Fleeing Responsibility for Aggression and Genocide: Serbia Needs a Moral Revision

By Nedžad Ahatović

From Belgrade, politicians from Serbia and the RS entity sent war-mongering messages, threatening a total blockade of Bosnia and Herzegovina for the submission of a revision of the judgment in the case of BiH v. Serbia for aggression and genocide, hiding behind the preservation of peace and stability in the Balkans. Despite this, the legal team of Bosnia and Herzegovina submitted an application for a revision of the judgment in the case of BiH v. Serbia in the lawsuit for aggression and genocide before the International Court of Justice of the UN in The Hague. This was the best response to Belgrade's war-mongering rhetoric.  

Why is Belgrade guilty and why is responsibility being evaded in both Serbia and the RS?

After the war tragedy and horrors that befell this region where a state called the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia once existed, people tried to explain why all this happened. What is evident and what emerges as the only constant fact regarding the breakup of Yugoslavia is that the breakup and the war in the former Yugoslavia were initiated due to the ambition of one man – Slobodan Milošević – to rule the entire territory of the former state without challenge.

His insatiable ambition for power surfaced accidentally during the confrontation between the Serbian and Albanian communities in Kosovo in 1987. From that moment on, all Yugoslav peoples were condemned to suffering and hardship that would follow them until 1999. One of the regions that suffered the most due to Slobodan Milošević's ambitions was Bosnia and Herzegovina. The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina was undoubtedly the product of the aggression of Milošević's regime and his political and military satraps, both within and outside Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The aggression, in a military sense, was carried out with the highest degree of brutality in the use of lethal force since the end of World War II, in accordance with the set war aims. Therefore, Bosnia and Herzegovina became the scene of a total war aimed at seizing its entire state territory, with the physical extermination and displacement of an entire people – Bosniaks – from the Balkan region. 

Indeed, the instruments and means of waging war were used to conquer the entire state territory of BiH and physically eliminate Bosniaks through liquidation or expulsion. In a political sense, the intention was to portray the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a state community in which democratic relations based on the principle of one person, one vote could not be established, due to the numerical majority of Bosniaks and the possibility of them politically outvoting the political will of Serbs and Croats.

Therefore, it was necessary to resolve this political problem by military means and reduce the territory of the internationally recognized state of BiH to a series of non-functional and territorially disconnected enclaves, and to reduce the only population that wanted to live in such a state, the Bosniaks, to a religious group concentrated around larger urban centers in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This was a very specific type and form of war that was planned and executed with the weapons of the former JNA worth 2 billion USD. 

The aggression and war actions against BiH were initiated at the very moment BiH gained international recognition, not before. This means that the ultimate goal of the war was, under the threat and implementation of physical extermination, i.e., genocide, to induce a mass exodus of Bosniaks, thereby reducing their numbers to a statistically acceptable figure that would not guarantee greater political rights to that people and would prevent Bosniaks from predominantly deciding on the organization of government in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

In achieving this goal, paramilitary formations from neither the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia nor the Republic of Croatia operated in Bosnia and Herzegovina. All those formations referred to as such were completely regular military units of their army or police-intelligence structures. 

In an international context, the cases of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, and Kosovo vividly illustrate and prove the thesis of demographic warfare as well as a designed strategy for achieving political-territorial goals. BiH, Rwanda, and Kosovo all saw cases of planned intimidation of the "undesirable" population through mass executions with elements of horrific cruelty and severe torture of victims, aimed at causing mass ethnic migrations. Of course, if this recipe did not yield the desired results in the targeted territory, thorough physical extermination of the "undesirables" – GENOCIDE – was resorted to.

The actions of so-called "paramilitary units" are linked to such an approach in order to conceal the role of the state leadership in achieving war aims, which in modern military theory is called Hybrid Warfare. In the case of BiH, Belgrade has identical goals today, only the methods have changed. Instead of direct military actions, for more than a decade, BiH has been exposed to the use of political blockade measures aimed at portraying BiH as a failed project of the international community, with the ultimate goal of partitioning the country (when it could not be fully occupied by military means), which generates social and economic crisis and continued population migration from BiH.

Any activity undertaken by Belgrade or the RS entity towards further blockades of the state of BiH, regardless of political excuses, can be confidently considered the beginning of the integration of the RS entity into the constitutional and legal framework of Serbia.

Therefore, official Belgrade is guilty because it still keeps open the option of separating the RS entity from BiH and annexing it into its state-legal system, by force or by will. That is why the revision of the judgment in the case of BiH v. FRY, i.e., Serbia, is the first step towards normalizing relations between Serbia and BiH, because the process itself will show that Serbia today desperately needs a moral revision and renunciation of the politics of war, suffering, and genocide.