by Rich Markosian
Genocide still continues to this day. One method to dissuade further atrocities is to tell the stories accurately.
Utah Armenians gathered on Easter to commemorate the 98th anniversary of when, beginning in 1910, the Turks systematically slaughtered an estimated 1.5 million Armenians. Over 70 Utah Armenians gathered at the Arbat Restaurant in Salt Lake City as part of a national and world-wide gathering to remember events that occurred in Turkey and Armenia, and the incredible carnage Armenians suffered while the world was preoccupied with the first World War.
[left to rightHovig Megerdichian Armenian Relief Society, Kevork Joulhayan President of Armenian Center, Raffi Shahinian, Kevork Baronian, Manoug Joulhayan, Garinè Bekerian, Caroline Karakashian
To this day, the United States is afraid of the repercussions of formally recognizing the first mass genocide of the 20th century. Further, the Utah State Legislature passed resolution (SJR 21) to begin the process to recognize Turkey as a favored partner, “both dearly cherishing the universal values of freedom, democracy, and human rights,” as stated in the language of the resolution. This resolution, and its passage by the Utah State Legislature, was felt as a humiliating blow to many of the Utah Armenians gathered, because while the U.S. government still refuses to recognize the Armenian Genocide, individual states have made progress towards recognition.
“I feel like this is a blow to Utah Armenians who deserve the respect of their State Legislature and respect for those who were killed,” says Kevork, and to say that Turkey shares our human rights values when they refuse to recognize what they did to Armenians, and actively still persecute those who protest against this refusal.
Most Armenians in Utah are descendants of the survivors (including my own ancestors). The United States has always been a safe-haven for persecuted refugees. Thousands of Armenians found safety immigrating to the United States and most Armenians have assimilated and intermarried. Many are Americanized with just partial Armenian ancestry. But according to Kevork Joulhayan any person who has ancestors who fled due to genocides, holocausts or persecution should recognize that if past autorcities aren’t accounted for, they are certain to continue.
Genocide in Bosnia
Even with the recent capture of Ratko Mladic, one of the greatest modern-day mass murderers, we find powerful leaders who believe they can get away with genocide. Mladic and the Serbian Government refuse to admit to the genocide of Bosnian Muslims.
In Serebinica 25,000 Bosnian Muslims were systematically murdered under the orders of Mladic. Thousands of Croatian and Bosnians fled when the Serbian army began shelling their defenceless cities. There are Bosnians in Utah who lost brothers, sisters and fathers. Serbia denies this happened as these survivors say it did, and Russia supports this claim. There are currently news reports that still label the Bosnian war a “civil war,” when it clearly was not.
Ratko Mladic ordered the murder of 20,000 defenseless Bosnians in Serebinica. Serbia denies this happened. Mladic was captured and will be tried for war crimes in the Hague.
Turkey claims the same inaccurate story to describe the Armenian Genocide. My own great-grandmother’s five brothers, father and mother, were all murdered by the Turkish army in 1910. Turkey denies this happened.
My wife and family fled their city of Sanski Most after the Serbian army began shelling their city, Serbia says this didn’t happen.
In Rwanda and Darfur, we find a similar attempts to rewrite genocide as civil conflict. African warlords have yet to be tried in the Hague.
Mladic is finally now being tried after living 12 years on the lam. Throughout Bosnia residents know the only reason Mladic was captured is so Serbia can enter the European Union. However residents of Serbia still see Mladic as a war hero because parents teach their children he didn’t order genocide.
Whether Muslims are killing Christians or Christians are killing Muslims, Nazis are killing Jews, or Hutu are killing Tutsi; or for whatever reasons people conspire to kill another group, we can be assured this practice will continue unless our governments, State and Federal, punish the murderers and commit the storytellers of history to state the facts, regardless of political implications. Let’s write an alternative history: The truth.§
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I notice no mention of even a scratch on your wife or her family. Every one notes how all the Bosniaks are able-bodied and show no sign of torture, unlike the Serbs refugees. An American woman working with refugees from the Balkans and other places in the world saw that it was Serbs who showed signs of torture – face beaten in, needing surgery for the severe sodomy and abuse by Bosnian Muslims, 5 bullets still left in the body of a petite young Serbian woman whose whole family and other villagers were massacred by the Muslims – only the fact that her mother pushed her to the ground (as the Muslims started to fire) and then fell on top of her as they were shot did she stay alive. It was only hours later when the Serbian army pushed the Muslims out did they pull the girl out from under all the dead.
Further here’s what a Sanski Most Muslim man describes the scene in Sanski Most during the end of the war:
http://www.ex-yupress.com/dani/dani33.html:
…is the headline of Kljucanin’s exclusive report about the liberation of Sanski Most published in Bosnjak on October 31 1995. The article is introduced with the following paragraph: “I’ve been driving, driving, driving. I’ve been driving through the Sanski Most region. I have been dreaming about the day when I would be able to drive through the BOSNIAK Sana [Sanski Most region]. Through a cleansed Bosniak town, without a single Serb. And I’ve lived to see that day. Ignoring captured Serbs, who are, already, under guard, cleaning the streets of Sanski Most, there are no more Serbs in the town.(…)
Furthermore your statistics for Srebrenica are way off – you multiply by several times even the ICTY’s claims of 7,000-8,000 men killed. But they do not even have that figure. Plus it’s known they are counting their army fallen from before 1995.
Srebrenica had and ENTIRE BRIGADE (the 28th) in the city and were under the command of Naser Oric – a man who is still alive as are many of their soldiers who left the evening before the fall under orders of their brigade commanders and the UN.
The Bosnian Muslim army numbered 200,000 while the Bosnian Serb army was only 40,000. And Croatia had brigades stationed in Bosnia through the entire war. Their numbers were 40,000.
It was an open secret that Croatia had 10s of thousands of troops in Bosnia.
Recently a Croatian Army woman – Azra Basic – was arrested in the U.S. for claims of torture and murder in concentration camps run by the Croatian army in Bosnia at the beginning of the war.
She was sited as abusing at 3 concentration camps the Croats were running starting from April 1992. This was in Serbian villages far from Croatian borders and actually near to the border with Serbia.
The fact that the Croatian and Muslim armies were operating concentration camps of Serbs at the beginning of the war showed that Serbs weren’t near as strong as the media presented them and also showed that the media hid what their troops and paramilitary were doing.
The Muslim composition of Bosnia is the same or even higher percentage NOW as it was before the war. No true “genocide” leaves the population at an equal or greater percentage of the allegedly genocided population within the country it allegedly took place.
The Jews percentage plunged to almost nothing in many countries were they were genocided and the Armenians are gone to. But the Bosnian Muslims are still there – most Srebrenica Muslims went to Tuzla or Sarajevo. Some were settled in the U.S. – including the father of that Suleman Talovic (the teen who massacred several Americans in the Utah mall in 2007). His father and uncles were Srebrenica soldiers who were all living in the U.S.
The Muslim army simply walked out but they had a large Serbian-controlled territory to get through so some died in running battles. But most of Srebrenica’s population was registered in Tuzla.
The Srebrenica commander, Naser Oric, was showing videos to western reporters John Pomfret, of the Washington Post, and Bill Schiller of the Toronto Star, back in January 1994 – of Serb villages he and the 28th Brigade had burned and destroyed. John Pomfret saw a scene of decapitated Serbian men in a “pathetic heap”. Naser talked how he killed one night with “cold weapons” and another time when they used explosives to kill Serbian civilians in the villages surrounding Sarajevo: he “sent them to the moon”.
The Muslims were roasting Serbs alive – a Japanese photographer took some gruesome photos of this (and the Serbs are fully identified). Mainstream media is covering up what the Muslims and Croats did to Serbs as they were/are tools in the NATO/western agenda to break up Yugoslavia in to little ethnically pure or divided statlets in order to be more easily absorbed/digested in to the EU and to expand NATO/U.S. power and bases, and to come in and control the economy.
There was no fighting back when the Bosnian war began, it started completely one-sided. Evenually Bosnian Muslims and Croats became organized and fought back against the Serbs. But this doesn’t change the facts: The war in Bosnia was lead by a Serbian president and a Serbian army that had control of the majority of the former Yugoslovian army. They attempted to ethnically cleanse the region of Muslims. This is genocide.
My wife’s two uncles were tortured in a Serbian prison camp. My wife lost several friends in her town that were killed. My wife lived in a safe haven for two years without electricity or running water. I’ve been to her former home that was mortared the first day of the war, where everything they had was destroyed. One of my wife’s uncles never recovered the torture he suffered and died insane. Attempts to re-write history or undermine the claims of defenseless populations that were attacked — doesn’t help the situation for the living.