Genocide, whether you decide to look at its legal definition or a generalized definition, a mass killing of one group with the intent of another and regardless of whether certain governments choose to acknowledge it, has taken place in our world numerous times. One of the main things I learned from studying the genocide in Bosnia was that what took place was morally wrong on the part of the perpetrators, in this case being all three ethnicities, and also on the part of those who failed to stop it, namely the U.S and the U.N. It was morally wrong whether you call it genocide or not, but that is often left up to the government to decide. I found it most interesting to study how the U.S reacted to the happenings in Bosnia, the U.S sent medical relief throughout the war that was going on, but failed to make much of an effort to actually end the war. Even after the death tolls rolled in and it became more known what was actually happening in Bosnia, the U.S still did not acknowledge it as a genocide and treated it as another simple foreign aid effort. Now the U.S did eventually use military force in Bosnia, and did more than just provide medical aid, but afterwards government officials made statements skewing the picture, causing it to seem as though peace was brought upon the bosnians as soon as the U.S entered the picture. One thing I want to mention is that its hard ot place blame on the U.S for not reacting faster, without over shadowing the bigger moral dilemma that took place. When nationalism spurs different nations and ethnicities to war with each other and there are people commanding their officers to kill based on other’s ethnicities, something needs to be done about it. The U.N stepped in there to try the criminals for war crimes and crimes against humanity, yet many people got off with small sentences such as 5 years in prison with the excuse of just following orders. Now another big decision comes into play with how to try the criminals, its hard to pick and chooses guilty and not when some people don’t even acknowledge that a genocide took place. Part of the trouble is just figuring out who can be tried for crimes and who “was just following orders.” That raises a big issue in the world community, especially to those victims of the genocide, because they want to see action taken against those who killed so many people. I think that who will be blamed is one of the unanswerable questions that has to be answered eventually, and it is being answered slowly, the U.N has taken action against a majority of the leaders of the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims that were involved in the genocide, but many trials are still pending. So even as this problem is being dealt with, the same thing is beginning to take place in other parts of the world, with many of the same results. I think that studying the genocide in Bosnia became a good demonstration to me of how important moral decisions are in the world today. Besides just thinking about faith decisions i make in my own life, this showed me decisions made by nations and also individuals on a larger scale that boil down to faith and moral based decisions.

Another thing this research has showed me is how complicated these decisions become, it has shed a new light onto the term unanswerable questions that must be answered for me. When asked to provide moral questions to go along with the research I thought about how I would answer them myself, and often it was very hard. Even after researching the topic being able to answer a question like how could the Serbians kill nearly 8,000 Muslims and Croats at once in a massacre, I was at a loss for an answer. There were simple answers you could provide like nationalism, and it may be true that nationalism was one of the causes of the killings but that doesn't do justice to answer how 8,000 people could be killed at one time.

In conclusion, I think researching genocide was a positive experience for me and it showed me a lot of things about our world that I wasn’t aware of, and with this new knowledge I am able to better understand some of the simpler moral decisions that I have to face within my own life.