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Friday, July 12, 2013

Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide: Working Today as in the Past

"Proving, once again, that genocide is a viable solution to any problem..."
-Fallout 2

"The damage was done when you let them around you.  When you are forced out into the desert to die so will the terrorists."
-Marine Staff Sargent to Catholicgauze while wargaming Shia v. Sunni militia fighting outside of Baghdad

Former Salafi Islamist and now Sufi Democratic Islamist Ed Husain tweeted today in remembrance of the 8,000 Bosniak Muslims killed by Serbs in the majority Muslim, supposed United Nations-safe zone of Srebrenica.
Today marks the 18h anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica, where over 8,000 Bosniaks lost their lives. Lesson not learned by Syria.
I have to disagree.  The Syrian regime seems to have learned an important lesson: ethnic cleansing and genocide works and one can easily get away with it.

July 11th marks not only the anniversary of Srebrenica but also the high point in the genocide against Poles by the anti-Nazi/anti-Soviet Ukrainian Insurgent Army.  Today, the sites of the UIA's violence are inside Ukraine and not Poland while Srebrenica is well inside the ethnically "pure" Republika Srpska and has an ethnically Serb local government.  Ethno-sectarian violence works elsewhere today as part of military-political realignment.  Islamist rebels have hijacked the rebellion in the Central African Republic against the majority Catholic south while the Myanmar government gains ground against Muslim rebels by forcing Muslim civilians off their farms and into the jungle to die of starvation.

The leaders of Syria and other dictators both in the present and future have well learned the lessons of Srebrenica and elsewhere.  Genocide works and foreign intervention and punishment is more likely than not unlikely.

1 comment:

data diplomacy said...

Yes, the lesson is what you can get away with. The international community has never really been very proactive or interventionist on this. Even with an international or military presence, rules of engagement or UN Observer rules are convenient excuses for inaction