What do you believe about Muslims and Islam?

[Sofiyya 1,687]

The conflict in Serbia and the former Yugoslavia 1 didnt start because of so called Christian aggression. It started because the Iron curtain fell and the communist ruler at the time (Josip Broz Tito) could no longer stay in control. Shortly after, the largest part of Yugoslavian infrastructure was in serbia a man by the name of Slobodan Milosavic was the president at the time and tried to bring the then fractured yugoslavia back under one flag. Since in communism there is only national identity and religion isnt allowed. It wasnt a Christian- Muslim problem, it was a ethnicity battle certain groups of people who only wanted to be around the same people and none of the fractured states wanted to be united under the serbian flag. In fact if you go farther back the entire area was only muslim after the battle of kosovo when the serbs fought against sultan suleman attacking eastern europe and conquering constantinople circa 1389 and then only serbia. Yugoslavia was only brought out from under the Muslim rule circa WW1.

Get your facts right, if you are going to quote history.

You're entitled to your own opinions, but you're not entitled to your own convenient facts to support your denials. A person who tries to assign responsibility to a religion for the acts of a few in order to taint the whole group needs to expect that the same will be attempted on them. The difference between you and I is that I don't assign blame where it doesn't belong. You do. Perhaps you should admit that the event(s) that turned you into an irrational bigot fall into the category of ethnic conflict, too, instead of blaming Islam. May God have mercy on you.

________________________________________________________________________________

In the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, conflict between the three main ethnic groups, the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, resulted in genocide committed by the Serbs against the Muslims in Bosnia.

Bosnia is one of several small countries that emerged from the break-up of Yugoslavia, a multicultural country created after World War I by the victorious Western Allies. Yugoslavia was composed of ethnic and religious groups that had been historical rivals, even bitter enemies, including the Serbs (Orthodox Christians), Croats (Catholics) and ethnic Albanians (Muslims).

During World War II, Yugoslavia was invaded by Nazi Germany and was partitioned. A fierce resistance movement sprang up led by Josip Tito. Following Germany's defeat, Tito reunified Yugoslavia under the slogan "Brotherhood and Unity," merging together Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, along with two self-governing provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina.

Tito, a Communist, was a strong leader who maintained ties with the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War, playing one superpower against the other while obtaining financial assistance and other aid from both. After his death in 1980 and without his strong leadership, Yugoslavia quickly plunged into political and economic chaos.

A new leader arose by the late 1980s, a Serbian named Slobodan Milosevic, a former Communist who had turned to nationalism and religious hatred to gain power. He began by inflaming long-standing tensions between Serbs and Muslims in the independent provence of Kosovo. Orthodox Christian Serbs in Kosovo were in the minority and claimed they were being mistreated by the Albanian Muslim majority. Serbian-backed political unrest in Kosovo eventually led to its loss of independence and domination by Milosevic.

In June 1991, Slovenia and Croatia both declared their independence from Yugoslavia soon resulting in civil war. The national army of Yugoslavia, now made up of Serbs controlled by Milosevic, stormed into Slovenia but failed to subdue the separatists there and withdrew after only ten days of fighting.

Milosevic quickly lost interest in Slovenia, a country with almost no Serbs. Instead, he turned his attention to Croatia, a Catholic country where Orthodox Serbs made up 12 percent of the population.

During World War II, Croatia had been a pro-Nazi state led by Ante Pavelic and his fascist Ustasha Party. Serbs living in Croatia as well as Jews had been the targets of widespread Ustasha massacres. In the concentration camp at Jasenovac, they had been slaughtered by the tens of thousands.

In 1991, the new Croat government, led by Franjo Tudjman, seemed to be reviving fascism, even using the old Ustasha flag, and also enacted discriminatory laws targeting Orthodox Serbs.

Aided by Serbian guerrillas in Croatia, Milosevic's forces invaded in July 1991 to 'protect' the Serbian minority. In the city of Vukovar, they bombarded the outgunned Croats for 86 consecutive days and reduced it to rubble. After Vukovar fell, the Serbs began the first mass executions of the conflict, killing hundreds of Croat men and burying them in mass graves.

The response of the international community was limited. The U.S. under President George Bush chose not to get involved militarily, but instead recognized the independence of both Slovenia and Croatia. An arms embargo was imposed for all of the former Yugoslavia by the United Nations. However, the Serbs under Milosevic were already the best armed force and thus maintained a big military advantage.

By the end of 1991, a U.S.-sponsored cease-fire agreement was brokered between the Serbs and Croats fighting in Croatia.

In April 1992, the U.S. and European Community chose to recognize the independence of Bosnia, a mostly Muslim country where the Serb minority made up 32 percent of the population. Milosevic responded to Bosnia's declaration of independence by attacking Sarajevo, its capital city, best known for hosting the 1984 Winter Olympics. Sarajevo soon became known as the city where Serb snipers continually shot down helpless civilians in the streets, including eventually over 3,500 children.

Bosnian Muslims were hopelessly outgunned. As the Serbs gained ground, they began to systematically roundup local Muslims in scenes eerily similar to those that had occurred under the Nazis during World War II, including mass shootings, forced repopulation of entire towns, and confinement in make-shift concentration camps for men and boys. The Serbs also terrorized Muslim families into fleeing their villages by using rape as a weapon against women and girls.

The actions of the Serbs were labeled as 'ethnic cleansing,' a name which quickly took hold among the international media.

Despite media reports of the secret camps, the mass killings, as well as the destruction of Muslim mosques and historic architecture in Bosnia, the world community remained mostly indifferent. The U.N. responded by imposing economic sanctions on Serbia and also deployed its troops to protect the distribution of food and medicine to dispossessed Muslims. But the U.N. strictly prohibited its troops from interfering militarily against the Serbs. Thus they remained steadfastly neutral no matter how bad the situation became.

Throughout 1993, confident that the U.N., United States and the European Community would not take militarily action, Serbs in Bosnia freely committed genocide against Muslims. Bosnian Serbs operated under the local leadership of Radovan Karadzic, president of the illegitimate Bosnian Serb Republic. Karadzic had once told a group of journalists, "Serbs and Muslims are like cats and dogs. They cannot live together in peace. It is impossible."

When Karadzic was confronted by reporters about ongoing atrocities, he bluntly denied involvement of his soldiers or special police units.

On February 6, 1994, the world's attention turned completely to Bosnia as a marketplace in Sarajevo was struck by a Serb mortar shell killing 68 persons and wounding nearly 200. Sights and sounds of the bloody carnage were broadcast globally by the international news media and soon resulted in calls for military intervention against the Serbs.

The U.S. under its new President, Bill Clinton, who had promised during his election campaign in 1992 to stop the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, now issued an ultimatum through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) demanding that the Serbs withdraw their artillery from Sarajevo. The Serbs quickly complied and a NATO-imposed cease-fire in Sarajevo was declared.

The U.S. then launched diplomatic efforts aimed at unifying Bosnian Muslims and the Croats against the Serbs. However, this new Muslim-Croat alliance failed to stop the Serbs from attacking Muslim towns in Bosnia which had been declared Safe Havens by the U.N. A total of six Muslim towns had been established as Safe Havens in May 1993 under the supervision of U.N. peacekeepers.

Bosnian Serbs not only attacked the Safe Havens but also attacked the U.N. peacekeepers as well. NATO forces responded by launching limited air strikes against Serb ground positions. The Serbs retaliated by taking hundreds of U.N. peacekeepers as hostages and turning them into human shields, chained to military targets such as ammo supply dumps.

At this point, some of the worst genocidal activities of the four-year-old conflict occurred. In Srebrenica, a Safe Haven, U.N. peacekeepers stood by helplessly as the Serbs under the command of General Ratko Mladic systematically selected and then slaughtered nearly 8,000 men and boys between the ages of twelve and sixty - the worst mass murder in Europe since World War II. In addition, the Serbs continued to engage in mass rapes of Muslim females.

On August 30, 1995, effective military intervention finally began as the U.S. led a massive NATO bombing campaign in response to the killings at Srebrenica, targeting Serbian artillery positions throughout Bosnia. The bombardment continued into October. Serb forces also lost ground to Bosnian Muslims who had received arms shipments from the Islamic world. As a result, half of Bosnia was eventually retaken by Muslim-Croat troops.

Faced with the heavy NATO bombardment and a string of ground losses to the Muslim-Croat alliance, Serb leader Milosevic was now ready to talk peace. On November 1, 1995, leaders of the warring factions including Milosevic and Tudjman traveled to the U.S. for peace talks at Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Ohio.

After three weeks of negotiations, a peace accord was declared. Terms of the agreement included partitioning Bosnia into two main portions known as the Bosnian Serb Republic and the Muslim-Croat Federation. The agreement also called for democratic elections and stipulated that war criminals would be handed over for prosecution. 60,000 NATO soldiers were deployed to preserve the cease-fire.

By now, over 200,000 Muslim civilians had been systematically murdered. More than 20,000 were missing and feared dead, while 2,000,000 had become refugees. It was, according to U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, "the greatest failure of the West since the 1930s."

Copyright © 1999 The History Place™ All Rights Reserved

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Landmark Ruling for Women's Human Rights

Mass Rape Ruled a War Crime

by Andrew Osborn in Brussels

Mass rape and sexual enslavement in time of war will for the first time be regarded as a crime against humanity, a charge second in gravity only to genocide, after a landmark ruling from the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in the Hague yesterday which sentenced three Bosnian Serbs to a combined tariff of 60 years in jail.

In a judgment that is likely to have far-reaching implications for war crimes trials in Rwanda, Kosovo and East Timor, the tribunal elevated systematic rape from being a mere violation of the customs of war to one of the most heinous war crimes of all - a crime against humanity.

"This verdict is a significant step for women's human rights. Sexual enslavement in armed conflict is now legally acknowledged as a crime against humanity and perpetrators can and must be held to account," said Amnesty International in a statement after the decision.

The court ruled that the three veterans of the 1992-95 Bosnian war - who stood in silence as the verdict was read out - were guilty of the systematic and savage rape, torture and enslavement of Muslim women in 1992 in the town of Foca in south-eastern Bosnia. They were convicted on 19 separate counts.

"This is the first case where sexual slavery has been charged," the UN prosecutor Dirk Ryneveld said yesterday. "What sets this apart is that this is a case in which we have a large rape camp organisation. This is the first case of sexual enslavement and the only one with sexual assaults and no murders."

In the past international courts such as the tribunals set up in Nuremberg and Tokyo after the second world war have been reluctant to class wartime rape as a serious crime of war but the Hague tribunal took a much tougher line on the issue.

The judgment will give hope to thousands of surviving "comfort women" used as sex slaves by Japanese soldiers during the second world war who have been fighting in vain for recognition and compensation from the Japanese government.

The presiding judge, Florence Mumba of Zambia, described in graphic detail how the three Bosnian Serbs had in the summer of 1992 abducted girls as young as 12 and subjected them to appalling sexual torture in sports halls and a variety of "rape houses".

"The three accused are not ordinary soldiers whose morals were merely loosened by the hardships of war. They thrived in the dark atmosphere of the dehumanisation of those believed to be enemies," she told the court.

"Rape was used by members of the Bosnian Serb armed forces as an instrument of terror," the judge concluded at the end of the 11-month trial as she read out the verdict to the three accused.

"You abused and ravaged Muslim women because of their ethnicity and from among their number you picked whomsoever you fancied. You have shown the most glaring disrespect for the women's dignity and their fundamental human rights on a scale that far surpasses even what one might call the average seriousness of rapes during wartime."

Dragoljub Kunarac, 40, said to have been involved in a "nightmarish scheme of sexual exploitation", was given 28 years for rape and torture. Radomir Kovac, 39, was sentenced to 20 years for similar crimes. The third defendant, Zoran Vukovic, 45, was given a sentence of 12 years because prosecutors were able to produce less evidence in his case. He was, nevertheless, convicted of raping and torturing a 15-year-old Muslim girl who was about the same age as his own daughter.

The three had looked confident before the judgment was read out, shaking hands with their lawyers, but when the verdict was pronounced Kunarac sank slowly into his seat and shook his head.

In Sarajevo a group of Bosnian Muslim women reacted with fury to the sentences, which they regarded as insufficiently tough.

"We are shocked with the verdict. Justice has not been done, as the three received a minimum punishment for what they have done," argued Nezira Zolota of the Sarajevo association of former camp inmates.

Human rights groups estimate that tens of thousands of Muslim women and girls were systematically raped during the war. Many were deliberately impregnated so as to bear Serbian babies and advance the cause of ethnic cleansing.

Published on Friday, February 23, 2001 in the Guardian of London

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001

[William33 110]

VJ Members, please stay on topic, with factual evidence.

Sourcing your post is great, but respected sources validate your position.

No source commentary is speculation at best.

This is a highly controversial topic, so valid source material would substantially benefit the debate.

Regards,

VJ Moderation

[Sofiyya 1,687]

For me it is an exercise in semantic and logical jujitsu to try and divorce Islam from it's roots in the Middle East. How Islam is practiced where it has spread is largely a function of the manner in which it spread. Areas where Islam spread by conquest trend towards a more radical, militant version as a rule. Areas where Islam spread by contact, say by trade generally practice a more open and peaceful version.

Regardless of the above there is more often than not an element of Radical Islam either in the majority persecuting moderate Muslims and non-Muslims alike, or playing the role of terrorist underdog always with an eye to gaining control where ever Islam is to be found. These are the folks who concern me, threatening our national security and the security of many if not most other nations on the planet.

There is no Islamophobia in the above, merely a statement on the situation we find in the world today.

Applying your logic, Christianity was spread by violence in the America's where Natives and African slaves were forced to surrender their land in the name of Jesus, their religion to that of their conquerers, and their freedom to accommodate European superiority. Is Christianity harsher in the New World now because its beginning here was violent, and its history in the Old World pretty violent, too?

Multiple versions of Islam do not exist. Multiple interpretations do, in order to serve the purposes of those who cannot follow God's Word, but prefer to follow their own desires. But, abuse and disregard are casualties that all religions are subject to.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

VJ Members, please stay on topic, with factual evidence.

Sourcing your post is great, but respected sources validate your position.

No source commentary is speculation at best.

This is a highly controversial topic, so valid source material would substantially benefit the debate.

Regards,

VJ Moderation

What would be a quantifiable measure of "factual evidence", "respected sources" or "valid source material" on the net? Most sources express a bias, and I look hard to try to find material that's not too slanted, but it is difficult. The internet is primarily an opinion driven venue, after all.

[William33 110]

Well, since you pointed it out, a commonly respected source would suffice. Obscure sources don't advance any agenda.

Just a thought.

[slim 1,525]

By now, over 200,000 Muslim civilians had been systematically murdered. More than 20,000 were missing and feared dead, while 2,000,000 had become refugees.

I read earlier in this thread that only Muslims do this kind of thing.

Human rights groups estimate that tens of thousands of Muslim women and girls were systematically raped

I also read only Muslims do this kind of thing.

Are you saying Christianity - which is a religion of peace - has members that would do this sort of thing? Perhaps Christians should have a meeting and condemn this type of behavior. While they're at it, they should also issue a statement to the world that it's not OK and that not all Christians are like that. They should really do a better job of holding themselves accountable.

Or so we've been led to believe....

[Harsh_77 718]

You do realize that there are Buddhist terrorists right?

Where in the world did Buddhist terrorist take AK47 and unarmed man, children kids?

When and where in the world did Buddhist terrorist attack another place of worship and a HOSPITAL??

Would love to see that.

Beware all these killings by muslim terrorist are done in name of religion, so pls dont come and tell me they are not followers of islam and stuff.

[^_^ 5,021]

Even your screen name broadcasts your state of mind.

Harsh is an Indian first name. The 'a' is pronounced like the 'u' in but.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

Harsh is an Indian first name. The 'a' is pronounced like the 'u' in but.

I know. The guy who owns my favorite Indian restaurant goes by that name. Still, in English, it goes with his territory.

[^_^ 5,021]

I know. The guy who owns my favorite Indian restaurant goes by that name. Still, in English, it goes with his territory.

Um, ok.

[ready4ONE 5,400]

There is no doubt or argument that the events in Bosnia were horrific or that the response was slow. Equally there is no doubt Christianity played a negative role in the destruction and subjugation of the Native Americans in the US. Nor is there any doubt that 'good' Christian men supported, condoned, and fought to support slavery. None of this is on topic. All of it seeks to deflect from the struggle taking place throughout the world in Islamic faith.

Islam originated in the ME so it is quite fair to first look there to discuss Islam. It is disingenuous to toss any person or group of persons from the faith when their actions don't fit your ideals for the religion.

I think we can reasonably assume most Christians do not support or engage in the murder of abortion providers. But those who do those types of things do so in the name of Christianity, thus reflecting poorly on the faith as a whole. Fair enough.

I think we can reasonably assume most Muslims do not support or engage in terrorism either, but why deny those who do reflect poorly on the faith as a whole? Seems fair enough.

[thongd4me 69]

I read earlier in this thread that only Muslims do this kind of thing.

I also read only Muslims do this kind of thing.

Are you saying Christianity - which is a religion of peace - has members that would do this sort of thing? Perhaps Christians should have a meeting and condemn this type of behavior. While they're at it, they should also issue a statement to the world that it's not OK and that not all Christians are like that. They should really do a better job of holding themselves accountable.

Or so we've been led to believe....

If you're looking for a religion of peace Christianity is among the most un-peaceful if you take a look at European history.

Un-peaceful to both domestic folks (the inquisition) and foreigners (Crusades).

Lots of meddling in politics.

Look at the history of the Catholic church.

I like to think that Buddhism is among the most peaceful, but look at the bloody

wars fought between Burma & Thailand (both Buddhist). Nobody is exempt.

Among the major world religions, I don't see any of them that didn't go to war for the sake of religion.

Yes they all claim that they were attacked or offended first.

That's a given.

[^_^ 5,021]

Religion is evil.

[Peikko 1,575]

If you're looking for a religion of peace Christianity is among the most un-peaceful if you take a look at European history.

Un-peaceful to both domestic folks (the inquisition) and foreigners (Crusades).

Lots of meddling in politics.

Look at the history of the Catholic church.

I like to think that Buddhism is among the most peaceful, but look at the bloody

wars fought between Burma & Thailand (both Buddhist). Nobody is exempt.

Among the major world religions, I don't see any of them that didn't go to war for the sake of religion.

Yes they all claim that they were attacked or offended first.

That's a given.

Which is exactly why American citizens should be treated equally, no matter what religion they espouse - Americans who are practicing muslims should not be segregated as part of some nefarious 'them' which is also exactly why the charge of insensitivity on the part of muslims wanting to worship in their own community is bunkum.

Edited August 24, 2010 by Madame Cleo