have you heard of bosnia? kosovo..

The fall of the town of Srebrenica to Bosnian Serb forces and the subsequent murder of up to 8,000 Bosnian Muslims - the most serious war crime in Europe since World War II. Ten years after the horrible events of Srebrenica and nearly ten years after the Dayton agreement ended the war many of the scars caused by the bloodshed have not yet healed. This is particularly true for the families of more than 14,500 persons reported missing throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina – including 5,500 missing persons from Srebrenica – still waiting for evidence of what exactly happened to their relatives.The fact that the missing are almost certainly dead takes nothing away from the suffering their families are experiencing every day. Not knowing what happened to a husband, father or brother (almost all the missing persons are men), not being able to give them a dignified burial, to mourn their passing at a gravesite, continues to place an intolerable burden on these families. They need to be given the possibility to gain closure on the tragedies of the past and to be able to move on with their lives. Moreover, for a country like Bosnia-Herzegovina, trying to overcome the divisions of the past, progress on the resolution of the fate of missing persons will help to improve and stabilize relations between different communities.
If we turn our attention towards humanitarian aids on the basis of protecting Human Rights the UN has had difficult dilemmas. Interventions made in order to safe civilians human rights against tyrant rules have shown varied results depending on different factors. Some classified the intervention in East Timor and Sierra Leone as a success. However what happened in Bosnia was and still is a major humanitarian catastrophe and disaster. In 1993, the UNPROFOR in Bosnia created safe areas for Muslims in Bosnia as protection from Serb forces. But thousands of men and boys who have traveled there to gain UN protection ended being murdered. For the families of the more than 14,500 persons reported missing throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina and 5,500 missing persons from Srebrenica the pain is just indescribable. The UN in trying to alleviate suffering has instead contributed to it. An attempt to provide protection and security to threatened minorities where they lived proved fatal in a situation of ethnic cleansing(5).
However this blame is not for the UN to shoulder itself, it is for the whole world in fact the whole of humanity. The reason given for being divided in its action, the UN reported, that it had not enough ground troops or military advancement to intervene in Bosnia. Even China and Russia within UN Security Council was still upholding sovereignty and was against interventions (BROWN). Who is then responsible in deciding what is right or wrong at this point? The anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre obliges the international community, including humanitarian organizations, to re-examine critically its role at the time and now…


Sources:
Brown, Ainley (2006). Understanding International Relation
Human Rights (2004) Jack Donelly.
http://www.icrc.org/Web/Eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/srebrenica-editorial-050705