Foreign Digest: Bosnia: Ratko Mladic Conviction, Burma: Update on Ethnic Cleansing, North Korea: State Sponsor of Terrorism

Bosnia: Ratko Mladic Conviction

            The International Criminal Court late this week sentenced former Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity for his responsibility for ethnic cleansing and genocide against Muslims in Bosnia Herzegovina in its war of independence from the former Yugoslavia from 1992-1995.  The crimes included the largest massacre of civilians in Europe since the Second World War.  The Serb-dominated Yugoslavia was led by a Communist dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, who was using nationalist demagoguery to maintain power in the fractious Balkan state, including backing ethnic Serbs in Bosnia against Muslims and Croats.  Milosevic died while being tried for crimes against humanity, while Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic had also been convicted, like Mladic, of similar crimes against Bosniaks and Croats in the attempt to unite the Serbian parts of Bosnia with Serbia.

Burma: Update on Ethnic Cleansing

            The United States yesterday declared the Burmese military suppression of a Muslim insurgency in its northeast “ethnic cleansing,” as many civilians have been killed and hundreds of thousands have been forced to flee to neighboring states.  It is hoped that the American statement will increase pressure on Burma’s democratic government to stop the abuses by the Burmese military.

North Korea: State Sponsor of Terrorism

            The U.S. yesterday placed North Korea on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism.  The Communist state’s had been removed by President George W. Bush after a lengthy period of not engaging in terrorist attacks, as a goodwill gesture during negotiations about the Hermit Kingdom’s nuclear weapons program, but, as I had posted in July of 2010 in War on Terrorism Update: Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea, http://williamcinfici.blogspot.com/2010/07/war-on-terrorism-update-afghanistan.html, it continues to harbor terrorists and it threatened in 2014 to blow up movie theaters that played a film mocking the North Korean dictator, which I posted about afterward in January of 2015, A Consideration of Recent Alleged Instances of Terrorism and Related Observations, http://williamcinfici.blogspot.com/2015/01/a-consideration-of-recent-alleged.html. 

           North Korea joins Iran, Syria and Sudan as the only state sponsors of terrorism on the State Department’s list.  Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Cuba had all been removed.  Cuba should also be placed back on the list, as it continues to harbor terrorists, while Venezuela and Russia should be added to it. Venezuela assists the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shi’ite terrorist organization, Hezbollah, which Russia trains while supporting Bashar Assad’s terrorist-sponsoring Syrian regime.  The designation triggers a series of specific economic sanctions and other restrictions.