The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

have something to do with the Ustaša. When the shooting started in
Bosnia, people thought it only involved the people in the burning
neighbouring village. Only when their own village burned did they realize
that the armed paramilitary units and the army were waging war against
the civilian population. When people were rounded up, they thought
they themselves were blameless, and would soon be let free. When
they were taken to the camps, tortured and killed by the thousands, they
couldn’t think anymore. The people in Sarajevo thought they were part
of the civilized world, having hosted the Olympic Games in 1988 with
great success, and that they were actually a good example of Christians
and Muslims living together. They lost their faith in humanity and their
hope when they were besieged, shelled and shot at from the surround -
ing mountains for over three years. The snipers got DM 100 for each
person shot, for each dead child, for each dead woman, for each dead
man, regardless of nationality. The free world could be reached only
through a narrow tunnel dug under the airfield. Anyone trying to escape
from the city was shot by the UNO soldiers, who proclaimed their neutrality.
In the other cities too, the non-Serbian population was to be bled
to death and driven out by starvation. In 1993, when more than fifty-one
thousand people were driven together in Srebrenica by the ‘ethnic
cleans ing’ of eastern Bosnia, the French General Philippe Morillon promised
desperate women preventing him from leaving town that the UN
would defend Srebrenica from further attacks as a protected zone. Two
years later, after they had been left to endure starvation and constant
shelling, UN soldiers stood idly by as the greatest massacre in Europe
since the Second World War was carried out.
“Shortly thereafter, Serbian officers left the Croatian Krajina, the ‘border
area’, with their families and their property. Two weeks later, some two
hundred thousand Serbs fled before Operation Storm. For the USA, it
was important after the massacre in Srebrenica in July 1995 to end the
war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and to bring the Bosnian Serbs to the negotiating
table. Since they themselves did not want to intervene militarily
any more than their Nato allies did, somebody else had to do it. That some -
body was Croatia, which received strategic assistance from the USA
for that purpose. The Croatian armed forces expanded their operations
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