viewpoint: ben cohen

Bosnia to Brussels, Europe fumbles again

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The former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic finally received a modicum of justice last week, when a United Nations court in The Hague sentenced him to 40 years in prison for his monstrous war crimes. Karadzic was convicted of 10 charges, including his role in the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica in July 1995. Those who remember that horrific event will recall that, along with the disgraceful buck-passing that stained European response to a genocide, there was a more generalized disbelief that such a vicious war was actually raging on the continent just 50 years after the liberation of Auschwitz.

Two decades later, Europe is again being reminded of the illusion of a permanent peace. In the same week that judgment was passed on Karadzic for his crimes in a European war of the recent past, the war of the European present came again to Brussels, where Islamic State terrorists murdered 31 people and injured scores more in a single hour of atrocities. (I say “once again” because in 2014, the Jewish museum in the Belgian capital was targeted by an Islamist gunman, killing four innocents.)

There are, of course, major differences between the Balkan wars of the 1990s and the current battle. Hundreds of thousands of people across several nationalities died in the Balkans, whereas the number murdered by Islamist terrorists in Europe is thankfully far short of that. During the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession, nationalist extremists in Serbia were fighting for lebensraum, and emptying the territories they conquered of the non-Serb populations; it was a brutal war, but a local one. The Islamists have declared war on their enemies in the Middle East and on western civilization itself; this brutal war is both local, as demonstrated by the continuing slaughter in Syria, and global, as the Brussels attacks tragically remind us.

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