Informazione
Details zum "Skorpion" Video
[Ancora in merito al video presentato come "prova inconfutabile del
massacro di 8000 innocenti a Srebrenica": alcune dettagliate analisi
dall'ottimo quotidiano tedesco Junge Welt e da altri siti di
controinformazione...]
Medien und Krieg - Das 'Massaker von Srebrenica'
Details zum "Skorpion" Video unter:
http://www.arbeiterfotografie.com/galerie/kein-krieg/hintergrund/index-srebrenica-0005.html
---
Junge Welt, 08.06.2005
Jürgen Elsässer
Das Video der »Skorpione«
Ein Filmdokument über ein Massaker an wehrlosen Gefangenen erschüttert
Serbien.
Die Behauptung, die Einheit habe der Regierung in Belgrad
unterstanden, ist unbewiesen
Am Mittwoch letzter Woche zeigte der Anklagevertreter den
Filmausschnitt im Haager Prozeß gegen den früheren jugoslawischen
Präsidenten Slobodan Milosevic, noch am gleichen Tag strahlten ihn
serbische Fernsehstationen aus - und in der Zwischenzeit ist er zum
Topthema der Westmedien avanciert. Zu sehen ist ein grausames
Massaker, im Sommer 1995 von Angehörigen einer serbischen
Sondereinheit mit dem Namen »Skorpione« begangen. Sechs
bosnisch-muslimische Soldaten - vermutlich bei der Einnahme von
Srebrenica am 11. Juli 1995 in Gefangenschaft geraten - liegen
gefesselt und mit dem Gesicht nach unten auf einem Lastwagen. Eine
Wache kickt einem gegen den Kopf. Später werden die armen Teufel von
der Pritsche geholt und, einer nach dem anderen, von hinten in den
Kopf geschossen. Nachdem die ersten vier tot sind, nimmt man den
letzten beiden die Fesseln ab und befiehlt ihnen, die Leichen
fortzuschleppen. Schließlich werden auch sie exekutiert. Serbiens
Premier Vojislav Kostunica sprach von einem »brutalen, gnadenlosen und
beschämenden Verbrechen«, und die Tageszeitung Politika kommentierte:
»Kein Produkt aus Hollywood, sondern leider der nackte, brutale und
bestialische Mord, den einige Serben an Leuten aus Srebrenica begangen
haben, weil sie keine Serben waren.« Umgehend wurden vier Angehörige
der mittlerweile aufgelösten Eliteeinheit verhaftet, darunter ihr
Kommandeur Slobodan Medic.
Smoking guns
So verabscheuungswürdig diese Taten und diese Täter sind, so wenig
sollten sie für politische Propaganda benutzt werden. Ausdruck dieser
Propaganda ist etwa der Kommentar des Londoner Observer vom Sonntag:
»Das Band ist das rauchende Gewehr (the smoking gun), denn es ist der
letzte unbestreitbare Beweis für die Verwicklung Serbiens in die
Srebrenica-Massaker, bei denen mehr als 7 500 bosnische Männer und
Jungen ermordet wurden.«
Der Film beweist den scheußlichen Mord an sechs Menschen - nicht an
über 7 500. Würden die westlichen Angaben stimmen, müßte es eigentlich
auch darüber Bilddokumente geben, denn das fragliche Gebiet rund um
Srebrenica wurde damals rund um die Uhr von US-Satelliten überwacht.
Tatsächlich zeigte die damalige US-Botschafterin bei den Vereinten
Nationen, Madeleine Albright, kurz nach der Einnahme der UN-Schutzzone
Aufnahmen, auf denen zusammengetriebene Gefangene und später
planiertes Erdreich zu sehen waren. Seltsamerweise gibt es aber keine
Satellitenaufnahmen von den Massenerschießungen, obwohl diese, sofern
sie stattgefunden haben, stundenlang gedauert haben müssen.
Milosevic und die Skorpione
Für Milosevic ist entscheidend, ob er die These entkräften kann, die
»Skorpione« seien Teil der serbischen Sonderpolizei (MUP) gewesen oder
hätten immerhin Befehle aus Belgrad bekommen. Die Uniformen auf dem
Video sprechen nicht unbedingt dafür, sie sind bunt zusammengewürfelt,
manche haben serbische Hoheitszeichen, andere nicht. Andererseits
waren einige der Killer auf dem Video auch im Kosovo 1999 wieder aktiv
- als Präsident führte Milosevic damals das Kommando. Nun verweist
seine Verteidigung darauf, daß die »Skorpione« 1999 nicht als
geschlossene Einheit zum Einsatz kamen, sondern sich lediglich
einzelne ihrer Veteranen bei Kriegsbeginn wieder hatten aktivieren
lassen. Von ihren Verbrechen in Bosnien habe man nichts gewußt.
Die stärkste Unterstützung für Milosevic findet sich in der Aussage
von Milan Milanovic. Der war Vizeverteidigungsminister der
Krajina-Republik gewesen, die die serbische Minderheit in Kroatien
zwischen 1991 und 1995 gebildet hatte. In dieser Funktion habe er
selbst die Sondereinheit der »Skorpione« im Mai 1992 aufgestellt, und
diese hätten später auch in Bosnien dem Krajina-Kommando unterstanden.
Erst 1994 seien sie schließlich der MUP-Polizei eingegliedert worden,
aber nicht der jugoslawisch-serbischen mit Hauptquartier in Belgrad,
sondern der bosnisch-serbischen mit Hauptquartier in Pale. Stimmt die
Aussage, gibt es keine Verbindung zwischen Milosevic und den
»Skorpionen«. Und warum sollte sie nicht stimmen: Milanovic machte die
Angaben am 14. Oktober 2003 vor dem Haager Gericht - und zwar als
Zeuge der Anklage. Hätte es mehr Belastendes gegeben, hätte er es wohl
gesagt.
In der kommenden Woche schließlich wird der Chef der niederländischen
UN-Truppen, General Thom Karremans, in Den Haag aussagen. Dessen
Report über antiserbische Übergriffe rund um Srebrenica dürfte nicht
das mediale Interesse finden wie der jetzt präsentierte Horrorfilm.
---
http://www.jungewelt.de/2005/06-16/007.php
16.06.2005
Ausland
Anneliese Fikentscher / Andreas Neumann
»Bilder lügen nicht«, sagt man
Über einige Widersprüchlichkeiten im Video, das die Exekution von
sechs Moslems durch die serbische Sondereinheit »Skorpione« zeigt
Am Mittwoch, dem 1. Juni 2005, wurde im Rahmen des Prozesses gegen den
ehemaligen Präsidenten der Bundesrepublik Jugoslawien, Slobodan
Milosevic, am UN-Tribunal in Den Haag ein Video vorgeführt, das einen
Zusammenhang zwischen dem Angeklagten und dem sogenannten
Srebrenica-Massaker beweisen soll. »Mordbefehl aus Belgrad«, ist der
diesbezügliche Artikel im aktuellen Spiegel bezeichnenderweise
überschrieben.
Gehen wir der Frage nach, wo sich die im Film gezeigten Ereignisse
zugetragen haben sollen. Im Standard vom 4. Juni lesen wir: in
Srebrenica. So verbreitet es auch das Schweizer Fernsehen am 3. Juni
in der Sendung »10 vor 10«. Bei DPA erfahren wir am 3. Juni: nahe
Trnovo. Das schreibt am 4. Juni auch die taz. Im St. Galler Tagblatt
vom 4. Juni erfahren wir, wo Trnovo liegt, nämlich nahe des
ostbosnischen Städtchens Srebrenica. Das hätten wir auch angenommen.
Denn die dargestellten Szenen sollen ja etwas mit Srebrenica zu tun
haben. Bei tagesschau.de lesen wir am 7. Juni, daß Trnovo östlich von
Sarajevo liegt. Auch diese Angabe kommt uns plausibel vor. Denn
schließlich liegt auch Srebrenica östlich von Sarajevo. Und wir können
wiederum annehmen, daß Trnovo in der Nähe von Srebrenica gelegen ist.
Aber dann lesen wir: »Laut [Serbiens Innenminister Dragan] Jocic trug
sich die aufgezeichnete Erschießung der sechs Einwohner der
ostbosnischen Moslem-Enklave Srebrenica am 16. oder 17. Juli 1995
unweit des Dorfes Trnovo am Berg Jahorina zu.« Mit dieser Angabe
können wir den Ort Trnovo endlich lokalisieren. Das Bergmassiv
Jahorina liegt 20 bis 30 Kilometer südlich von Sarajevo. Hier haben im
Februar 1984 die olympischen Winterspiele stattgefunden. Und dort
finden wir tatsächlich Trnovo. Der Ort ist nach Angabe serbischer
Zeitungen etwa 160 Kilometer von Srebrenica entfernt. Wenn das Video
ein Beweis für das sogenannte Massaker von Srebrenica ist – fand dann
dieses Massaker gar nicht in Srebrenica statt?
Juni, Juli oder November
Kommen wir nun zur Frage, wann sich die dargestellten Ereignisse
zugetragen haben sollen. In der Sendung »10 vor 10« des Schweizer
Fernsehens SF1 haben wir am 3. Juni erfahren: am 11. Juli 1995, also
am Tag, an dem die bosnisch-serbischen Truppen in das Gebiet von
Srebrenica einmarschiert sind. »Laut [Serbiens Innenminister Dragan]
Jocic trug sich die aufgezeichnete Erschießung der sechs Einwohner der
ostbosnischen Moslem-Enklave Srebrenica am 16. oder 17. Juli 1995 ...
zu.« Das schreibt Der Standard am 4. Juni. Und dem schließt sich am 6.
Juni in etwa auch die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung an.
Der Stern dagegen kommt zu einem ganz anderen Ergebnis: »Die Opfer
wurden in der Stadt [Srebrenica] und in den umliegenden Dörfern
zusammengetrieben und anschließend erschossen... Azmir, Zivilist und
unbewaffnet, soll, so hat seine Mutter erfahren, noch vier Monate in
einem serbischen Lager verbracht haben, ehe er vor der laufenden
Kamera der Henker nahe Trnovo erschossen wurde.« Das ›Massaker von
Srebrenica‹ hat gar nicht – so müssen wir daraus schließen – wie
behauptet im Juli 1995, sondern erst im November 1995 stattgefunden.
Die Gedenkfeiern zum zehnten Jahrestag müssen also nicht nur in die
Gegend von Sarajevo verlagert, sondern auch um einige Monate
verschoben werden – folgern wir.
Die willkürlichen Zeitangaben erfolgen vor dem Hintergrund, daß das
Video selbst ausgerechnet bei den Massakerszenen keine Datumszeile
hat. In allen vorhergehenden Sequenzen sind die Stationen der
Sondereinheit »Skorpione« penibel mit einem mitlaufenden Datum
versehen worden – die letzte so ausgewiesene Sequenz wurde demnach am
25. Juni 1995 gedreht. Doch die Einnahme von Srebrenica durch
serbische Truppen fand erst am 10. Juli 1995 statt. Das Video beweist
nicht, ob die Erschießungen in den 15 Tagen zuvor oder später stattfanden.
* Mehr zum Thema unter: www.arbeiterfotografie.com
---
http://www.jungewelt.de/2005/06-16/005.php
16.06.2005
Ausland
Anna Gutenberg / Jürgen Elsässer
Milosevic muß schweigen
»Spinne« und »Skorpione« – westliche Geheimdienste und Srebrenica.
Haager Richter verhindern Aufdeckung unliebsamer Fakten
Eklat in Den Haag: Am gestrigen Mittwoch wollte der ehemalige
jugoslawische Staatschef Slobodan Milosevic die Schlußbefragung seines
Zeugen Obrad Stevanovic nutzen, um unterdrückte Fakten über das
sogenannte Massaker von Srebrenica zu präsentieren. Doch der leitende
Richter Patrick Robinson unterbrach den Angeklagten mehrfach, beendete
das Kreuzverhör vorzeitig und verlor sogar die sprichwörtliche
angelsächsische Coolness. »Sie mißbrauchen das Gericht! Sie beleidigen
uns!«, schrie Robinson Milosevic an. Noch nie zuvor seit Prozeßbeginn
im Frühjahr 2002 hat ein Richter seine Voreingenommenheit so
offensichtlich zum Ausdruck gebracht.
Der Serbe wird frech
Was war geschehen? Milosevic wird wegen der Ereignisse nach der
Einnahme von Srebrenica im Juli 1995 des Völkermordes beschuldigt. In
dem ostbosnischen Städtchen seien über 7 000 wehrlose Muslime von
serbischen Einheiten massakriert worden, behauptet die Anklageschrift.
Schon die Ankündigung Milosevics, dieses Dogma vom Völkermord in
Srebrenica beweiskräftig in Frage stellen zu wollen, brachte den
beisitzenden Richter Ian Bonomy gestern in Harnisch. Ob der Serbe
»denn bestreiten wolle, daß es in Srebrenica ein Massaker gegeben«,
brauste er auf. »Keineswegs«, erwiderte Milosevic. Es gehe jedoch
darum, endlich der Wahrheit über die Abläufe näher zu kommen. Zum
einen glaube er nicht, daß die offizielle Todeszahl haltbar sei, zum
anderen gebe es ernsthafte Gründe anzunehmen, daß ausländische
Geheimdienste mitgemischt hatten, so Milosevic. Dazu wollte der
Angeklagte eine Aussage des französischen Blauhelm-Generals Philippe
Morillon zitieren. Doch dazu kam es nicht.
Mit allen Mitteln soll offenbar erreicht werden, daß zum zehnten
Jahrestag der Ereignisse in Srebrenica – am 10. Juli ist der Jahrestag
des Falls der Stadt – ausschließlich über die serbische Schuld
diskutiert wird. Dazu war ein Videofilm recht nützlich, der im Gericht
zu Monatsanfang ausgestrahlt und danach in den internationalen Medien
breit diskutiert wurde. Er zeigt eine serbische Polizeisondereinheit,
die »Skorpione«, bei der kaltblütigen Exekution von sechs wehrlosen
muslimischen Gefangenen. Obwohl die Authentizität des Streifens auch
von Milosevic nicht bestritten wird, ist der vielbehauptete
Zusammenhang der Bluttat mit der Eroberung von Srebrenica alles andere
als bewiesen. Vor allem aber ist strittig, ob diese Einheit ihre
Befehle aus Belgrad bekam. Nach Aussage des Gründers der Einheit,
eines gewissen Milan Milanovic, unterstanden die Skorpione nicht den
jugoslawischen Behörden, sondern jenen der abtrünnigen
Serbenrepubliken in der Krajina und in Bosnien. Dies sagte Milanovic
vor dem Haager Gericht am 14. Oktober 2003 aus – und zwar als Zeuge
der Anklage. Nachdenklich macht auch, was ein weiterer Gewährsmann der
Anklage am 2. April 2003 aussagte, der geschützte (anonyme) Zeuge
B-071: Er sah die »Skorpione« während des bosnischen Bürgerkrieges in
NATO-Tarnuniformen.
Die »Spinne« sticht
Während in diesem Fall noch reichlich unklar ist, wer die giftigen
Insekten zum Töten schickte, verdichten sich in einem anderen die
Indizien – und genau deswegen mußte Milosevic gestern am Sprechen
gehindert werden. »Die Spinne« ist der Name einer zweiten serbischen
Sondereinheit, die im Sommer 1995 grausige Massaker an mehreren
hundert moslemischen Zivilisten verübte – im Unterschied zu den
»Skorpionen« sogar in unmittelbarer Nähe von Srebrenica, nämlich auf
einer Farm im Dörfchen Pilica. Einer der deswegen in Den Haag
Verurteilten, Drazen Erdemovic, gab bei seiner Vernehmung an, daß ihm
und den anderen Soldaten ein Befehl der obersten Armeeführung bekannt
gemacht worden sei, wonach »unter keinen Umständen« Zivilisten
angegriffen werden dürften. Doch von ihren unmittelbaren Vorgesetzten
hätten sie andere Order bekommen. Zu diesen Vorgesetzten gehörten
unter anderem die »Spinne«-Mitglieder Jugoslav Petrusic und Milorad
Pelemis. Petrusic hat neben der jugoslawischen auch die französische
Staatsbürgerschaft und ist wohl ein Mann des französischen
Geheimdienstes. Fakt ist jedenfalls, daß er 1997 einen Trupp von 180
serbischen Söldnern nach Zaire führte, wo sie sich auf der Seite des
von Frankreich gestützten Diktators Mobutu schlugen. Aufhorchen läßt
auch, daß die FAZ am 7. Dezember 1999 schrieb, daß Angehörige der
Spinne »mit der Sonderpolizei des montenegrinischen
Republikspräsidenten Djukanovic zusammenarbeiteten«. Der war zu dem
Zeitpunkt vom Westen schon zum Gegenspieler Milosevics aufgebaut
worden. Ende November 1999 wurden »Dominik Yugo« – so der Spitzname
von Petrusic – und vier weitere »Spinne«-Kombattanten von den
jugoslawischen Behörden unter dem Vorwurf verhaftet, ein Attentat auf
Milosevic vorbereitet zu haben.
Eine Vernehmung Petrusic wurde damals gefilmt und auf
Pressekonferenzen gezeigt. An einer Stelle hält er Dokumente des
französischen Innenministeriums in die Kamera. »Von denen« erhalte er
kein Geld, beteuert Petrusic. Er werde bezahlt, indem er gute Jobs als
Leibwächter angeboten bekomme, »zum Beispiel für die Prinzessin von
Katar«.
Ob man dieses Video auch einmal in Den Haag zu sehen bekommen wird?
[Ancora in merito al video presentato come "prova inconfutabile del
massacro di 8000 innocenti a Srebrenica": alcune dettagliate analisi
dall'ottimo quotidiano tedesco Junge Welt e da altri siti di
controinformazione...]
Medien und Krieg - Das 'Massaker von Srebrenica'
Details zum "Skorpion" Video unter:
http://www.arbeiterfotografie.com/galerie/kein-krieg/hintergrund/index-srebrenica-0005.html
---
Junge Welt, 08.06.2005
Jürgen Elsässer
Das Video der »Skorpione«
Ein Filmdokument über ein Massaker an wehrlosen Gefangenen erschüttert
Serbien.
Die Behauptung, die Einheit habe der Regierung in Belgrad
unterstanden, ist unbewiesen
Am Mittwoch letzter Woche zeigte der Anklagevertreter den
Filmausschnitt im Haager Prozeß gegen den früheren jugoslawischen
Präsidenten Slobodan Milosevic, noch am gleichen Tag strahlten ihn
serbische Fernsehstationen aus - und in der Zwischenzeit ist er zum
Topthema der Westmedien avanciert. Zu sehen ist ein grausames
Massaker, im Sommer 1995 von Angehörigen einer serbischen
Sondereinheit mit dem Namen »Skorpione« begangen. Sechs
bosnisch-muslimische Soldaten - vermutlich bei der Einnahme von
Srebrenica am 11. Juli 1995 in Gefangenschaft geraten - liegen
gefesselt und mit dem Gesicht nach unten auf einem Lastwagen. Eine
Wache kickt einem gegen den Kopf. Später werden die armen Teufel von
der Pritsche geholt und, einer nach dem anderen, von hinten in den
Kopf geschossen. Nachdem die ersten vier tot sind, nimmt man den
letzten beiden die Fesseln ab und befiehlt ihnen, die Leichen
fortzuschleppen. Schließlich werden auch sie exekutiert. Serbiens
Premier Vojislav Kostunica sprach von einem »brutalen, gnadenlosen und
beschämenden Verbrechen«, und die Tageszeitung Politika kommentierte:
»Kein Produkt aus Hollywood, sondern leider der nackte, brutale und
bestialische Mord, den einige Serben an Leuten aus Srebrenica begangen
haben, weil sie keine Serben waren.« Umgehend wurden vier Angehörige
der mittlerweile aufgelösten Eliteeinheit verhaftet, darunter ihr
Kommandeur Slobodan Medic.
Smoking guns
So verabscheuungswürdig diese Taten und diese Täter sind, so wenig
sollten sie für politische Propaganda benutzt werden. Ausdruck dieser
Propaganda ist etwa der Kommentar des Londoner Observer vom Sonntag:
»Das Band ist das rauchende Gewehr (the smoking gun), denn es ist der
letzte unbestreitbare Beweis für die Verwicklung Serbiens in die
Srebrenica-Massaker, bei denen mehr als 7 500 bosnische Männer und
Jungen ermordet wurden.«
Der Film beweist den scheußlichen Mord an sechs Menschen - nicht an
über 7 500. Würden die westlichen Angaben stimmen, müßte es eigentlich
auch darüber Bilddokumente geben, denn das fragliche Gebiet rund um
Srebrenica wurde damals rund um die Uhr von US-Satelliten überwacht.
Tatsächlich zeigte die damalige US-Botschafterin bei den Vereinten
Nationen, Madeleine Albright, kurz nach der Einnahme der UN-Schutzzone
Aufnahmen, auf denen zusammengetriebene Gefangene und später
planiertes Erdreich zu sehen waren. Seltsamerweise gibt es aber keine
Satellitenaufnahmen von den Massenerschießungen, obwohl diese, sofern
sie stattgefunden haben, stundenlang gedauert haben müssen.
Milosevic und die Skorpione
Für Milosevic ist entscheidend, ob er die These entkräften kann, die
»Skorpione« seien Teil der serbischen Sonderpolizei (MUP) gewesen oder
hätten immerhin Befehle aus Belgrad bekommen. Die Uniformen auf dem
Video sprechen nicht unbedingt dafür, sie sind bunt zusammengewürfelt,
manche haben serbische Hoheitszeichen, andere nicht. Andererseits
waren einige der Killer auf dem Video auch im Kosovo 1999 wieder aktiv
- als Präsident führte Milosevic damals das Kommando. Nun verweist
seine Verteidigung darauf, daß die »Skorpione« 1999 nicht als
geschlossene Einheit zum Einsatz kamen, sondern sich lediglich
einzelne ihrer Veteranen bei Kriegsbeginn wieder hatten aktivieren
lassen. Von ihren Verbrechen in Bosnien habe man nichts gewußt.
Die stärkste Unterstützung für Milosevic findet sich in der Aussage
von Milan Milanovic. Der war Vizeverteidigungsminister der
Krajina-Republik gewesen, die die serbische Minderheit in Kroatien
zwischen 1991 und 1995 gebildet hatte. In dieser Funktion habe er
selbst die Sondereinheit der »Skorpione« im Mai 1992 aufgestellt, und
diese hätten später auch in Bosnien dem Krajina-Kommando unterstanden.
Erst 1994 seien sie schließlich der MUP-Polizei eingegliedert worden,
aber nicht der jugoslawisch-serbischen mit Hauptquartier in Belgrad,
sondern der bosnisch-serbischen mit Hauptquartier in Pale. Stimmt die
Aussage, gibt es keine Verbindung zwischen Milosevic und den
»Skorpionen«. Und warum sollte sie nicht stimmen: Milanovic machte die
Angaben am 14. Oktober 2003 vor dem Haager Gericht - und zwar als
Zeuge der Anklage. Hätte es mehr Belastendes gegeben, hätte er es wohl
gesagt.
In der kommenden Woche schließlich wird der Chef der niederländischen
UN-Truppen, General Thom Karremans, in Den Haag aussagen. Dessen
Report über antiserbische Übergriffe rund um Srebrenica dürfte nicht
das mediale Interesse finden wie der jetzt präsentierte Horrorfilm.
---
http://www.jungewelt.de/2005/06-16/007.php
16.06.2005
Ausland
Anneliese Fikentscher / Andreas Neumann
»Bilder lügen nicht«, sagt man
Über einige Widersprüchlichkeiten im Video, das die Exekution von
sechs Moslems durch die serbische Sondereinheit »Skorpione« zeigt
Am Mittwoch, dem 1. Juni 2005, wurde im Rahmen des Prozesses gegen den
ehemaligen Präsidenten der Bundesrepublik Jugoslawien, Slobodan
Milosevic, am UN-Tribunal in Den Haag ein Video vorgeführt, das einen
Zusammenhang zwischen dem Angeklagten und dem sogenannten
Srebrenica-Massaker beweisen soll. »Mordbefehl aus Belgrad«, ist der
diesbezügliche Artikel im aktuellen Spiegel bezeichnenderweise
überschrieben.
Gehen wir der Frage nach, wo sich die im Film gezeigten Ereignisse
zugetragen haben sollen. Im Standard vom 4. Juni lesen wir: in
Srebrenica. So verbreitet es auch das Schweizer Fernsehen am 3. Juni
in der Sendung »10 vor 10«. Bei DPA erfahren wir am 3. Juni: nahe
Trnovo. Das schreibt am 4. Juni auch die taz. Im St. Galler Tagblatt
vom 4. Juni erfahren wir, wo Trnovo liegt, nämlich nahe des
ostbosnischen Städtchens Srebrenica. Das hätten wir auch angenommen.
Denn die dargestellten Szenen sollen ja etwas mit Srebrenica zu tun
haben. Bei tagesschau.de lesen wir am 7. Juni, daß Trnovo östlich von
Sarajevo liegt. Auch diese Angabe kommt uns plausibel vor. Denn
schließlich liegt auch Srebrenica östlich von Sarajevo. Und wir können
wiederum annehmen, daß Trnovo in der Nähe von Srebrenica gelegen ist.
Aber dann lesen wir: »Laut [Serbiens Innenminister Dragan] Jocic trug
sich die aufgezeichnete Erschießung der sechs Einwohner der
ostbosnischen Moslem-Enklave Srebrenica am 16. oder 17. Juli 1995
unweit des Dorfes Trnovo am Berg Jahorina zu.« Mit dieser Angabe
können wir den Ort Trnovo endlich lokalisieren. Das Bergmassiv
Jahorina liegt 20 bis 30 Kilometer südlich von Sarajevo. Hier haben im
Februar 1984 die olympischen Winterspiele stattgefunden. Und dort
finden wir tatsächlich Trnovo. Der Ort ist nach Angabe serbischer
Zeitungen etwa 160 Kilometer von Srebrenica entfernt. Wenn das Video
ein Beweis für das sogenannte Massaker von Srebrenica ist – fand dann
dieses Massaker gar nicht in Srebrenica statt?
Juni, Juli oder November
Kommen wir nun zur Frage, wann sich die dargestellten Ereignisse
zugetragen haben sollen. In der Sendung »10 vor 10« des Schweizer
Fernsehens SF1 haben wir am 3. Juni erfahren: am 11. Juli 1995, also
am Tag, an dem die bosnisch-serbischen Truppen in das Gebiet von
Srebrenica einmarschiert sind. »Laut [Serbiens Innenminister Dragan]
Jocic trug sich die aufgezeichnete Erschießung der sechs Einwohner der
ostbosnischen Moslem-Enklave Srebrenica am 16. oder 17. Juli 1995 ...
zu.« Das schreibt Der Standard am 4. Juni. Und dem schließt sich am 6.
Juni in etwa auch die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung an.
Der Stern dagegen kommt zu einem ganz anderen Ergebnis: »Die Opfer
wurden in der Stadt [Srebrenica] und in den umliegenden Dörfern
zusammengetrieben und anschließend erschossen... Azmir, Zivilist und
unbewaffnet, soll, so hat seine Mutter erfahren, noch vier Monate in
einem serbischen Lager verbracht haben, ehe er vor der laufenden
Kamera der Henker nahe Trnovo erschossen wurde.« Das ›Massaker von
Srebrenica‹ hat gar nicht – so müssen wir daraus schließen – wie
behauptet im Juli 1995, sondern erst im November 1995 stattgefunden.
Die Gedenkfeiern zum zehnten Jahrestag müssen also nicht nur in die
Gegend von Sarajevo verlagert, sondern auch um einige Monate
verschoben werden – folgern wir.
Die willkürlichen Zeitangaben erfolgen vor dem Hintergrund, daß das
Video selbst ausgerechnet bei den Massakerszenen keine Datumszeile
hat. In allen vorhergehenden Sequenzen sind die Stationen der
Sondereinheit »Skorpione« penibel mit einem mitlaufenden Datum
versehen worden – die letzte so ausgewiesene Sequenz wurde demnach am
25. Juni 1995 gedreht. Doch die Einnahme von Srebrenica durch
serbische Truppen fand erst am 10. Juli 1995 statt. Das Video beweist
nicht, ob die Erschießungen in den 15 Tagen zuvor oder später stattfanden.
* Mehr zum Thema unter: www.arbeiterfotografie.com
---
http://www.jungewelt.de/2005/06-16/005.php
16.06.2005
Ausland
Anna Gutenberg / Jürgen Elsässer
Milosevic muß schweigen
»Spinne« und »Skorpione« – westliche Geheimdienste und Srebrenica.
Haager Richter verhindern Aufdeckung unliebsamer Fakten
Eklat in Den Haag: Am gestrigen Mittwoch wollte der ehemalige
jugoslawische Staatschef Slobodan Milosevic die Schlußbefragung seines
Zeugen Obrad Stevanovic nutzen, um unterdrückte Fakten über das
sogenannte Massaker von Srebrenica zu präsentieren. Doch der leitende
Richter Patrick Robinson unterbrach den Angeklagten mehrfach, beendete
das Kreuzverhör vorzeitig und verlor sogar die sprichwörtliche
angelsächsische Coolness. »Sie mißbrauchen das Gericht! Sie beleidigen
uns!«, schrie Robinson Milosevic an. Noch nie zuvor seit Prozeßbeginn
im Frühjahr 2002 hat ein Richter seine Voreingenommenheit so
offensichtlich zum Ausdruck gebracht.
Der Serbe wird frech
Was war geschehen? Milosevic wird wegen der Ereignisse nach der
Einnahme von Srebrenica im Juli 1995 des Völkermordes beschuldigt. In
dem ostbosnischen Städtchen seien über 7 000 wehrlose Muslime von
serbischen Einheiten massakriert worden, behauptet die Anklageschrift.
Schon die Ankündigung Milosevics, dieses Dogma vom Völkermord in
Srebrenica beweiskräftig in Frage stellen zu wollen, brachte den
beisitzenden Richter Ian Bonomy gestern in Harnisch. Ob der Serbe
»denn bestreiten wolle, daß es in Srebrenica ein Massaker gegeben«,
brauste er auf. »Keineswegs«, erwiderte Milosevic. Es gehe jedoch
darum, endlich der Wahrheit über die Abläufe näher zu kommen. Zum
einen glaube er nicht, daß die offizielle Todeszahl haltbar sei, zum
anderen gebe es ernsthafte Gründe anzunehmen, daß ausländische
Geheimdienste mitgemischt hatten, so Milosevic. Dazu wollte der
Angeklagte eine Aussage des französischen Blauhelm-Generals Philippe
Morillon zitieren. Doch dazu kam es nicht.
Mit allen Mitteln soll offenbar erreicht werden, daß zum zehnten
Jahrestag der Ereignisse in Srebrenica – am 10. Juli ist der Jahrestag
des Falls der Stadt – ausschließlich über die serbische Schuld
diskutiert wird. Dazu war ein Videofilm recht nützlich, der im Gericht
zu Monatsanfang ausgestrahlt und danach in den internationalen Medien
breit diskutiert wurde. Er zeigt eine serbische Polizeisondereinheit,
die »Skorpione«, bei der kaltblütigen Exekution von sechs wehrlosen
muslimischen Gefangenen. Obwohl die Authentizität des Streifens auch
von Milosevic nicht bestritten wird, ist der vielbehauptete
Zusammenhang der Bluttat mit der Eroberung von Srebrenica alles andere
als bewiesen. Vor allem aber ist strittig, ob diese Einheit ihre
Befehle aus Belgrad bekam. Nach Aussage des Gründers der Einheit,
eines gewissen Milan Milanovic, unterstanden die Skorpione nicht den
jugoslawischen Behörden, sondern jenen der abtrünnigen
Serbenrepubliken in der Krajina und in Bosnien. Dies sagte Milanovic
vor dem Haager Gericht am 14. Oktober 2003 aus – und zwar als Zeuge
der Anklage. Nachdenklich macht auch, was ein weiterer Gewährsmann der
Anklage am 2. April 2003 aussagte, der geschützte (anonyme) Zeuge
B-071: Er sah die »Skorpione« während des bosnischen Bürgerkrieges in
NATO-Tarnuniformen.
Die »Spinne« sticht
Während in diesem Fall noch reichlich unklar ist, wer die giftigen
Insekten zum Töten schickte, verdichten sich in einem anderen die
Indizien – und genau deswegen mußte Milosevic gestern am Sprechen
gehindert werden. »Die Spinne« ist der Name einer zweiten serbischen
Sondereinheit, die im Sommer 1995 grausige Massaker an mehreren
hundert moslemischen Zivilisten verübte – im Unterschied zu den
»Skorpionen« sogar in unmittelbarer Nähe von Srebrenica, nämlich auf
einer Farm im Dörfchen Pilica. Einer der deswegen in Den Haag
Verurteilten, Drazen Erdemovic, gab bei seiner Vernehmung an, daß ihm
und den anderen Soldaten ein Befehl der obersten Armeeführung bekannt
gemacht worden sei, wonach »unter keinen Umständen« Zivilisten
angegriffen werden dürften. Doch von ihren unmittelbaren Vorgesetzten
hätten sie andere Order bekommen. Zu diesen Vorgesetzten gehörten
unter anderem die »Spinne«-Mitglieder Jugoslav Petrusic und Milorad
Pelemis. Petrusic hat neben der jugoslawischen auch die französische
Staatsbürgerschaft und ist wohl ein Mann des französischen
Geheimdienstes. Fakt ist jedenfalls, daß er 1997 einen Trupp von 180
serbischen Söldnern nach Zaire führte, wo sie sich auf der Seite des
von Frankreich gestützten Diktators Mobutu schlugen. Aufhorchen läßt
auch, daß die FAZ am 7. Dezember 1999 schrieb, daß Angehörige der
Spinne »mit der Sonderpolizei des montenegrinischen
Republikspräsidenten Djukanovic zusammenarbeiteten«. Der war zu dem
Zeitpunkt vom Westen schon zum Gegenspieler Milosevics aufgebaut
worden. Ende November 1999 wurden »Dominik Yugo« – so der Spitzname
von Petrusic – und vier weitere »Spinne«-Kombattanten von den
jugoslawischen Behörden unter dem Vorwurf verhaftet, ein Attentat auf
Milosevic vorbereitet zu haben.
Eine Vernehmung Petrusic wurde damals gefilmt und auf
Pressekonferenzen gezeigt. An einer Stelle hält er Dokumente des
französischen Innenministeriums in die Kamera. »Von denen« erhalte er
kein Geld, beteuert Petrusic. Er werde bezahlt, indem er gute Jobs als
Leibwächter angeboten bekomme, »zum Beispiel für die Prinzessin von
Katar«.
Ob man dieses Video auch einmal in Den Haag zu sehen bekommen wird?
--- In yugoslaviainfo @ yahoogroups.com, Predrag Tosic wrote:
[ An excellent and timely piece by American university professor and
author Edward Herman.
An excerpt: "[...] Croatian authorities were also delighted with the
claims of a Srebrenica massacre, as this deflected attention from their
prior devastating ethnic cleansing of Serbs and Bosnian Muslims in
Western Bosnia (almost entirely ignored by the Western media), [6] and it
provided a cover for their already planned removal of several hundred
thousand Serbs from the Krajina area in Croatia. This massive ethnic
cleansing operation was carried out with U.S. approval and logistical
support within a month of the Srebrenica events, and it may well have
involved the killing of more Serb civilians than Bosnian Muslim
civilians
killed in the Srebrenica area in July: most of the Bosnian Muslim victims
were fighters, not civilians, as the Bosnian Serbs bused the Srebrenica
women and children to safety; the Croatians made no such provision and
many women, children and old people were slaughtered in Krajina. [7] The
ruthlessness of the Croats was impressive: "UN troops watched horrified
as Croat soldiers dragged the bodies of dead Serbs along the road
outside
the UN compound and then pumped them full of rounds from the AK-47s. They
then crushed the bullet-ridden bodies under the tracks of a tank." [8]
But
this was hardly noticed in the wake of the indignation and propaganda
generated around Srebrenica with the aid of the mainstream media, whose
co-belligerency role in the Balkan wars was already well-entrenched. [9]"
P. T. ]
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=74&ItemID=8244
ZMAG (USA)
The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre*
by Edward S. Herman; July 07, 2005
"Srebrenica" has become the symbol of evil, and specifically Serb evil. It
is commonly described as "a horror without parallel in the history of
Europe
since the Second World War" in which there was a cold-blooded
execution "of
at least 8,000 Muslim men and boys." [1] The events in question took place
in or near the Bosnian town of Srebrenica between July 10 and 19, 1995, as
the Bosnian Serb army (BSA) occupied that town and fought with and killed
many Bosnian Muslims, unknown numbers dying in the fighting and by
executions. There is no question but that there were executions, and that
many Bosnian Muslim men died during the evacuation of Srebrenica and its
aftermath. But even though only rarely discussed there is a major issue of
how many were executed, as numerous bodies found in local grave sites were
victims of fighting, and many Bosnian Muslim men who fled Srebrenica
reached
Bosnian Muslim territory safely. Some bodies were also those of the many
Serbs killed in the forays by the Bosnian Muslims out of Srebrenica
in the
years before July 1995.
The Srebrenica massacre has played a special role in the politics of
Western treatment of the restructuring of the former-Yugoslavia and in
Western interventionism more broadly, and it is receiving renewed
attention
and memorialization at its tenth anniversary in July 2005. It is
regularly
cited as proof of Serb evil and genocidal intent and helped justify a
focus
on punishing the Serbs and Milosevic and NATO's 1999 war on Serbia. It has
also provided important moral support for the further Western wars of
vengeance, power projection, and "liberation," having shown that there is
evil that the West can and must deal with forcibly.
However, there are three matters that should have raised serious questions
about the massacre at the time and since, but didn't and haven't. One was
that the massacre was extremely convenient to the political needs of the
Clinton administration, the Bosnian Muslims, and the Croats (see Section 1
below). A second was that there had been (and were after Srebrenica) a
series of claimed Serb atrocities, that were regularly brought forth at
strategic moments when forcible intervention by the United States and NATO
bloc was in the offing but needed some solid public relations support, but
which were later shown to be fraudulent (Section 2). A third is that the
evidence for a massacre, certainly of one in which 8,000 men and boys
were
executed, has always been problematic, to say the least (Sections 3
and 4).
1. Political Convenience
The events of Srebrenica and claims of a major massacre were extremely
helpful to the Clinton administration, the Bosnian Muslim leadership, and
Croatian authorities. Clinton was under political pressure in 1995
both from
the media and from Bob Dole to take more forceful action in favor of the
Bosnian Muslims, [2] and his administration was eager to find a
justification for more aggressive policies. Clinton officials rushed
to the
Srebrenica scene to confirm and publicize the claims of a massacre,
just as
William Walker did later at Racak in January 1999. Walker's immediate
report to Madeleine Albright caused her to exult that "spring has come
early
this year." [3] Srebrenica allowed the "fall to come early" for the
Clinton
administration in the summer of 1995.
Bosnian Muslim leaders had been struggling for several years to persuade
the NATO powers to intervene more forcibly on their behalf, and there is
strong evidence that they were prepared not only to lie but also to
sacrifice their own citizens and soldiers to serve the end of inducing
intervention (matters discussed further in Section 2). Bosnian Muslim
officials have claimed that their leader, Alija Izetbegovic, told them
that
Clinton had advised him that U.S. intervention would only occur if the
Serbs
killed at least 5,000 at Srebrenica. [4] The abandonment of
Srebrenica by
a military force much larger than that of the attackers, and a
retreat that
made that larger force vulnerable and caused it to suffer heavy casualties
in fighting and vengeance executions, helped produce numbers that
would meet
the Clinton criterion, by hook or by crook. There is other evidence that
the retreat from Srebrenica was not based on any military necessity
but was
strategic, with the personnel losses incurred considered a necessary
sacrifice for a larger purpose. [5]
Croatian authorities were also delighted with the claims of a Srebrenica
massacre, as this deflected attention from their prior devastating ethnic
cleansing of Serbs and Bosnian Muslims in Western Bosnia (almost entirely
ignored by the Western media), [6] and it provided a cover for their
already planned removal of several hundred thousand Serbs from the
Krajina
area in Croatia. This massive ethnic cleansing operation was carried out
with U.S. approval and logistical support within a month of the Srebrenica
events, and it may well have involved the killing of more Serb civilians
than Bosnian Muslim civilians killed in the Srebrenica area in July:
most of
the Bosnian Muslim victims were fighters, not civilians, as the Bosnian
Serbs bused the Srebrenica women and children to safety; the Croatians
made
no such provision and many women, children and old people were slaughtered
in Krajina. [7] The ruthlessness of the Croats was impressive: "UN troops
watched horrified as Croat soldiers dragged the bodies of dead Serbs
along
the road outside the UN compound and then pumped them full of rounds from
the AK-47s. They then crushed the bullet-ridden bodies under the
tracks of a
tank." [8] But this was hardly noticed in the wake of the indignation and
propaganda generated around Srebrenica with the aid of the mainstream
media, whose co-belligerency role in the Balkan wars was already
well-entrenched. [9]
The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) and UN also had
an important role to play in the consolidation of the standard Srebrenica
massacre narrative. From its inception the ICTY served as an arm of
the NATO
powers, who created it, funded it, served as its police arm and main
information source, and expected and got responsive service from the
organization. [10] The ICTY focused intensively on Srebrenica and provided
important and nominally independent corroboration of the massacre claims
along with citable "judicial" claims of planned "genocide." The UN is
less
thoroughly integrated into NATO-power demands, but it is highly responsive
and in the Srebrenica case it came through just as the United States
and its
main allies desired. [11]
This political interest in the Srebrenica massacre hardly proves that the
establishment narrative is wrong. It does, however, suggest the need for
caution and an awareness of the possibility of falsification and inflated
claims. That awareness has been entirely absent from mainstream
treatment of
Srebrenica.
2. The Serial Lying Before and After Srebrenica
At each stage in the dismantlement of Yugoslavia, its ethnic cleansing,
and before and during the NATO war over the Kosovo province of Serbia in
1999, propaganda lies played a very important role in forwarding conflict
and anti-Serb actions. There were lies of omission and lies that directly
conveyed false impressions and information. An important form of lie of
omission was the regular presentation of Serb misbehavior as unique
to the
Serbs, not also characteristic of the behavior of the Muslims and
Croatians or of the conflict overall. In case after case the media would
report on Serb attacks and atrocities, having neglected to report the
prior
assaults on Serbs in those same towns and making the Serb behavior
seem like
unprovoked acts of aggression and barbarity.
This was evident from the very start of the serious fighting in 1991 in
the republic of Croatia. In their treatment of the Eastern Croatian
city of
Vukovar, for example, the media (and ICTY) focused exclusively on the
federal Yugoslav army's capture of the town in the fall of 1991,
completely
ignoring the prior spring and summer's slaughter by Croatian National
Guard
troops and paramilitaries of hundreds of ethnic Serbs who had lived
in the
Vukovar area. According to Raymond K. Kent, "a substantial Serb
population in the major Slavonian city of Vukovar disappeared without
having
fled, leaving traces of torture in the old Austrian the spring catacombs
under the city along with evidence of murder and rape. The Western media,
whose demonization of the Serbs was well underway, chose to overlook these
events." [12] This selective and misleading focus was standard media and
ICTY practice.
Lies of omission were also clear in the attention given Bosnian Serb
prison camps like Omarska, which the media focused on intensively and with
indignation, when in fact the Muslims and Croats had very similar prison
camps-at Celebici, Tarcin, Livno, Bradina, Odzak, and in the Zetra
camp in
Sarajevo, among other sites-[13] with roughly comparable numbers,
facilities, and certainly no worse treatment of prisoners; [14] but in
contrast with the Serbs, the Muslims and Croats hired competent PR
firms and
refused permission to inspect their facilities-and the already
well-developed structure of bias made the media little interested in
any but
Serb camps.
Wild allegations of Auschwitz-like conditions in Serb "concentration
camps" were spread by "journalists of attachment" who lapped up propaganda
handouts by Muslim and Croat officials and PR hirlings. Roy Gutman,
who won
a Pulitzer prize jointly with John Burns for Bosnia reporting in 1993,
depended heavily on Croat and Muslim officials and witnesses with suspect
credentials and implausible claims, and he was a major source of
inflated,
one-sided, and false "concentration camp" propaganda. [15] John Burns'
Pulitzer award was based on an extended interview with Boris Herak, a
captured Bosnian Serb supplied to him and a Soros-funded film-maker by the
Bosnian Muslims. Several years later Herak admitted that his extremely
implausible confession had been coerced and that he had been forced to
memorize many pages of lies. Two of his alleged victims also turned up
alive
in later years. In reporting on Herak, John Burns and the New York Times
(and the Soros-funded film) suppressed the credibility-damaging fact that
Herak had also accused former UNPROFOR commandant, Canadian General Lewis
Mackenzie, of having raped young Muslim women at a Serb-run bordello. [16]
These scandalous awards are symptomatic of the media bias that was
already
overwhelming in 1992 and 1993.
In a recent development of interest, on a visit to the dying Alija
Izetbegovic, Bernard Kouchner asked him about the Bosnian Serb
concentration
camps, whereupon Izetbegovic, surprisingly, admitted that these claims had
been inflated with the aim of getting NATO to bomb the Serbs. [17] This
important confession has not been mentioned in the U.S. or British
mainstream media.
One of the most important propaganda lies of the 1990s featured the
Serb-run Trnopolje camp, visited by Britain's ITN reporters in August
1992.
These reporters photographed the resident Fikret Alic, showing him
emaciated and seemingly inside a concentration camp fence. In fact,
Fikret
Alic was in a transit camp, was a sick man (and was sick with tuberculosis
long before reaching the camp), was not in any way representative of
others
in the camp, and was soon able to move to Sweden. Furthermore, the
fence was
around the photographers, not the man photographed. [18] But this hugely
dishonest photo was featured everywhere in the West as proving a
Serb-organized Auschwitz, was denounced by NATO high officials, and helped
provide the moral basis for the creation of the ICTY and its clear
focus on
Serb evil.
In the case of the siege of Sarajevo, as with conflict around many "safe
haven" towns, the Bosnian Muslim government engaged in a steady program of
provoking the Serbs, blaming them for the ensuing response, lying about
casualties, and trying-usually successfully-to place the blame on the
Serbs. As Tim Fenton has said, "Massacre allegations by the Bosnian
Muslims
followed any reported conflict as night followed day: most notoriously
Muslim Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic claimed the UN was responsible
for the
deaths of 70,000 in Bihac in early 1995, when in fact there had barely
been
any fighting and casualties were small." [19]
A remarkable feature of the Bosnian Muslim struggle to demonize the
Serbs, in order to get NATO to come to Bosnian Muslim aid with bombs, was
their willingness to kill their own people. This was most notable in the
case of the ruthless bombing of Sarajevo civilians in three massacres: in
1992 (the "Breadline Massacre"), 1994 (the Markale "Market Massacre")
and a
"Second Market Massacre" in 1995. In the standard narrative the Serbs
were
responsible for these massacres, and it is admittedly not easy to believe
that the Muslim leadership would kill their own for political advantage
even if the evidence points strongly in that direction. But these
massacres
were all extremely well timed to influence imminent NATO and UN
decisions to
intervene more forcibly on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims. More important,
numerous UN officials and senior Western military officials have claimed
that the evidence is strong in all three cases that the actions were
planned
and executed by Bosnian Muslims. [20] U.S. Army officer John E. Sray, who
was on the scene in Bosnia during these and other massacres and was
head of
the U.S. intelligence section in Sarajevo, even suggested that the
incidents, and probable Bosnian Muslim official connivance in these
atrocities, "deserve a thorough scrutiny by the International War Crimes
Tribunal." [21] Needless to say no such scrutiny was forthcoming. In
short,
this view of the three massacres is not conspiracy theory, it is a
conclusion based on serious and substantial evidence, but not even
debated
in the party-line dominated accounts of recent Balkan history. [22]
Both before and after Srebrenica lying about numbers killed was also
standard practice, helpful in sustaining the dominant narrative. For
Bosnia,
in December 1992 the Bosnian Muslim government claimed 128,444 deaths of
their forces and people, a number which grew to 200,000 by June 1993,
rising
to 250,000 in 1994. [23] These figures were swallowed without a qualm by
Western politicians, media, and intellectual war-campaigners (e.g., David
Rieff), with Clinton himself using the 250,000 figure in a speech in
November 1995. Former State Department official George Kenney has long
questioned these figures and marveled at media gullibility in accepting
these claims without the least interest in verification. His own estimate
ran between 25,000 and 60,000. [24] More recently, a study sponsored
by the
Norwegian government estimated the Bosnian war dead as 80,000, and one
sponsored by the Hague Tribunal itself came up with a figure of 102,000
dead. [25] Neither of these studies has been reported on in the U.S.
media,
which had regularly offered its readers/listeners the inflated numbers.
A similar inflation process took place during the 78-day NATO bombing war
in 1999, with high U.S. officials at various moments claiming 100,000,
250,000 and 500,000 Serb killings of Kosovo Albanians, along with the
lavish use of the word "genocide" to describe Serb actions in Kosovo. [26]
This figure gradually shrank to 11,000, and has remained there despite the
fact that only some 4,000 bodies were found in one of the most intense
forensic searches in history, and with unknown numbers of those bodies
combatants, Serbs, and civilian victims of U.S. bombing. But the
11,000
must be valid because the NATO governments and ICTY say it is, and Michael
Ignatieff assured readers of the New York Times that "whether those 11,334
bodies will be found depends on whether the Serb military and the police
removed them." [27]
This record of systematic disinformation certainly does not disprove the
truth of the standard narrative on the Srebrenica massacre. It does,
however, suggest the need for a close look at the claims, which have
proved
so convenient, a close look that the mainstream has steadily refused to
provide.
3. The Problematic Massacre Claims
By the time of the Srebrenica events of July 1995 the stage had been well
set for making massacre claims effective. The serial lying had been
largely
unchallenged in the mainstream, the demonization process and
good-versus-evil dichotomy had been well established, the ICTY and UN
leadership were closely following the agenda of the United States and its
NATO allies, and the media were on board as co-belligerents.
In this environment, context-stripping was easy. One element of context
was the fact that the "safe area" concept was a fraud, as the safe areas
were supposed to have been disarmed, but weren't, and with UN connivance.
[28] They were therefore used by the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica and
other
safe havens as launching pads for attacks on nearby Serb villages. In the
three years prior to the massacre well over a thousand Serb civilians were
killed by Muslim forces in scores of devastated nearby villages; [29] and
well before July 1995 the Srebrenica Muslim commander Nasir Oric proudly
showed Western reporters videos of some of his beheaded Serb victims and
bragged about his killings. [30] Testifying before the Tribunal on
February
12, 2004, UN military commander in Bosnia in 1992 and 1993, General
Philippe Morillon, stated his conviction that the attack on Srebrenica
was a
"direct reaction" to the massacres of Serbs by Nasir Oric and his
forces in
1992 and 1993, massacres with which Morillon was closely familiar. [31]
Morillon's testimony was of no interest to the Western media, and when the
ICTY finally got around to indicting Nasir Oric on March 28, 2003, very
possibly to create the image of judicial balance, he was charged with
killing only seven Serbs who were tortured and beaten to death after
capture, and with the "wanton destruction" of nearby villages. Although he
openly bragged to Western reporters of slaughtering Serb civilians,
the ICTY
reportedly "found no evidence that there were civilian casualties in the
attacks on Serb villages in his theater of operations." [32]
When the Bosnian Serbs captured Srebrenica in July 1995, it was reported
that the 28th regiment of the Bosnian Muslim Army (BMA), comprising
several
thousand men, had just fled the town. [33] The media failed to ask how
such
a large force could have been present in a disarmed "safe area."
Having also
succeeded in ignoring the prior abuses emanating from the safe area, this
allowed them to follow a quickly established party line of a planned
"genocide" and inexplicable brutality rather than the vengeance which the
media allow as semi-exoneration of violence by "worthy" victims (e.g.,
Kosovo Albanians driving out and killing Serbs and Roma after the NATO
takeover of Kosovo).
A second element of context was the possible political basis for the
surrender of Srebrenica by a force in a good defensive position,
outnumbering the attacking BSA by a 6-1 or 8-1 ratio, but retreating in
advance of the assault, their leaders having been withdrawn previously by
order of the Bosnian Muslim leadership. [34] This left the population
unprotected, and made the BMA cadres vulnerable as they retreated in
disarray toward Bosnian Muslim lines. Could this have been another
self-sacrificing maneuver by the leadership to produce victims, perhaps
designed to help meet the Clinton 5,000 target and induce more
forcible NATO
intervention? These questions never arose in the mainstream media.
The Srebrenica events had a number of features that made it possible to
claim 8,000 "men and boys" executed. One was the confusion and uncertainty
about the fate of the fleeing Bosnian Muslim forces, some reaching Tuzla
safely, some killed in the fighting, and some captured. The 8,000
figure was
first provided by the Red Cross, based on their crude estimate that
the BSA
had captured 3,000 men and that 5,000 were reported "missing." [35] It is
well established that thousands of those "missing" had reached Tuzla or
were killed in the fighting, [36] but in an amazing transformation
displaying the eagerness to find the Bosnian Serbs evil and the Muslims
victims, the "reaching safety/killed-in-action" basis of being
missing was
ignored and the missing were taken as executed! This misleading
conclusion
was helped along by the Red Cross's reference to the 5,000 as having
"simply disappeared," and its failure to correct this politically biased
usage and claim despite its own recognition that "several thousand"
refugees
had reached Central Bosnia. [37]
It was also helped along by the Bosnian Muslim leadership's refusal to
disclose the names and numbers of those reaching safety, [38] but
there was
a remarkable readiness in the Western establishment not only to ignore
those
reaching safety, but also to disregard deaths in fighting and to take dead
bodies as proving executions. The will to believe here was limitless:
reporter David Rohde saw a bone sticking up in a grave site near
Srebrenica,
which he just knew by instinct was a remnant of an execution and serious
evidence of a "massacre." [39] It was standard media practice to move
from
an asserted and unproven claim of thousands missing, or a report of the
uncovering of bodies in a grave site, to the conclusion that the claim of
8,000 executed was thereby demonstrated. [40]
With 8,000 executed and thousands killed in the fighting there should have
been huge grave sites and satellite evidence of both executions, burials,
and any body removals. But the body searches in the Srebrenica
vicinity were
painfully disappointing, with only some two thousand bodies found in
searches through 1999, including bodies killed in action and possibly Serb
bodies, some pre-dating July 1995. The sparseness of these findings led to
claims of body removal and reburial, but this was singularly
unconvincing as
the Bosnian Serbs were under intense military pressure after July
1995. This
was the period when NATO was bombing Serb positions and Croat/Muslim
armies
were driving towards Banja Luka. The BSA was on the defensive and was
extremely short of equipment and resources, including gasoline. To have
mounted an operation of the magnitude required to exhume, transport and
rebury thousands of corpses would have been far beyond the BSA's
capacity at
that time. Furthermore, in carrying out such a program they could hardly
hope to escape observation from OSCE personnel, local civilians, and
satellite observations.
On August 10, 1995, Madeleine Albright showed some satellite photos at a
closed session of the Security Council, as part of a denunciation of the
Bosnian Serbs, including one photo showing people--allegedly Bosnian
Muslims
near Srebrenica--assembled in a stadium, and one allegedly taken shortly
thereafter showing a nearby field with "disturbed" soil. These photos have
never been publicly released, but even if they are genuine they don't
prove
either executions or burials. Furthermore, although the ICTY speaks of
"an organized and comprehensive effort" to hide bodies, and David Rohde
claimed a "huge Serb effort to hide bodies," [41] neither Albright nor
anyone else has ever shown a satellite photo of people actually being
executed, buried, or dug up for reburial, or of trucks conveying thousands
of bodies elsewhere. This evidence blank occurred despite Albright's
warning
the Serbs that "We will be watching," and with satellites at that time
making at least eight passes per day and geostationary drones able to
hover
and take finely detailed pictures in position over Bosnia during the
summer
of 1995. [42] The mainstream media have found this failure to confirm
of no
interest.
There have been a great many bodies gathered at Tuzla, some 7,500 or more,
many in poor condition or parts only, their collection and handling
incompatible with professional forensic standards, their provenance
unclear
and link to the July 1995 events in Srebrenica unproven and often
unlikely,
[43] and the manner of their death usually uncertain. Interestingly,
although the Serbs were regularly accused of trying to hide bodies, there
has never been any suggestion that the Bosnian Muslims, long in charge of
the body search, might shift bodies around and otherwise manipulate
evidence, despite their substantial record of dissembling. A systematic
attempt to use DNA to trace connections to Srebrenica is underway, but
entails many problems, apart from that of the integrity of the material
studied and process of investigation, and will not resolve the question of
differentiating executions from deaths in combat. There are also lists of
missing, but these lists are badly flawed, with duplications, individuals
listed who had died before July 1995, who fled to avoid BSA service,
or who
registered to vote in 1997, and they include individuals who died in
battle
or reached safety or were captured and assumed a new existence elsewhere.
[44]
The 8,000 figure is also incompatible with the basic arithmetic of
Srebrenica numbers before and after July 1995. Displaced persons from
Srebrenica-that is, massacre survivors-- registered with the World Health
Organization and Bosnian government in early August 1995, totalled 35,632.
Muslim men who reached Muslim lines "without their families being
informed"
totaled at least 2,000, and some 2,000 were killed in the fighting. That
gives us 37,632 survivors plus the 2,000 combat deaths, which would
require
the prewar population of Srebrenica to have been 47,000 if 8,000 were
executed, whereas the population before July was more like 37-40,000
(Tribunal judge Patricia Wald gave 37,000 as her estimate). The numbers
don't add up. [45]
There were witnesses to killings at Srebrenica, or those who claimed to be
witnesses. There were not many of these, and some had a political axe to
grind or were otherwise not credible, [46] but several were believable and
were probably telling of real and ugly events. But we are talking here of
evidence of hundreds of executions, not 8,000 or anything close to
it. The
only direct participant witness claim that ran to a thousand was that of
Drazen Erdemovic, an ethnic Croat associated with a mercenary group of
killers whose members were paid 12 kilos of gold for their Bosnian service
(according to Erdemovic himself) and ended up working in the Congo on
behalf of French intelligence. His testimony was accepted despite its
vagueness and inconsistencies, lack of corroboration, and his
suffering from
mental problems sufficient to disqualify him from trial--but not from
testifying before the Tribunal, free of cross-examination. within two
weeks
of this disqualification from trial. This and other witness evidence
suffered from serious abuse of the plea-bargaining process whereby
witnesses could receive mitigating sentences if they cooperated
sufficiently
with the prosecution. [47]
It is also noteworthy how many relatively impartial observers in or near
Srebrenica in July 1995 didn't see any evidence of massacres,
including the
members of the Dutch forces present in the "safe area" and people like
Henry
Wieland, the chief UN investigator into alleged human rights abuses, who
could find no eyewitnesses to atrocities after five days of interviewing
among the 20,000 Srebrenica survivors gathered at the Tuzla airport
refugee
camp. [48]
4. Anomalies
One anomaly connected with Srebrenica has been the stability of the
figure of Bosnian Muslim victims-8,000 in July 1995 and 8,000 today,
despite the crudity of the initial estimate, the evidence that many or
most
of the 5,000 "missing" reached Bosnian Muslim territory or were killed in
the fighting, and the clear failure to produce supportive physical
evidence
despite a massive effort. In other cases, like the 9/11 fatality estimate,
and even the Bosnian killings and Kosovo bombing war estimates, the
original
figures were radically scaled down as evidence of body counts made the
earlier inflated numbers unsustainable. [49] But because of its key
political role for the United States, Bosnian Muslims and Croats, and an
almost religious ardour of belief in this claim, Sebrenica has been immune
to evidence. From the beginning until today the number has been taken
as a
given, a higher truth, the questioning of which would show a lack of faith
and very likely "apologetics" for the demon.
Another anomaly also showing the sacred, untouchable, and politicized
character of the massacre in Western ideology has been the ready
designation
of the killings as a case of "genocide." The Tribunal played an important
role here, with hard-to-match gullibility, unrestrained
psychologizing, and
incompetent legal reasoning, which the judges have applied to Serb-related
cases only. On gullibility, one Tribunal judge accepted as fact the
witness
claim that Serb soldiers had forced an old Muslim man to eat the liver of
his grandson; [50] and the judges repeatedly stated as an established fact
that 7-8,000 Muslim men had been executed, while simultaneously
acknowledging that the evidence only "suggested" that "a majority" of the
7-8,000 missing had not been killed in combat, which yields a number
substantially lower than 7-8,000. [51]
The Tribunal dealt with the awkward problem of the genocide-intent Serbs
bussing Bosnian Muslim women and children to safety by arguing that
they did
this for public relations reasons, but as Michael Mandel points out,
failing
to do some criminal act despite your desire is called "not committing a
crime." [52] The Tribunal never asked why the genocidal Serbs failed to
surround the town before its capture to prevent thousands of males from
escaping to safety, or why the Bosnian Muslim soldiers were willing to
leave
their women and children as well as many wounded comrades to the
mercies of
the Serbs; [53] and they failed to confront the fact that 10,000 mainly
Muslim residents of Zvornik sought refugee from the civil war in Serbia
itself, as prosecution witness Borislav Jovic testified. [54]
Among the other idiocies in the Tribunal judges' argument, it was genocide
if you killed many males in a group in order to reduce the future
population
of that group, thereby making it unviable in that area. Of course, you
might
want to kill them to prevent their killing you in the future, but the
court
knows Serb psychology better-that couldn't be the sole reason, there must
have been a more sinister aim. The Tribunal reasoning holds forth the
possibility that with only a little prosecution-friendly judicial
psychologizing any case of killing enemy soldiers can be designated
genocide.
There is also the problem of definition of the group. Were the Serbs
trying to eliminate all the Muslims in Bosnia, or Muslims globally? Or
just
in Srebrenica? The judges suggested that pushing them out of the
Srebrenica
area was itself genocide, and they essentially equated genocide with
ethnic
cleansing. [55] It is notable that the ICTY has never called the Croat
ethnic cleansing of 250,000 Krajina Serbs "genocide" although in that
case
many women and children were killed and the ethnic cleansing applied to a
larger area and larger victim population than in Srebrenica. [56] (On
August 10, 1995, Madeleine Albright cried out to the Security Council that
"as many as 13,000 men, women and children were driven from their
homes" in
Srebrenica.) [57] Perhaps the ICTY had accepted Richard Holbrooke's
comic
designation of Krajina as a case of "involuntary expulsions." [58] The
bias is blatant; the politicization of a purported judicial
enterprise is
extreme.
Media treatment of the Srebrenica and Krajina cases followed the same
pattern and illustrates well how the media make some victims worthy and
others unworthy in accord with a political agenda. With the Serbs their
government's target, and their government actively aiding the massive
Croat
ethnic cleansing program in Krajina, the media gave huge and indignant
treatment to the first, with invidious language, calls for action, and
little context. With Krajina, attention was slight and passing,
indignation
was absent, detailed reporting on the condition of the victims was
minimal,
descriptive language was neutral, and there was context offered that made
the events understandable. The contrast is so gross as to be droll: the
attack on Srebrenica "chilling," "murderous," "savagery," "cold-blooded
killing," "genocidal," "aggression,"and of course "ethnic cleansing."
With
Krajina, the media used no such strong language-even ethnic cleansing was
too much for them. The Croat assault was merely a big "upheaval" that is
"softening up the enemy," "a lightning offensive," explained away as a
"response to Srebrenica" and a result of Serb leaders "overplaying their
hand." The Washington Post even cited U.S. Ambassador to Croatia Peter
Galbraith saying the "the Serb exodus was not 'ethnic cleansing'."
[59] The
paper does not allow a challenge to that judgment. In fact, however, the
Croat operations in Krajina left Croatia as the most ethnically
purified of
all the former components of the former Yugoslavia, although the NATO
occupation of Kosovo has allowed an Albanian ethnic cleansing that is
rivalling that of Croatia in ethnic purification.
Another anomaly in the Srebrenica case is the insistence on bringing all
the criminals (Serb) to trial and getting the willing executioners
(Serb) to
admit guilt as necessary for justice and essential for reconciliation. A
problem is that justice cannot be one-sided or it ceases to be
justice, and
shows its true face as vengeance and a cover for other political ends.
Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was by no means one-sided, and deaths by
nationality were not far off from population proportionality; [60] the
Serbs
claim and have documented thousands of deaths at the hands of the
Bosnian
Muslims and their imported Mujahedin cadres, and by the Croatians, and
they
have their own group examining and trying to identify bodies at an
estimated
73 mass graves. [61] This victimization has hardly been noticed by the
Western media or ICTY-the distinguished Yugoslav forensic expert Dr. Zoran
Stankovic observed back in 1996 that "the fact that his team had
previously
identified the bodies of 1,000 Bosnian Serbs in the [Srebrenica]
region had
not interested prosecutor Richard Goldstone." [62] Instead, there is a
steady refrain about the Serbs tendency to whine, whereas Bosnian Muslim
complaints are taken as those of true victims and are never designated
whining.
Rather than producing reconciliation the steady focus on Srebrenica
victims and killers makes for more intense hatred and nationalism, just as
the Kosovo war and its violence exacerbated hatred and tensions there and
showed that Clinton's claimed objective of a tolerant multi-ethnic Kosovo
was a fraud. In Kosovo, this one-sided propaganda and NATO control has
unleashed serious and unremitting anti-Serb-along with anti-Roma,
anti-Turk,
anti-dissident-Albanian-- violence, helped along by the willingness of the
NATO authorities to look the other way as their allies-the purported
victims-take their revenge and pursue their long-standing aim of ethnic
purification. [63] In Bosnia and Serbia the Serbs have been under steady
attack, humiliated, and their leaders and military personnel punished,
while the criminals among the Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and NATO powers
(e.g., Clinton, Blair, Albright, Holbrooke) suffer no penalties [64]
and may
even be portrayed as dispensers of justice (Clinton et al.).
.
It is clear that the objectives of the retribution-pushers are not
justice and reconciliation-they are to unify and strengthen the
position of
the Bosnian Muslims, to crush the Republica Srpska, and possibly even
eliminate it as an independent entity in Bosnia, to keep Serbia
disorganized, weak and dependent on the West, and to continue to put the
U.S. and NATO attack and dismantlement of Yugoslavia in a favorable light.
The last objective requires diverting attention from the Clinton/Bosnian
Muslim role in giving Al Qaeda a foothold in the Balkans, Izetbegovic's
close alliance with Osama bin Laden, his Islamic Declaration declaring
hostility to a multi-ethnic state, [65] the importation of 4,000
Mujahaden
to fight a holy war in Bosnia, with active Clinton administration aid, and
the KLA-Al Qaeda connection.
These aspects of the siding with the Bosnian Muslims have always been
awkward for the war propagandists, and they became more so after 9/11-the
U.S. 9/11 Commission Report claims that two of the 19 hijackers, Nawaf al
Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar, and a "mastermind" of the attack, Khalid
Sheikh
Mohammed, "fought" in Bosnia, and that bin Laden had "service" offices in
Zagreb and Sarajevo. [66] Despite the huge focus on 9/11 and Al Qaeda
these
links have not been featured in the mainstream media and have not
influenced
Bosnian proconsul Paddy Ashdown, who attended Izetbegovic's funeral and
continues to push Bosnian Muslim interests. The Serbs, of course, were
complaining about the brutality (and beheadings) of the Mujahaden in
1993,
but the media and ICTY were not interested then and remain uninterested.
Let's just talk about Srebrenica, the Bosnian Muslims as unique
victims, and
Clinton's and the West's generous if belated service to those victimized
underdogs.
But didn't the Bosnian Serbs "confess" that they had murdered 8,000
civilians? This has been the take of the Western media, but again
demonstrating their subservience to their leaders' political agenda. The
Bosnian Serbs actually did put out a report on Srebrenica in September
2002,
[67] but this report was rejected by Paddy Ashdown for failing to come up
with the proper conclusions. He therefore forced a further report by
firing
a stream of Republica Srpska politicians and analysts, threatening the RS
government, and eventually extracting a report prepared by people who
would
come to the officially approved conclusions. [68] This report, issued on
June 11, 2004, was then greeted in the Western media as a meaningful
validation of the official line-the refrain was, the Bosnian Serbs "admit"
the massacre, which should finally settle any questions. Amusingly, even
this coerced and imposed report didn't come near acknowledging 8,000
executions (it speaks of "several thousand" executions). What this episode
"proves" is that the Western campaign to make the defeated Serbia
grovel is
not yet terminated, and the media's continuing gullibility and propaganda
service.
Conclusion
The "Srebrenica massacre" is the greatest triumph of propaganda to emerge
from the Balkan wars. Other claims and outright lies have played
their role
in the Balkan conflicts, but while some have retained a modest place
in the
propaganda repertoire despite challenge (Racak, the Markale massacre, the
Serb refusal to negotiate at Rambouillet, 250,000 Bosnian dead, the
aim of a
Greater Serbia as the driving force in the Balkan wars), [69] the
Srebrenica
massacre reigns supreme for symbolic power. It is the symbol of Serb evil
and Bosnian Muslim victimhood, and the justice of the Western
dismantling of
Yugoslavia and intervention there at many levels, including a bombing war
and colonial occupations of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo.
But the link of this propaganda triumph to truth and justice is
non-existent. The disconnection with truth is epitomized by the fact that
the original estimate of 8,000, including 5,000 "missing"--who had left
Srebrenica for Bosnian Muslim lines-was maintained even after it had been
quickly established that several thousand had reached those lines and that
several thousand more had perished in battle. This nice round number lives
on today in the face of a failure to find the executed bodies and
despite
the absence of a single satellite photo showing executions, bodies,
digging, or trucks transporting bodies for reburial. The media have
carefully refrained from asking questions on this point, despite
Albright's
August 1995 promise that "We will be watching."
That Albright statement, and the photos she did display at the time,
helped divert attention from the ongoing "Krajina massacre" of Serbs in
Croatian Krajina, an ethnic cleansing process of great brutality and
wider
scope than that at Srebrenica, in which there was less real fighting
than at
Srebrenica, mainly attacks on and the killing and removal of defenseless
civilians. At Srebrenica the Bosnian Serbs moved women and children to
safety, and there is no evidence of any of them being murdered; [70]
whereas in Krajina there was no such separation and an estimated 368 women
and children were killed, along with many too old and infirm to flee. [71]
One measure of the propaganda success of the "Srebrenica massacre" is
that
the possibility that the intense focus on the Srebrenica massacre was
serving as a cover for the immediately following "Krajina massacre,"
supported by the United States, was outside the orbit of thought of the
media. For the media, Srebrenica helped bring about Krajina, and the Serbs
had it coming. [72]
The media have played an important role in making the Srebrenica massacre
a propaganda triumph. As noted earlier, the media had become a
co-belligerent by 1991, and all standards of objectivity disappeared in
their subservience to the pro-Bosnian Muslim and anti-Serb agenda.
Describing the reporting of Christine Amanpour and others on a battle
around
Gorazde, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel John Sray wrote back in October 1995
that these news reports "were devoid of any semblance of truth," that
Americans were suffering from "a cornucopia of disinformation," that
"America has not been so pathetically deceived" since the Vietnam War, and
that popular perceptions of Bosnia "have been forged by a prolific
propaganda machine..[that has] managed to manipulate illusions to further
Muslim goals." [73]
That propaganda machine also conquered the liberals and much of the left
in the United States, who swallowed the dominant narrative of the evil
Serbs seeking hegemony, employing uniquely brutal and genocidal
strategies,
and upsetting a previous multi-cultural haven in Bosnia-run by Osama bin
Laden's friend and ally Alija Izetbegovic, and with rectification brought
belatedly by Clinton, Holbrooke and Albright working closely with Iran,
Turkey and Saudi Arabia! The liberal/left war coalition needed to
find the
Serbs demons in order to justify imperial warfare, and they did so by
accepting and internalizing a set of lies and myths that make up the
dominant narrative. [74] This liberal/"cruise missile left" (CML)
combo was
important in helping develop the "humanitarian intervention" rationale for
attacking Serbia on behalf of the Kosovo Liberation Army, and in fact
preparing the ground for Bush's eventual basing of his own wars on the
quest
for "liberation." [75] The Srebrenica massacre helped make the
liberals and
CML true believers in the crusade in the Balkans and gave moral backup to
their servicing the expanding imperial role of their country and its
allies.
Former UN official Cedric Thornberry, writing in 1996, noted that
"prominently in parts of the international liberal media" the position is
"that the Serbs were the only villains," and back at UN headquarters
in the
spring of 1993 he was warned: "Take cover-the fix is on." [76] The
fix was
on, even if only tacit and built-in to the government-media-Tribunal
relationship. It helped make the Srebrenica massacre the symbol of evil
and, with the help of Tribunal "justice," and support of liberals
and CML,
provided a cover for the U.S.-NATO attack on and dismantling of
Yugoslavia, colonial occupations in Bosnia and Kosovo, and
justification for
"humanitarian intervention" more broadly. What more could be asked of a
propaganda system?
Notes:
*This paper is partly drawn from and cites chapters in a forthcoming book
on the Srebrenica massacre, Srebrenica: The Politics of War Crimes,
written
by George Bogdanich, Tim Fenton, Philip Hammond, Edward S. Herman,
Michael
Mandel, Jonathan Rooper, and George Szamuely. This book is referred to in
the notes below as Politics of War Crimes. The author and his colleagues
are indebted to Diana Johnstone, David Peterson, Vera Vratusa-Zunjic,
Milan
Bulajic, Milivoje Ivanisevic, Konstantin Kilibarda, and George
Pumphrey for
advice. Johnstone's Fools Crusade is a fine basic statement of an
alternative perspective on the Balkan Wars; George Pumphrey's "Srebrenica:
Three Years Later, And Still Searching," is a classic critique of the
establishment Srebrenica massacre narrative and repeatedly hit the target
with facts and analyses still not rebutted.
1. "Bosnia: 2 Officials Dismissed for Obstructing Srebrenica Inquiry," AP
Report, New York Times, April 17, 2004; Marlise Simons, "Bosnian Serb
Leader
Taken Before War Crimes Tribunal," New York Times, April 8, 2000; UN, The
Fall of Srebrenica (A/54/549), Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to
General Assembly resolution 53/35, November 15, 1999, par. 506
(http://www.un.org/News/ossg/srebrenica.pdf )
2. See Ivo Pukanic, "US Role In Storm: Thrilled With Operation Flash,
President Clinton Gave the Go Ahead to Operation Storm," Nacional
(Zagreb),
May 24, 2005.
3. Barton Gellman, "The Path to Crisis: How the United States and Its
Allies Went to War," Washington Post, April 18, 1999
4. "Some surviving members of the Srebrenica delegation have stated that
President Izetbegovic also told that he had learned that a NATO
intervention
in Bosnia and Herzegovina was possible, but could occur only if the Serbs
were to break into Srebrenica, killing at least 5,000 of its people.
President Izetbegovic has flatly denied making such a statement." The Fall
of Srebrenica (A/54/549), Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to
General Assembly resolution 53/35, November 15, 1999, par. 115,
(http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/reports/UNsrebrenicareport.htm)
The UN report does not mention that there were nine others present
at that
meeting, and that one of them, Hakija Meholijic, former Srebrenica
chief of
police, has stated that eight of them (all those living) "can confirm" the
Clinton suggestion. (Dani, June 22, 1998:
http://cdsp.neu.edu/info/students/marko/dani/dani2.html)
5. Politics of War Crimes, Bogdanich, chapter 2, "Prelude to Capture,"
and Fenton, chapter 3, "Military Context." See also Tim Ripley, Operation
Deliberate Force (Center for Defence and Security Studies: 1999), p. 145.
6. In his Balkan Odyssey, Lord David Owen stated that "By acquiescing in
the Croatian government's seizure of Western Slavonia, the Contact
Group had
in effect given the green light to the Bosnian Serbs to attack Srebrenica
and Zepa" (pp. 199-200). Owen was mistaken; the Contact Group was serving
one side only, and the media's failure to report on and criticize the
approved aggression made it possible to present the takeover of Srebrenica
as a unique and unprovoked evil.
7. Veritas estimated that 1,205 civilians were killed in Operation Storm,
including 358 women and 10 children. In the graves around Srebrenica
through
1999, among the 1,895 bodies only one was identified as female. See
"Croatian Serb Exodus Commemorated," Agence France Press, Aug. 4, 2004;
also, Veritas at www.veritas.org.yu.
8. Ripley, Operation Deliberate Force, p. 192. See also footnotes 56 and
70.
9. The co-belligerency role was described by Peter Brock in "Dateline
Yugoslavia: The Partisan Press," Foreign Policy, Winter 1993-94. A
forthcoming book by Brock, on Media Cleansing: UNcovering Yugoslavia's
Civil
Wars, shows this partisanship in greater and effective detail. In his
autobiography, U. S. Secretary of State James Baker says that he
instructed
his press secretary, Margaret Tutweiler to help Bosnian Foreign Minister
Haris Silajdzic utilize the Western media to further the Bosnian Muslim
cause, noting that he "had her talk to her contacts at the four television
networks, the Washington Post and the New York Times." James A. Baker, The
Politics of Diplomacy (Putnam: 1995), pp. 643-4.
10. As NATO PR spokesman Jamie Shea stated on May 16, 1999, when asked
about NATO's vulnerability to Tribunal charges, he was not worried. The
prosecutor, he said, will start her investigation "because we will
allow her
to." Further, "NATO countries are those that have provided the
finance," and
on the need to build a second chamber "so that prosecutions can be speeded
up...we and the Tribunal are all one on this, we want to see war criminals
brought to justice." http://www.nato.int/kosovo/press/p990516b.htm
See Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder (London: Pluto,
2004), chaps. 4-5; Edward Herman, "The Milosevic Trial, Part 1," Z
Magazine,
April 2002.
11. See Politics of War Crimes, chap. 7, Bogdanich, "UN Report on
Srebrenica-A distorted Picture of Events."
12. Raymond K. Kent, "Contextualizing Hate: The Hague Tribunal, the
Clinton Administration and the Serbs," Dialogue (Paris), v. 5, no. 20,
December, 1996 (as posted to the Emperor's Clothes website,
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/misc/kent.htm)
13. Carl Savitch, "Celebici,"
http://www.serbianna.com/columns/savich/047.shtml.
14. It would be hard to surpass the savagery of the Bosnian Muslims at
the Celebici camp, described in ibid. See also, Diana Johnstone, Fools'
Crusade (Pluto: 2002), pp. 71-72.
15. See the two works by Peter Brock, note 9 above; also Johnstone, Fools'
Crusade, pp. 70-83.
16. For details and citations see Brock's article and book (note 9 above).
17. Bernard Kouchner, Les Guerriers de la Paix (Paris: Grasset, 2004),
pp. 372-4.
18. Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, pp, 72-73; Thomas Deichmann,
"Misinformation: TV Coverage of a Bosnian Camp," Covert Action Quarterly,
Fall, 1998, pp. 52-55.
19. In a private communication dated November 21, 2003.
20. For a good summary of the case that these were "Self-Inflicted
Atrocities," with further references, see the Senate Staff Report of
January
16, 1997, on "Clinton Approved Iranian Arms Transfers Help Turn Bosnia
Into
Militant Islamic Base,"
http://www.senate.gov/%7erpc/releases/1997/iran.htm#top. See also Cees
Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia, 1992 - 1995, London: Lit
Verlag,
2003, pp. 68-69:
http://213.222.3.5/srebrenica/toc/p6_c02_s004_b01.html ).
21. John E. Sray, "Selling the Bosnian Myth to America: Buyer Beware,"
Foreign Military Studies, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, October, 1995,
<http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents/bosnia2.htm>.
22. For exceptions to this rule, Leonard Doyle, "Muslims 'slaughter their
own people.'" The Independent, Aug. 22, 1992; Hugh Manners, "Serbs 'Not
Guilty' of Massacre," The Sunday Times [London], Oct. 1, 1995. David
Binder
was unable to get his own paper, the New York Times, to publish
analyses of
possible Muslim involvement in Sarajevo massacres; he had to publish these
elsewhere. See David Binder, "The Balkan Tragedy: Anatomy of a Massacre,"
Foreign Policy, No. 97, Winter, 1994-1995; David Binder, "Bosnia's
Bombers,"
The Nation, October 2, 1995
23. For a good summary, Srdja Trifkovic, "Une spectaculaire revision de
chiffres," Balkan Infos (B.I.), February 2005.
24. George Kenney, "The Bosnian Calculation," New York Times Magazine,
April 23, 1995.
25. See Trifkovic, supra note 23; also,
http://grayfalcon.blogspot.com/2004/12/death-tolls-part-3.html.
26. See Edward Herman and David Peterson, "The NATO-Media Lie Machine:
'Genocide' in Kosovo," Z Magazine, May 2000:
http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/hermanmay2000.htm
27. Michael Ignatieff, "Counting Bodies in Kosovo," New York Times,
November 21, 1999.
28. Politics of War Crimes, Bogdanovich, chap. 2, "Prelude to Capture."
29. Detailed evidence was presented to the UN on "War Crimes and Crimes
of Genocide in Eastern Bosnia (Communes of Bratunac Skelani, and
Srebrenica)
Committed Against the Serbian Population from April 1982 to April
1993," by
the Yugoslav Ambassador to the UN; see also Joan Phillips, "Victims and
Villains in Bosnia's War," Southern Slav Journal, Spring-Summer 1992.
30. Bill Schiller, "Muslims' hero vows he'll fight to the last man,"
Toronto Star, January 31, 1994; John Pomfret, "Weapons, Cash and Chaos
Lend
Clout to Srebrenica's Tough Guy," Washington Post, February 16, 1994.
31. Carl Savich, "Srebrenica and Naser Oric: An Analysis of General
Philippe Morillon's Testimony at the ICTY," http:/www.serbianna.co.
32. "No Evidence of Civilian Casualties in Operations By Bosnian
Commander," BBC Monitoring International Reports, April 11, 2003; for a
review of Oric's operations and a critical analysis of the ICTY decision,
Carl Savitch, "Srebrenica: The Untold Story,"
http://www.serbianna.com/columns/savich/o51.html.
33. Politics of War Crimes, chaps 2-3. The UN estimated that there had
been 3-4,000 Bosnian Muslim soldiers in Srebrenica just before its fall.
34. Ibid.
35. Politics of War Crimes, chap. 2.
36. "Conflict in the Balkans, 8000 Muslims Missing," AP, New York Times,
Sept. 15, 1995.
37. One Red Cross official told a German interviewer that the Muslims
who reached safety "cannot be removed from the list of
missing..because we
have not received their names," quoted in Pumphrey, "Srebrenica: Three
Years
Later, And Still Searching." See also, "Former Yugoslavia: Srebrenica:
help
for families still awaiting news," International Committee of the Red
Cross,
September 13, 1995
http://www.icrc.org/Web/Eng/siteeng0.nsf/iwpList74/7609D560283849CFC1256B6600595006
38. Ibid.
39. Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, p. 76.
40. This jump from a few bodies to 8,000 was recently illustrated in the
treatment by Tim Judah and Daniel Sunter in the London Observer of the
video
of six killings of Bosnian Muslims, given heavy publicity in June 2005-it
is the "smoking gun, the final, incontrovertible proof of Serbia's part in
the Srebrenica massacres in which more than 7,500 Bosnian Muslim men and
boys were murdered." ("How the video that put Serbia in dock was
brought to
light," June 5).
.
41. ICTY, Amended Joinder Indictment, May 27, 2002, Par. 51:
http://www.un.org/icty/indictment/english/nik-ai020527c.htm.; David Rohde,
"The World Five Years Later: The Battle of Srebrenica Is Now Over The
Truth," New York Times, July 9, 2000.
42. Steven Lee Meyers, "Making Sure War Crimes Aren't Forgotten," New York
Times, September 22, 1997. In fact, one U.S. official acknowledged in
late
July 1995 that "satellites have produced nothing." Paul Quinn-Judge,
"Reports of Atrocities Unconfirmed So Far: U.S. Aerial Surveillance
Reveals
Little," Boston Globe, July 27, 1995.
43. The web site of the International Commission on Missing Persons in the
Former Yugoslavia acknowledges that the bodies "have been exhumed from
various gravesites in northeast HiH," not just in the Srebrenica region;
quoted in a 2003 Statement by ICMP Chief of Staff Concerning Persons
Reported Missing from Srebrenica in July 1995, Gordon Bacon.
44. Politics of War Crimes, Rooper, chap. 4, "The Numbers Game."
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.; also, Politics of War Crimes, Szamuely, chap. 5, "Witness
Evidence."
47. Szamuely, "Witness Evidence."
48. Tim Butcher, "Serb Atrocities in Srebrenica are Unproven," The Daily
Telegraph, July 24, 1995.
49. Politics of War Crimes, Rooper, chap. 4, "The Numbers Game."
50. This claim appears in the November 1995 indictments of Radovan
Karadzic and Ratko Mladic; it was recounted by the French policeman,
Jean-Rene Ruez, and first surfaced at the ICTY in early July, 1996,
during a
seven-day publicity-stunt-type hearing into the charges against
Karadzic and
Mladic. As Associated Press reported Ruez's liver-eating testimony at the
time (Jennifer Chao, July 3, 1996):
"Amid the feverish mass murder was throat-gagging sadism. Ruez cited an
incident where a soldier forced a man to cut open his grandson's
stomach and
eat part of his liver. "He took the old man and put a knife in his
hand ...
and cut open the stomach of the little boy and then with the tip of his
knife took out an organ from the inside of the child's stomach and he
forced
the man to eat that part,' Ruez told the court."
51. Politics of War Crimes, Mandel, chap. 6, "The ICTY Calls It
'Genocide'."
52. Ibid.
53. Chris Hedges, "Bosnian Troops Cite Gassing At Zepa," New York Times,
July 27, 1995.
54. Jovic testified in the Milosevic trial on November 18,
2003-www.slobodan-milosevic.org- November 18, 2003.
55. Politics of War Crimes, Mandel, chap. 6; also, Michael Mandel, How
America Gets Away With Murder (Pluto: 2004), pp. 157-8.
56. Carlos Martins Branco, a former UN military observer in Bosnia,
contended that it was in Krajina rather than Srebrenica that one can
identify a pre-meditated genocidal process "when the Croatian army
implemented the mass murder of all Serbians found there. In this instance,
the media maintained an absolute silence, despite the fact that this
genocide occurred over a three month period. The objective of
Srebrenica was
ethnic cleansing and not genocide, unlike what happened in Krajina, in
which, although there was not military action, the Croatian army decimated
villages." "Was Srebrenica A Hoax? Eye-Witness Account of a Former UN
Military Observer in Bosnia,"
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/BRA403A.html
57. Madeleine Albright, again before the Security Council (The Situation
in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (S/PV.3564), UN Security
Council,
August 10, 1995, 5.30 p.m., pp. 6-7):
58. Richard Holbrooke, on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, Transcript #5300,
August 24, 1995.
59. "U.N. Report: Bosnian Serbs Massacred Srebrenica Muslims," Washington
Post, Aug. 12, 1995; John Pomfret, "Investigators Begin Exhuming Group of
Mass Graves in Bosnia," Washington Post, July 8, 1996. Biggest
"upheaval" is
in "Softening Up The Enemy," Newsweek, Aug. 21, 1995.
60. See the evidence drawn from the Norwegian study of Bosnia casualties
in: http://grayfalcon.blogspot.com/2004/12/death-tolls-part-3.html.
61. Slavisa Sabijic, "The Trade in Bodies in Bosnia-Herzegovina":
http://www.serbianna.com/press/010.html; Joan Phillips, "Victims and
Villains in Bosnia's War," Southern Slav Journal, Spring-Summer 1992.
62. "Yugoslav Forensic Expert Says No Proof About Srebrenica Mass Grave,"
BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, July 15, 1996.
63. Kosta Christitch, "Les veritable raisons d'une faillite," B.I., March
2005. As Diana Johnstone has said, "by endorsing every accusation against
Serbs, and ignoring crimes against Serbs, the United States and its NATO
allies have given carte blanche to violence against them. Ethnic Albanian
children are growing up in the belief that nobody really blames them for
hunting down elderly 'Skrinje' (the ethnic slur for Serbs) and beating
them
to death." "The OSCE Report: Things Told and Things Seen," ZNet
Commentary,
Dec. 26, 1999.
64. There have been a modest number of exceptions, mainly Muslim and Croat
small fry, usually indicted at a time when the imbalance appeared
exceptionally gross and some PR offset was needed. None of the leaders of
Croatia or Bosnia were indicted, although it was alleged that indictments
were near soon after Tudjman's and Izetbegovic's deaths, although the long
delays were never explained. No leader or anybody else in NATO was ever
indicted. For a good discussion of the deep bias, Mandel, How America Gets
Away With Murder, Part II.
65. In his 1970 Islamic Declaration, never repudiated by him, Izetbegovic
said: "There is neither peace nor coexistence between the 'Islamic
religion'
and non-Islamic social and political institutions. Having the right to
govern
its own world, Islam clearly excludes the right and possibility of
putting a
foreign ideology into practice on its territory." Quoted in Johnstone,
Fools' Crusade, p. 58.
66. The 9/11 Commission Report, Final Report of the National Commission on
Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Official Government Edition, pp.
58, 146-147, 155, 238-239.
67. Documentation Centre of Republic of Srpska, Report About Case
Srebrenica (The First Part), (Banja Luka, Sept. 2002).
68. Gregory Copley, "US Official Implicated With Bosnian High
Representative Ashdown in Attempting to Force Fabricated Report on
Srebrenica," Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily, September 8, 2003:
http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/ssi09082003.htm; Nebojsa Malic,
"Srebrenica Revisited: Reports, Confessions and the Elusive Truth,"
Antiwar.com, June 24, 2004:
http://antiwar.com/malic/?articleid=2865
69. On the fallacies of the claims regarding Racak, Rambouillet and the
Serb drive for a Greater Serbia as a reality and causal force, see
Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, and Mandel, How America Gets Away with Murder.
70. Only one body found around Srebrenica in the graves explored through
1999 was identified as female.
71. See note 7 above. Tim Ripley says that "Thousands of people, those too
old or infirm to flee,.remained behind. UN patrols soon found
hundreds had
been murdered by Croat soldiers and civilians. Almost every home had been
looted." (p. 192).
72. Serb refugees in Srebrenica in 1997 are explained as "coming from
neighborhoods elsewhere that Croat and Muslim armies emptied in
retaliation
for the Srebrenica atrocities and other such killings." Dana Priest, "U.S.
Troops Extend a Hand To Refugees Tainted by War," Washington Post,
Feb. 18,
1997.
73. Sray, "Selling the Bosnian Myth."
74. For an account and critique of these humanitarian interventionists,
see Edward Herman and David Peterson, "Morality's Avenging Angels: The New
Humanitarian Crusaders," in David Chandler, ed., Rethinking Human Rights
(Palgrave: 2002). For a more extensive dismantling of their arguments, see
Johnstone's Fools' Crusade and Mandel's How America Gets Away With Murder.
75. On the meaning and application of "cruise missile left" (my phrase),
see my "The Cruise Missile Left: Aligning with Power," Z Magazine,
November,
2002; and "The Cruise Missile Left (part 5): Samantha Power And The
Genocide
Gambit," ZNet Commentaries, May 17, 2004.
76. Cedric Thornberry, "Saving the War Crimes Tribunal; Bosnia
Herzegovina," Foreign Policy, September 1996.
--- End forwarded message ---
[ An excellent and timely piece by American university professor and
author Edward Herman.
An excerpt: "[...] Croatian authorities were also delighted with the
claims of a Srebrenica massacre, as this deflected attention from their
prior devastating ethnic cleansing of Serbs and Bosnian Muslims in
Western Bosnia (almost entirely ignored by the Western media), [6] and it
provided a cover for their already planned removal of several hundred
thousand Serbs from the Krajina area in Croatia. This massive ethnic
cleansing operation was carried out with U.S. approval and logistical
support within a month of the Srebrenica events, and it may well have
involved the killing of more Serb civilians than Bosnian Muslim
civilians
killed in the Srebrenica area in July: most of the Bosnian Muslim victims
were fighters, not civilians, as the Bosnian Serbs bused the Srebrenica
women and children to safety; the Croatians made no such provision and
many women, children and old people were slaughtered in Krajina. [7] The
ruthlessness of the Croats was impressive: "UN troops watched horrified
as Croat soldiers dragged the bodies of dead Serbs along the road
outside
the UN compound and then pumped them full of rounds from the AK-47s. They
then crushed the bullet-ridden bodies under the tracks of a tank." [8]
But
this was hardly noticed in the wake of the indignation and propaganda
generated around Srebrenica with the aid of the mainstream media, whose
co-belligerency role in the Balkan wars was already well-entrenched. [9]"
P. T. ]
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=74&ItemID=8244
ZMAG (USA)
The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre*
by Edward S. Herman; July 07, 2005
"Srebrenica" has become the symbol of evil, and specifically Serb evil. It
is commonly described as "a horror without parallel in the history of
Europe
since the Second World War" in which there was a cold-blooded
execution "of
at least 8,000 Muslim men and boys." [1] The events in question took place
in or near the Bosnian town of Srebrenica between July 10 and 19, 1995, as
the Bosnian Serb army (BSA) occupied that town and fought with and killed
many Bosnian Muslims, unknown numbers dying in the fighting and by
executions. There is no question but that there were executions, and that
many Bosnian Muslim men died during the evacuation of Srebrenica and its
aftermath. But even though only rarely discussed there is a major issue of
how many were executed, as numerous bodies found in local grave sites were
victims of fighting, and many Bosnian Muslim men who fled Srebrenica
reached
Bosnian Muslim territory safely. Some bodies were also those of the many
Serbs killed in the forays by the Bosnian Muslims out of Srebrenica
in the
years before July 1995.
The Srebrenica massacre has played a special role in the politics of
Western treatment of the restructuring of the former-Yugoslavia and in
Western interventionism more broadly, and it is receiving renewed
attention
and memorialization at its tenth anniversary in July 2005. It is
regularly
cited as proof of Serb evil and genocidal intent and helped justify a
focus
on punishing the Serbs and Milosevic and NATO's 1999 war on Serbia. It has
also provided important moral support for the further Western wars of
vengeance, power projection, and "liberation," having shown that there is
evil that the West can and must deal with forcibly.
However, there are three matters that should have raised serious questions
about the massacre at the time and since, but didn't and haven't. One was
that the massacre was extremely convenient to the political needs of the
Clinton administration, the Bosnian Muslims, and the Croats (see Section 1
below). A second was that there had been (and were after Srebrenica) a
series of claimed Serb atrocities, that were regularly brought forth at
strategic moments when forcible intervention by the United States and NATO
bloc was in the offing but needed some solid public relations support, but
which were later shown to be fraudulent (Section 2). A third is that the
evidence for a massacre, certainly of one in which 8,000 men and boys
were
executed, has always been problematic, to say the least (Sections 3
and 4).
1. Political Convenience
The events of Srebrenica and claims of a major massacre were extremely
helpful to the Clinton administration, the Bosnian Muslim leadership, and
Croatian authorities. Clinton was under political pressure in 1995
both from
the media and from Bob Dole to take more forceful action in favor of the
Bosnian Muslims, [2] and his administration was eager to find a
justification for more aggressive policies. Clinton officials rushed
to the
Srebrenica scene to confirm and publicize the claims of a massacre,
just as
William Walker did later at Racak in January 1999. Walker's immediate
report to Madeleine Albright caused her to exult that "spring has come
early
this year." [3] Srebrenica allowed the "fall to come early" for the
Clinton
administration in the summer of 1995.
Bosnian Muslim leaders had been struggling for several years to persuade
the NATO powers to intervene more forcibly on their behalf, and there is
strong evidence that they were prepared not only to lie but also to
sacrifice their own citizens and soldiers to serve the end of inducing
intervention (matters discussed further in Section 2). Bosnian Muslim
officials have claimed that their leader, Alija Izetbegovic, told them
that
Clinton had advised him that U.S. intervention would only occur if the
Serbs
killed at least 5,000 at Srebrenica. [4] The abandonment of
Srebrenica by
a military force much larger than that of the attackers, and a
retreat that
made that larger force vulnerable and caused it to suffer heavy casualties
in fighting and vengeance executions, helped produce numbers that
would meet
the Clinton criterion, by hook or by crook. There is other evidence that
the retreat from Srebrenica was not based on any military necessity
but was
strategic, with the personnel losses incurred considered a necessary
sacrifice for a larger purpose. [5]
Croatian authorities were also delighted with the claims of a Srebrenica
massacre, as this deflected attention from their prior devastating ethnic
cleansing of Serbs and Bosnian Muslims in Western Bosnia (almost entirely
ignored by the Western media), [6] and it provided a cover for their
already planned removal of several hundred thousand Serbs from the
Krajina
area in Croatia. This massive ethnic cleansing operation was carried out
with U.S. approval and logistical support within a month of the Srebrenica
events, and it may well have involved the killing of more Serb civilians
than Bosnian Muslim civilians killed in the Srebrenica area in July:
most of
the Bosnian Muslim victims were fighters, not civilians, as the Bosnian
Serbs bused the Srebrenica women and children to safety; the Croatians
made
no such provision and many women, children and old people were slaughtered
in Krajina. [7] The ruthlessness of the Croats was impressive: "UN troops
watched horrified as Croat soldiers dragged the bodies of dead Serbs
along
the road outside the UN compound and then pumped them full of rounds from
the AK-47s. They then crushed the bullet-ridden bodies under the
tracks of a
tank." [8] But this was hardly noticed in the wake of the indignation and
propaganda generated around Srebrenica with the aid of the mainstream
media, whose co-belligerency role in the Balkan wars was already
well-entrenched. [9]
The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) and UN also had
an important role to play in the consolidation of the standard Srebrenica
massacre narrative. From its inception the ICTY served as an arm of
the NATO
powers, who created it, funded it, served as its police arm and main
information source, and expected and got responsive service from the
organization. [10] The ICTY focused intensively on Srebrenica and provided
important and nominally independent corroboration of the massacre claims
along with citable "judicial" claims of planned "genocide." The UN is
less
thoroughly integrated into NATO-power demands, but it is highly responsive
and in the Srebrenica case it came through just as the United States
and its
main allies desired. [11]
This political interest in the Srebrenica massacre hardly proves that the
establishment narrative is wrong. It does, however, suggest the need for
caution and an awareness of the possibility of falsification and inflated
claims. That awareness has been entirely absent from mainstream
treatment of
Srebrenica.
2. The Serial Lying Before and After Srebrenica
At each stage in the dismantlement of Yugoslavia, its ethnic cleansing,
and before and during the NATO war over the Kosovo province of Serbia in
1999, propaganda lies played a very important role in forwarding conflict
and anti-Serb actions. There were lies of omission and lies that directly
conveyed false impressions and information. An important form of lie of
omission was the regular presentation of Serb misbehavior as unique
to the
Serbs, not also characteristic of the behavior of the Muslims and
Croatians or of the conflict overall. In case after case the media would
report on Serb attacks and atrocities, having neglected to report the
prior
assaults on Serbs in those same towns and making the Serb behavior
seem like
unprovoked acts of aggression and barbarity.
This was evident from the very start of the serious fighting in 1991 in
the republic of Croatia. In their treatment of the Eastern Croatian
city of
Vukovar, for example, the media (and ICTY) focused exclusively on the
federal Yugoslav army's capture of the town in the fall of 1991,
completely
ignoring the prior spring and summer's slaughter by Croatian National
Guard
troops and paramilitaries of hundreds of ethnic Serbs who had lived
in the
Vukovar area. According to Raymond K. Kent, "a substantial Serb
population in the major Slavonian city of Vukovar disappeared without
having
fled, leaving traces of torture in the old Austrian the spring catacombs
under the city along with evidence of murder and rape. The Western media,
whose demonization of the Serbs was well underway, chose to overlook these
events." [12] This selective and misleading focus was standard media and
ICTY practice.
Lies of omission were also clear in the attention given Bosnian Serb
prison camps like Omarska, which the media focused on intensively and with
indignation, when in fact the Muslims and Croats had very similar prison
camps-at Celebici, Tarcin, Livno, Bradina, Odzak, and in the Zetra
camp in
Sarajevo, among other sites-[13] with roughly comparable numbers,
facilities, and certainly no worse treatment of prisoners; [14] but in
contrast with the Serbs, the Muslims and Croats hired competent PR
firms and
refused permission to inspect their facilities-and the already
well-developed structure of bias made the media little interested in
any but
Serb camps.
Wild allegations of Auschwitz-like conditions in Serb "concentration
camps" were spread by "journalists of attachment" who lapped up propaganda
handouts by Muslim and Croat officials and PR hirlings. Roy Gutman,
who won
a Pulitzer prize jointly with John Burns for Bosnia reporting in 1993,
depended heavily on Croat and Muslim officials and witnesses with suspect
credentials and implausible claims, and he was a major source of
inflated,
one-sided, and false "concentration camp" propaganda. [15] John Burns'
Pulitzer award was based on an extended interview with Boris Herak, a
captured Bosnian Serb supplied to him and a Soros-funded film-maker by the
Bosnian Muslims. Several years later Herak admitted that his extremely
implausible confession had been coerced and that he had been forced to
memorize many pages of lies. Two of his alleged victims also turned up
alive
in later years. In reporting on Herak, John Burns and the New York Times
(and the Soros-funded film) suppressed the credibility-damaging fact that
Herak had also accused former UNPROFOR commandant, Canadian General Lewis
Mackenzie, of having raped young Muslim women at a Serb-run bordello. [16]
These scandalous awards are symptomatic of the media bias that was
already
overwhelming in 1992 and 1993.
In a recent development of interest, on a visit to the dying Alija
Izetbegovic, Bernard Kouchner asked him about the Bosnian Serb
concentration
camps, whereupon Izetbegovic, surprisingly, admitted that these claims had
been inflated with the aim of getting NATO to bomb the Serbs. [17] This
important confession has not been mentioned in the U.S. or British
mainstream media.
One of the most important propaganda lies of the 1990s featured the
Serb-run Trnopolje camp, visited by Britain's ITN reporters in August
1992.
These reporters photographed the resident Fikret Alic, showing him
emaciated and seemingly inside a concentration camp fence. In fact,
Fikret
Alic was in a transit camp, was a sick man (and was sick with tuberculosis
long before reaching the camp), was not in any way representative of
others
in the camp, and was soon able to move to Sweden. Furthermore, the
fence was
around the photographers, not the man photographed. [18] But this hugely
dishonest photo was featured everywhere in the West as proving a
Serb-organized Auschwitz, was denounced by NATO high officials, and helped
provide the moral basis for the creation of the ICTY and its clear
focus on
Serb evil.
In the case of the siege of Sarajevo, as with conflict around many "safe
haven" towns, the Bosnian Muslim government engaged in a steady program of
provoking the Serbs, blaming them for the ensuing response, lying about
casualties, and trying-usually successfully-to place the blame on the
Serbs. As Tim Fenton has said, "Massacre allegations by the Bosnian
Muslims
followed any reported conflict as night followed day: most notoriously
Muslim Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic claimed the UN was responsible
for the
deaths of 70,000 in Bihac in early 1995, when in fact there had barely
been
any fighting and casualties were small." [19]
A remarkable feature of the Bosnian Muslim struggle to demonize the
Serbs, in order to get NATO to come to Bosnian Muslim aid with bombs, was
their willingness to kill their own people. This was most notable in the
case of the ruthless bombing of Sarajevo civilians in three massacres: in
1992 (the "Breadline Massacre"), 1994 (the Markale "Market Massacre")
and a
"Second Market Massacre" in 1995. In the standard narrative the Serbs
were
responsible for these massacres, and it is admittedly not easy to believe
that the Muslim leadership would kill their own for political advantage
even if the evidence points strongly in that direction. But these
massacres
were all extremely well timed to influence imminent NATO and UN
decisions to
intervene more forcibly on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims. More important,
numerous UN officials and senior Western military officials have claimed
that the evidence is strong in all three cases that the actions were
planned
and executed by Bosnian Muslims. [20] U.S. Army officer John E. Sray, who
was on the scene in Bosnia during these and other massacres and was
head of
the U.S. intelligence section in Sarajevo, even suggested that the
incidents, and probable Bosnian Muslim official connivance in these
atrocities, "deserve a thorough scrutiny by the International War Crimes
Tribunal." [21] Needless to say no such scrutiny was forthcoming. In
short,
this view of the three massacres is not conspiracy theory, it is a
conclusion based on serious and substantial evidence, but not even
debated
in the party-line dominated accounts of recent Balkan history. [22]
Both before and after Srebrenica lying about numbers killed was also
standard practice, helpful in sustaining the dominant narrative. For
Bosnia,
in December 1992 the Bosnian Muslim government claimed 128,444 deaths of
their forces and people, a number which grew to 200,000 by June 1993,
rising
to 250,000 in 1994. [23] These figures were swallowed without a qualm by
Western politicians, media, and intellectual war-campaigners (e.g., David
Rieff), with Clinton himself using the 250,000 figure in a speech in
November 1995. Former State Department official George Kenney has long
questioned these figures and marveled at media gullibility in accepting
these claims without the least interest in verification. His own estimate
ran between 25,000 and 60,000. [24] More recently, a study sponsored
by the
Norwegian government estimated the Bosnian war dead as 80,000, and one
sponsored by the Hague Tribunal itself came up with a figure of 102,000
dead. [25] Neither of these studies has been reported on in the U.S.
media,
which had regularly offered its readers/listeners the inflated numbers.
A similar inflation process took place during the 78-day NATO bombing war
in 1999, with high U.S. officials at various moments claiming 100,000,
250,000 and 500,000 Serb killings of Kosovo Albanians, along with the
lavish use of the word "genocide" to describe Serb actions in Kosovo. [26]
This figure gradually shrank to 11,000, and has remained there despite the
fact that only some 4,000 bodies were found in one of the most intense
forensic searches in history, and with unknown numbers of those bodies
combatants, Serbs, and civilian victims of U.S. bombing. But the
11,000
must be valid because the NATO governments and ICTY say it is, and Michael
Ignatieff assured readers of the New York Times that "whether those 11,334
bodies will be found depends on whether the Serb military and the police
removed them." [27]
This record of systematic disinformation certainly does not disprove the
truth of the standard narrative on the Srebrenica massacre. It does,
however, suggest the need for a close look at the claims, which have
proved
so convenient, a close look that the mainstream has steadily refused to
provide.
3. The Problematic Massacre Claims
By the time of the Srebrenica events of July 1995 the stage had been well
set for making massacre claims effective. The serial lying had been
largely
unchallenged in the mainstream, the demonization process and
good-versus-evil dichotomy had been well established, the ICTY and UN
leadership were closely following the agenda of the United States and its
NATO allies, and the media were on board as co-belligerents.
In this environment, context-stripping was easy. One element of context
was the fact that the "safe area" concept was a fraud, as the safe areas
were supposed to have been disarmed, but weren't, and with UN connivance.
[28] They were therefore used by the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica and
other
safe havens as launching pads for attacks on nearby Serb villages. In the
three years prior to the massacre well over a thousand Serb civilians were
killed by Muslim forces in scores of devastated nearby villages; [29] and
well before July 1995 the Srebrenica Muslim commander Nasir Oric proudly
showed Western reporters videos of some of his beheaded Serb victims and
bragged about his killings. [30] Testifying before the Tribunal on
February
12, 2004, UN military commander in Bosnia in 1992 and 1993, General
Philippe Morillon, stated his conviction that the attack on Srebrenica
was a
"direct reaction" to the massacres of Serbs by Nasir Oric and his
forces in
1992 and 1993, massacres with which Morillon was closely familiar. [31]
Morillon's testimony was of no interest to the Western media, and when the
ICTY finally got around to indicting Nasir Oric on March 28, 2003, very
possibly to create the image of judicial balance, he was charged with
killing only seven Serbs who were tortured and beaten to death after
capture, and with the "wanton destruction" of nearby villages. Although he
openly bragged to Western reporters of slaughtering Serb civilians,
the ICTY
reportedly "found no evidence that there were civilian casualties in the
attacks on Serb villages in his theater of operations." [32]
When the Bosnian Serbs captured Srebrenica in July 1995, it was reported
that the 28th regiment of the Bosnian Muslim Army (BMA), comprising
several
thousand men, had just fled the town. [33] The media failed to ask how
such
a large force could have been present in a disarmed "safe area."
Having also
succeeded in ignoring the prior abuses emanating from the safe area, this
allowed them to follow a quickly established party line of a planned
"genocide" and inexplicable brutality rather than the vengeance which the
media allow as semi-exoneration of violence by "worthy" victims (e.g.,
Kosovo Albanians driving out and killing Serbs and Roma after the NATO
takeover of Kosovo).
A second element of context was the possible political basis for the
surrender of Srebrenica by a force in a good defensive position,
outnumbering the attacking BSA by a 6-1 or 8-1 ratio, but retreating in
advance of the assault, their leaders having been withdrawn previously by
order of the Bosnian Muslim leadership. [34] This left the population
unprotected, and made the BMA cadres vulnerable as they retreated in
disarray toward Bosnian Muslim lines. Could this have been another
self-sacrificing maneuver by the leadership to produce victims, perhaps
designed to help meet the Clinton 5,000 target and induce more
forcible NATO
intervention? These questions never arose in the mainstream media.
The Srebrenica events had a number of features that made it possible to
claim 8,000 "men and boys" executed. One was the confusion and uncertainty
about the fate of the fleeing Bosnian Muslim forces, some reaching Tuzla
safely, some killed in the fighting, and some captured. The 8,000
figure was
first provided by the Red Cross, based on their crude estimate that
the BSA
had captured 3,000 men and that 5,000 were reported "missing." [35] It is
well established that thousands of those "missing" had reached Tuzla or
were killed in the fighting, [36] but in an amazing transformation
displaying the eagerness to find the Bosnian Serbs evil and the Muslims
victims, the "reaching safety/killed-in-action" basis of being
missing was
ignored and the missing were taken as executed! This misleading
conclusion
was helped along by the Red Cross's reference to the 5,000 as having
"simply disappeared," and its failure to correct this politically biased
usage and claim despite its own recognition that "several thousand"
refugees
had reached Central Bosnia. [37]
It was also helped along by the Bosnian Muslim leadership's refusal to
disclose the names and numbers of those reaching safety, [38] but
there was
a remarkable readiness in the Western establishment not only to ignore
those
reaching safety, but also to disregard deaths in fighting and to take dead
bodies as proving executions. The will to believe here was limitless:
reporter David Rohde saw a bone sticking up in a grave site near
Srebrenica,
which he just knew by instinct was a remnant of an execution and serious
evidence of a "massacre." [39] It was standard media practice to move
from
an asserted and unproven claim of thousands missing, or a report of the
uncovering of bodies in a grave site, to the conclusion that the claim of
8,000 executed was thereby demonstrated. [40]
With 8,000 executed and thousands killed in the fighting there should have
been huge grave sites and satellite evidence of both executions, burials,
and any body removals. But the body searches in the Srebrenica
vicinity were
painfully disappointing, with only some two thousand bodies found in
searches through 1999, including bodies killed in action and possibly Serb
bodies, some pre-dating July 1995. The sparseness of these findings led to
claims of body removal and reburial, but this was singularly
unconvincing as
the Bosnian Serbs were under intense military pressure after July
1995. This
was the period when NATO was bombing Serb positions and Croat/Muslim
armies
were driving towards Banja Luka. The BSA was on the defensive and was
extremely short of equipment and resources, including gasoline. To have
mounted an operation of the magnitude required to exhume, transport and
rebury thousands of corpses would have been far beyond the BSA's
capacity at
that time. Furthermore, in carrying out such a program they could hardly
hope to escape observation from OSCE personnel, local civilians, and
satellite observations.
On August 10, 1995, Madeleine Albright showed some satellite photos at a
closed session of the Security Council, as part of a denunciation of the
Bosnian Serbs, including one photo showing people--allegedly Bosnian
Muslims
near Srebrenica--assembled in a stadium, and one allegedly taken shortly
thereafter showing a nearby field with "disturbed" soil. These photos have
never been publicly released, but even if they are genuine they don't
prove
either executions or burials. Furthermore, although the ICTY speaks of
"an organized and comprehensive effort" to hide bodies, and David Rohde
claimed a "huge Serb effort to hide bodies," [41] neither Albright nor
anyone else has ever shown a satellite photo of people actually being
executed, buried, or dug up for reburial, or of trucks conveying thousands
of bodies elsewhere. This evidence blank occurred despite Albright's
warning
the Serbs that "We will be watching," and with satellites at that time
making at least eight passes per day and geostationary drones able to
hover
and take finely detailed pictures in position over Bosnia during the
summer
of 1995. [42] The mainstream media have found this failure to confirm
of no
interest.
There have been a great many bodies gathered at Tuzla, some 7,500 or more,
many in poor condition or parts only, their collection and handling
incompatible with professional forensic standards, their provenance
unclear
and link to the July 1995 events in Srebrenica unproven and often
unlikely,
[43] and the manner of their death usually uncertain. Interestingly,
although the Serbs were regularly accused of trying to hide bodies, there
has never been any suggestion that the Bosnian Muslims, long in charge of
the body search, might shift bodies around and otherwise manipulate
evidence, despite their substantial record of dissembling. A systematic
attempt to use DNA to trace connections to Srebrenica is underway, but
entails many problems, apart from that of the integrity of the material
studied and process of investigation, and will not resolve the question of
differentiating executions from deaths in combat. There are also lists of
missing, but these lists are badly flawed, with duplications, individuals
listed who had died before July 1995, who fled to avoid BSA service,
or who
registered to vote in 1997, and they include individuals who died in
battle
or reached safety or were captured and assumed a new existence elsewhere.
[44]
The 8,000 figure is also incompatible with the basic arithmetic of
Srebrenica numbers before and after July 1995. Displaced persons from
Srebrenica-that is, massacre survivors-- registered with the World Health
Organization and Bosnian government in early August 1995, totalled 35,632.
Muslim men who reached Muslim lines "without their families being
informed"
totaled at least 2,000, and some 2,000 were killed in the fighting. That
gives us 37,632 survivors plus the 2,000 combat deaths, which would
require
the prewar population of Srebrenica to have been 47,000 if 8,000 were
executed, whereas the population before July was more like 37-40,000
(Tribunal judge Patricia Wald gave 37,000 as her estimate). The numbers
don't add up. [45]
There were witnesses to killings at Srebrenica, or those who claimed to be
witnesses. There were not many of these, and some had a political axe to
grind or were otherwise not credible, [46] but several were believable and
were probably telling of real and ugly events. But we are talking here of
evidence of hundreds of executions, not 8,000 or anything close to
it. The
only direct participant witness claim that ran to a thousand was that of
Drazen Erdemovic, an ethnic Croat associated with a mercenary group of
killers whose members were paid 12 kilos of gold for their Bosnian service
(according to Erdemovic himself) and ended up working in the Congo on
behalf of French intelligence. His testimony was accepted despite its
vagueness and inconsistencies, lack of corroboration, and his
suffering from
mental problems sufficient to disqualify him from trial--but not from
testifying before the Tribunal, free of cross-examination. within two
weeks
of this disqualification from trial. This and other witness evidence
suffered from serious abuse of the plea-bargaining process whereby
witnesses could receive mitigating sentences if they cooperated
sufficiently
with the prosecution. [47]
It is also noteworthy how many relatively impartial observers in or near
Srebrenica in July 1995 didn't see any evidence of massacres,
including the
members of the Dutch forces present in the "safe area" and people like
Henry
Wieland, the chief UN investigator into alleged human rights abuses, who
could find no eyewitnesses to atrocities after five days of interviewing
among the 20,000 Srebrenica survivors gathered at the Tuzla airport
refugee
camp. [48]
4. Anomalies
One anomaly connected with Srebrenica has been the stability of the
figure of Bosnian Muslim victims-8,000 in July 1995 and 8,000 today,
despite the crudity of the initial estimate, the evidence that many or
most
of the 5,000 "missing" reached Bosnian Muslim territory or were killed in
the fighting, and the clear failure to produce supportive physical
evidence
despite a massive effort. In other cases, like the 9/11 fatality estimate,
and even the Bosnian killings and Kosovo bombing war estimates, the
original
figures were radically scaled down as evidence of body counts made the
earlier inflated numbers unsustainable. [49] But because of its key
political role for the United States, Bosnian Muslims and Croats, and an
almost religious ardour of belief in this claim, Sebrenica has been immune
to evidence. From the beginning until today the number has been taken
as a
given, a higher truth, the questioning of which would show a lack of faith
and very likely "apologetics" for the demon.
Another anomaly also showing the sacred, untouchable, and politicized
character of the massacre in Western ideology has been the ready
designation
of the killings as a case of "genocide." The Tribunal played an important
role here, with hard-to-match gullibility, unrestrained
psychologizing, and
incompetent legal reasoning, which the judges have applied to Serb-related
cases only. On gullibility, one Tribunal judge accepted as fact the
witness
claim that Serb soldiers had forced an old Muslim man to eat the liver of
his grandson; [50] and the judges repeatedly stated as an established fact
that 7-8,000 Muslim men had been executed, while simultaneously
acknowledging that the evidence only "suggested" that "a majority" of the
7-8,000 missing had not been killed in combat, which yields a number
substantially lower than 7-8,000. [51]
The Tribunal dealt with the awkward problem of the genocide-intent Serbs
bussing Bosnian Muslim women and children to safety by arguing that
they did
this for public relations reasons, but as Michael Mandel points out,
failing
to do some criminal act despite your desire is called "not committing a
crime." [52] The Tribunal never asked why the genocidal Serbs failed to
surround the town before its capture to prevent thousands of males from
escaping to safety, or why the Bosnian Muslim soldiers were willing to
leave
their women and children as well as many wounded comrades to the
mercies of
the Serbs; [53] and they failed to confront the fact that 10,000 mainly
Muslim residents of Zvornik sought refugee from the civil war in Serbia
itself, as prosecution witness Borislav Jovic testified. [54]
Among the other idiocies in the Tribunal judges' argument, it was genocide
if you killed many males in a group in order to reduce the future
population
of that group, thereby making it unviable in that area. Of course, you
might
want to kill them to prevent their killing you in the future, but the
court
knows Serb psychology better-that couldn't be the sole reason, there must
have been a more sinister aim. The Tribunal reasoning holds forth the
possibility that with only a little prosecution-friendly judicial
psychologizing any case of killing enemy soldiers can be designated
genocide.
There is also the problem of definition of the group. Were the Serbs
trying to eliminate all the Muslims in Bosnia, or Muslims globally? Or
just
in Srebrenica? The judges suggested that pushing them out of the
Srebrenica
area was itself genocide, and they essentially equated genocide with
ethnic
cleansing. [55] It is notable that the ICTY has never called the Croat
ethnic cleansing of 250,000 Krajina Serbs "genocide" although in that
case
many women and children were killed and the ethnic cleansing applied to a
larger area and larger victim population than in Srebrenica. [56] (On
August 10, 1995, Madeleine Albright cried out to the Security Council that
"as many as 13,000 men, women and children were driven from their
homes" in
Srebrenica.) [57] Perhaps the ICTY had accepted Richard Holbrooke's
comic
designation of Krajina as a case of "involuntary expulsions." [58] The
bias is blatant; the politicization of a purported judicial
enterprise is
extreme.
Media treatment of the Srebrenica and Krajina cases followed the same
pattern and illustrates well how the media make some victims worthy and
others unworthy in accord with a political agenda. With the Serbs their
government's target, and their government actively aiding the massive
Croat
ethnic cleansing program in Krajina, the media gave huge and indignant
treatment to the first, with invidious language, calls for action, and
little context. With Krajina, attention was slight and passing,
indignation
was absent, detailed reporting on the condition of the victims was
minimal,
descriptive language was neutral, and there was context offered that made
the events understandable. The contrast is so gross as to be droll: the
attack on Srebrenica "chilling," "murderous," "savagery," "cold-blooded
killing," "genocidal," "aggression,"and of course "ethnic cleansing."
With
Krajina, the media used no such strong language-even ethnic cleansing was
too much for them. The Croat assault was merely a big "upheaval" that is
"softening up the enemy," "a lightning offensive," explained away as a
"response to Srebrenica" and a result of Serb leaders "overplaying their
hand." The Washington Post even cited U.S. Ambassador to Croatia Peter
Galbraith saying the "the Serb exodus was not 'ethnic cleansing'."
[59] The
paper does not allow a challenge to that judgment. In fact, however, the
Croat operations in Krajina left Croatia as the most ethnically
purified of
all the former components of the former Yugoslavia, although the NATO
occupation of Kosovo has allowed an Albanian ethnic cleansing that is
rivalling that of Croatia in ethnic purification.
Another anomaly in the Srebrenica case is the insistence on bringing all
the criminals (Serb) to trial and getting the willing executioners
(Serb) to
admit guilt as necessary for justice and essential for reconciliation. A
problem is that justice cannot be one-sided or it ceases to be
justice, and
shows its true face as vengeance and a cover for other political ends.
Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was by no means one-sided, and deaths by
nationality were not far off from population proportionality; [60] the
Serbs
claim and have documented thousands of deaths at the hands of the
Bosnian
Muslims and their imported Mujahedin cadres, and by the Croatians, and
they
have their own group examining and trying to identify bodies at an
estimated
73 mass graves. [61] This victimization has hardly been noticed by the
Western media or ICTY-the distinguished Yugoslav forensic expert Dr. Zoran
Stankovic observed back in 1996 that "the fact that his team had
previously
identified the bodies of 1,000 Bosnian Serbs in the [Srebrenica]
region had
not interested prosecutor Richard Goldstone." [62] Instead, there is a
steady refrain about the Serbs tendency to whine, whereas Bosnian Muslim
complaints are taken as those of true victims and are never designated
whining.
Rather than producing reconciliation the steady focus on Srebrenica
victims and killers makes for more intense hatred and nationalism, just as
the Kosovo war and its violence exacerbated hatred and tensions there and
showed that Clinton's claimed objective of a tolerant multi-ethnic Kosovo
was a fraud. In Kosovo, this one-sided propaganda and NATO control has
unleashed serious and unremitting anti-Serb-along with anti-Roma,
anti-Turk,
anti-dissident-Albanian-- violence, helped along by the willingness of the
NATO authorities to look the other way as their allies-the purported
victims-take their revenge and pursue their long-standing aim of ethnic
purification. [63] In Bosnia and Serbia the Serbs have been under steady
attack, humiliated, and their leaders and military personnel punished,
while the criminals among the Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and NATO powers
(e.g., Clinton, Blair, Albright, Holbrooke) suffer no penalties [64]
and may
even be portrayed as dispensers of justice (Clinton et al.).
.
It is clear that the objectives of the retribution-pushers are not
justice and reconciliation-they are to unify and strengthen the
position of
the Bosnian Muslims, to crush the Republica Srpska, and possibly even
eliminate it as an independent entity in Bosnia, to keep Serbia
disorganized, weak and dependent on the West, and to continue to put the
U.S. and NATO attack and dismantlement of Yugoslavia in a favorable light.
The last objective requires diverting attention from the Clinton/Bosnian
Muslim role in giving Al Qaeda a foothold in the Balkans, Izetbegovic's
close alliance with Osama bin Laden, his Islamic Declaration declaring
hostility to a multi-ethnic state, [65] the importation of 4,000
Mujahaden
to fight a holy war in Bosnia, with active Clinton administration aid, and
the KLA-Al Qaeda connection.
These aspects of the siding with the Bosnian Muslims have always been
awkward for the war propagandists, and they became more so after 9/11-the
U.S. 9/11 Commission Report claims that two of the 19 hijackers, Nawaf al
Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar, and a "mastermind" of the attack, Khalid
Sheikh
Mohammed, "fought" in Bosnia, and that bin Laden had "service" offices in
Zagreb and Sarajevo. [66] Despite the huge focus on 9/11 and Al Qaeda
these
links have not been featured in the mainstream media and have not
influenced
Bosnian proconsul Paddy Ashdown, who attended Izetbegovic's funeral and
continues to push Bosnian Muslim interests. The Serbs, of course, were
complaining about the brutality (and beheadings) of the Mujahaden in
1993,
but the media and ICTY were not interested then and remain uninterested.
Let's just talk about Srebrenica, the Bosnian Muslims as unique
victims, and
Clinton's and the West's generous if belated service to those victimized
underdogs.
But didn't the Bosnian Serbs "confess" that they had murdered 8,000
civilians? This has been the take of the Western media, but again
demonstrating their subservience to their leaders' political agenda. The
Bosnian Serbs actually did put out a report on Srebrenica in September
2002,
[67] but this report was rejected by Paddy Ashdown for failing to come up
with the proper conclusions. He therefore forced a further report by
firing
a stream of Republica Srpska politicians and analysts, threatening the RS
government, and eventually extracting a report prepared by people who
would
come to the officially approved conclusions. [68] This report, issued on
June 11, 2004, was then greeted in the Western media as a meaningful
validation of the official line-the refrain was, the Bosnian Serbs "admit"
the massacre, which should finally settle any questions. Amusingly, even
this coerced and imposed report didn't come near acknowledging 8,000
executions (it speaks of "several thousand" executions). What this episode
"proves" is that the Western campaign to make the defeated Serbia
grovel is
not yet terminated, and the media's continuing gullibility and propaganda
service.
Conclusion
The "Srebrenica massacre" is the greatest triumph of propaganda to emerge
from the Balkan wars. Other claims and outright lies have played
their role
in the Balkan conflicts, but while some have retained a modest place
in the
propaganda repertoire despite challenge (Racak, the Markale massacre, the
Serb refusal to negotiate at Rambouillet, 250,000 Bosnian dead, the
aim of a
Greater Serbia as the driving force in the Balkan wars), [69] the
Srebrenica
massacre reigns supreme for symbolic power. It is the symbol of Serb evil
and Bosnian Muslim victimhood, and the justice of the Western
dismantling of
Yugoslavia and intervention there at many levels, including a bombing war
and colonial occupations of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo.
But the link of this propaganda triumph to truth and justice is
non-existent. The disconnection with truth is epitomized by the fact that
the original estimate of 8,000, including 5,000 "missing"--who had left
Srebrenica for Bosnian Muslim lines-was maintained even after it had been
quickly established that several thousand had reached those lines and that
several thousand more had perished in battle. This nice round number lives
on today in the face of a failure to find the executed bodies and
despite
the absence of a single satellite photo showing executions, bodies,
digging, or trucks transporting bodies for reburial. The media have
carefully refrained from asking questions on this point, despite
Albright's
August 1995 promise that "We will be watching."
That Albright statement, and the photos she did display at the time,
helped divert attention from the ongoing "Krajina massacre" of Serbs in
Croatian Krajina, an ethnic cleansing process of great brutality and
wider
scope than that at Srebrenica, in which there was less real fighting
than at
Srebrenica, mainly attacks on and the killing and removal of defenseless
civilians. At Srebrenica the Bosnian Serbs moved women and children to
safety, and there is no evidence of any of them being murdered; [70]
whereas in Krajina there was no such separation and an estimated 368 women
and children were killed, along with many too old and infirm to flee. [71]
One measure of the propaganda success of the "Srebrenica massacre" is
that
the possibility that the intense focus on the Srebrenica massacre was
serving as a cover for the immediately following "Krajina massacre,"
supported by the United States, was outside the orbit of thought of the
media. For the media, Srebrenica helped bring about Krajina, and the Serbs
had it coming. [72]
The media have played an important role in making the Srebrenica massacre
a propaganda triumph. As noted earlier, the media had become a
co-belligerent by 1991, and all standards of objectivity disappeared in
their subservience to the pro-Bosnian Muslim and anti-Serb agenda.
Describing the reporting of Christine Amanpour and others on a battle
around
Gorazde, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel John Sray wrote back in October 1995
that these news reports "were devoid of any semblance of truth," that
Americans were suffering from "a cornucopia of disinformation," that
"America has not been so pathetically deceived" since the Vietnam War, and
that popular perceptions of Bosnia "have been forged by a prolific
propaganda machine..[that has] managed to manipulate illusions to further
Muslim goals." [73]
That propaganda machine also conquered the liberals and much of the left
in the United States, who swallowed the dominant narrative of the evil
Serbs seeking hegemony, employing uniquely brutal and genocidal
strategies,
and upsetting a previous multi-cultural haven in Bosnia-run by Osama bin
Laden's friend and ally Alija Izetbegovic, and with rectification brought
belatedly by Clinton, Holbrooke and Albright working closely with Iran,
Turkey and Saudi Arabia! The liberal/left war coalition needed to
find the
Serbs demons in order to justify imperial warfare, and they did so by
accepting and internalizing a set of lies and myths that make up the
dominant narrative. [74] This liberal/"cruise missile left" (CML)
combo was
important in helping develop the "humanitarian intervention" rationale for
attacking Serbia on behalf of the Kosovo Liberation Army, and in fact
preparing the ground for Bush's eventual basing of his own wars on the
quest
for "liberation." [75] The Srebrenica massacre helped make the
liberals and
CML true believers in the crusade in the Balkans and gave moral backup to
their servicing the expanding imperial role of their country and its
allies.
Former UN official Cedric Thornberry, writing in 1996, noted that
"prominently in parts of the international liberal media" the position is
"that the Serbs were the only villains," and back at UN headquarters
in the
spring of 1993 he was warned: "Take cover-the fix is on." [76] The
fix was
on, even if only tacit and built-in to the government-media-Tribunal
relationship. It helped make the Srebrenica massacre the symbol of evil
and, with the help of Tribunal "justice," and support of liberals
and CML,
provided a cover for the U.S.-NATO attack on and dismantling of
Yugoslavia, colonial occupations in Bosnia and Kosovo, and
justification for
"humanitarian intervention" more broadly. What more could be asked of a
propaganda system?
Notes:
*This paper is partly drawn from and cites chapters in a forthcoming book
on the Srebrenica massacre, Srebrenica: The Politics of War Crimes,
written
by George Bogdanich, Tim Fenton, Philip Hammond, Edward S. Herman,
Michael
Mandel, Jonathan Rooper, and George Szamuely. This book is referred to in
the notes below as Politics of War Crimes. The author and his colleagues
are indebted to Diana Johnstone, David Peterson, Vera Vratusa-Zunjic,
Milan
Bulajic, Milivoje Ivanisevic, Konstantin Kilibarda, and George
Pumphrey for
advice. Johnstone's Fools Crusade is a fine basic statement of an
alternative perspective on the Balkan Wars; George Pumphrey's "Srebrenica:
Three Years Later, And Still Searching," is a classic critique of the
establishment Srebrenica massacre narrative and repeatedly hit the target
with facts and analyses still not rebutted.
1. "Bosnia: 2 Officials Dismissed for Obstructing Srebrenica Inquiry," AP
Report, New York Times, April 17, 2004; Marlise Simons, "Bosnian Serb
Leader
Taken Before War Crimes Tribunal," New York Times, April 8, 2000; UN, The
Fall of Srebrenica (A/54/549), Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to
General Assembly resolution 53/35, November 15, 1999, par. 506
(http://www.un.org/News/ossg/srebrenica.pdf )
2. See Ivo Pukanic, "US Role In Storm: Thrilled With Operation Flash,
President Clinton Gave the Go Ahead to Operation Storm," Nacional
(Zagreb),
May 24, 2005.
3. Barton Gellman, "The Path to Crisis: How the United States and Its
Allies Went to War," Washington Post, April 18, 1999
4. "Some surviving members of the Srebrenica delegation have stated that
President Izetbegovic also told that he had learned that a NATO
intervention
in Bosnia and Herzegovina was possible, but could occur only if the Serbs
were to break into Srebrenica, killing at least 5,000 of its people.
President Izetbegovic has flatly denied making such a statement." The Fall
of Srebrenica (A/54/549), Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to
General Assembly resolution 53/35, November 15, 1999, par. 115,
(http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/reports/UNsrebrenicareport.htm)
The UN report does not mention that there were nine others present
at that
meeting, and that one of them, Hakija Meholijic, former Srebrenica
chief of
police, has stated that eight of them (all those living) "can confirm" the
Clinton suggestion. (Dani, June 22, 1998:
http://cdsp.neu.edu/info/students/marko/dani/dani2.html)
5. Politics of War Crimes, Bogdanich, chapter 2, "Prelude to Capture,"
and Fenton, chapter 3, "Military Context." See also Tim Ripley, Operation
Deliberate Force (Center for Defence and Security Studies: 1999), p. 145.
6. In his Balkan Odyssey, Lord David Owen stated that "By acquiescing in
the Croatian government's seizure of Western Slavonia, the Contact
Group had
in effect given the green light to the Bosnian Serbs to attack Srebrenica
and Zepa" (pp. 199-200). Owen was mistaken; the Contact Group was serving
one side only, and the media's failure to report on and criticize the
approved aggression made it possible to present the takeover of Srebrenica
as a unique and unprovoked evil.
7. Veritas estimated that 1,205 civilians were killed in Operation Storm,
including 358 women and 10 children. In the graves around Srebrenica
through
1999, among the 1,895 bodies only one was identified as female. See
"Croatian Serb Exodus Commemorated," Agence France Press, Aug. 4, 2004;
also, Veritas at www.veritas.org.yu.
8. Ripley, Operation Deliberate Force, p. 192. See also footnotes 56 and
70.
9. The co-belligerency role was described by Peter Brock in "Dateline
Yugoslavia: The Partisan Press," Foreign Policy, Winter 1993-94. A
forthcoming book by Brock, on Media Cleansing: UNcovering Yugoslavia's
Civil
Wars, shows this partisanship in greater and effective detail. In his
autobiography, U. S. Secretary of State James Baker says that he
instructed
his press secretary, Margaret Tutweiler to help Bosnian Foreign Minister
Haris Silajdzic utilize the Western media to further the Bosnian Muslim
cause, noting that he "had her talk to her contacts at the four television
networks, the Washington Post and the New York Times." James A. Baker, The
Politics of Diplomacy (Putnam: 1995), pp. 643-4.
10. As NATO PR spokesman Jamie Shea stated on May 16, 1999, when asked
about NATO's vulnerability to Tribunal charges, he was not worried. The
prosecutor, he said, will start her investigation "because we will
allow her
to." Further, "NATO countries are those that have provided the
finance," and
on the need to build a second chamber "so that prosecutions can be speeded
up...we and the Tribunal are all one on this, we want to see war criminals
brought to justice." http://www.nato.int/kosovo/press/p990516b.htm
See Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder (London: Pluto,
2004), chaps. 4-5; Edward Herman, "The Milosevic Trial, Part 1," Z
Magazine,
April 2002.
11. See Politics of War Crimes, chap. 7, Bogdanich, "UN Report on
Srebrenica-A distorted Picture of Events."
12. Raymond K. Kent, "Contextualizing Hate: The Hague Tribunal, the
Clinton Administration and the Serbs," Dialogue (Paris), v. 5, no. 20,
December, 1996 (as posted to the Emperor's Clothes website,
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/misc/kent.htm)
13. Carl Savitch, "Celebici,"
http://www.serbianna.com/columns/savich/047.shtml.
14. It would be hard to surpass the savagery of the Bosnian Muslims at
the Celebici camp, described in ibid. See also, Diana Johnstone, Fools'
Crusade (Pluto: 2002), pp. 71-72.
15. See the two works by Peter Brock, note 9 above; also Johnstone, Fools'
Crusade, pp. 70-83.
16. For details and citations see Brock's article and book (note 9 above).
17. Bernard Kouchner, Les Guerriers de la Paix (Paris: Grasset, 2004),
pp. 372-4.
18. Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, pp, 72-73; Thomas Deichmann,
"Misinformation: TV Coverage of a Bosnian Camp," Covert Action Quarterly,
Fall, 1998, pp. 52-55.
19. In a private communication dated November 21, 2003.
20. For a good summary of the case that these were "Self-Inflicted
Atrocities," with further references, see the Senate Staff Report of
January
16, 1997, on "Clinton Approved Iranian Arms Transfers Help Turn Bosnia
Into
Militant Islamic Base,"
http://www.senate.gov/%7erpc/releases/1997/iran.htm#top. See also Cees
Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia, 1992 - 1995, London: Lit
Verlag,
2003, pp. 68-69:
http://213.222.3.5/srebrenica/toc/p6_c02_s004_b01.html ).
21. John E. Sray, "Selling the Bosnian Myth to America: Buyer Beware,"
Foreign Military Studies, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, October, 1995,
<http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents/bosnia2.htm>.
22. For exceptions to this rule, Leonard Doyle, "Muslims 'slaughter their
own people.'" The Independent, Aug. 22, 1992; Hugh Manners, "Serbs 'Not
Guilty' of Massacre," The Sunday Times [London], Oct. 1, 1995. David
Binder
was unable to get his own paper, the New York Times, to publish
analyses of
possible Muslim involvement in Sarajevo massacres; he had to publish these
elsewhere. See David Binder, "The Balkan Tragedy: Anatomy of a Massacre,"
Foreign Policy, No. 97, Winter, 1994-1995; David Binder, "Bosnia's
Bombers,"
The Nation, October 2, 1995
23. For a good summary, Srdja Trifkovic, "Une spectaculaire revision de
chiffres," Balkan Infos (B.I.), February 2005.
24. George Kenney, "The Bosnian Calculation," New York Times Magazine,
April 23, 1995.
25. See Trifkovic, supra note 23; also,
http://grayfalcon.blogspot.com/2004/12/death-tolls-part-3.html.
26. See Edward Herman and David Peterson, "The NATO-Media Lie Machine:
'Genocide' in Kosovo," Z Magazine, May 2000:
http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/hermanmay2000.htm
27. Michael Ignatieff, "Counting Bodies in Kosovo," New York Times,
November 21, 1999.
28. Politics of War Crimes, Bogdanovich, chap. 2, "Prelude to Capture."
29. Detailed evidence was presented to the UN on "War Crimes and Crimes
of Genocide in Eastern Bosnia (Communes of Bratunac Skelani, and
Srebrenica)
Committed Against the Serbian Population from April 1982 to April
1993," by
the Yugoslav Ambassador to the UN; see also Joan Phillips, "Victims and
Villains in Bosnia's War," Southern Slav Journal, Spring-Summer 1992.
30. Bill Schiller, "Muslims' hero vows he'll fight to the last man,"
Toronto Star, January 31, 1994; John Pomfret, "Weapons, Cash and Chaos
Lend
Clout to Srebrenica's Tough Guy," Washington Post, February 16, 1994.
31. Carl Savich, "Srebrenica and Naser Oric: An Analysis of General
Philippe Morillon's Testimony at the ICTY," http:/www.serbianna.co.
32. "No Evidence of Civilian Casualties in Operations By Bosnian
Commander," BBC Monitoring International Reports, April 11, 2003; for a
review of Oric's operations and a critical analysis of the ICTY decision,
Carl Savitch, "Srebrenica: The Untold Story,"
http://www.serbianna.com/columns/savich/o51.html.
33. Politics of War Crimes, chaps 2-3. The UN estimated that there had
been 3-4,000 Bosnian Muslim soldiers in Srebrenica just before its fall.
34. Ibid.
35. Politics of War Crimes, chap. 2.
36. "Conflict in the Balkans, 8000 Muslims Missing," AP, New York Times,
Sept. 15, 1995.
37. One Red Cross official told a German interviewer that the Muslims
who reached safety "cannot be removed from the list of
missing..because we
have not received their names," quoted in Pumphrey, "Srebrenica: Three
Years
Later, And Still Searching." See also, "Former Yugoslavia: Srebrenica:
help
for families still awaiting news," International Committee of the Red
Cross,
September 13, 1995
http://www.icrc.org/Web/Eng/siteeng0.nsf/iwpList74/7609D560283849CFC1256B6600595006
38. Ibid.
39. Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, p. 76.
40. This jump from a few bodies to 8,000 was recently illustrated in the
treatment by Tim Judah and Daniel Sunter in the London Observer of the
video
of six killings of Bosnian Muslims, given heavy publicity in June 2005-it
is the "smoking gun, the final, incontrovertible proof of Serbia's part in
the Srebrenica massacres in which more than 7,500 Bosnian Muslim men and
boys were murdered." ("How the video that put Serbia in dock was
brought to
light," June 5).
.
41. ICTY, Amended Joinder Indictment, May 27, 2002, Par. 51:
http://www.un.org/icty/indictment/english/nik-ai020527c.htm.; David Rohde,
"The World Five Years Later: The Battle of Srebrenica Is Now Over The
Truth," New York Times, July 9, 2000.
42. Steven Lee Meyers, "Making Sure War Crimes Aren't Forgotten," New York
Times, September 22, 1997. In fact, one U.S. official acknowledged in
late
July 1995 that "satellites have produced nothing." Paul Quinn-Judge,
"Reports of Atrocities Unconfirmed So Far: U.S. Aerial Surveillance
Reveals
Little," Boston Globe, July 27, 1995.
43. The web site of the International Commission on Missing Persons in the
Former Yugoslavia acknowledges that the bodies "have been exhumed from
various gravesites in northeast HiH," not just in the Srebrenica region;
quoted in a 2003 Statement by ICMP Chief of Staff Concerning Persons
Reported Missing from Srebrenica in July 1995, Gordon Bacon.
44. Politics of War Crimes, Rooper, chap. 4, "The Numbers Game."
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.; also, Politics of War Crimes, Szamuely, chap. 5, "Witness
Evidence."
47. Szamuely, "Witness Evidence."
48. Tim Butcher, "Serb Atrocities in Srebrenica are Unproven," The Daily
Telegraph, July 24, 1995.
49. Politics of War Crimes, Rooper, chap. 4, "The Numbers Game."
50. This claim appears in the November 1995 indictments of Radovan
Karadzic and Ratko Mladic; it was recounted by the French policeman,
Jean-Rene Ruez, and first surfaced at the ICTY in early July, 1996,
during a
seven-day publicity-stunt-type hearing into the charges against
Karadzic and
Mladic. As Associated Press reported Ruez's liver-eating testimony at the
time (Jennifer Chao, July 3, 1996):
"Amid the feverish mass murder was throat-gagging sadism. Ruez cited an
incident where a soldier forced a man to cut open his grandson's
stomach and
eat part of his liver. "He took the old man and put a knife in his
hand ...
and cut open the stomach of the little boy and then with the tip of his
knife took out an organ from the inside of the child's stomach and he
forced
the man to eat that part,' Ruez told the court."
51. Politics of War Crimes, Mandel, chap. 6, "The ICTY Calls It
'Genocide'."
52. Ibid.
53. Chris Hedges, "Bosnian Troops Cite Gassing At Zepa," New York Times,
July 27, 1995.
54. Jovic testified in the Milosevic trial on November 18,
2003-www.slobodan-milosevic.org- November 18, 2003.
55. Politics of War Crimes, Mandel, chap. 6; also, Michael Mandel, How
America Gets Away With Murder (Pluto: 2004), pp. 157-8.
56. Carlos Martins Branco, a former UN military observer in Bosnia,
contended that it was in Krajina rather than Srebrenica that one can
identify a pre-meditated genocidal process "when the Croatian army
implemented the mass murder of all Serbians found there. In this instance,
the media maintained an absolute silence, despite the fact that this
genocide occurred over a three month period. The objective of
Srebrenica was
ethnic cleansing and not genocide, unlike what happened in Krajina, in
which, although there was not military action, the Croatian army decimated
villages." "Was Srebrenica A Hoax? Eye-Witness Account of a Former UN
Military Observer in Bosnia,"
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/BRA403A.html
57. Madeleine Albright, again before the Security Council (The Situation
in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (S/PV.3564), UN Security
Council,
August 10, 1995, 5.30 p.m., pp. 6-7):
58. Richard Holbrooke, on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, Transcript #5300,
August 24, 1995.
59. "U.N. Report: Bosnian Serbs Massacred Srebrenica Muslims," Washington
Post, Aug. 12, 1995; John Pomfret, "Investigators Begin Exhuming Group of
Mass Graves in Bosnia," Washington Post, July 8, 1996. Biggest
"upheaval" is
in "Softening Up The Enemy," Newsweek, Aug. 21, 1995.
60. See the evidence drawn from the Norwegian study of Bosnia casualties
in: http://grayfalcon.blogspot.com/2004/12/death-tolls-part-3.html.
61. Slavisa Sabijic, "The Trade in Bodies in Bosnia-Herzegovina":
http://www.serbianna.com/press/010.html; Joan Phillips, "Victims and
Villains in Bosnia's War," Southern Slav Journal, Spring-Summer 1992.
62. "Yugoslav Forensic Expert Says No Proof About Srebrenica Mass Grave,"
BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, July 15, 1996.
63. Kosta Christitch, "Les veritable raisons d'une faillite," B.I., March
2005. As Diana Johnstone has said, "by endorsing every accusation against
Serbs, and ignoring crimes against Serbs, the United States and its NATO
allies have given carte blanche to violence against them. Ethnic Albanian
children are growing up in the belief that nobody really blames them for
hunting down elderly 'Skrinje' (the ethnic slur for Serbs) and beating
them
to death." "The OSCE Report: Things Told and Things Seen," ZNet
Commentary,
Dec. 26, 1999.
64. There have been a modest number of exceptions, mainly Muslim and Croat
small fry, usually indicted at a time when the imbalance appeared
exceptionally gross and some PR offset was needed. None of the leaders of
Croatia or Bosnia were indicted, although it was alleged that indictments
were near soon after Tudjman's and Izetbegovic's deaths, although the long
delays were never explained. No leader or anybody else in NATO was ever
indicted. For a good discussion of the deep bias, Mandel, How America Gets
Away With Murder, Part II.
65. In his 1970 Islamic Declaration, never repudiated by him, Izetbegovic
said: "There is neither peace nor coexistence between the 'Islamic
religion'
and non-Islamic social and political institutions. Having the right to
govern
its own world, Islam clearly excludes the right and possibility of
putting a
foreign ideology into practice on its territory." Quoted in Johnstone,
Fools' Crusade, p. 58.
66. The 9/11 Commission Report, Final Report of the National Commission on
Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Official Government Edition, pp.
58, 146-147, 155, 238-239.
67. Documentation Centre of Republic of Srpska, Report About Case
Srebrenica (The First Part), (Banja Luka, Sept. 2002).
68. Gregory Copley, "US Official Implicated With Bosnian High
Representative Ashdown in Attempting to Force Fabricated Report on
Srebrenica," Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily, September 8, 2003:
http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/ssi09082003.htm; Nebojsa Malic,
"Srebrenica Revisited: Reports, Confessions and the Elusive Truth,"
Antiwar.com, June 24, 2004:
http://antiwar.com/malic/?articleid=2865
69. On the fallacies of the claims regarding Racak, Rambouillet and the
Serb drive for a Greater Serbia as a reality and causal force, see
Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, and Mandel, How America Gets Away with Murder.
70. Only one body found around Srebrenica in the graves explored through
1999 was identified as female.
71. See note 7 above. Tim Ripley says that "Thousands of people, those too
old or infirm to flee,.remained behind. UN patrols soon found
hundreds had
been murdered by Croat soldiers and civilians. Almost every home had been
looted." (p. 192).
72. Serb refugees in Srebrenica in 1997 are explained as "coming from
neighborhoods elsewhere that Croat and Muslim armies emptied in
retaliation
for the Srebrenica atrocities and other such killings." Dana Priest, "U.S.
Troops Extend a Hand To Refugees Tainted by War," Washington Post,
Feb. 18,
1997.
73. Sray, "Selling the Bosnian Myth."
74. For an account and critique of these humanitarian interventionists,
see Edward Herman and David Peterson, "Morality's Avenging Angels: The New
Humanitarian Crusaders," in David Chandler, ed., Rethinking Human Rights
(Palgrave: 2002). For a more extensive dismantling of their arguments, see
Johnstone's Fools' Crusade and Mandel's How America Gets Away With Murder.
75. On the meaning and application of "cruise missile left" (my phrase),
see my "The Cruise Missile Left: Aligning with Power," Z Magazine,
November,
2002; and "The Cruise Missile Left (part 5): Samantha Power And The
Genocide
Gambit," ZNet Commentaries, May 17, 2004.
76. Cedric Thornberry, "Saving the War Crimes Tribunal; Bosnia
Herzegovina," Foreign Policy, September 1996.
--- End forwarded message ---
Londra. Ancora una volta i morti sono nostri ma la guerra è la vostra.
Comunicato del Comitato per il ritiro dei militari italiani dall'Iraq
Gli attentati che hanno sconvolto Londra - come quelli dell'11 marzo a
Madrid - hanno colpito la popolazione civile della capitale inglese
mentre in Gran Bretagna era in corso il vertice delle otto principali
potenze del mondo. Colpire i civili è indubbiamente un atto
terroristico, ma a nessuno ormai può sfuggire come queste operazioni
vengano concepite dai loro ideatori, esecutori e interlocutori nel sud
del mondo, come un'azione di guerra simmetrica a quelle messe in atto
dalle potenze occidentali in Iraq, Afganistan, Palestina. In questo
senso vogliamo esprimere la nostra solidarietà con tutti i
civili vittime di questa guerra.
Con questi attentati la guerra sta entrando drammaticamente nella vita
quotidiana e nelle case delle popolazioni di quegli Stati che
partecipano alla guerra preventiva, all'occupazione e all'oppressione
di altri popoli e paesi. Dopo gli attentati dell'11 marzo, a Madrid la
gente scese in piazza con uno striscione coraggioso e di grande
chiarezza: "Nostri sono i morti, vostra è la guerra". Quella parola
d'ordine è stata la lapide di un governo reazionario e filo USA come
quello Aznar che aveva voluto essere parte a tutti i costi della
coalizione politico-militare che aveva invaso illegalmente e
ingiustamente l'Iraq in contrasto con la maggioranza della popolazione
spagnola.
E' tempo che anche il governo Berlusconi sia costretto a prendere la
decisione dovuta. La maggioranza sociale del nostro paese vuole che le
truppe italiane in Iraq vengano ritirate e che l'Italia venga
sottratta alla guerra e alle sue conseguenze. Il governo - al
contrario - continua a far finta di niente ed a gestire il
coinvolgimento dell'Italia nella guerra e nell'occupazione di Iraq e
Afganistan come normale amministrazione. Fino ad oggi ha potuto
contare sulla riluttanza della gran parte dell'opposizione ad
ingaggiare una seria battaglia per il ritiro delle truppe.
Gli attentati di Londra dimostrano al governo e al centro-sinistra che
non c'è più molto tempo per prendere la decisione giusta: ritirare le
truppe dall'Iraq e mettere fine alla complicità dell'Italia con la
guerra. Le conseguenze delle loro scelte oggi sono drammatiche solo
per i cittadini iracheni, domani potrebbero diventarle anche per
quelli italiani. I morti sarebbero ancora una volta i nostri ma la
responsabilità della guerra sarebbe tutta loro.
(per contatti: cpiano@ tiscali.it)
MADRID, LONDRA...L'ALIBI DEL TERRORISMO ISLAMICO NON E' PIU' CONVINCENTE
Editoriale Radio Citta Aperta del 07 Luglio 2005
http://www.radiocittaperta.it
A Londra nella mattinata di oggi abbiamo visto ripetersi lo scenario
raccapricciante che avevamo visto l'11 marzo dello scorso anno a
Madrid. Lì erano stati colpiti i treni, a Londra una serie di bombe
sincronizzate sono esplose sulla metropolitana e su alcuni autobus
della capitale inglese seminando, con un attentato "diffuso", decine
di morti e feriti tra la popolazione civile. Il cuore di uno degli
otto paesi più potenti della terra riuniti nel loro vertice annuale in
Gran Bretagna, è stato così oggetto di una devastante incursione
terroristica.
Una operazione di tale portata - come quella dell'11 marzo a Madrid -
non si improvvisa nè può essere messa in piedi da una rete
terroristica che non sia fortemente centralizzata e organizzata nè
priva di una visione politica e mediatica estremamente sofisticata.
Viene colpita la società più che gli uomini o i simboli del potere
proprio perchè il terrore moderno fonda la sua efficacia sulla
pervasività sociale dei suoi effetti. E' una scala di valutazioni e
operazioni completamente diversa da quella con cui eravamo abituati a
fare i conti anche noi in Italia, che pure con le bombe sui treni,
nelle stazioni o nelle piazze abbiamo dovuto condividere le pagine
peggiori della nostra storia recente. Si spara nel mucchio ma con
obiettivi mirati. Si colpisce scientificamente a casaccio - tra i
pendolari madrileni o londinesi - ma si colpisce dentro un calendario
politico ben preciso: dalla vigilia delle elezioni in Spagna
all'apertura di un conflittuale vertice del G8 a Londra.
Di fronte a questo le reazioni delle potenze riunite al G8 di
Gleneagles non nascondono una voglia di vendetta che è del tutto
speculare alla rivelazione della loro vulnerabilità politica,
mediatica, sociale.
E' ormai evidente che il cosiddetto "terrorismo islamico" è un
paravento del tutto inadeguato e screditato per spiegare tutto questo
e per indicare il nemico "all'ira dei giusti".
I governi delle otto potenze riunite in Scozia sanno ormai benissimo
di aver scatenato e essere pienamente coinvolti in una guerra di cui
hanno completamente sottovalutato le conseguenze. Hanno occupato
spietatamente l'Afganistan e l'Iraq convinti di poter usare la
sindrome islamica per gestire una operazione coloniale tradizionale,
ma stanno verificando come la asimmetria della guerra preventiva
(paesi potenti contro paesi deboli) sta trovando sulla sua strada un
competitore globale che conosce le regole della guerra moderna ed è
disposto ad utilizzarle senza scrupoli. Nelle cucciolate dei rampolli
allevati dalle petromonarchie, che hanno studiato nei migliori
colleges americani ed europei, che hanno imparato a conoscere usi,
consumi e incubi delle società occidentali, che maneggiano con
maestria i mass media e le nuove tecnologie, è cresciuto un polo
competitivo contro Stati Uniti e le potenze loro alleate.
Non possiamo più nasconderci come gli attentati dell'11 settembre,
quelli dell'11 marzo e quelli di oggi a Londra, vengano vissuti
diversamente nei vari quadranti del mondo. Provocano terrore, odio e
costernazione nei nostri paesi ma possono provocare sensazioni di
onnipotenza in altre aree che del nostro mondo hanno visto anche le
responsabilità nel mattatoio palestinese, di Falluja, della complicità
con regimi e monarchie corrotte e feroci.
Lo schema di lettura della realtà internazionale del terzo millennio
da parte di Bush, Blair, Chirac, Berlusconi, appare ormai del tutto
inadeguata e rischia di travolgere nel dramma l'umanità. Prima li
costringiamo ad esserne consapevoli, meglio sarà per tutti; a
cominciare dal ritiro delle truppe e dalla cessazione dell'occupazione
dell'Iraq.
Mail: cpiano@ tiscali.it
Sito : http://www.contropiano.org
Comunicato del Comitato per il ritiro dei militari italiani dall'Iraq
Gli attentati che hanno sconvolto Londra - come quelli dell'11 marzo a
Madrid - hanno colpito la popolazione civile della capitale inglese
mentre in Gran Bretagna era in corso il vertice delle otto principali
potenze del mondo. Colpire i civili è indubbiamente un atto
terroristico, ma a nessuno ormai può sfuggire come queste operazioni
vengano concepite dai loro ideatori, esecutori e interlocutori nel sud
del mondo, come un'azione di guerra simmetrica a quelle messe in atto
dalle potenze occidentali in Iraq, Afganistan, Palestina. In questo
senso vogliamo esprimere la nostra solidarietà con tutti i
civili vittime di questa guerra.
Con questi attentati la guerra sta entrando drammaticamente nella vita
quotidiana e nelle case delle popolazioni di quegli Stati che
partecipano alla guerra preventiva, all'occupazione e all'oppressione
di altri popoli e paesi. Dopo gli attentati dell'11 marzo, a Madrid la
gente scese in piazza con uno striscione coraggioso e di grande
chiarezza: "Nostri sono i morti, vostra è la guerra". Quella parola
d'ordine è stata la lapide di un governo reazionario e filo USA come
quello Aznar che aveva voluto essere parte a tutti i costi della
coalizione politico-militare che aveva invaso illegalmente e
ingiustamente l'Iraq in contrasto con la maggioranza della popolazione
spagnola.
E' tempo che anche il governo Berlusconi sia costretto a prendere la
decisione dovuta. La maggioranza sociale del nostro paese vuole che le
truppe italiane in Iraq vengano ritirate e che l'Italia venga
sottratta alla guerra e alle sue conseguenze. Il governo - al
contrario - continua a far finta di niente ed a gestire il
coinvolgimento dell'Italia nella guerra e nell'occupazione di Iraq e
Afganistan come normale amministrazione. Fino ad oggi ha potuto
contare sulla riluttanza della gran parte dell'opposizione ad
ingaggiare una seria battaglia per il ritiro delle truppe.
Gli attentati di Londra dimostrano al governo e al centro-sinistra che
non c'è più molto tempo per prendere la decisione giusta: ritirare le
truppe dall'Iraq e mettere fine alla complicità dell'Italia con la
guerra. Le conseguenze delle loro scelte oggi sono drammatiche solo
per i cittadini iracheni, domani potrebbero diventarle anche per
quelli italiani. I morti sarebbero ancora una volta i nostri ma la
responsabilità della guerra sarebbe tutta loro.
(per contatti: cpiano@ tiscali.it)
MADRID, LONDRA...L'ALIBI DEL TERRORISMO ISLAMICO NON E' PIU' CONVINCENTE
Editoriale Radio Citta Aperta del 07 Luglio 2005
http://www.radiocittaperta.it
A Londra nella mattinata di oggi abbiamo visto ripetersi lo scenario
raccapricciante che avevamo visto l'11 marzo dello scorso anno a
Madrid. Lì erano stati colpiti i treni, a Londra una serie di bombe
sincronizzate sono esplose sulla metropolitana e su alcuni autobus
della capitale inglese seminando, con un attentato "diffuso", decine
di morti e feriti tra la popolazione civile. Il cuore di uno degli
otto paesi più potenti della terra riuniti nel loro vertice annuale in
Gran Bretagna, è stato così oggetto di una devastante incursione
terroristica.
Una operazione di tale portata - come quella dell'11 marzo a Madrid -
non si improvvisa nè può essere messa in piedi da una rete
terroristica che non sia fortemente centralizzata e organizzata nè
priva di una visione politica e mediatica estremamente sofisticata.
Viene colpita la società più che gli uomini o i simboli del potere
proprio perchè il terrore moderno fonda la sua efficacia sulla
pervasività sociale dei suoi effetti. E' una scala di valutazioni e
operazioni completamente diversa da quella con cui eravamo abituati a
fare i conti anche noi in Italia, che pure con le bombe sui treni,
nelle stazioni o nelle piazze abbiamo dovuto condividere le pagine
peggiori della nostra storia recente. Si spara nel mucchio ma con
obiettivi mirati. Si colpisce scientificamente a casaccio - tra i
pendolari madrileni o londinesi - ma si colpisce dentro un calendario
politico ben preciso: dalla vigilia delle elezioni in Spagna
all'apertura di un conflittuale vertice del G8 a Londra.
Di fronte a questo le reazioni delle potenze riunite al G8 di
Gleneagles non nascondono una voglia di vendetta che è del tutto
speculare alla rivelazione della loro vulnerabilità politica,
mediatica, sociale.
E' ormai evidente che il cosiddetto "terrorismo islamico" è un
paravento del tutto inadeguato e screditato per spiegare tutto questo
e per indicare il nemico "all'ira dei giusti".
I governi delle otto potenze riunite in Scozia sanno ormai benissimo
di aver scatenato e essere pienamente coinvolti in una guerra di cui
hanno completamente sottovalutato le conseguenze. Hanno occupato
spietatamente l'Afganistan e l'Iraq convinti di poter usare la
sindrome islamica per gestire una operazione coloniale tradizionale,
ma stanno verificando come la asimmetria della guerra preventiva
(paesi potenti contro paesi deboli) sta trovando sulla sua strada un
competitore globale che conosce le regole della guerra moderna ed è
disposto ad utilizzarle senza scrupoli. Nelle cucciolate dei rampolli
allevati dalle petromonarchie, che hanno studiato nei migliori
colleges americani ed europei, che hanno imparato a conoscere usi,
consumi e incubi delle società occidentali, che maneggiano con
maestria i mass media e le nuove tecnologie, è cresciuto un polo
competitivo contro Stati Uniti e le potenze loro alleate.
Non possiamo più nasconderci come gli attentati dell'11 settembre,
quelli dell'11 marzo e quelli di oggi a Londra, vengano vissuti
diversamente nei vari quadranti del mondo. Provocano terrore, odio e
costernazione nei nostri paesi ma possono provocare sensazioni di
onnipotenza in altre aree che del nostro mondo hanno visto anche le
responsabilità nel mattatoio palestinese, di Falluja, della complicità
con regimi e monarchie corrotte e feroci.
Lo schema di lettura della realtà internazionale del terzo millennio
da parte di Bush, Blair, Chirac, Berlusconi, appare ormai del tutto
inadeguata e rischia di travolgere nel dramma l'umanità. Prima li
costringiamo ad esserne consapevoli, meglio sarà per tutti; a
cominciare dal ritiro delle truppe e dalla cessazione dell'occupazione
dell'Iraq.
Mail: cpiano@ tiscali.it
Sito : http://www.contropiano.org
--- In yugoslaviainfo @yahoogroups.com, "Darkita" wrote:
Zvonimir Trajković [Zvonimir Traykovitch] in the authorized text:
I was evacuating civilians from Srebrenitsa
Srebrenitsa, lies and media games
Karagitch's war consultant truly on Srebrenitsa
"OGLEDALO"
Belgrade, June 22, 2005
§ What was really happening in Srebrenitsa?
§ Why has been just now, after ten years, shown the short movie
on the liquidation of six Muslims?
§ Will this media euphoria, in which the highest level
statesmen have been included themselves, lead to a national catharsis,
or it is only the fulfillment of the obligations of our Government
marionettes, which they accepted before October 5, 2000?
§ How much will cost us that political exhibitionism of our
politicians and who will pay for that?
The operation Srebrenitsa was leading and planned in the form of the
horseshoe, intentionally leaving open space for the Muslim army and
civilians to be able to move towards Tuzla. It is the distance of 36
Km and the landscape is such that every man with an average condition
can it pass walking. Such a manner of the operation performance was
conducted in order to minimize the number of victims since Muslims
brought therein serious military forces. If they had been hermetically
closed, then there would have been violent fighting in which the army
of the RS would have had also serious losses, which was the reason to
accept the horseshoe plan.
All this can be seen on the American map of the withdraw of the Muslim
army by noting that there was not any ambush at Snagovo but the main
part of the Muslim army had planned to infiltrate into Zvornik and to
create a new city problem to the army of RS. The clashes at Nova
Kasaba in the Konyevitch Field occurred due to the Muslim blockade of
the magisterial road Belgrade – Zvornik -Vlasenitsa –Han Pyesak –
Sarayevo, i.e. Pale.
According to the data of the army of RS there were killed between 600
and 700 Muslim fighters in that operation, who were trying at some
places to break the horseshoe ring in order to join some of their
dislocated parts of units. The main Muslim force, as well as a part of
civilians went to Tuzla across free mountain trails.
In Srebrenitsa and in Zhepa, in which Muslims were staying almost for
three years, there were between 6.5 - 7 thousands of Muslim soldiers
that were, under the protection of the UN forces, permanently going
out from the protected enclave by attacking the neighboring Serb
villages. With such strategy of the permanent aggressions in the
vicinity of Srebrenitsa there were destroyed 128 Serb villages and
killed 2400 Serb civilians. In order to tie the significant part of
the Serb military for the defense against the continuous Muslim
attacks, so that that part of the Serb army could not be transferred
to the Sarayevo front to enforce the siege of Sarayevo. Besides, as
suggested by Croatian - Occidental strategists it was necessary to
disconnect the Republic of Srpska from the frontier with Serbia in
order to ease its later destruction. Therefore, there were created by
the UN the protected enclaves along Drina such as Srebrenitsa, Zhepa,
and Gorazhde. Moreover, the sever propaganda about thousands of killed
was aimed at keeping the tension of the world community and to push
into the full oblivion Muslim atrocities in Bratunats, Kravitsa,
Skelani and in other burned out Serb villages around Srebrenitsa, in
which were destroyed only Serb civilians.
On the territory of East Bosnia there were fighting's against the
Muslim forces taking place all three years and all their perished
soldiers as well as the Muslims civilians were burying in that bent space.
Often also, in mass graves, which are now opening as alleged genocide
victims. Several months after the fall of Srebrenitsa our pathologists
led by General Stankovitch and together with Occidental pathologists
found in all mass graves 1,284 carcasses that had to be identified by
the DNK and other well known methods. Those investigations were
lasting up to the mid of 1997 and just then the West ordered to halt
the investigations because they considered that that number was fairly
approximate final number of victims. Moreover, after five years of the
intensified search by KFOR and Hague investigators on the territory of
Srebrenitsa there were not found more than 1,700 carcasses in all mass
graves altogether.
After the bombing of Serbia 1999 Srebrenitsa has been again actualized
and new mass graves have been appearing, but now occidental experts
under the protection of the Hague Tribunal have been the exclusive
investigators. Those investigations have not been yet ended, even new
graves are appearing so that there are about 3,000 alleged carcasses.
Nothing will surprise me if the number grows and reaches 12 - 15
thousands. They will perhaps take care not to exceed the overall
number of all civil population from that region.
I was the consultant of Radovan Karagitch during the execution of the
operation Srebrenitsa and I was with him. Immediately after the end of
the military operation I was sent in Srebrenitsa in order to ensure
buses and lorries for the transport of Muslim civilians, up to the
Tuzla region. Nothing was indicating any such massacre neither the UN
soldiers, who were there present during the whole operation
performance, were pointing out to something like that. They did not
give then any declaration or comment that would point out that the
massacre happened. Only later under the instructions from their
headquarters they were beginning to declare that there were killings
of civilians and mass executions, and all in the concatenation of the
media propaganda dictated from lobistic and other world centers of power.
Besides, this photo shows clearly grown up men, and not only women and
children. Srebrenitsa has literally two streets since it is a little
mining settlement in which about 35,000 civilians and soldiers of
Naser Oric were crowding. It is evident on the photo that nobody was
wailing or crying that would be logical if 1/4 of the total number of
the inhabitants were killed, which is claimed today.
A question raises how is that possible that during such alleged
massacre, none of the commandants of Muslim forces under the command
of Naser Oric did not suffer any damage, but they withdrew safely to
Tuzla.
During the first elections after the Dayton Agreement due to Muslim
incautiousness and wish to gain as strong as possible vote score there
appeared at the voting places throughout Bosnia several thousands of
those "massacred" in Srebrenitsa and Zhepa. Later all of them were
getting urgently new documents with other names in other to exploit
further freely this farce on Srebrenitsa.
A particular role in that region there had also the French Legion of
Strangers because General Morillon was the commandant of the UN forces
for the protected zones for the long period. He was tolerating, out of
the agreement on the protected zones, thousands of armed Muslims so
that he was regularly arming them through humanitary convoys. Our
state has about that several video recordings in which was established
beyond dispute with cameras at the place that there was delivering in
lorries with the humanitary aid the arms and munitions to Srebrenitsa
Muslims. Besides, we have a rich video documentation of the massacre
of Serbs in the villages around Srebrenitsa, but it is not convenient
to this marionette Government to show them to the public. Then our and
world community could get another insight in the events in Srebrenitsa
and why it was necessary to neutralize that "Free zone".
Zhepa has been lost in an unbelievable manner from this constructed
Srebrenitsa story because there were imprisoned 1,500 soldiers with a
reach arsenal of arms. All of them were safely transferred across
Drina in Serbia, later in Bosnia, without losing a hair from the head.
Before they were returned to Bosnia, numerous "humanitary expeditions"
were visiting those imprisoned soldiers, among whom there was Ms
Ogata, in order to confirm that fair treatment of the prisoners. That
is why Zhepa is nowhere mentioned because it could be a strong proof
how our army was behaving during that clash. It is to notice that the
operations of Srebrenitsa and Zhepa were carrying out simultaneously
under the command of the same commandants against whom there is the
claim that they were leading the massacre in Srebrenitsa, but perhaps
because Muslims from Zhepa were more likeable to them and therefore
they transferred them safely into Serbia without killing anybody.
Why the video recording made 10 years ago is shown just now
The video recording of the execution of six Muslims, which is turning
around on all media these days, and which was lanced by Soros B92, who
could be else, is only a part of the organized campaign before the
important negotiations on Kosovo.
It does not concern any facing with the truth because that crime does
not have any connection with Srebrenitsa. It was committed in the
vicinity of Trnovo near Sarayevo, i.e. 170 km far from Srebrenitsa.
Linking that crime with Srebrenitsa is aimed at refreshing the myth
about the suffer of Srebrenitsa Muslims before the denotation of the
decade of the event at which our President Taditch should appear with
the apology. It is the continuation of the propaganda war, which is
aimed at representing the Serbs as the genocidal nation to the world.
Against such nation, all is justifiable including the bombing of 1999.
Such a nation does not deserve to retain Kosovo in its state, so that
the hands will be tied to our "statesmen" as the representatives of
the genocidal people in any international negotiations. RS Srpska is
in that case the genocidal creation that should be destroyed as such
and a tutor should be imposed on the Serbs. That is why everything has
been being done in order to force the Serbs "to face" with their
"truth" in order the West to stay pure and moral. For this purpose,
all available means are used, such as diverse "non-government"
organizations and foundations, our venal intellectuals and world
propaganda machinery.
For this purpose of driving into "truth", Peddy Ashdown has nimbly
included himself. He split up angrily the report of the independent
commission of RS about the crimes in Srebrenitsa and under the menace
of the replacement he ordered to president Chavitch and to other
leaders of RS that there were killed 8,000 Muslims and that he
expected such a report from them. Also, in order to drown RS into the
united Bosnia this English democrat kicked out "democratically" 73
legally elected RS statesmen from their leading positions because they
dared to think with their heads and to defend the rules of the Dayton
agreement.
Many are working on building an image about the Serbs, starting with
the known to us the International Crisis Group (ICG) up to the office
of David Barnow, which is often mentioned as the source of
"information" about massacre of 6,000 later 8,000 Muslim civilians in
Srebrenitsa. That office is well paid Muslim lobistic center in the
United States, which created and which has conducted the campaign
about Srebrenitsa, as earlier lies about thousands raped Muslim women,
concentration camps for Muslims…
Irresponsibility of politicians and of the actual Government
Our tragedy is not Srebrenitsa, nor even other Serb scaffolds. Our
problem is the existing marionette government that does not try to
fight for the truth, to defend national dignity and Serb interests.
Our tragedy is the fact that our state politics is in the hands of
Natasha Kanditch and other band of foreign hirelings, because our
President apologizes under the order from West without caring possible
consequences for the state and nation.
Miloshevitch was hiding the truth in order not to irritate the West by
trying to "buy" for himself couple years more of the presidential
mandate, and now he is in Hague. Will he at least now present the full
truth will depend on the availability to him of all the documentation
we have, or he will finally accepted a negotiation with the tribunal
in order to smooth the punishment, so as many other have done so far.
For Serbian people it would be ideal if the whole truth could be
presented. We Serbs, just for the sake of the truth, we are obliged to
respond sharply against the lies and constructions for it is the only
way for the nation to escape the real catharsis. It is crime to kill
one man, and not to speak about cold killing of six fellows. However,
such crimes are acts of ill-minded individuals who have the name and
the family name and who should be doubtless charged juridical. In
these civil - religious clashes in our spaces there were various awful
crimes on all sides, there we should not create epopees from some of
them, and we should not forget others as that they had not happened.
In these civil - religious clashes, the Serbs have been ethnically
cleansed from Slovenia, Croatia, from a part of Bosnia and from Kosovo
and Metohiya, but only we are accused for ethnic purification. Others
were starting the wars, but they accuse only us for the war
and the disintegration of Yugoslavia. See
the map and you will see clearly that the
Great Croatia has been created, but they
accuse us for the creation of the Great Serbia. Until when those lies
and falsification of facts will continue. When will
our state leadership submit under the nose of the West all those very
clearly evident and provable facts. When will they say to the United
States and EC that Shiptars can get that degree of the autonomy that
the same West gave to the Serbs in Croatia, i.e. RSK. I hope that
soon, if not this then a new leadership will do this.
Zvonimir Traykovitch
www.trajkovic.co.yu
Translated by
Lyubomir T.
Gruyitch
lyubomir_gruyitch@...
--- End forwarded message ---
Zvonimir Trajković [Zvonimir Traykovitch] in the authorized text:
I was evacuating civilians from Srebrenitsa
Srebrenitsa, lies and media games
Karagitch's war consultant truly on Srebrenitsa
"OGLEDALO"
Belgrade, June 22, 2005
§ What was really happening in Srebrenitsa?
§ Why has been just now, after ten years, shown the short movie
on the liquidation of six Muslims?
§ Will this media euphoria, in which the highest level
statesmen have been included themselves, lead to a national catharsis,
or it is only the fulfillment of the obligations of our Government
marionettes, which they accepted before October 5, 2000?
§ How much will cost us that political exhibitionism of our
politicians and who will pay for that?
The operation Srebrenitsa was leading and planned in the form of the
horseshoe, intentionally leaving open space for the Muslim army and
civilians to be able to move towards Tuzla. It is the distance of 36
Km and the landscape is such that every man with an average condition
can it pass walking. Such a manner of the operation performance was
conducted in order to minimize the number of victims since Muslims
brought therein serious military forces. If they had been hermetically
closed, then there would have been violent fighting in which the army
of the RS would have had also serious losses, which was the reason to
accept the horseshoe plan.
All this can be seen on the American map of the withdraw of the Muslim
army by noting that there was not any ambush at Snagovo but the main
part of the Muslim army had planned to infiltrate into Zvornik and to
create a new city problem to the army of RS. The clashes at Nova
Kasaba in the Konyevitch Field occurred due to the Muslim blockade of
the magisterial road Belgrade – Zvornik -Vlasenitsa –Han Pyesak –
Sarayevo, i.e. Pale.
According to the data of the army of RS there were killed between 600
and 700 Muslim fighters in that operation, who were trying at some
places to break the horseshoe ring in order to join some of their
dislocated parts of units. The main Muslim force, as well as a part of
civilians went to Tuzla across free mountain trails.
In Srebrenitsa and in Zhepa, in which Muslims were staying almost for
three years, there were between 6.5 - 7 thousands of Muslim soldiers
that were, under the protection of the UN forces, permanently going
out from the protected enclave by attacking the neighboring Serb
villages. With such strategy of the permanent aggressions in the
vicinity of Srebrenitsa there were destroyed 128 Serb villages and
killed 2400 Serb civilians. In order to tie the significant part of
the Serb military for the defense against the continuous Muslim
attacks, so that that part of the Serb army could not be transferred
to the Sarayevo front to enforce the siege of Sarayevo. Besides, as
suggested by Croatian - Occidental strategists it was necessary to
disconnect the Republic of Srpska from the frontier with Serbia in
order to ease its later destruction. Therefore, there were created by
the UN the protected enclaves along Drina such as Srebrenitsa, Zhepa,
and Gorazhde. Moreover, the sever propaganda about thousands of killed
was aimed at keeping the tension of the world community and to push
into the full oblivion Muslim atrocities in Bratunats, Kravitsa,
Skelani and in other burned out Serb villages around Srebrenitsa, in
which were destroyed only Serb civilians.
On the territory of East Bosnia there were fighting's against the
Muslim forces taking place all three years and all their perished
soldiers as well as the Muslims civilians were burying in that bent space.
Often also, in mass graves, which are now opening as alleged genocide
victims. Several months after the fall of Srebrenitsa our pathologists
led by General Stankovitch and together with Occidental pathologists
found in all mass graves 1,284 carcasses that had to be identified by
the DNK and other well known methods. Those investigations were
lasting up to the mid of 1997 and just then the West ordered to halt
the investigations because they considered that that number was fairly
approximate final number of victims. Moreover, after five years of the
intensified search by KFOR and Hague investigators on the territory of
Srebrenitsa there were not found more than 1,700 carcasses in all mass
graves altogether.
After the bombing of Serbia 1999 Srebrenitsa has been again actualized
and new mass graves have been appearing, but now occidental experts
under the protection of the Hague Tribunal have been the exclusive
investigators. Those investigations have not been yet ended, even new
graves are appearing so that there are about 3,000 alleged carcasses.
Nothing will surprise me if the number grows and reaches 12 - 15
thousands. They will perhaps take care not to exceed the overall
number of all civil population from that region.
I was the consultant of Radovan Karagitch during the execution of the
operation Srebrenitsa and I was with him. Immediately after the end of
the military operation I was sent in Srebrenitsa in order to ensure
buses and lorries for the transport of Muslim civilians, up to the
Tuzla region. Nothing was indicating any such massacre neither the UN
soldiers, who were there present during the whole operation
performance, were pointing out to something like that. They did not
give then any declaration or comment that would point out that the
massacre happened. Only later under the instructions from their
headquarters they were beginning to declare that there were killings
of civilians and mass executions, and all in the concatenation of the
media propaganda dictated from lobistic and other world centers of power.
Besides, this photo shows clearly grown up men, and not only women and
children. Srebrenitsa has literally two streets since it is a little
mining settlement in which about 35,000 civilians and soldiers of
Naser Oric were crowding. It is evident on the photo that nobody was
wailing or crying that would be logical if 1/4 of the total number of
the inhabitants were killed, which is claimed today.
A question raises how is that possible that during such alleged
massacre, none of the commandants of Muslim forces under the command
of Naser Oric did not suffer any damage, but they withdrew safely to
Tuzla.
During the first elections after the Dayton Agreement due to Muslim
incautiousness and wish to gain as strong as possible vote score there
appeared at the voting places throughout Bosnia several thousands of
those "massacred" in Srebrenitsa and Zhepa. Later all of them were
getting urgently new documents with other names in other to exploit
further freely this farce on Srebrenitsa.
A particular role in that region there had also the French Legion of
Strangers because General Morillon was the commandant of the UN forces
for the protected zones for the long period. He was tolerating, out of
the agreement on the protected zones, thousands of armed Muslims so
that he was regularly arming them through humanitary convoys. Our
state has about that several video recordings in which was established
beyond dispute with cameras at the place that there was delivering in
lorries with the humanitary aid the arms and munitions to Srebrenitsa
Muslims. Besides, we have a rich video documentation of the massacre
of Serbs in the villages around Srebrenitsa, but it is not convenient
to this marionette Government to show them to the public. Then our and
world community could get another insight in the events in Srebrenitsa
and why it was necessary to neutralize that "Free zone".
Zhepa has been lost in an unbelievable manner from this constructed
Srebrenitsa story because there were imprisoned 1,500 soldiers with a
reach arsenal of arms. All of them were safely transferred across
Drina in Serbia, later in Bosnia, without losing a hair from the head.
Before they were returned to Bosnia, numerous "humanitary expeditions"
were visiting those imprisoned soldiers, among whom there was Ms
Ogata, in order to confirm that fair treatment of the prisoners. That
is why Zhepa is nowhere mentioned because it could be a strong proof
how our army was behaving during that clash. It is to notice that the
operations of Srebrenitsa and Zhepa were carrying out simultaneously
under the command of the same commandants against whom there is the
claim that they were leading the massacre in Srebrenitsa, but perhaps
because Muslims from Zhepa were more likeable to them and therefore
they transferred them safely into Serbia without killing anybody.
Why the video recording made 10 years ago is shown just now
The video recording of the execution of six Muslims, which is turning
around on all media these days, and which was lanced by Soros B92, who
could be else, is only a part of the organized campaign before the
important negotiations on Kosovo.
It does not concern any facing with the truth because that crime does
not have any connection with Srebrenitsa. It was committed in the
vicinity of Trnovo near Sarayevo, i.e. 170 km far from Srebrenitsa.
Linking that crime with Srebrenitsa is aimed at refreshing the myth
about the suffer of Srebrenitsa Muslims before the denotation of the
decade of the event at which our President Taditch should appear with
the apology. It is the continuation of the propaganda war, which is
aimed at representing the Serbs as the genocidal nation to the world.
Against such nation, all is justifiable including the bombing of 1999.
Such a nation does not deserve to retain Kosovo in its state, so that
the hands will be tied to our "statesmen" as the representatives of
the genocidal people in any international negotiations. RS Srpska is
in that case the genocidal creation that should be destroyed as such
and a tutor should be imposed on the Serbs. That is why everything has
been being done in order to force the Serbs "to face" with their
"truth" in order the West to stay pure and moral. For this purpose,
all available means are used, such as diverse "non-government"
organizations and foundations, our venal intellectuals and world
propaganda machinery.
For this purpose of driving into "truth", Peddy Ashdown has nimbly
included himself. He split up angrily the report of the independent
commission of RS about the crimes in Srebrenitsa and under the menace
of the replacement he ordered to president Chavitch and to other
leaders of RS that there were killed 8,000 Muslims and that he
expected such a report from them. Also, in order to drown RS into the
united Bosnia this English democrat kicked out "democratically" 73
legally elected RS statesmen from their leading positions because they
dared to think with their heads and to defend the rules of the Dayton
agreement.
Many are working on building an image about the Serbs, starting with
the known to us the International Crisis Group (ICG) up to the office
of David Barnow, which is often mentioned as the source of
"information" about massacre of 6,000 later 8,000 Muslim civilians in
Srebrenitsa. That office is well paid Muslim lobistic center in the
United States, which created and which has conducted the campaign
about Srebrenitsa, as earlier lies about thousands raped Muslim women,
concentration camps for Muslims…
Irresponsibility of politicians and of the actual Government
Our tragedy is not Srebrenitsa, nor even other Serb scaffolds. Our
problem is the existing marionette government that does not try to
fight for the truth, to defend national dignity and Serb interests.
Our tragedy is the fact that our state politics is in the hands of
Natasha Kanditch and other band of foreign hirelings, because our
President apologizes under the order from West without caring possible
consequences for the state and nation.
Miloshevitch was hiding the truth in order not to irritate the West by
trying to "buy" for himself couple years more of the presidential
mandate, and now he is in Hague. Will he at least now present the full
truth will depend on the availability to him of all the documentation
we have, or he will finally accepted a negotiation with the tribunal
in order to smooth the punishment, so as many other have done so far.
For Serbian people it would be ideal if the whole truth could be
presented. We Serbs, just for the sake of the truth, we are obliged to
respond sharply against the lies and constructions for it is the only
way for the nation to escape the real catharsis. It is crime to kill
one man, and not to speak about cold killing of six fellows. However,
such crimes are acts of ill-minded individuals who have the name and
the family name and who should be doubtless charged juridical. In
these civil - religious clashes in our spaces there were various awful
crimes on all sides, there we should not create epopees from some of
them, and we should not forget others as that they had not happened.
In these civil - religious clashes, the Serbs have been ethnically
cleansed from Slovenia, Croatia, from a part of Bosnia and from Kosovo
and Metohiya, but only we are accused for ethnic purification. Others
were starting the wars, but they accuse only us for the war
and the disintegration of Yugoslavia. See
the map and you will see clearly that the
Great Croatia has been created, but they
accuse us for the creation of the Great Serbia. Until when those lies
and falsification of facts will continue. When will
our state leadership submit under the nose of the West all those very
clearly evident and provable facts. When will they say to the United
States and EC that Shiptars can get that degree of the autonomy that
the same West gave to the Serbs in Croatia, i.e. RSK. I hope that
soon, if not this then a new leadership will do this.
Zvonimir Traykovitch
www.trajkovic.co.yu
Translated by
Lyubomir T.
Gruyitch
lyubomir_gruyitch@...
--- End forwarded message ---
