Tuesday, October 27, 2009

The Proximate Cause.

"It will be a black cauldron where 300,000 Muslims will die. They will disappear. That people will disappear from the face of the Earth."

- Green party activist, poet, amulet-seller, meditation enthusiast and Yoga-bioenergy fancier Radovan Karadzic, now on trial at The Hague.

How well I recall being dismissed as a neoconservative war-monger for merely wishing the Butcher of Bosnia would be taken out by force before it was too late. Which put me in the "orthodox" camp, without even knowing it, and eventually in a schism, which ended up leaving me a partisan in "the most serious split within the left since the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956." Or if you prefer, simply a refusenik.

Funny old world. It's the "orthodox" among us, the refuseniks, who are most likely to be called "Islamophobic" these days.

Never forgive. Never forget:


UPDATE:

Adam LeBor writes: I reported from Banja Luka for The Times in autumn 1992. The terror in the ancient Ottoman city was almost tangible as Serb militiamen organised the ethnic cleansing of Muslim and Catholic residents, before blowing up the city’s 16 ancient mosques. In Visegrad the river was choked with corpses of the murdered.

War criminal or statesman and peacemaker? It’s all a question of timing, it seems. So stop sulking in your cell, Radovan, and stand in the dock. Tell us who offered you what in exchange for peace and how you strung them along. . .

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