From Markale market place to Douma

In August 1995, then U.S. President Bill Clinton, the last Democrat president before Barack Obama, was in office. He and the rest of the Western leaders were in a good mood. A month before, the United Nations Protection Force's (UNPROFOR) 370 Dutchbat soldiers in Srebrenica, a safe area under U.N. protection, failed to prevent the area's capture by the Serbs, and the Srebrenica massacre where more than 8,000 Muslim Bosniaks were slaughtered. But still, the negotiations with the Serbs were going well. Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic was accepting almost every demand of the West. It was unlikely that the U.S.-led West would launch a NATO military intervention against Serbian forces.

Then again, on Aug. 28, 1995, just before noon, a mortar shell hit the Markale market place in Sarajevo, the city under the longest siege of its kind in modern times, killing 43 people and wounding another 75. This was the second time the market place was hit with the first happening 18 months before, killing 68 and wounding 144. Controversy over Markale started with the first massacre when an initial UNPROFOR report claimed the mortar shell was fired from Bosnian positions. A later report noted a calculation error in the initial findings. In the second massacre, the first UNPROFOR report again stated that Serbian forces were falsely blamed for the attack on Markale. Serbian forces also denied all responsibility and accused the Bosnian government of bombing its own people. Nevertheless, NATO finally launched an airstrike campaign against Serbian forces that would eventually lead to the Dayton Peace Accords and to the end of the Bosnian war. Later in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) trials, Serbian generals in the siege of Sarajevo admitted that the massacres were committed by Serbian forces.

It has been 20 years since the second Markale massacre and more than four years and five months since the Syrian civil war started. The Bosnian war, in which more than 100,000 people were killed, up to 50,000 women, the majority of whom were Bosniak, were raped and over 2.2 million people were displaced, lasted three years and eight months. It was called the most devastating conflict in Europe since the end of World War II. According to the latest reports, more than 320,000 have been killed in the ongoing Syrian civil war, around 110,000 of whom are civilians. Over 3 million have fled to neighboring countries while 6.5 million are internally displaced in Syria, a country with an estimated population of roughly 23 million.

Many thought that the chemical attack in Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, might become the Markale of the Syrian war and the slaughter of 1,400 people by the Syrian government's missiles containing sarin gas could be a turning point in the conflict. Aug. 21, 2015 marked the second anniversary of the chemical attack and we have stopped counting how many massacres have been committed by Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime since then. With the help of the malignancy and brutality of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), the Assad regime's killings have been overshadowed and there is still no light at the end of the tunnel.

The Aug. 16 Douma market place massacre, which left 110 dead and 330 injured in a string of regime air raids, or the subsequent shelling of Douma that killed 34 civilians, including 12 children, on Aug. 23, was neither the first nor the last massacre by the Syrian government. The deafening silence of the world over the massacres is growing every day and slaughters in Syria hardly become news unless their perpetrator is ISIS.

I guess the elders are right when they say the world is becoming a much worse place by the day and the situation in Syria is the bloody evidence of this.