The Genocide in Bosnia - Research Paper Example

Sells (1998) suggests that it was the Serbian religious mythology, extreme nationalism, and racist theories, which contributed to the occurrence of the Bosnian genocide. The events which led to this genocide were put into motion with the death of the Yugoslav president Josip Tito in 1980 who had managed to hold the Yugoslav federation together throughout his rule. Now the Croat and Bosnian nationalists started to agitate for their independence and as a response, Serbian nationalism, which had been dormant for many decades, was suddenly given a new lease of life.

The Serbians had been the dominant people within the Yugoslav federation and with its collapse they would have lost the power and influence which they had exercised over the other states within it. After Slobodan Milosevic became the Serb leader and by default the leader of the Yugoslav federation in 1987, he encouraged Serb nationalism not only in Serbia but also in the other states in which large Serb communities lived. Croatia, Slovenia, and Macedonia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 and these three new states were all recognized internationally.

There followed a year’s fierce fighting between the mainly Serb Yugoslavian army and Croatia in Yugoslavia’s attempt to hang on to the Serb communities there and when this was not successful, the Serbs turned their attention to Bosnia. A sign of the increasing tensions in the area occurred in 1992 when the Serb army began shelling the National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo. Over a million books, more than a hundred thousand manuscripts and rare books, and centuries of historical records were destroyed and this can be considered to have been a systematic campaign of cultural eradication.

A good case study of the Bosnian genocide would be the one that happened in Srebrenica. In July 1995, Serb troops and paramilitary units descended on the town of Srebrenica and began shelling it after dealing with the Muslim soldiers in the countryside, besieging the town’s thousands of Muslim civilians. The United Nations peacekeeping mission in the town which consisted of French and Dutch soldiers, could do little to help the civilian population and had to agree to a vague promise made by Mladic, the Serb commander, that everyone would be allowed to cross out of Serb territory but only after the screening of the men so that ‘war criminals’ could be detected.

This promise proved to be false as witnessed when the men were separated from the women and children and the latter were forced into trucks and buses and deported. The men on the other hand were all killed and this process of large scale murder and deportation continued for the next four days. It is estimated that up to 7500 men and boys over thirteen years old were killed after being driven on trucks or marched to their places of death. It is said that up to 3000 were while in the act of escaping by being shot and decapitated in the fields.

Thousands of bodies were buried in mass graves although most of these were later exhumed and re-buried in more secret places. According to Ching and Ching (2008) more, than 26000 Muslim civilians were killed during the Bosnian genocide and thousands more died from starvation and a lack of medical care. Furthermore, over 10000 Muslim civilia