Western countries put a blind eye on ethnic cleansing of
more than 250,000 Serbs from Krajina in Croatia. The UN peacekeepers hadn't done anything to stop it. What's the shame!
We, Russians, didn't let Saakashvili to make the ethnic cleansing of Ossetains. Our soldiers are real heroes.
About ethnic cleansing in Krajina:
http://arirusila.blogactiv.eu/2008/08/05/forgotten-pogrom-operation-storm/
This was an horrific event, and one which was perpetrated by (with American and NATO assistance) Franjo Tuđman and his former Ustaša allies, many of whom were early leaders in his HDZ party, in the HOP, and emigrés living abroad who financed much of Tuđman's political career.
Tuđman was no better than Milošević insofar as they both manipulated nationalist sentiments and fomented ethnic hatreds for heir own personal political gains. This was why it is highly likely (and has been commented upon by several prosecutors) that he would have been indicted for war crimes at the Hague had he lived longer than he did.
His own parents were murdered by the Ustaša shortly after the end of World War II, while he at the same time was a Tito partisan fighting against them during the war. But for political expediency, and in return for the financial support he later received from former members of the Ustaša, he later claimed that it was the Communists who killed his parents.
This man was a pure opportunist through and through, without a moral bone in his body.
However, this does not take away from the fact that the events which you mention (or Operation Storm, which was the code name it was given) were brought on by five years of aggression and ethnic cleansing of Croats on the part of the RSK and the Serbs' refusal to accept the Z-4 plan which would give Serbs autonomy inside Croatia.
THe RSK leadership under Milan Martić was expecting the military support of Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić in Bosnia as well as Milošević in Serbia to assist the RSK agaiunst any Croat military action, and so refused to accept any deal that was less than complete independence for the Krajina Serbs.
Apparently the West had these same concerns. In his book
My Life, former President Bill Clinton wrote that he believed the Serbs could only be brought to the negotiating table if they sustained major losses on the ground, while Germany's Chancellor at the time, Helmut Kohl, agreed with him according to an article on the Croatian language web page of
VOAnews.com, that he "was also aware that peaceful diplomacy will be successful only when Serbs experience significant failure on the battlefield."
There were other concerns as well. After the Srebrenica Genocide, there were concerns over the re occurrence of the massacre in the Bihac pocket area, where the population of Bosniaks was four times larger then in Srebrenica and which was surrounded and under attack by Bosnian Serb and Croatian Serb forces.
Also what Mr. Rusila fails to mention in his article is that the enormous bulk of Serbs, between approximately 150,000 to 200,000, according to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia's
indictment against Ante Gotovina, one of the Croatian generals alleged to have been involved in the planning and execution of Operation Storm, had fled the area to Serb controlled parts of Bosnia and Serbia before the Croat forces had even arrived.
Also, Serbia refused to allow a great many refugees to cross the border after a few days into the operation, and either conscripted the able bodied men into its forces in Bosnia and eastern Slovenia.
On August 12th, Serbia also announced that men of military age would no longer be allowed to cross from Bosnian Serb-controlled territory into Serbia proper, claiming that it had accepted 107,000 refugees from Krajina since August 4.
Some of the RSK refugees were declared illegal migrants by FRY authorities and many were deported. Some were reportedly turned over by the police to paramilitary units of Željko Ražnatović, a.k.a. Arkan, in the latter's base in the village of Erdut in eastern Slavonia and reported being mistreated by Arkan's men. Reportedly, conscripted refugees taken to eastern Slavonia had been beaten and humiliated in public because they "surrendered Krajina to the enemy."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Storm#Refugees
Just for the record,
Željko Ražnatović was a Serbian career criminal and later a paramilitary leader who was notable for organizing and leading a paramilitary force in the Yugoslav Wars. He was on Interpol's most wanted list in the 1970s and 1980s for robberies and murders committed in a number of European countries and was later indicted by the UN for crimes against humanity, including his role as a leader in acts of genocide. His bio makes for some very interesting reading, I can assure you...
If anything, the Serbs were just as responsible as the Croats for many of the deaths and displacements that occurred during this time, from what I see. And against their own people, for Heaven's sake!
As to your final statement, there is no evidence to purport that the Georgians had any intention of engaging in ethnic cleansing. And the brutal and barbaric acts of the Russian soldiers and the filth they dragged into Georgia with them to murder and loot the country would hardly be considered heroic even in the most generous definition of the word.
Are they thugs and criminals? Quite so. But heroes? Not even close.
