Monsters Abroad

Busted!

It was the chilling climax of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the most vicious and genocidal battlefront in the Balkans conflict.

Srebrenica  - July 1995, one of the most notorious modern acts of gendercide took place. While the internat'l community and U.N. peacekeepers looked on, Serbian forces separated civilian guys from girls and killed thousands en masse.

And the cat believed to be in command of the genocide is the freshly busted 'General' Ratko Mladić.

Not unlike 3rd Reich's Das Reich's"Just following orders!" meme defense (that funnily enough failed to defend anyone at Nürnburg), Ratko laid out to his Parliament exactly what Greater Serbia entailed

‘People are not little stones, or keys in someone's pocket, that can be moved from one place to another just like that... Therefore, we cannot precisely arrange for only Serbs to stay in one part of the country while removing others painlessly...That is genocide.’

  Ratko was right. Aside from the nearly 8k civilians killed at Srebrenica while the UN's gay Dutch contingent looked on in dispassionate impotence as the entire Hitlerian Dance Macabre exploded

The policies of aggression and ethnic cleansing as implemented by Serb forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995 with the direct support of Serbian regime of Slobodan Milošević and its followers ultimately led to the displacement of more than 2,000,000 people, an estimated 200,000 killed, tens of thousands raped or otherwise tortured and abused, and the innocent civilians of Sarajevo and other urban centres repeatedly subjected to shelling and sniper attacks; meet the terms defining the crime of genocide in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, created in Paris on 9 December 1948, and entered into force on 12 January 1951.

 As the ungodly - yet delightfully daemoneoconic avuncular Christopher Hitchens teaches:

"On whatever basis the post-Tito Yugoslavia was to be reconstituted, there was one that was utterly impossible as well as unthinkable: a "Greater Serbia," whereby smaller republics and their populations were forcibly cut to fit the requirements of a dictatorial tailoring. It will one day seem incredible that the NATO powers did not see this right away and continued to treat Slobodan Milosevic as a "partner in peace," thus opening the road that led straight to Srebrenica and the murder of people ostensibly under our protection.

 "At times like this, we are always reliably reminded of what John Quincy Adams said about the risk to the United States of going "abroad in search of monsters to destroy." The monstrous character of Mladic and his movement needed no exaggeration. To this day, a lot of people do not understand how much misery and chaos and suffering it purposely inflicted. 

 "The monstrous nature of his power and reach was paradoxically and enormously exaggerated—not by those who wanted to confront it, but by those who did not! This meant that the whole nightmare was needlessly prolonged and the expense of concluding it greatly increased.

Pic - "The reverse of course is allowing monsters abroad to come in search of us"