt to make a deal with the anti-Semitic Croatian regime, which eventually fell through. The petition also presented reports by human rights activists about Israelis training the Serb army, and that the arms deal with the Serbs enabled Jews to leave Sarajevo, which was under siege.

While all of this was taking place in relative secrecy, at the public level the government of Israel lamely expressed its misgivings about the situation, as if this were some force majeure and not a manmade slaughter. In July 1994, then-Chairman of the Israeli Knesset’s Foreign Relations and Defense Committee MK Ori Or visited Belgrade and said: “Our memory is alive. We know what it means to live with boycotts. Every UN resolution against us has been taken with a two-thirds majority.” That year, Vice President of the US at the time, Al Gore, summoned the Israeli ambassador and warned Israel to desist from this cooperation.

Incidentally, in 2013 Israel had no problem extraditing to Bosnia-Herzegovina a citizen who immigrated to Israel seven years earlier and was wanted for suspicion of involvement in a massacre in Bosnia in 1995. In other words, at some point the state itself recognized the severity of the issue.

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Who is playing for Kosovo?

Made Albanians proud. Both refugees because of Serbia but they kept their faith and traditions! #Xhaka #Shaqiri #Albania pic.twitter.com/iSkkO7JbVX

— Elis (Bey) Gjevori (@Elis_Gj) June 22, 2018

We are not sports fan but was surprised to see all this controversy about Swiss footballers Granit Xhaka and Xherdan Shaqiri who have risked inflaming political tensions in the Balkans after they used an Albanian nationalist symbol to celebrate their goals against Serbia in a 2-1 Group E victory in Kaliningrad.

The pair, who both have ethnic Albanian heritage but grew up in Switzerland, turned Friday night’s match around after Serbia had taken the lead through Aleksandar Mitrovic early in the first half.

Both put their open hands together with their thumbs locked and fingers outstretched to make what looks like the double-headed eagle displayed on Albania’s national flag. The thumbs represent the heads of the two eagles, while the fingers look like the feathers.

Shaqiri was born in Kosovo, the former Serbian province that declared independence in 2008. Serbia does not recognise Kosovo’s independence and relations between the two countries remain tense. Xhaka’s parents are originally from Kosovo and they are of Albanian heritage. The Arsenal midfielder’s father was imprisoned in the former Yugoslavia for campaigning in favour of Kosovan independence.

So what exactly happened in Kosovo?

During the period between March 24, 1999 to June 19, 1999, approximately 10,000 people were killed, with the vast majority of the victims being Kosovar Albanians killed by FRY forces. Approximately 863,000 civilians sought or were forced into refuge outside Kosovo and an additional 590,000 were internally displaced. There is also evidence of widespread rape and torture, as well as looting, pillaging and extortion.

Read all about Ethnic Cleansing of Muslims in Kosovo here.

Read all about Islam and Muslims in Kosovo here.

Bosnia's Muslims reopen mosque Serbs blew up during the war

More than 10,000 people gathered for the reopening of a mosque in Bosnia that was blown up by Christian Orthodox Serbs during the 1992-1995 war.

The Ferhat Pasha mosque, also called Ferhadija, was a masterpiece of 16th-century Ottoman architecture and one of the 16 mosques in Banja Luka, or one of the 534 throughout the country, that were destroyed or damaged by Bosnian Serbs in order to erase any traces of those they were expelling or killing.

Their aim was to make that part of Bosnia a part of neighbouring Serbia.

The so-called "ethnic cleansing" project, also targeting Roman Catholic Croats and other non-Serbs, included expelling people from their homes, looting their property, killing some and putting others in concentration camps.

The destruction of their heritage was an essential part of the plan, aimed also at discouraging survivors from returning.

In 1995, after more than 100,000 people were killed, a peace agreement divided the country in two halves - one for the Serbs, where Banja Luka ended up, and the other shared by Croats and Muslim Bosniaks.

The agreement guaranteed refugees the right to return to their pre-war homes and reconstruction of the Ferhadija mosque was to encourage the plan.

An attempt in 2001 to lay a foundation stone was disrupted by a Serb nationalist mob. One Muslim visitor was killed and dozens were injured.

Nato forces had to evacuate foreign ambassadors from the ceremony by helicopters.

Activists located fragments of the mosque that were not thrown into the river or the rubbish dump, separated them and used computers to place the more thanr 3,500 fragments where they belong. Reconstruction took 15 years.

On Saturday, the 23rd anniversary of the Ferhadija destruction, Bosnian Serb authorities deployed more than 1,000 policemen to secure the event, attended by outgoing Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Bosnian leaders, foreign ambassadors and representatives of the Roman Catholic, Serb Orthodox Churches and the Jewish community.

The event symbolised a further push to restore Bosnia's multi-faith and multi-ethnic fabric. Turkey and other international donors as well as Serbs gave funds for the reconstruction.

During the war, Serbs often referred to Muslims as "Turks", explaining their actions as revenge for hundreds of years of Ottoman occupation.

At the ceremony in Banja Luka, Davutoglu said: "We were here once, we are here now and we will always stay here."

Jakob Fincik, leader of Bosnia's Jewish Community, said in his speech that rarely a Jew speaks at the opening of a mosque but in Bosnia it was possible. He, as well as Catholic bishop Franjo Komarica and Serb Orthodox priest Jefrem, welcomed the opening of the mosque and the people who will pray in it.

"Our differences are not a historical mistake," said Husein Kavazovic, the leader of Bosnia's Islamic Community. "They are God's gift, and any violence against those differences is an act against God's will."

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Srebrenica Massacre: 14 years ago...

Today, fourteen years after the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica – the worst atrocity in Europe since the end of the Second World War – another 500 coffins will join the thousands buried in the memorial graveyard outside the town.

The International Commission on Missing Persons has been carrying out the grim task of identifying remains using DNA and other evidence, allowing relatives to bury their dead and gain "closure". To date, it has identified 6,186 of the massacre's victims. Every year, on the anniversary, the bodies that have been identified in the previous 12 months are laid to rest in a ceremony of painful emotion. After today's funeral, groups of mourners will lay flowers in front of the barn in the nearby village of Kravica where, in the worst single incident of the massacre, more than 1,000 men were tortured and executed in a single afternoon.

Though hemmed in by Serbs, the Muslim community of the coal mining town in eastern Bosnia believed itself to be under the protection of about 600 Dutch UN peacekeepers. But when Serbian forces poured into the town in the summer of 1995, under the command of General Ratko Mladic, the Dutch failed to protect their charges. The women and children were crammed into buses and sent away to safety, but over a period of three days the unarmed men, aged from 12 to 77, were systematically murdered.

Afterwards their bodies were dumped into rivers and mass graves. When aerial photos surfaced afterwards, the Serbian army ordered the corpses to be dispersed to secondary and even tertiary grave sites, to hide the carnage. This was done by bulldozers and resulted in bodies being broken up and widely scattered. In one case, the remains of a victim were discovered in four different mass graves, two of which were about 12 miles apart.

Srebrenica is Serb-dominated now and ethnic intolerance is a steady undercurrent in the region. The nearby town of Bratunac is said to hold the highest number of unprosecuted war criminals per capita in all of Bosnia. Many of them serve in the local police force.

"Bosnia is facing the worst political crisis since the war," political analyst Srecko Latal told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Bosnia is gripped by rising political tensions, with Serbs threatening to secede and some Muslim leaders calling for the abolition of the Serbs' Republika Srpska.

"One of the rare encouraging things is that political tensions have not reflected on the relationships between ordinary people," said Latal.

But he warned that "might be changing."

Bosnia fell into a devastating civil war in 1992 that left 200,000 people dead and displaced millions.

So far some 3,200 victims have been buried at a memorial just outside the ill-fated town. Thousands are yet to be exhumed and identified in the area where some 70 mass graves have been uncovered.