Page 136 - The Winter of Islam and the Spring to Come

THE WINTER OF ISLAM AND THE SPRING TO COME
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Following the collapse of the Cold War Warsaw Pact, a referendum
was held on March 1, 1992, and Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its inde-
pendence. However, the Serbs then occupied the country and began
three years of slaughter. The number of Bosnian Muslims killed by the
Serbs in just those three years totalled more than 200,000. Some 2 million
Muslims were forced from their homes. Fifty thousand Muslim women
were raped. Muslims sent to Serbian concentration camps were subjected
to unbelievable torture, and tens of thousands of them were crippled.
Some of the cases of torture inflicted on the Muslims were taken up
by the United Nations' International War Crimes Tribunal. Statements
given by Muslims there show the extent of the persecution they were
subjected to. For example, according to a statement by 46-year-old
Sulejman Besic, a Chetnik called Dusan Tadic went up to a Muslim
woman one day and shouted at her to tell him where her husband was.
He later told the woman to undress, threatening to kill her if she refused.
In tears, she began to strip, at gunpoint. In less than a minute, however,
Tadic shot her in the head. That same Chetnik then brought her son, who
during this horrific scene had been lying a short distance away with his
hands tied, and ordered him to rape his dead mother. The young man
then gave out a terrible cry, and was immediately shot dead by Dusan
Tadic.
Bodies lay at the scenes of their murders for long periods. Such a
thing was nothing extraordinary in the concentration camps. According

to Sulejman Besic, many injured Muslims were in a truly terrible situa-
tion. Some of them lay unconscious as maggots crawled in their open
wounds. The stench given off by the corpses lying in the open and the
maggot-infested flesh was truly dreadful.
Besic witnessed these things during internment in the Trnopolje
camp, and he spoke of his experience to the International War Crimes
Tribunal in the Hague, which was set up to investigate war crimes in the
former Yugoslavia and try the suspects. These terrible things he both wit-
nessed and experienced were just a few examples out of thousands of the
systematic torture and slaughter inflicted on Muslims by the Serbs in
Bosnia.