From: trh@jack.sns.com (Al Trh)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.turkish
Subject: "SOS BOSNIA": RESIST THE AGGRESSORS!
Date: 25 Jan 1993 07:35:58 -0600
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
Reply-To: Turkish Cultural Program List <TRKNWS-L%USCVM.BitNet@pucc.PRINCETON.EDU>
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

Forwarded message:
>From VM.USC.EDU!LISTSERV Mon Jan 25 01:42:00 1993
Via:        UK.AC.LEEDS.CMS1; 15 JAN 93 12:47:26 GMT
Date:       Fri, 15 Jan 93 12:47:27 GMT
From: Haluk DEMIRBAG <TEX5HAD@cms1.ucs.leeds.ac.uk>
Subject:    "SOS BOSNIA": RESIST THE AGGRESSORS! (fwd)
To: HQ.GGG@forsythe.stanford.edu
Message-Id: <15 Jan 93 12:48:46 GMT #5458@UK.AC.LEEDS.CMS1>

RESIST THE AGGRESSORS!

I find  it both  extraordinary and  disgraceful that  many people
seem to take it for granted that Bosnia should be partitioned, or
at least  divided into segregated  "cantons", and that  the Serbs
and Croats actually have a right to  divide it so long as part of
the country  is left  to the  Muslims. To think  like this  is to
understand very  little about  Bosnia or  what its  government is
standing  for.  It  is  simply  to succumb  to  the  demands  and
propaganda  of aggressors,  demands which  can still  in fact  be
successfully resisted, if the world  community has the will to do
so.

  Why should such demands be emphatically rejected? First because
Bosnia-Herzogovina is a  country with an identity  and history of
its own. In a letter from P.B. Walsh to which  The Times chose to
give  pride of  place  last Monday,  it is  claimed  that it  has
"entirely  arbitrary  administrative  boundaries".  This  is,  of
course, part  of the  Serbian case but  it is  profoundly untrue.
Bosnia has existed as a recognisable entity for far more than 500
years, with its capital at  either Travnik or Sarajevo, including
such towns  as Banja Luka in  the north, Mostar in  the south and
Tuzla in the east.

  Bosnia is  not some sort  of geographical hole  between Serbia,
Croatia and Albania  as some people have oddly  suggested. It has
at least as  strong a historic claim to exist  as its neighbours.
But its  identity has  not been realised  through pursuit  of the
religiously monolithic, as  in Serbia. On the contrary,  it has a
long  record   of  tolerant  pluralism,   incorporating  Muslims,
Catholics  and  Orthodox  throughout   the  country  and  not  in
segregated  areas.  Until  this   year  Sarajevo  was  well-known
throughout   Europe   as   a  place   with   outstandingly   good
Muslim-Christian relations. To say that  all this is lost forever
because of a few months of appalling Serbian aggression should be
unthinkable. Europe  actually needs Bosnia  in a way it  does not
need  a  nationalist  ultra-Catholic  Croatia  or  a  nationalist
ultra-Orthodox Serbia.

  The fact that a minority of  Bosnians happen to be Orthodox and
another minority  Catholic provides no right  whatever for Serbia
or Croatia  to annex part  of its territory. Ethnically  they are
all  one.  Nor  was  any  minority  ill-treated  in  Bosnia.  The
appalling ill-treatment meted out by Croats to Serbs 50 years ago
is wholly irrelevant  to Bosnia and to 1992, much  as it has been
used for  propaganda in recent  months. The present  conflict has
been  produced  by  the  ambition  of  Slobodan  Milosevic,  well
documented over years, to produce a "Greater Serbia" and is by no
means supported by  all Serbs. The novelist Mirko  Kovac has even
argued for the bombing of strategic targets in his own country to
stop it.  Many Serbs  and Croats  are helping  in the  defence of
Sarajevo  in support  of  their legitimate  government which  was
elected by a majority of the people and is in no way "Muslim".

  Sarajevo  is  besieged  by  the heavy  weaponry  and  conscript
soldiers  of the  Serbian army.  Without them  Radovan Karadzic's
bands would not last long. Karadzic himself, self-styled "leader"
of the  Bosnian Serbs, has  been elected by  no one. It  would be
unbelievable, were it not true, that the United Nations, strongly
backed by Britain,  has maintained an arms embargo  on Bosnia and
its civilian  defence force while  its aggressors control  one of
the largest armament industries in Europe.

  Finally, let us  remember that the very purpose  of the Serbian
campaign has been "ethnic cleansing", the systematic expulsion of
all non-Serbs  from their  homes throughout  the greater  part of
Bosnia.  Milosevic and  Karadzic are  personally responsible  for
these  expulsions.  Even  apart  from  the  massacres  and  other
barbarisms  which  have  accompanied   them,  this  is  something
comparable with  the major  crimes of the  Second World  War. Any
settlement  ratified by  Britain, the  European Community  or the
United  Nations  which accepted  these  expulsions  as final  and
allowed their  perpetrators to achieve permanent  success,  would
constitute a gross  violation of the basic rights  of hundreds of
thousands  of individuals  and would  itself be  a crime  against
humanity.

  Milosevic's aggression  has gone from Slovenia  through Croatia
to  Bosnia, each  time getting  worse,  and it  will continue  to
devastate the Balkans and produce  a legacy of ceaseless conflict
for  the  future  (because  its victims  will  never  accept  its
finality)  unless the  world intervenes  effectively as  it could
quite easily  do but has,  hitherto, lamentably failed to  do. In
this I wholly agree with  Jacques Delors, Paddy Ashdown, Margaret
Thatcher, Michael Foot and David Owen.

THE TABLET, 29 August 1992

Adrian HASTINGS,
Professor of Theology,
Department of Theology and
Religious Studies, University
of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK
            _
|-| /-\ |_ |_| |<