My last posting, "In Defense of the Serbs," has prompted a protest letter to Foreign Policy from Hamdija Custovic, Vice President of the Congress of North American Bosniaks. The letter is too long to reproduce in full here, but I will summarize its contents in the spirit of free and open discussion. You can read the letter in full at his  organization's website.

Custovic accuses me of "appeasing the Serbs" who have been critical of my coverage of the Ratko Mladic trial by seeking to "spread the blame" for the Serbian "aggression and genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina." He compares Milosevic's project for a "Greater Serbian state" to Hitler's attempts to "consolidate all Germans into a single state." According to Custovic, the Serbian "war of aggression finally prompted a NATO intervention in the fall of 1995 in Bosnia and again four years later in Kosovo." He fears that we are now witnessing a revival of the "same nationalist rhetoric" that caused the Bosnia war in the first place, as evidenced by the election of Tomislav Nikolic to the presidency of Serbia.

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One of the primary goals of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal -- beyond the obvious one of punishing the guilty -- is public education. The tribunal views itself as a kind of "truth commission" in a part of the world where facts are malleable things, filtered through the lenses of rival ethnic groups and political parties. The first step to national reconciliation is an agreement on precisely what happened. 

That at least is the theory. In practice, as I discovered by participating in a recent "outreach" session organized by the tribunal in the Bosnian Serb-controlled town of Bijeljina, a more nuanced, elliptical approach sometimes works best.

Remember that Bosnia is a country where children are taught completely different narratives about the fratricidal war of 1992-95. In both school and home and through the media, Muslim students learn that Serbs began the war, and committed terrible atrocities. Their Serbian counterparts are raised to believe that the war was started by Islamic fundamentalists who wanted to control all of Bosnia. 

I was intrigued to see how tribunal outreach officer Almir Alic (photographed above) would handle a room full of Serb, Muslim, and Croat law students from different parts of Bosnia who had been invited to attend a week-long "human rights school" in Bijeljina. Situated close to the border with Serbia, Bijeljina had a 34 percent Muslim population prior to the war, but was "ethnically cleansed" and is now overwhelmingly Serb. A Bijelina resident told me that "99 percent" of the population believe that former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic is a hero.

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The trial began -- and then it stopped because of so-called "disclosure" problems. What's up with that?

Prosecutors at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal today gave their first detailed explanation for the bungled opening of the Ratko Mladic trial. In a 42-page filing to the court, they blamed the fiasco on a computer "operator error" that had led to the non-disclosure of around 5,000 documents, or just over 3 percent of the disclosable trial record. They added that the omissions were largely "technical" in nature, and should not require a lengthy trial delay. 

The trial, which began on May 16 with a summary of the prosecution case against the former Bosnian Serb military commander, was due to resume on May 29 with the calling of witnesses. But Judge Alphons Orie ordered an indefinite delay while he investigated "significant errors" by the prosecution in the disclosure process. Lawyers for Mladic have called for a six-month postponement of the trial, alleging "an unprecedented disclosure failure whose scope is without parallel in the history of the Tribunal."

For those interested in the details, I have posted the latest prosecution filing here, along with the defense filing here, and e-mail correspondence between the prosecutor and defense here.

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I will be in the Hague on Wednesday for the long-awaited start of the Mladic trial, almost seventeen years after he was first indicted by the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal. While we wait to hear the prosecutor's opening statement, let's take a look at some more "roads not taken" during the run-up to the Srebrenica tragedy of July 1995, which features prominently in the Mladic indictment.

While primary responsibility for the Srebrenica massacre certainly rests with the Bosnian Serb forces commanded by Mladic, the international community also played a role through a series of diplomatic missteps. Here are three more key moments, selected by the former United Nations civil affairs official, David Harland, that led directly to Europe's worst massacre since World War II.

For three earlier decision points, click here.

Key Moment 4. The Bosnian government's decision to block the evacuation of Srebrenica in April 1993. On April 2, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees reported to the Security Council that non-combatants were "desperate to escape to safety because they see no other prospect than death if they remain where they are." On instructions from the Bosnian government, the Muslim commander in Sarajevo, Nasir Oric, prevented the evacuation of refugees on the grounds that it would pave the way for the takeover of Srebrenica by the Bosnian Serbs, and would facilitate their policy of "ethnic cleansing." A convoy of United Nations trucks was forced to leave the enclave without any refugees on board. Ironically, Oric himself left Srebrenica in April 1995, three months before the town fell.

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The Srebrenica massacre offers a prime example of the dangers of what can be called a "feel good response" to mass atrocity. By a "feel good response," I mean action that is designed to look good in the eyes of international public opinion but fails to do anything really effective to protect a threatened population. A feel good response can often wind up making a tragic situation even worse -- as was the case in Srebrenica, where around 7,000 Muslims became the victims of pre-meditated mass murder in July 1995.

Examples of such empty moralism abound -- from Bosnia to Rwanda to Darfur to Syria.

To explain what I mean, let me review the history of the establishment of the so-called United Nations "safe area" of Srebrenica as a result of Security Council resolution 819, adopted on April 16, 1993. The resolution represented the response of the United States and Security Council members to the public outrage engendered by a widely publicized visit to Srebrenica the previous month by General Philippe Morillon of France. The photograph above shows the charismatic U.N. general being besieged by a crowd of Muslim refugees as he tried to leave the town on March 12. Here is a YouTube clip:

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The Dutch have rightly come under a lot of criticism for their failure to prevent Europe's worst massacre since World War II in Srebrenica. Apart from a token air strike against Bosnian Serb troops described in my last post, Dutch peacekeepers did not offer any significant resistance to the takeover of the United Nations "safe area" in July 1995. They permitted General Ratko Mladic to forcibly separate Muslim men and boys from their families outside Dutchbat headquarters in Potocari. To put the matter very bluntly, they were bystanders to a terrible atrocity.

On the other hand, it seems unfair that a single Dutch peacekeeping battalion should become a scapegoat for the much broader failures of the international community. Many of the decisions, non-decisions, or fudged decisions that led to the Srebrenica tragedy were taken long before July 1995, at a variety of political and military levels, right up to the United Nations Security Council in New York and the White House in Washington, DC.

The Dutchbat commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Thom Karremans, (photographed above with Mladic) may have been the wrong man for the job, as I described in a previous post. But the evidence shows that he and his men were put in an almost impossible position. They were ordered to protect a "safe area" inhabited by some 40,000 Muslim refugees -- but they were not given the resources and political support they needed to accomplish their mission.

By way of illustration, let me review the history of the week preceding the fall of the "safe area." The record shows that Dutchbat requested close air support on six separate occasions -- but their calls for assistance were denied or simply ignored by their UN superiors. Since the peacekeepers themselves were only lightly armed, NATO air power represented their only means of effective defense.

The bureaucratic procedure for requesting air support was extraordinarily cumbersome. Requests were first submitted to Sector North East headquarters in Tuzla, then to the Bosnia-Herzegovina command in Sarajevo. If Sarajevo approved the request, it was then forwarded to the Crisis Action Team in Zagreb, by which time up to three hours might have been lost. Since peacekeeping was a joint UN-NATO operation, all requests were subject to a so-called "dual key." A military bureaucrat anywhere along the line could delay or even block a request for air support from the Srebrenica peacekeepers because it was submitted on "the wrong form."

A blow-by-blow chronology of air support requests from Dutchbat, with links to sources (Dutch and United Nations reports):

First request. July 6, 13:50. This request from Karremans was prompted by the shelling of the U.N. compound at Potocari by Mladic's forces, and preliminary incursions into the "safe area." Forwarded to Sarajevo by Sector North East, but turned down by Dutch general (Kees Nicolai) as premature.

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The photograph above is the iconic image of Ratko Mladic sipping wine with the commander of the Dutch peacekeeping forces in Srebrenica shortly after the fall of the United Nations "safe area" on July 11, 1995. Dutch colonel Thom Karremans apologized to Mladic for briefly opening fire in a last ditch attempt to deter the Bosnian Serb forces as they entered the enclave. He depicted himself as a humble "piano player" performing a score devised by others.

"Don't shoot the piano player," the Dutch peacekeeper pleaded, clearly hoping to lighten the atmosphere.

"You're a lousy piano player," Mladic shot back, before offering Karremans a cigarette and a drink.

It now turns out that the unfortunate Karremans was under considerable personal and psychological pressure at the time he was appointed commander of the Dutch peacekeeping battalion, or Dutchbat, in Srebrenica. According to a superior officer, General Hans Kouzy, he was in the process of a messy divorce, and was not fully focused on his military duties.

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Thanks to the online video feed from the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, I have been watching Radovan Karadzic rebut charges that he ordered the murder of 7,000-plus Muslim prisoners following the fall of Srebrenica. It is a curtain-raiser to the arguments we can expect when the Ratko Mladic trial finally opens in The Hague on May 14. (The date has now been finalized.)

As you can see from the photographs above, Karadzic is a man with many sides-poet, psychiatrist, president, fugitive from justice, New Age healer. His latest role is that of defense attorney, representing himself, in a trial that has been going on for over two years. Superficially at least, he is playing the part with utmost seriousness. In contrast to Mladic, who has become known for his courtroom tantrums, Karadzic treats the judges with great respect, referring to them as "Excellencies," and is polite to prosecution witnesses, thanking them for their testimony.

But when you examine his defense strategy in more detail, you have to wonder about his goal. Again in contrast to Mladic, Karadzic has a plausible defense against the charge that he ordered the Srebrenica killings. He was not on the scene himself, and did not have direct operational control over the executioners, who answered to Mladic as the Bosnian Serb military commander. Furthermore, we know that relations between the two men were extremely strained in July 1995. Karadzic might have followed the example of Drina Corps commander Radislav Krstic in pinning primary responsibility for Srebrenica on Mladic.

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In my last post, I published an overhead photograph of several hundred Muslim prisoners in a field at a place called Nova Kasaba in Bosnia, and posed a question: what happened to these people? The answer to that question is contained in the photograph above:  the vast majority of the men photographed by an American spy satellite around 14:00 on July 13 ended up in mass graves, like the one above at Branjevo Military Farm. 

By coincidence, a survivor from Branjevo testified on Thursday at the Yugoslav war crimes trial of Radovan Karadzic. He appeared as a "protected witness" under the codename KDZ-333. Cross-examined by the former Bosnian Serb president, KDZ-333  said he was somewhere in the middle of the crowd in the American intelligence photo.  Before nightfall on July 13, buses arrived to collect the prisoners, who were ambushed by Serb forces after fleeing the United Nations "safe area" of Srebrenica.   The prisoners were taken to the town of Bratunac, where they spent the night in the buses.

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Talk to the players in any major ethnic conflict -- Bosnia, northern Ireland, Israel-Palestine -- and you quickly run across a phenomenon that I call the "chain of victimhood." The other side did something horrible to us X years ago, forcing us to defend ourselves. This led to a new atrocity in Y years ago. They provoked us, and we responded, and so on, ad infinitum.

The constant in the "chain of victimhood" is that it was always the other side that committed the first crime. Talk to a Bosnian Muslim, and he will describe the terrible spate of ethnic cleansing, mass killing, and house burnings, initiated by Serb militia groups in March 1992. Talk to a Serb, and he will date the start of the conflict to Bosnia's secession from Yugoslavia earlier the same month, rekindling memories of the massacres of Serbs in Nazi-controlled Bosnia in World War II. Follow the chain back and you quickly end up in 1389 when the Serbian Prince Lazar was killed in battle against the Turks.

It is a similar situation in the Middle East. Every month seems to create new links in a chain of victimhood that stretches back into the mists of time. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu feels that he is justified in ordering new Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian territory in response to unilateral Palestinian moves to gain international recognition for a Palestinian state. The Palestinians complain about earlier settlement activity. The Israelis cite the threat posed by Palestinian terrorists. And so on, back to biblical times. Each side is convinced the other side started it.

So how do you break this chain of suffering, and the sense of historical grievance and victimhood that goes along with it? After spending the last few weeks talking to all sides in the Bosnia conflict, I have a modest proposal for encouraging a more reasonable, productive debate. It boils down to the following, very simple idea from the Gospel of Saint Matthew: first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.

I am inspired to make this suggestion by reading a book by the Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic, entitled They Would Never Hurt a Fly, about war criminals from the former Yugoslavia. Although she is Croatian ("a bad Croat," Croatian nationalists would argue), Drakulic goes into painful detail about Croatian crimes against Serbs, before describing Serbian crimes against Croats and Muslims. Her willingness to talk about Croatian misdeeds first gives her the credibility to talk about the misdeeds of others.

Some might object to my proposal on the grounds that the three sides in the Bosnia conflict -- Serb, Muslim (or Bosniak), Croat -- were not all equally bad. It is true that the Muslims suffered disproportionately in the most recent war, in large measure because they were less well armed than either the Serbs or the Croats. Nevertheless, there are plenty of examples of war crimes committed by Muslims against Serbs and Croats. To talk only about Serb and Croat crimes against Muslims is a recipe for merely prolonging the chain of suffering, and strengthening feelings of victimhood.

If Americans have any moral claim to lecture the rest of the world on human rights abuses, it is because we are willing to air our own dirty linen in public. While it is painful to read about shameful episodes such as the My Lai massacre, Abu Ghraib, and waterboarding, in the U.S. media, it is also necessary. Criticizing your own society is viewed by some as unpatriotic. In fact, it is the highest form of patriotism. If all sides in the Bosnia could display that kind of civic duty, the conflict would become much easier to resolve.

Few matters are more fraught with emotion in Srebenica, and Bosnia as a whole, than the question of whether the cold-blooded executions of around 8,000 Muslim men by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995 should be qualified as "genocide." I experienced this myself when I referred to the event as a "massacre" in a conversation with a Srebenica survivor. "It was not a massacre," Hatidza Mehmedovic shouted at me angrily. "It was a genocide."

I must admit that I find it difficult to use the word genocide, which conjures up images of the Holocaust. The word appears to have been invented by the Polish-born American jurist, Raphael Lemkin, in 1944 in relation to Hitler's campaign of extermination against European Jewry. The word derives from the Greek genos, meaning "race," and the Latin suffix -cida, meaning "killer." In the popular culture, at least, when we talk about "geno-cide," we think about the killing of an entire race or ethnic group. Genocide is the most horrific of crimes.

My reluctance to use the word genocide, particularly in casual conversation, stems in part from the way in which the expression has been abused by all sides in the former Yugoslavia. Muslims, Serbs, and Croats accuse each other of genocide on a routine basis when talking about alleged war crimes committed against them. It is important that outsiders avoid the inflammatory rhetoric that has become so poisonous and commonplace in this part of the world. When we employ terms like "genocide," we need to be careful to explain exactly what we mean, and use the words in a very specific context.

So what exactly did the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal mean to say when it found that "genocide" had been committed at Srebrenica in July 1995? Fortunately, there is a wealth of case law defining the term very precisely.  As used by the tribunal, the term has a narrower meaning that the intent to destroy an entire race. It can also be employed to mean the intended destruction of a "substantial part" of an ethnic group in a given location, specifically eastern Bosnia in the case of Srebrenica. Article Four of the tribunal's statute draws directly on language from the 1948 U.N. Convention on Genocide to define genocide as:

any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) killing members of the group;

(b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;  

(c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its

physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Exactly what constitutes an ethnic group is the subject of a lengthy discussion in a 2001 judgment involving one of Ratko Mladic's subordinate commanders, Radislav Krstic. The judgment defines the term "ethnic group" in this case as "the Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica." The court concluded that the systematic massacre of 7,000 to 8,000 Muslim males from this community plus the forcible transfer of some 25,000 women and children to other parts of Bosnia constituted genocide within the meaning of the Genocide Convention:

The Bosnian Serb forces knew, by the time they decided to kill all of the military aged men, that the combination of those killings with the forcible transfer of the women, children and elderly would inevitably result in the physical disappearance of the Bosnian Muslim population at Srebrenica ... The Chamber concludes that the intent to kill all the Bosnian Muslim men of military age in Srebrenica constitutes an intent to destroy in part the Bosnian Muslim group within the meaning of Article 4 and therefore must be qualified as a genocide.

The original court found Krstic guilty of genocide. In 2004, an appeals court modified the verdict to "aiding and abetting genocide" on the grounds that it had not been proven that Krstic himself had the intent to commit genocide.