A slow-motion genocide in Bosnia

The indisputable reality is that from the draft of the first peace plan in 1992 until the Dayton Agreement in November 1995, the fundamental issue behind the political conflict, hostilities and negotiations was the ethnic division of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and how to prevent its people, predominantly Muslim, from creating a Muslim state in the heart of Europe. Equally undeniable is the role played by the Non-Aligned Club in the Security Council, of which Venezuela was a member. If we had not tried to save the sovereign rights of the young Republic and the human rights of its inhabitants, despite the objections we faced in the Security Council and the failures of the United Nations, Bosnia and Herzegovina would probably have ceased to exist as an independent state, and its people would have been totally deprived of protection. The outrageous double standards of the Security Council and European governments in dealing with the republics of the former Yugoslavia made them complicit in the policy of sinister ethnic extermination by the Serbs. If the international community had shown even a minimum of determination, it could have stopped Serbia's brutal aggression from the very beginning, which escalated to genocide, with Srebrenica as its final episode. DIEGO ARRIA