The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #107019 Message #2216061
Posted By: Emma B
15-Dec-07 - 03:29 PM
Thread Name: Immigration to Belgium
Subject: RE: Immigration to Belgium
Ringinslinger, I'm not an American and I trust I know a little more about European history and politics than you seem to.
In fact I remember the infamy of the Bosnia conflict very well.
On April 6, 1992, the Bosnian Serbs launched a campaign of aggression against Bosnia with the siege of Sarajevo and the ethnic cleansing of the Drina River valley and the Bosnian Krajina
During the next three and a half years, Bosnian Serb forces, with the support of Milosevic in Belgrade, laid waste to large parts of Bosnia, killing more than 200,000 civilians and forcing half the population, two million people, to flee their homes. Tens of thousands of women were systematically raped. Concentration camps were set up in Prijedor, Omarska, Trnopolje, and other areas. Civilians were shot by snipers on a daily basis in Sarajevo, a city left without heat, electricity, or water.
I also remember the shame that was Srebrenica, a UN-declared safe area and guarded by a lightly armed Dutch contingent. This did not deter Mladic, who was intent on taking over the enclave; during a few days in mid-July, more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim males were executed by Mladic's troops; the rest of the town's women and children were driven out
Facing a retreat of UN peacekeepers, President Clinton took the lead in August 1995 and launched a limited bombing campaign against Bosnian Serb positions and resulted in Karadzic and Mladic agreeing to peace negotiations commencing in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995
THIS WAS 3 YEARS BEFORE ANY MONICA LEWINSKY SCANDAL!!!
Meanwhile the international community appeared to have turned its back on Kosovo the offer of a NATO peace keeping force was rejected by Milosevic, who wanted to maintain complete control of the province and would not consider an outside military force on Serb soil.
On March 24th 1999 NATO bombing began with the proclaimed goal "Serbs out, peacekeepers in, refugees back".
'On the ground, the ethnic cleansing campaign by the Serbians was stepped up and within a week of the war starting, over 300,000 Kosovo Albanians had fled into neighboring Albania and Macedonia, with many thousands more displaced within Kosovo. By April, the United Nations was reporting that 850,000 people—the vast majority of them Albanians—had fled their homes.
Shortly before the end of the bombing, Yugoslav President Slobodan Miloševiæ, along with Milan Milutinoviæ, Nikola Sainoviæ, Dragoljub Ojdaniæ and Vlajko Stojiljkoviæ were charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) with crimes against humanity including murder, forcible transfer, deportation and "persecution on political, racial or religious grounds.' - From Wikipedia
Now you can re write history as much as you want but do not expect me to share your gross inaccuracies or blatent prejeudices!