Review of In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011) by Lumnije T — 05 Feb 2012

Not an excellent movie, but a good one nonetheless.

I was surprised to see it receive such a low rating. Then I started reading the reviews, and now I see what the issue is. It seems that many people have a problem with what they perceive as "anti-Serb bias" of the movie. They claim that by presenting the Serb side as the main perpetrators of crime and aggression, the movie is not conductive to reconciliation in the country and region. And when writing about the issue, it is obvious that they have been using some very unreliable sources whose main purpose is to obstruct the facts about the wars.

As someone who has spent a lot of time studying the wars and what led to them in the first place, I feel it is my duty to point out the great incorrectness of this attitude. First of all, I would like to say I have nothing against the Serb nation. But it appears to me that many Serbs have had a problem dealing with the past. It seems that they believe "everyone was equally responsible" and pointing out Serbian politicians and troops as having the lion's share of guilt is an expression of anti-Serb bias. They often combine this with conspiracy theories of some great Western anti-Serb plan, theories which can easily be disproved.

We have to admit that while all sides committed crimes in the conflicts (including in the Bosnian War, which was by far the deadliest of the conflicts), there are good reasons to present Serbian politicians and military commanders as the most responsible for both the disintegration of Yugoslavia as well as what followed.

For starters, Milo?ević was the first major politician to embrace nationalism, and his power base were basically Serb nationalists who he used to start dominating Yugoslavia. Everything that followed was a consequence of this. And we do have to mention that he was supported by a majority of Serbs in his plan for a Great Serbia.

As for the wars, we should also not deny the truth. While all sides committed crimes, crimes committed by Serbian troops stand out in many ways: To cite Carla del Ponte "'It is true that most of the accused before the ICTY are ethnic Serbs. There are several reasons for this. The simple, although not always welcome fact, is that the Serb forces committed the most crimes,' Del Ponte said of complaints that ICTY was biased...'At the end of the day, 'the decisions on who to indict are based on evidence we collect,' Del Ponte said. 'This is why you will find that we have indicted high-ranking individuals regardless of their ethnic background. We have indicted Croatian and Bosnian generals, Albanian high-ranking politicians and a Macedonian minister.'".

To cite a CIA report from March 1995 (note that this was before the Srebrenica Massacre, which means the biggest single crime was yet to come): "In what is believed to be the most comprehensive United States assessment of atrocities in Bosnia, the Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that 90 percent of the acts of "ethnic cleansing" were carried out by Serbs and that leading Serbian politicians almost certainly played a role in the crimes.

The C.I.A. report, based on aerial photography and what one senior official called "an enormous amount of precise technical analysis," also concludes that while war crimes were by no means committed exclusively by Serbs, they were the only party involved in a systematic attempt to eliminate all traces of other ethnic groups from their territory." "The report makes nonsense of the view -- now consistently put forward by western European governments and intermittently by the Clinton Administration -- that the Bosnian conflict is a civil war for which guilt should be divided between Serbs, Croats and Muslims. This argument has increasingly been used by countries -- particularly Britain and France -- that have been opposed to any Western military intervention in the Bosnian conflict...

"To those who think the parties are equally guilty, this report is pretty devastating," one official said. "The scale of what the Serbs did is so different. But more than that, it makes clear with concrete evidence that there was a conscious, coherent and systematic Serbian policy to get rid of Muslims, through murders, torture and imprisonment.".

"The report, the officials said, also contains specific evidence that some Bosnian Serb leaders ? including Radovan Karadzic ? knew of the concentration camps through which many Bosniaks and Croats who had been evicted from their homes in 1992 were processed.

Mr. Milosevic and Dr. Karadzic have consistently denied responsibility for the killing and imprisonment of Bosniaks in the 70 percent of Bosnia now held by Serbs. In an interview in December, Dr. Karadzic attributed the departure of nearly three-quarters of a million Bosniaks from this area to "chaos and fear" in an uncontrollable war.".

"The report, an attempt to collate and analyze all the evidence on the war known to the intelligence agency, says Muslims and Croats also committed atrocities, some of them of great ferocity. But it concludes that these actions "lack the intensity, sustained orchestration and scale of what the Bosnian Serbs did.".

I felt the need to point these things out as I was extremely irritated by many comments. And to those who say that pointing out Serbian politicians and military as the most responsible is not conductive to achieving conciliation, my answer is: On the contrary. Accepting the truth for what it is is the best option for reconciliation. Obscuring the truth because it is inconvenient for some people certainly is not.

What many commentators are saying about Jolie is simply wrong and insulting. She doesn't deserve this. More importantly, it's insulting to the victims of war crimes. They don't deserve this.