Why Incitement is Ignored
Richard Holbrooke is probably the most accomplished and experienced US diplomat that served in recent years in the US Department of State, and therefore his ideas should be seriously considered. He is responsible for the greatest achievement of the Clinton administration in foreign policy–the Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnian War. Before that, he had served as the US ambassador to Germany, assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs and then assistant secretary of state for European affairs. He also became the US ambassador to the UN and was regarded as the leading candidate to be Secretary of State, had Hillary Clinton won the presidency in 2008.
In his book on his role in achieving the Dayton Accords, Holbrooke considers why the war in Bosnia erupted. He raises the theory that was widely cited in intellectual circles in the 1990′s that the war in the Balkans was due to “ancient hatreds” between Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. But then he dismisses this theory completely and argues instead that the hatred that fed the conflict had been deliberately inflamed. He writes that there was a deliberate policy of incitement by the Serbian leadership through Belgrade Television, which spread ethnic hatred “like an epidemic.” In short, incitement was not a symptom of the Balkan Wars but rather, according to Holbrooke, it was a root cause.
In the Arab-Israeli conflict, incitement has not been taken as seriously.