“Holy” Bosnia War: Karadzic

Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, the mastermind of the massacre of thousands of Muslims, described Monday, March 1 the Bosnia war as “just and holy”.

"I will defend that nation of ours and their cause that is just and holy," he told the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia.

"We have a good case. We have good evidence and proof."

Karadzic, 64, faces charges of genocide and crimes against humanity and war crimes during the 1992-1995 Bosnia war.

More than a million non-Serbs were driven from their homes by Serbian forces from villages where they had lived for generations.

The expulsions were accompanied by widespread killings and up to 20,000 rapes in a calculated program of terror that left the international community both shocked and impotent to respond.

More than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered and buried in mass graves in Srebrenica alone, which was a UN-protected Muslim enclave until July 11, 1995, when it was overrun by Serb forces.

Prosecutors say Karadzic led a genocidal campaign to make Bosnian Muslims "disappear from the face of the earth".

But the Serbian leader alleges that Serbs had acted legitimately to "provocations" from the Muslim-held enclaves of Srebrenica and Zepa.

"The Serbs were not engaged in action, they were engaged in reaction," he said from the defense lawyers’ bench at the tribunal.

Justice

Hundreds of war survivors and families of Srebrenica victims gathered outside the courthouse to demand justice.

"We are here today to tell the whole world that victims are still alive,” Melina Hadziselimovic of the Mothers of Srebrenica movement told Reuters.

“We are waiting for the truth and for justice."

The court has rejected Karadzic’s request to postpone the trial until June 17 after his two-day opening statement to study an additional 400,000 pages of prosecution evidence he claims have been filed since October.

“We expect from the court that the trial will be as short as possible, that the Milosevic episode won’t be repeated, and that the people of Bosnia Herzegovina can move on with their lives,” Munira Subasic, president of the Mothers of Srebrenica, told Euro News.

Hatidza Mehmedovic had lost her husband and two sons at Srebrenica.

"What he is telling here today is really not true,” she told reporters outside the court.

“I experienced Srebrenica and the war in Bosnia and this is not what my experience is.

"For us victims, the most important thing is that this monster faces justice."

France searches for storm survivors

Rescue workers are continuing to search for survivors and bodies along France's Atlantic coast following a fierce storm that killed at least 60 people across Western Europe.

The storm, called Xynthia, unleashed gale force winds and torrential rains on Sunday, destroying roads and houses and smashed sea walls along the French coast.

It also battered Belgium, Portugal, Spain and parts of Germany - where at least five people are said to have died.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, toured the coastal region of Vendee and Charente-Maritime, which were hit hard by the storm, and pledged $4m in emergency aid.

'Drowned in their homes'

"We must with all urgency shed light on this unacceptable and incomprehensible tragedy," he said.

"We have to ask ourselves how in France in the 21st century families can be surprised in their sleep and die, drowned in their homes."

Nazanine Moshiri, Al Jazeera's correspondent in London, said there were serious questions about building rules on the coast and the safety of sea levees.

Philippe de Villiers, a right-wing politician who heads the regional government in Vendee, told France-Info that the "sea wall that broke dated from [the era] of Napoleon".

"Either we build [new] sea walls, in which case they need to be taller and taller ... or we have to build further'' inland.

Thousands of French firefighters and emergency workers have been deployed to reach residents who have been stranded by the floods, taking boats to flooded houses.

Hundreds of families slept in shelters on Sunday night set up in schools and dance halls.

The storm hit France early Sunday with eight-metre waves, surprising residents in their beds and sending them scrambling onto rooftops. The wind reached speeds of 150 km per hour.

In Portugal's Azores islands, a flash flood swept a school bus off a road.The driver and one child are missing on Sao Miguel, one of the archipelago's nine islands.

Kenya Muslim Heroines

She wore an ankle-length sequined gown and her crown of veiled head frames a no non-sense face, but also a gentle one that glitters with hope and determination.

Mrs. Dekha Ibrahim Abdi is a veteran of years of civil right activism and a community peace builder from the marginal Muslim region of Northeastern Kenya, a region devastated by years of inter-clan conflicts.

And because of her aspirations to rid wars and conflict she had recently received international recognition after wining the Hessen 2009 peace award in Germany.

"I think it is electrifying in the sense that I was getting recognition from the world as a person and above all as a Muslim woman who has contributed to peace building in contemporary times," she told IslamOnline.net.

"It has never been an easy venture to preach peace in our province, but all the while we had to rise above all obstacles to realize sanity."

The award that she had received comes together with a whooping 25,000 euros and is one of the most prestigious appreciations in recognition to persons advocating for stability in the world.

"I believe my efforts were recognized because of being a Muslim peacemaker."

In her years of community service, Mrs. Abdi has spoken about every issue affecting her predominantly pastoral Somali community, but addressing peace was her priority.

Two decades ago when, she first started setting her pace towards peace building, much of her region was groaning under the weight of protracted conflict fueled by scarcity of resources such as water and pasture.

And from her experience of death and destruction she started holding a peace vigil with signs that says "war is not the answer but peace"

"In those days, women, the aged and children were the most vulnerable groups in tribal conflicts and so we believed that we should make our voices heard to end what seemed an endless destruction."

She never knew how long it would take to heal the wounds of conflict but she had nursed a brimming hope that one day her Somali community in Kenya will embrace peace.

"So it was an enormous thing for women to take the difficult initiative of preaching concord and more comprehensively we started to search out opportunities to realize our dreams."

Women for Peace

In the summer of 1993 there was raging conflict between two clans in Kenya’s Wajir town amid widespread anarchy, fear and fire.

As fighting engulfed her community, Mrs. Abdi and a group of other women hatched their peace campaign at a wedding hall in one of the villages.

"This was a turning point and it was around this time that we formed Wajir Peace Group," she recalls.

"The wedding then provided a formidable opportunity for us to unite and separate the conflict from the social fabric of our society."

Since that day, Wajir women never missed to stand with groups, friends and families just to preach peace.

They have incorporated the views of both pacifists and non-pacifists within the community in their desperate demand for pacification.

"We refused to be victims of conflict, we developed home-grown solutions and we started going homes to talk about the conflict and its effects," the 46-year-old mother of four says confidently.

True to her own words, she helped develop a campaign of pragmatism to turn the battlefield into a beacon of hope and success.

For her, through building peace, she had learnt to work holistically and understand it from multiple perspectives to transform society from violent past to peace.

Over the past few years Northeastern Kenya emerged from the edge of an abyss and it has become one of the most peaceful regions in the politically-polarized East African country.

In recent years an increased participation of Muslim women in building unity has helped transform the region from a grisly crime zone to one under sanity.

"We are very much happy about the role Women in our region have taken. We are happy that now we are enjoying peace, and without them it would have been a hard nut to crack," says Mr. Musa Abdi, a village elder in Wajir.

"I think it is necessary that women should join us men in the search for development too."

These days Mrs. Abdi has started reaching out to the outside world to talk about Islam and peace.

"Many of the Western people have an ill-presumed presumption that Islam is volatile and they cannot imagine that a Muslim person can advocate for peace."

For a woman like her, who has worked within the tenets of Islam, religion is the basis of her success and now her greatest ambition is to change the perception of the West.

"Over the years, I have loved to work with Muslim religious leaders, they have always allowed me to work within the conformity of my religion," she explains.

"It is now my role to preach to the West that Islam is peaceful and can make a peace maker."

Muslim Peacekeepers for Mindanao Ceasefire

Peace monitors from three Muslim countries start on Monday, March 1, a mission to oversee a ceasefire agreement in the southern Philippines, ahead of a new round peace talks this week.

"With the deployment of the International Monitoring Team, peace talks are back on track," Rafael Seguis, head of the government's peace panel, said after the arrival of Malaysian troops in Mindanao.

The 17 unarmed peacekeepers will join 20 monitors from Brunei and Libya who had stayed on in Mindanao despite the breakdown in peace talks last year, reported Reuters.

"(Their presence would) strengthen the security, civilian protection and ceasefire monitoring in the conflict areas," said Seguis.

Two Japanese aid workers also arrived to join the monitoring team.

Norway and Indonesia also offered to send soldiers to join the monitoring team but both have yet to send their troops.

Since 2001, Malaysia has been brokering negotiations between Manila and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) to end a decades-long conflict that has killed more than 120,000 people.

MILF, the country's largest Muslim group, has been struggling for an independent state in the mineral-rich southern region for some three decades now.

Mindanao, the birthplace of Islam in the Philippines, is home to more than 5 million Muslims.

Peace Talks

Negotiators from Manila and MILF are meeting on Thursday in Kuala Lumpur to discuss proposed drafts on a political settlement of the conflict.

"This will be a one-day meeting to give both sides a chance to clarify each other's position, then we can move forward to the more substantive agenda," a member of the government's peace panel told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

"We're not rushing things because this may only create more trouble on the ground if we agree on a half-baked peace formula," he added.

"We also realize that this government will end its term in June."

Manila and MILF resumed talks in Malaysia on December 8 to build peace in Mindanao.

The move came 16 months after the government had junked peacemaking after the suspension of a peace agreement with MILF over Christian protests.

Mohaqher Iqbal, the MILF chief negotiator, said his group is not seeking separation.

"We're not seeking to separate and create a new state," he said by phone from his hideout on Mindanao.

"We're only asking the government to recognize our right for self-determination and we're not even trying to reclaim areas where Muslims have become a minority."