‘We Betrayed the Legacy of the Holocaust’: Professor Yair Auron Pushes Israel to Confront Complicity with Bosnian Genocide

• ‘We Betrayed the Legacy of the Holocaust’: Professor Yair Auron pushes Israel to confront complicity with Bosnian Genocide 
  by Mersiha Gadzo, http://mondoweiss.net/
  “We betrayed the legacy of the Holocaust when we’re committing acts like this,” Professor Yair Auron said. “To sell weapons to Serbia or to Rwanda during the genocide is similar to selling weapons to Nazi Germany during the Second World War. No country has the right to do it and especially not Israel.”
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  Yair Auron, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at the Open University of Israel is on a mission to bring Israeli officials complicit in the Bosnian genocide to account.
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  Under the public’s right-to-know, Auron and Jerusalem-based human rights lawyer Eitay Mack submitted a petition requesting the state to reveal its documents regarding Israel’s complicity in the Bosnian genocide.
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  The two presented their collected evidence, which they say proves that the Israeli government trained Serb forces and supplied them with weapons during the war in Bosnia.
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  Last month Israel’s Supreme Court rejected their petition claiming it would damage the state’s security and foreign relations. But Professor Auron says they’ll submit another claim- this time against specific individuals involved in supplying arms.
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  “I’m not expecting them to decide that they’re criminals. They’ll find one way or another to avoid the issue. But for me this is a basic moral issue. It’s a crime. And somebody who commits a crime like this needs to be punished,” Auron said.
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  His friends call him Don Quixote and some say he’s too naïve, but for Auron, this is simply his duty. “I’m first a human being. But I’m a Jew. As part of a victim group, we have even more of a responsibility to try to avoid present and future killings. But we are doing the opposite,” Auron said.
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  Attorney Mack explained that even if the Supreme Court rejected their petition, the decision is still significant since the judges didn’t deny the existence of evidence of arms exports and also admitted that they have the documents to prove it.
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  Worst atrocities committed in Europe since the Holocaust
  The breakup of Yugoslavia that started in 1991 with Slovenia and Croatia first seceding, escalated into a war in Bosnia & Herzegovina that culminated in a genocide and the worst atrocities Europe had witnessed since the Holocaust.
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