Students With A View

 In the country of Bosnia, one of the small countries that resulted in the break up of Yugoslavia, there are many different ethnic and religious groups. The main ethnic groups in this region are the Serbs, the Albanians, and the Bosnians.

             There was a civil war in Yugoslavia because of when Slovenia and Croatia declaring their independence in 1991. This  led to the Yugoslavian army, which consists mostly of Serbs, to try and subdue the separatists in Slovenia. The President of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, decided to send his troops that were in Slovenia, where there was not many Serbs, to Croatia. After the city of Vukovar fell to the Yugoslavian military, the Serbs began mass killings of Croatians. In 1992 the U.S. and European Community chose to recognize the independence of Bosnia. Milosevic did not like the fact that Bosnia was declared as an independent country because he wanted Bosnia under his control  and responded by attacking Sarajevo. All of this fighting was a result of one ethnic group wanting to rule all of Yugoslavia and ethnically clean the rest of Yugoslavia.

            Since the beginning of this war, there have been many cases of genocide. The Serbs began to round up Muslim people and execute them, they also used rape as a weapon against the women to cause them to flee their villages. The U.N. began to help the Bosnian Muslims by protecting the distribution of food and medicine but the troops were not allowed to interfere with the Serbs militarily. The Serbs were confident enough in the fact that the U.N. would not militarily interfere, that they continued to freely commit genocide. The Serbs have also made concentration camps of all these Muslims that they are trying to kill, and say that they do not want to waste a bullet on them (www.nybooks.com).

            At a concentration camp called Omarska, they turned theses people into “walking corpses” by withholding all the but the barest nourishment, forcing their bodies to waste away, impose on them a ceaseless terror by subjecting them to unremitting physical cruelty, and immerse them in degradation and death and decay, destroying all hope and obliterating the will to live. On August 5, 1992, Ed Vulliamy of The Guardian, the first newspaperman admitted to Omarska, stood in the camp’s canteen and watched while a group of men came squinting out of a rusted old shed, like they had not seen light in some time. All the prisoners called it the human hen coop in which thousands of men were crammed and left there in their own filth, commonly dying of asphyxiation. When these groups of people come running out of these sheds, they have precisely three minutes to run to the canteen where they eat their steaming hot stew or beans, which often caused them to have “ inside burns” but they could not help it because if they did not make it back into their shed by three minutes, they would be beaten to death (www.nybooks.com).

            This is just one example of genocide in Bosnia, which is happening everyday while we sit comfortably at our homes doing nothing about it. When we should be trying to help them in any way we can.

                                    –Gangsta Lincoln

Work Cited

The New York Review of Books. December 4, 1997. New York Review.  February 24, 2008. [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/989]

  United Human Rights Control. Human Rights. February 27, 2008. [http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/Genocide/bosnia_genocide.htm]