U.S. Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole (right) then speaks to reporters about the Senate vote to lift the arms embargo on Bosnia on July 26, 1995, in accordance opinion of Senator Joseph Biden.
Luke Frazza / AFP via Getty Images
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Luke Frazza / AFP via Getty Images
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole (right) then speaks to reporters about the Senate vote to lift the arms embargo on Bosnia on July 26, 1995, in accordance opinion of Senator Joseph Biden.
Luke Frazza / AFP via Getty Images
Bob Dole, who died last Sunday at the age of 98, was memorialized this morning in her hometown of Russell, Kan. But his death was also felt this week in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and by those of us who covered the conflict there. As Bosnian politician Bakir Izetbegovic wrote, “He will remain in the lasting memory of all those who [that] carry our homeland in their hearts. “
When Yugoslavia disintegrated along ethnic lines in 1991, US Secretary of State James Baker looked at the devastation and declared, “We didn’t have a dog in that war.”
Americans looked at Bosnia and saw the specter of their war in Vietnam. Western Europe sees the shadow of World War I, breaking out in Sarajevo. Both are wary of getting into someone else’s conflict.
But Bob Dole saw the “ethnic cleansing”, as Serbian leaders call it, of Bosnia’s Muslims and mixed ethnicities, and was reminded of his genocide against the Jews. Nazi Germany, and the oppression of millions of others.
We can forget today how many Europeans and Americans of the 1930s felt they could turn their backs on the crimes of Nazism without even bothering them. Bob Dole of Russell, Kan., enlisted, risked his life, received a shot that nearly killed him, and left him with wounds he would carry with him for the rest of his life.
Decades later, Republican Senator Bob Dole assembled a bipartisan Senate coalition, including Democrat Joe Biden of Delaware, calling for the lifting of the United Nations arms embargo on Bosnian.
The embargo is intended to prevent more guns from entering the conflict zone. In effect, it allowed Serbian forces to transfer guns, missiles and tanks they had acquired from the former Yugoslav army against Bosnian Muslims, Croats and mixed ethnic people.
“The genocide of the Bosnian people is continuing,” Dole wrote President George HW Bush in 1991. “We believe that the United Nations arms embargo on Bosnia must now be lifted.”
A bill to withdraw the US from the embargo was finally passed in August 1995. But only after the Serb army massacred more than 8,000 Muslim men and children in the country. Srebrenica, after the Dutch peacekeepers under the command of the United Nations opened fire and withdrew.
President Bill Clinton vetoed the bill to lift the embargo. Weeks later, Serbian forces shelled the Sarajevo market at midday and NATO airpower attacked the Serbs. Western democracies have seen genocide committed in Bosnia with the moral clarity of Bob Dole, a man from a small town with a big world view.
