- Maple_Leaf_Eh
Indulge me the moral high ground, but how arrogant of any visiting military force to pillage a national artifact! Whatever is in the country, belongs to that country - "abandoned" or not. There is no detail in the story about where the tank was found. Whoever left it there, did so for reasons unknown to the finders.
Moral high ground, eh? Wellll...there's plenty to go around where the conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia, et. al., are concerned. The participants surrendered any elevated moral grounds they started on through the course of these wars. Everyone ended up in the moral swamps, and were still digging when we/NATO arrived on the scene. By the time we intervened, sufficient atrocities and horror had been engaged in by both sides that there was no longer any claim to be right or the aggrieved party.
Like a number of folks here (possibly even yourself...I don't recall), I have witnessed the aftermath of the "moral" disputes in Bosnia. I have no sympathy for anyone's objections to anything we chose to do in cleaning up their human gut-pile.
As regards pillaging, the locals had pillaged anything that they deemed valuable from those vehicles before we arrived. Removing these wrecks was more akin to taking out the trash than stealing an artifact. I shudder to think what has happened to other far-more-historic vehicles I saw in Banja Luka, and I sincerely doubt that "conservation" or "protection" or even "security" are on the list of the possible.
Now, trash or not, I'm sure that someone managed to extract some consideration for the "pillaging" of their "historic" vehicle. I'm guessing that the first person of any authority that was asked immediately empowered himself to "repatriate" the vehicle...for a specific sum of cash.
Chuck