Serbian Cruelties in the Bosnian Genocide: 6-year

old Bosnian Muslim child repeatedly raped

The following archive article, entitled “Do a ‘Desert Storm’ on Serbs” was originally published on 9
October 1993 by New Straits Times.
By: H. Hashim Hassan
The cruelties committed by the Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina, said Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad,
defy the imagination. Expressing his disgust over the matter, the Prime Minister told the 48th UN
General Assembly in New York on Oct 1, a six-year-old [Bosnian Muslim] child was repeatedly
raped in front of her mother who not only had to watch but was prevented from giving any help
until the little child died after two days of exposure.
This was not the first time Dr Mahathir has publicly touched on the barbarity of the Serbs. At the Non-
Aligned Summit last year, he said that in Bosnia human rights were being ignored, ethnic cleansing
was being carried out, women were being raped and children were being shot and killed by
snipers. So apathetic and unconcerned were the Serbian aggressors after committing their horrendous
crimes that rape and murder were something that they took delight in doing.
There was a case of a Bosnian woman, Jasmina, who told newsmen during the early days of the
conflict how she was raped by her former neighbours and one of them was the best man at her
wedding. How many Bosnian Muslim girls have been raped and latered butchered is a matter for
conjecture.
Not all rape cases were reported to the police or to the hospitals, and in Bosnia of today there is no
proper police station and whatever hospitals that function give priority to battle casualties. But two
million Bosnian Muslims [Bosniaks] have been forced to flee from their towns and villages.
There were many girls in Malaysia who shared the same fate as Jasmina during the invasion of Malaya
by Japanese troops in December 1941. They were raped not only by the invading Japanese soldiers but
also by Japanese civilians who were residing in the towns since the pre-war years earning their living
as photographers, dentists, barbers and other businesses. Most of the were friends of the local folks.
Chin Kee Onn in his book ‘Malaya Upside Down’ on the conquest and occupation of Malaya, said,
“Rape is a touchy subject, but war without rape is as impossible as fire without smoke. It would be
sheer prudery to avoid it.”
But the tragedy of war is not confined only to rape. It goes further than that. Hitler who believed the
Germans, who are of ethnic Aryan stock, belonged to a ‘superior race’ carried out a genocidal war. He
believed the Jews were the main cause of economic problems in Germany after the First World War.
Before his Third Reich capitulated in 1945, he launched his so-called “Final Solution,” to wit, the
extermination of all the Jews detained in concentration camps all over occupied Europe.
In the summer of 1944 alone, more than 400,000 Jews were liquidated by cremating them in specially
built gas chambers. But before the cremation, gold rings were ripped from the fingers of corpses and
gold teeth torn out. Bones were ground down for fertiliser and women’s hair were collected for the
manufacture off socks. So far, we have not come across reports that the Serbs, who like Hitler believed
that they were ethnically superious to the others in the former Yugoslavia, had started to exterminate
their Muslim captives by gassing them, extracting their gold teeth and ripping away their gold rings.
But their unconcern for human lives, to say nothing of human dignity, shows they are capable of
perpetrating a Hitler on the Bosnian Muslims.
At the rate the Bosnian Muslims are being killed by the mightier forces of the Serbs, they will end up
as extinct as the proverbial dodo birds unless, as Dr Mahathir put it, “…. the UN decided to increase
pressure on the Serbs, including mounting a military offensive provided due preparations are m ade.”
Dr Mahathir is absolutely right.
From my experience as a veteran of World War Two (I was in the RAF), only a blitzkrieg a la Desert
Storm on the Serbs by the big democratic powers could free the Bosnian Muslims, end “ethnic
cleansing” and bring peace once again to that war-torn country.