BOSNIAN GENOCIDE, A FURNACE USED

TO BURN BOSNIAN MUSLIMS TO DEATH

The following article, “Remember and Protest War Crimes in Bosnia”, was published by The
Jewish Post & News, on 2 Dec 1992.

THE JEWISH POST — “We told them not to be afraid, we wouldn’t do anything to them, they
should just stand in front of the wall. But it was taken for granted among us that they should be
killed. So when somebody said ‘Shoot’, I swung around and pulled the trigger, three times on
automatic fire. I remember the little girl with the red dress hiding behind her granny.”

Those comments by a Serb nationalist soldier appeared in a story in The Globe and Mail
November 27. Now under arrest by Bosnian soldiers, the soldier told a reporter how he and two
companions gunned down 10 members of a Muslim family in their home in Bosnia-
Herzegovina last June.

In another incident, the soldier recalled, he saw 30 men from a Muslim village shot and
incinerated in a furnace at a steel plant. He said some of the men were still alive when they
were thrown into the furnace.

Last week, this writer sat through the showing of a video at Rosh Pina Synagogue, where a
Winnipeg Holocaust survivor described how the Nazis gunned down members of his family in
their town’s Jewish cemetery.

We Jews vowed to never let such atrocities happen again, and Jewish organizations and Israel
have protested these outrages. But are we doing enough?

Serb and Croat forces have been involved for the past few months in a massive land grab in
Bosnia, one of the many republics that have broken away from Yugoslavia in the past year.

As of last June, Slavic Moslems [Bosniaks, Bosnian Muslims] made up 44 percent of the
population in Bosnia – the largest single ethnic group there, compared to about 30 per cent
Serbs and 15 per cent Croats.

Serb and Croat forces in Bosnia have engaged in a relentless campaign to carve up that republic
between them. As of last month, Bosnian Serbs had grabbed about 65 per cent of Bosnia, with
Bosnian Croats holding about another 25 percent, and Muslims [Bosniaks] being forces into
four tiny enclaves in the remaining 10 per cent.

To accomplish that aim, Serb forces have engaged in a strategy called “ethnic cleansing”,
which has included murdering more than 14,000 mainly Muslim civilians. Serb and Croat
military actions in Bosnia have resulted in the creation of more than 1 million refugees there.

The Croat role in this land grab is especially hypocritical, because only a few months earlier,
Croats were wailing to the world about Serb encroachments on their own republic, and the UN
dispatched troops there to try and halt the fighting.

For the past few months, UN troops have tried with little success to impose a ceasefire in the
Sarajevo area, and other Muslim enclaves in Bosnia. Besides sending in soldiers, the UN has
tried sanctions against Serbia, and they’ve had little effect.

Serb and Croat leaders in Bosnia are now engaged in peace talks in Geneva, where they
cynically colluded in the permanent division of the republic between them. As of this writing,
they appear to be heading toward a ceasefire, where they will permanently reap the fruits of
their aggression.

That’s because the U.S. and Europeans have ruled our waging war against Serbia, fearing
they’ll become bogged down in another Vietnam. With no oil reserves at stake in Yugoslavia,
unlike in Kuwait, the American Administration is reluctant to take further military action,
beyond supporting the UN’s limited role.

Some Jews have pointed out that Serbs played a ‘heroic’ role in saving Jews from the Nazis
during the Holocaust [which is a myth, since Serbs and Serbia collaborated with Nazis in
WWII]. But Serbs forces have engaged in abominable war crimes this year, and Serbs and
Croats have gotten away with using military force to terrorize and expel a larger Muslim
population group.

If we Jews mean what we say about “Never again”, we should lead the world in remembering
and protesting this moral outrage.