A Letter of the IRGC and CNABC in Response to Mr. Coren’s article

Institute for the Research of Genocide Canada
Published: June 4, 2011  

A Letter of the IRGC and CNABC in Response to Mr. Coren’s article

Dear Mr. Gray and Mr. Granatstein,

After reading Mr. Coron’s opinion piece on Mladic’s arrest it was hard for me and my colleagues not to respond. I am sending you the following letter on behalf of the Institute for Research of Genocide Canada and the Congress of North American Bosniaks (Canadian Branch) and I kindly ask you to run it in your opinion section in print or online. As a human rights activist I cannot diasgree more with Mr. Coron’s views regarding this issue and I believe presenting the side of victims and their families is crucial. For that reason We ask you to run the following text in the opinion section.

Re: Reasons for Mladic’s arrest Shameful

The Institute for Research of Genocide Canada (IRGC) and the Congress of North American Bosniaks, Canadian Branch {CNABC} are outraged with the latest article published in the Toronto Sun discussing the arrest of Ratko Mladic. At first glance the article seems to welcome the arrest of the notorious war criminal Mladic. Sadly this is not the case. Michael Coren directly supports the Serb nationalists by accusing the West and Europe of being sympathetic to the Bosniaks by arresting war criminals and creating an international tribunal to punish those who have murdered thousands because of their religion and nationality. In the case of the aggression and genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Coren utterly disregards the Siege of Sarajevo, the Srebrenica genocide, the Bosnian genocide, the concentration and rape camps, rape of over 50 thousand women and girls and continuous uncovering of mass graves. Instead like many Serb nationalists he attempts to disregard the events between 1992 and 1995 and focuses on the Serb victims in Kosovo. His article tyrannically disregards human rights by stating that war criminals such as Mladic should not be arrested since there are individuals who have gotten away with their crimes against humanity in the past.

It is disappointing to know that Coren believe fascism is acceptable after the Holocaust, the Rwanda genocide, the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

As a research institution which encounters victims of genocide and other victims of human rights abuses on a daily bases {IRGC}, and as an umbrella organization representing the interests of 30.000 Canadian Bosniaks {CNABC}, the barbaric ideology expressed in this article is worrisome.

IRGC and CNABC invite Mr. Coren to look deeper into the aggression and genocide that occurred in Bosnia and Herzegovina before publicly supporting fascist ideology that has caused far too much damage in human history. As long as there are supporters of barbarism, our society will not be able to stop crimes against humanity.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely

Aldina Muslija

Secretary

Institute for Research of Genocide Canada

Reasons for Mladic’s arrest shameful

By Michael Coren ,QMI Agency

First posted: Thursday, June 2, 2021

I don’t think any civilized and informed person either condemns or doubts the reason why Ratko Mladic was arrested by Serbian security forces, and handed over to an international war crimes trial in The Hague.

He is alleged to have led a force that slaughtered 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, and almost certainly did so.

He was captured because Belgrade desperately wants to become part of the European Community, and knows it has to expunge any former connection with ethnic cleansing and tribal atrocities. The chances are that many in the Serbian government knew full well where Mladic had been hiding for more than a decade, and decided this was the right time to make a public display of collective outrage.

The accused man’s supporters — and there are huge numbers of them — do not so much defend all of his actions, as argue he was on the sharp end of a grotesque war in which Serb, Croat and Bosnian Muslims killed and raped each other with a hellish gusto and regularity.

Why are the Serbs the only ones targeted, they say, and why does the west, for example, not deal with the Islamic terror groups in Kosovo, and with Serbs being pushed from their homes in that troubled region?

They have a point. Washington and Europe have been enormously selective in their morality, and some of this is likely connected to the Americans and British in particular wanting to show the Islamic world that they care for the safety and plight of the world’s Muslims.

If so, they are incredibly naive.

Various Arab leaders may talk about the suffering of their fellow Muslims, but it is in fact their fellow Muslims who they themselves treat so badly on a regular basis.

The Serbian Orthodox nationalist Mladic may well have murdered 8,000 Muslims in Bosnia, but Hafez al-Assad, the father of the current Syrian leader, killed more Muslims than that in a single day when he wanted to demonstrate his authority and dissuade his people from revolution.

Boy Assad, the weak son, has probably gone past the 1,000 mark now, as he kills innocent people who even attend a funeral for a fallen protestor.

The Jordanian government is one of the more reasonable in the Islamic world, but in 1970 it killed more than 10,000 Palestinians, and the Arab nationalist icon General Nasser gassed entire villages in Yemen. In other words, different assumptions apply in many Middle Eastern societies than apply in the salons of New York, DC, Rome, and Paris.

The arrest of a Serb warlord is irrelevant to people who have no concern for their own, let alone for others.

The other aspect of this is the double standard where a Serb is arrested, but legions of fellow Slavs just a short flight away in Moscow who ran Soviet intelligence and security services enjoy wealth and freedom. Forget Stalin and the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, look at the cruelty of the gulags, the psychiatric prisons, and the torture chambers right up till the late 1980s. Yet nobody arrested, nobody punished.

If I were a Serb, I’d feel a little angry.

As an unaligned commentator, I’m absolutely disgusted.

http://www.torontosun.com/2011/06/01/reasons-for-mladics-arrest-shameful