A SAUDI MUSLIM

Let the Perpetrators of These Crimes Be Cursed, Along With Those Who Could Have Prevented Them

By Khaled Al-Maeena

Emboldened by apathy, indifference and callous disregard by the world community for the plight of the hapless Bosnians, the Serbs have now embarked on the "final solution"—the wiping out of Muslims from Europe. It is shameful that in a city not far from Geneva, Rome and Vienna, people are being butchered to death. Pictures of bodies blown apart by Serb shelling fill newspaper pages. Horror-struck faces of Bosnians, emaciated, dying, ill, flash on television screens.

The Serbs apparently are delighted at what they see. The president of Serbia has a goal—to slaughter all Muslims so that not a trace of Islam will remain in Europe. Look at his record. Yet those Europeans who sleep in warm beds and whose stomachs are full seem oblivious to the genocide taking place around them. Why should they care? Perhaps they are not really distressed at all.

Ethnic cleansing is not new to the West. They watched as Srebrenica was overrun by the Serbs. They watched as poor Muslims lay huddled in holes protecting themselves from bombs and shells in Zepa before it was overrun, looted and burned.

Muslim children and their mothers, some of whom have gone mad, cannot imagine why this is being done to them. What crime have they committed? Of what minor infraction of rules have they been guilty? This catastrophe that has befallen them, as the world approaches the 21st Century, is impossible to justify.

The world's so-called democracies watch and wait. The United Nations, under the cunning Boutros Boutros-Ghali, condemns the Serbs for the 78th time in four years. It listens to the criminal Serb leader Radovan Karadzic's boast: "Threats don't mean anything to us."

The impotence of the U.N. has increased Serbian lust for blood. Airstrikes came too late and were tame. It seems that the Serbs are being rewarded for their acts, said an analyst.

The disunity among the Western nations on policy and military options has contributed to this great tragedy. Only a short flight from Britain, a dark age is descending on thousands of refugees from savagery.

Muslim men were taken away by the notorious Serb warlord General Ratko Mladic—to be accused of being terrorists and then put to death. Literally thousands of people have disappeared. And yet the world watches. No one has made even an appeal for the carnage to stop. And pleas and appeals won't help. The crazed Serbs are systematically killing Muslims while the West watches and the Muslim world wriggles uncomfortably.

Britain is the arch-culprit in this whole bloody drama. It watched and waited and delayed all efforts to stop the Serb advance. Even while British newspapers warned that Mladic, the "Butcher of Bosnia," was about to exterminate Muslims, British officials made all efforts to abort any action against the bloodthirsty Serbs.

Prime Minister John Major has moved from mediocrity to callousness in appointing Malcolm Rifkind as foreign secretary. This man is even more cynical than the former foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd. Britain has shown a total abdication of moral responsibility.

Why be hypocritical? Why not openly say that "we don't care about Bosnia"? Why not say that "a Muslim presence in Europe is an anathema for us"? Why, why and why? A thousand questions come to mind.

And the Scandinavians who shed tears for a hack writer like Taslima Nasreen and whose foreign ministers went to receive her at the airport—what are they doing now? They come out to protect the rights of one person because of her anti-Islamic views. However, thousands of Muslim lives—nay, European ones—don't mean anything, just because they subscribe to a different faith. Shame, I say to them.

The Germans have an agenda of their own. The French now have awakened, but it is a case of too little and too late. The Dutch, known for their hostility to Islam and Muslims and their horrible record of colonization of Indonesia, also are actors in this gory drama. Their peacekeeping soldiers ran faster than the Bosnian refugees.

The Greeks, Cypriots and others are indirectly assisting the Serbs by helping them break the embargo. The Russians openly favor the Serbs and have put obstacles in the way of all efforts to settle the crisis.

The Westerners who cry about what happened in the ghettos in Warsaw in 1943 see history repeating itself in Srebrenica and Tuzla. But they don't want to act. They have learned from history by enacting anti-Semitic laws, but they have not moved a finger to protect the present-day victims and couldn't care a penny. Why? Because these people are Muslims. That is the honest and eternal truth.

Harvard University's Professor Samuel Huntington speaks of "the clash of civilizations." He writes of the Islamic threat to Western civilization. The Muslims are too weak, docile, impotent to wage war against anyone.

However, the West is blinded by the perception of Islam as an enemy. And the chance has been given to it to finish Islam in Europe. I have never been an advocate of conspiracy theories. I have always scoffed at these ideas and argued with my Muslim brothers and sisters who advanced them.

But now I am convinced that there is a sinister program to fight Islam to the hilt. At the nadir of their power, in the most dismal days of their history, Muslims are perceived as a threat. What if they become a superpower or even a medium one like China? Europeans may then not sleep!! The West allows Israel to have nuclear bombs. It denies them to us on flimsy excuses. It uses us as a dumping ground for its goods. It creates tensions among Muslim states by trying to set up "security problems" where none exist.

It does all this knowing that disunity, complacency and self-interest are the hallmark of the present-day Muslim community. The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) should not "denounce" "request" or "plead." It should make plans without consulting the West or Boutros Boutros-Ghali. This man is as responsible as any for the Bosnian blood. His background is sufficient to prove why he is indirectly helping the Serbs. His muddled thinking and deliberate obstinacy have created rivers of blood in Bosnia. Muslim women have been torn from their families, their daughters raped, their husbands slashed or shot to death—all because of this man.

My heart burns as, I am sure, do the hearts of all who have watched the horrors and read about them. Where are the 20,000 Muslims who have disappeared? For God's sake, let the West answer.

Six hundred Jewish residents were airlifted out of Sarajevo. The West cares for them. By God, if one Jewish family were taken away by the Serbs, Rifkind would have ordered the Royal Air Force to carpet bomb Serb positions.

But Muslims are not Jews. The West talks of rights—of Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasreen—outcasts who have outraged their own communities. But the horror of what is going on in Bosnia leaves it untouched.

If any Westerner ever talks to us again about democracy or human rights we should take it with a pinch of salt. I, for one, am now convinced that our worlds can never meet. Diplomats and ambassadors amicably explaining Western actions will be talking to the deaf.

Only when blood flows in their own cities and bodies are strewn in their own streets will they really understand the tragedy of the Muslims of Bosnia. Let the perpetrators of these heinous crimes be cursed, along with those who could have prevented those crimes with one snap of their fingers, but did not do so.

And that includes also the Muslim world, that world in which the Bosnian Muslims thought they had brothers. Facing annihilation, they must have thought that succor would come from those brothers.

But what should their brothers be doing?

Answers to that question cannot be avoided, because it comes from the Most High: And why should ye not fight in the cause of God and of those who, being weak, are ill-treated (and oppressed)?—men, women, and children, whose cry is: "Our Lord! Rescue us from this town, whose people are oppressors; and raise for us from Thee one who will protect; and raise for us from Thee one who will help!" (Qur'an IV:75).

Khaled Al-Maena, a columnist for the Arab News of Jeddah, is president and CEO of the Saudi Public Relations Company of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.