.E×à(ğ="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; TEXT-ALIGN: justify"> The 10th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre was commemorated solemnly. The Turkish public remembered the horrible tragedy that took place there and the press carried emotional articles, sharing the feelings of the fraternal Bosnian people.

 
  The 10th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre was commemorated solemnly. The Turkish public remembered the horrible tragedy that took place there and the press carried emotional articles sharing the feelings of the fraternal Bosnian people.

  This issue must never be forgotten. The humanitarian and legal aspects of the ethnic cleansing and genocide committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina must be researched extensively.

  In fact, on an extraordinary issue such as genocide Turkey should not limit its interest to a specific people it feels close to. The Turkish interest in this particular issue should go well beyond the realm of reacting to the Armenian genocide claims.

  Some of the relevant newspaper articles were obviously written in haste by columnists who did not even take the trouble to find out the name of the person found guilty of genocide (by the way, his name is Krstic) in the Srebrenica case or the name of the international court that tried him. As if the original number of victims were not high enough, there were those who exaggerated the death toll. There were even those who referred to Srebrenica as the first and gravest case of genocide since the Holocaust – although a year earlier than the Srebrenica incidents a more extensive genocide had taken place in Rwanda claiming the lives of 800,000 Tutsi.

  We in Turkey have suffered so much from terrorism all these years. And yet some of our politicians and journalists speak up without attempting to gain access to even an elementary knowledge of terrorism. We are a nation that has been accused of committing genocide, and yet we have failed to gain sufficient knowledge of the genocide issue. That must change. Going through all this suffering has definitely been a highly important experience for us. However, only if our sufferings cause us to engage in research and to gain knowledge can we draw lessons from our experience, put it into words and have an impact on the world.

  The Croatian-Serbian war spilled into Bosnia and Herzegovina in April 1992, that is to say, shortly after it began. During that war the People's Army of Yugoslavia (JNA) turned into a Serbian army and it was seen that it had no shortage of weapons and ammunition. In spite of this fact, on Sept. 25, 1991 the U.N. Security Council imposed an arms embargo on the entire Yugoslavia (Resolution No 713). Thus, first the Croatians and later the Bosnians were left defenseless in the face of the Serbs.

  The UNSC decided that the international force (UNPROFOR) that had been created to protect the Croats on Feb. 21, 1992 should protect the Bosnians as well in the course of the war in Bosnia. However, that peace force was equipped with only light weapons and it could not protect the Bosnians in a situation where peace did not reign. There is also the possibility that the aim had never been to protect the Bosnians. Maybe there was a desire to force the Bosnians to surrender to the conditions put forth by the Serbian side.

  As soon as the Serbian attacks began, Turkey assessed that what was going on there was an ethnic cleansing campaign, not simply a “war.” At the risk of compromising its interests it immediately abandoned “conventional diplomacy.” In other words, Turkey risked disrupting its relations with the Serbs.

  The international community had refrained from defining the crime and from identifying the aggressor or the culprit, maintaining that in the war all the parties concerned had been committing human rights violations. Although Turkey was not a member of the International Commission for Human Rights, it managed to convince the commission to hold a special session on this issue. The commission decided (Dec. 1, 1992, Decision No. S-2/1) that the ethnic cleansing committed by the Serbs constituted a “crime against humanity.” Unruffled by the “Armenian genocide” claims against Turkey, for the first time a U.N. body put on record that the aforementioned Serbian campaign could be an act of genocide.

  The European Union countries had wanted to resolve on their own this first European crisis of the post-Cold War era. So, they opposed U.S. involvement. They did not want the United Nations to lift the embargo or to bolster UNPROFOR. They did not implement the basic provision of the Genocide Convention to the effect that they should “prevent and punish the genocide.” Not only did they fail to protect the Bosnians from genocide, they also deprived the Bosnians of the means to protect themselves. They condoned the way the Serbian artillery bombed Sarajevo for years and the way they engaged in ethnic cleansing in the “safe areas.”

  After the Srebrenica massacre took place on July 10, 1995, a NATO operation was launched at the instigation of the United States. The operation showed that the tragedy that had claimed the lives of some 250,000 civilians could, in reality, have been easily prevented.

  Eight thousand men were massacred on a mountain road in Srebrenica by Serbs apparently transferring them to western Bosnia. The International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (at The Hague) decided on Aug. 2, 2001 that the massacre in question, perpetrated in the course of an ethnic cleansing activity, was an act of genocide. Bosnians were killed because they were considered “Turkish.” That characteristic of the massacre clearly indicates that the act in question constitutes the crime of genocide according to Article 2 of the convention.

  The Srebrenica genocide has a great significance for us because it proves that the ethnic cleansing that caused waves of Turks to be driven out of the Balkans throughout the 19th Century had involved acts of genocide by the same methods that had been used in Bosnia.

  N.B: My column of July 11 contained some translation mistakes: I wanted to point out that terrorists might look rational in their intermediary (not main) aims but irrational in their ultimate goals. I must also point out that al-Qaeda threatened Italy after the London bombings, not the Madrid bombings.