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CounterPunch - October 12, 2005

Using War as an Excuse for More War

Srebrenica Revisited

By DIANA JOHNSTONE

Last summer, almost the entire political spectrum in the Western
world joined in a chorus of self-flagellation on the 10th
anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. The dominant theme was
"nostra culpa": "we" let it happen, "we" didn't want to know
about it, and "we" mustn't let it happen again.

Dear reader, who are "we" in this case? How in the world could
"we" (you and I) have known or done anything about this at the time?
And in fact, how much do "we" really know about it now? We
know what we read in the newspapers or see on television. But how
precise and accurate is that information? How do we know now that
we are much better informed than we were before the event?

Such questions are virtually taboo. Srebrenica has become a
sacred symbol of collective guilt, and to raise the slightest
question is to be instantly condemned as an apologist for
frightful crimes , or as a "holocaust denier".

A left that retains any capacity for critical thinking should
regard the lavish public breast-beating over "Srebrenica" (the
quotation marks indicate the symbol rather than the actual event)
with a certain skepticism. If mainstream media commentators and
politicians are so extraordinarily moved by "Srebrenica", this is
because it has become an incantation to justify whatever future
foreign war the U.S. government and media decide to sell under
the label of "humanitarian intervention".


The Uses of a Massacre

Aside from the probable future use of "Srebrenica", there is the
way it has already been used. Indeed, it was perhaps being used
even before it happened.

From the the U.N. Secretary General's 1999 Report on Srebrenica,
it emerges that the idea of a "Srebrenica massacre" was already
in the air at a September 1993 meeting in Sarajevo between
Bosnian Muslim president Alija Izetbegovic and members of his
Muslim party from Srebrenica. On the agenda was a Serb proposal
to exchange Srebrenica and Zepa for some territories around
Sarajevo as part of a peace settlement.

"The delegation opposed the idea, and the subject was not
discussed further. Some surviving members of the Srebrenica
delegation have stated that President Izetbegovic also told them
he had learned that a NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina
was possible, but could only occur if the Serbs were to break
into Srebrenica, killing at least 5,000 of its people." (1)

Izetbegovic later denied this, but he is outnumbered by
witnesses. It is clear that Izetbegovic's constant strategy was
to portray his Muslim side in the bloody civil war as pure
helpless victims, in order to bring U.S. military power in on his
side. On his death bed, he readily admitted as much to his
ardent admirer Bernard Kouchner, in the presence of U.S. diplomat
Richard Holbrooke. Kouchner reminded Izetbegovic of a
conversation he had had with French President Mitterrand in which
he "spoke of the existence of 'extermination camps' in Bosnia."

You repeated that in front of the journalists. That provoked
considerable emotion throughout the world. [...] They were
horrible places, but people were not systematically exterminated.
Did you know that?

Yes. I thought that my revelations could precipitate bombings. I
saw the reaction of the French and the others-I was mistaken.
[...] Yes, I tried, but the assertion was false. There were no
extermination camps whatever the horror of those places. (2)

Like the Bosnian Serbs, the Muslims also herded their adversaries
into "horrible" camps at the start of the civil war, on the way
to expulsion. Unlike the Bosnian Serbs, the Bosnian Muslims
enjoyed the services of high-powered U.S. public relations
experts in the Washington-based Ruder Finn agency who knew how to
"spin" the Bosnian conflict in order to equate the Serbs with the
Nazis-the quickest and easiest way to win public opinion over to
the Muslim side. The news media and political figures were
showered with press releases and other materials exaggerating
Serb atrocities, whereas Muslim atrocities (such as the
decapitations of Serb prisoners, fully documented) remained
confidential. To the public, this was a one-sided conflict
between a Serbian "fascist aggressor" and innocent victims, all
unarmed civilians.

The general public did not know that Srebrenica, described as a
"safe area", was not in fact simply a haven for refugees, but
also a Muslim military base. The general public did not know what
Lord Owen knew and recounted in his important 1995 book, Balkan
Odyssey (p.143), namely that in April 1993, Serbian president
Slobodan Milosevic was extremely anxious to prevent Bosnian Serb
forces from overrunning Srebrenica. "On 16 April I spoke on the
telephone to President Milosevic about my anxiety that, despite
repeated assurances from Dr. Karadzic that he had no intention of
taking Srebrenica, the Bosnian Serb army was now proceeding to do
just that. The pocket was greatly reduced in size. I had rarely
heard Milosevic so exasperated, but also so worried: he feared
that if the Bosnian Serb troops entered Srebrenica there would be
a bloodbath because of the tremendous bad blood that existed
between the two armies. The Bosnian Serbs held the young Muslim
commander in Srebrenica, Naser Oric, responsible for a massacre
near Bratunac in December 1992 in which many Serb civilians had
been killed. Milosevic believed it would be a great mistake for
the Bosnian Serbs to take Srebrenica and promised to tell
Karadzic so."

Thus, many months before the July 1995 "Srebrenica massacre",
both Izetbegovic and Milosevic were aware of the possibility and
of its potential impact-favorable to the Muslim cause, and
disastrous for the Serbs.

A few other indisputable facts should not be overlooked:

Shortly before the Bosnian Serb attack on Srebrenica, the Muslim
troops stationed in that enclave carried out murderous attacks on
nearby Serb villages. These attacks were certain to incite Serb
commanders to retaliate against the Srebrenica garrison.

Meanwhile, the Muslim high command in Sarajevo ordered the
Srebrenica commanders, Oric and his lieutenants, to withdraw from
Srebrenica, leaving thousands of his soldiers without commanders,
without orders, and in total confusion when the foreseeable Serb
attack occurred. Surviving Srebrenica Muslim officials have
bitterly accused the Izetbegovic government of deliberately
sacrificing them to the interests of his State.

According to the most thorough study of Srebrenica events, by
Cees Wiebes for the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation
report, the Bosnian Serb forces set out in July 1995 to reduce
the area held by Bosnian Muslim forces on the outskirts of
Srebrenica, and only decided to capture the town itself when they
unexpectedly found it undefended.

"The VRS [Republika Srpska Army] advance went so well that the
evening of July 9 saw an important 'turning point' [...] The
Bosnian Serbs decided that they would no longer confine
themselves to the southern part of the enclave, but would extend
the operation and take the town of Srebrenica itself. Karadzic
was informed that the results achieved now put the Drina Corps in
a position to take the town; he had expressed his satisfaction
with this and had agreed to a continuation of the operation to
disarm the 'Muslim terrorist gangs' and to achieve a full
demilitarization of the enclave. In this order, issued by Major
General Zdravko Tolimir, it was also stated that Karadzic had
determined that the safety of UNPROFOR soldiers and of the
population should be ensured. Orders to this effect were to be
provided to all participating units. [...] The orders made no
mention of a forced relocation of the population. [...] A final
instruction, also of significance, was that the population and
prisoners of war should be treated in accordance with the Geneva
Convention. On July 11 all of Srebrenica fell into the hands of
the Bosnian Serbs."

In testimony to a French parliamentary commission inquiry into
Srebrenica, General Philippe Morillon, the UNPROFOR officer who
first called international attention to the Srebrenica enclave,
stated his belief that Bosnian Serb forces had fallen into a
"trap" when they decided to capture Srebrenica.

Subsequently, on February 12, 2004, testifying at the
International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, General Morillon
stressed that the Muslim commander in Srebrenica, Naser Oric,
"engaged in attacks during Orthodox holidays and destroyed
villages, massacring all the inhabitants. This created a degree
of hatred that was quite extraordinary in the region, and this
prompted the region of Bratunac in particular---that is the
entire Serb population---to rebel against the very idea that
through humanitarian aid one might help the population that was
present there."

Asked by the ICTY prosecutor how Oric treated his Serb prisoners,
General Morillon, who knew him well, replied that "Naser Oric was
a warlord who reigned by terror in his area and over the
population itself. I think that he realized that these were the
rules of this horrific war, that he could not allow himself to
take prisoners. According to my recollection, he didn't even look
for an excuse. It was simply a statement: One can't be bothered
with prisoners."

Morillon recounted how "the Serbs took me to a village to show me
the evacuation of the bodies of the inhabitants that had been
thrown into a hole, a village close to Bratunac. And this made me
understand the degree to which this infernal situation of blood
and vengeance [...] led to a situation when I personally feared
that the worst would happen if the Serbs of Bosnia managed to
enter the enclaves and Srebrenica."

"I feared that the Serbs, the local Serbs, the Serbs of Bratunac,
these militiamen, they wanted to take their revenge for
everything that they attributed to Naser Oric. It wasn't just
Naser Oric that they wanted to revenge, take their revenge on,
they wanted to revenge their dead on Orthodox Christmas."

* * *

In short, Srebrenica, whose Serb population had been chased out
by Muslim troops at the start of the civil war in 1992, was both
a gathering point for civilian Muslim refugees and a Muslim army
base. The enclave lived from international humanitarian aid. The
Muslim military did not allow civilians to leave, since their
presence was what ensured the arrival of humanitarian aid
provisions which the military controlled.

When the Bosnian Serb forces captured the town on July 11, 2005,
civilians were clamoring to leave the enclave, understandably
enough, since there was virtually no normal economic life there.
Much has been made of the fact that Serb forces separated the
population, providing buses for women, children and the infirm to
take them to Tuzla, while detaining the men. In light of all
that preceded, the reason for this separation is obvious: the
Bosnian Serbs were looking for the perpetrators of raids on Serb
villages, in order to take revenge.

However, only a relatively small number of Muslim men were
detained at that point, and some of them are known to have
survived and eventually been released in exchange for Serb
prisoners. When the Serb forces entered the town from the south,
thousands of Muslim soldiers, in disarray because of the absence
of commanding officers, fled northwards, through wild wooded
hills toward Tuzla. It is clear enough that they fled because
they feared exactly what everyone aware of the situation dreaded:
that Serb soldiers would take vengeance on the men they
considered guilty of murdering Serb civilians and prisoners.

Thousands of those men did in fact reach Tuzla, and were quietly
redeployed. This was confirmed by international observers.
However, Muslim authorities never provided information about
these men, preferring to let them be counted among the missing,
that is, among the massacred. Another large, unspecified number
of these men were ambushed and killed as they fled in scenes of
terrible panic. This was, then, a "massacre", such as occurs in
war when fleeing troops are ambushed by superior forces.


Counting the victims

So we come to the question of numbers. The question is difficult,
both because of the uncertainty that surrounds it, and because
merely pointing to this uncertainty is instantly denounced as
"revisionism" and lack of respect for the victims. This reproach
is not logical. Victims are victims, whether few or many, and
respect is not in proportion to their numbers.

The question of numbers is complex and has been dealt with in detail by
others, recently by an independent international Srebrenica
research group which will soon publish its findings in book form.
(3)

Suffice it here to note the following:

1. The sacralization of the estimated number of victims. In many
if not most disasters, initial estimates of casualties tend to be
inflated, for various reasons, such as multiple reports of the
same missing person, and are subsequently corrected downwards.
This was the case for the World Trade Center disaster, where
initial estimates of up to 10,000 victims were finally brought
down to less than 3000, and there are many other examples. In the
case of Srebrenica, the figure of 8,000 originated with September
1995 announcements by the International Committee of the Red
Cross that it was seeking information about some 3,000 men
reportedly detained as well as about some 5,000 who had fled to
central Bosnia. Neither the Bosnian Serbs nor the Muslims were
ever forthcoming with whatever information they had, and the
"8,000" figure has tended ever since to be repeated as an
established total of "Muslim men and boys executed by Serb
forces". It can be noted that this was always an estimate, the
sum of two separate groups, the smaller one of prisoners (whose
execution would be a clear war crime) and the larger one of
retreating troops (whose "massacre" as they fled would be the
usual tragic consequence of bitter civil war). Anyone familiar
with the workings of journalism knows that there is a sort of
professional inertia which leads reporters to repeat whatever
figure they find in previous reports, without verification, and
with a marked preference for big numbers. This inertia is all the
greater when no truly authoritative figures ever emerge.

The number of bodies exhumed.

Despite unprecedented efforts over the past ten years to recover
bodies from the area around Srebrenica, less than 3,000 have been
exhumed, and these include soldiers and others-Serb as well as
Muslim-who died in the vicious combats that took place during
three years of war. Only a fraction have been identified.

2. The political desire for the largest possible number. Aside
from the journalistic inertia mentioned above, the retention of
the unproven high figure of massacre victims in the case of
Srebrenica is clearly the result of political will on the part of
two governments: the Bosnian Muslim government of Alija
Izetbegovic and, more importantly, the government of the United
States. From the moment that Madeleine Albright brandished
satellite photos of what she claimed was evidence of Serb
massacres committed at Srebrenica (evidence that was both secret,
as the photos were shown in closed session to the Security
Council, and circumstantial, as they showed changes in terrain
which might indicate massacres, not the alleged massacres
themselves), the U.S. used "Srebrenica" for two clear purposes:

to draw attention away from the U.S.-backed Croatian
offensive which drove the Serb population out of the Krajina
which, as much as Srebrenica, was supposed to be protected by
the United Nations;

to implicate Bosnian Serb leaders in "genocide" in order to
disqualify them from negotiating the future of
Bosnia-Herzegovina. (The U.S. preferred to replace them at
Dayton by Milosevic, whose eagerness to end the war could be
exploited to get concessions the Bosnian Serbs might refuse.)

Exploitation of "Srebrenica" then helped set the stage for the
Kosovo war of 1999:

by blaming the United Nations (whose failure to defend
Srebrenica was in reality the inevitable result of the
unwillingness of the United States to give full support to U.N.
ground forces), NATO emerged as the only agent capable of
effective "humanitarian intervention".

by falsely identifying Milosevic with the Bosnian Serb
leadership and by exploiting the notion that Srebrenica
killings were part of a vast Serb plan of "genocide" carried
out against non-Serbs for purely racist reasons, Madeleine
Albright was able to advocate the NATO war against Yugoslavia
as necessary to prevent "another Srebrenica" in Kosovo, where
the situation was altogether different.


To use "Srebrenica" as an effective instrument in the
restructuring of former Yugoslavia, notably by replacing
recalcitrant Serb leaders by more pliable politicians, the crime
needed to be as big as possible: not a mere war crime (such as
the United States itself commits on a serial basis, from Vietnam
to Panama to Iraq), but "genocide": "the worst atrocity in Europe
since the Holocaust". That arouses the Hitler image, which is
always good for the image of the United States as saviour from
across the seas, and implies a plan decided at the highest
levels, rather than the brutal behavior of enraged soldiers (or
paramilitaries, the probable culprits in this case) out of
control.

But what plan for genocide includes offering safe passage to
women and children? And if this was all part of a Serb plot to
eliminate Muslims, what about all the Muslims living peacefully
in Serbia itself, including thousands of refugees who fled there
from Bosnia? Or the Muslims in the neighboring enclave of Zepa,
who were unharmed when the Serbs captured that town a few days
after capturing Srebrenica? To get around these common sense
obstacles, the ICTY prosecution came up with a sociologist who
provided an "expert" opinion: the Srebrenica Muslims lived in a
patriarchal society, therefore killing the men was enough to
ensure that there would be no more Muslims in Srebrenica. This
amounts to shrinking the concept of "genocide" to fit the
circumstances.

It was on basis of this definition that in August 2001 the
Tribunal found Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic guilty of
"complicity in genocide". Although he neither ordered,
participated in or was even aware of any executions, the judges
ruled that he took part in what the ICTY calls a "joint criminal
enterprise" simply by capturing Srebrenica, since he must have
been aware that genocide was "a natural and foreseeable
consequence". This is the ruling that established "genocide" as
the official description of events at Srebrenica.

Why such relentless determination to establish Srebrenica as
"genocide"? A December 27, 2003, Associated Press dispatch
provided an explanation by U.S. jurist Michael Scharf, one of the
designers of the ICTY who has also coached the judges for the
trial of Saddam Hussein: On a practical level, if the court
determines Srebrenica does not fit the legal definition of
genocide, it would be very difficult to make the charge stick
against Milosevic, said Michael Scharf, a professor at Case
Western Reserve University School of Law.

"And it is crucial that he be convicted of genocide," Scharf
said. If Milosevic can't be convicted, "then who can you convict
of genocide in the modern age?" he asked.

The legal definition of genocide could also come into play in an
Iraqi war-crimes tribunal, which has vowed to follow
international legal precedent.

It is striking that from the very start, the effort of the United
States and of the Tribunal in The Hague-which it mainly finances,
staffs and controls-has been to establish what it calls "command
responsibility" for Serb crimes rather than individual guilt of
actual perpetrators. The aim is not to identify and punish men
who violated the Geneva conventions by executing prisoners, but
rather to pin the supreme crime on the top Serb leadership.

The office of the ICTY prosecutor has chosen to rely heavily on a
single confessed participant in the Srebrenica massacre. This
person is one Drazen Erdemovic, a petty criminal of Croatian
nationality who was hospitalized in Serbia in March 1996 after a
near-fatal brawl in a bar in Novi Sad. Quite possibly in order
to escape further threats from his personal enemies, Erdemovic
confessed to Western news media to having taken part in mass
murder in Bosnia. He was arrested by Serb authorites who then,
at his request, turned him over to the Hague Tribunal.

From then on, the prosecution has used Erdemovic repeatedly as
its star witness, using the U.S. procedure of "plea bargaining"
by which a confessed criminal gets off lightly by incriminating
somebody else the prosecution wants to convict. He has told his
story to the judges at his own brief trial, where he was exempted
from cross examination thanks to his guilty plea, as well as at a
hearing incriminating Karadzic and Mladic (in the absence of any
legal defense) and at various trials whenever "Srebrenica" comes
up.

His story goes like this: after briefly serving in the Bosnian
Muslim army, Erdemovic joined an international mercenary militia
unit that seems to have been employed by the Bosnian Serb command
for sabotage operations on enemy territory. On July 16, 1995, his
unit of eight men executed between 1,000 and 1,200 Muslim men
near the village of Pilice, some 40 kilometers north of
Srebrenica. From around 10:30 in the morning to 3 o'clock in the
afternoon, these eight mercenaries emptied bus load after bus
load of prisoners and lined them up to be shot by groups of ten.

Now in fact, it seems that a serious crime was indeed committed
in Pilice. Subsequent forensic investigators exhumed 153 bodies.
One hundred and fifty-three executions of prisoners of war is a
serious crime, and there is material evidence that this crime was
committed. But 1,200? According to the manner of execution
described by Erdemovic, it would have taken 20 hours to murder so
many victims. Yet the judges have never questioned this
elementary arithmetical discrepancy, and Erdemovic's word has
consistently been accepted as gospel truth by the International
Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. (4)

Why this insistence on an implausibly higher number than can be
supported by material evidence? Obviously, the Tribunal wants to
keep the figures as high as possible in order to sustain the
charge of "genocide". The charge of "genocide" is what sharply
distinguishes the indictment of Serbs from indictments of Croats
or Muslims for similar crimes committed during the Yugoslav
disintegration wars.

In August 2000 after not quite four and a half years in jail, the
self-confessed mass murderer Erdemovic was freed, given a new
identity, residence in an unspecified Western country and a
"job", so to speak, as occasional paid and "protected" witness
for the ICTY.

In contrast, General Krstic was sentenced to 35 years in prison
and will be eligible for parole in 20 years.

Clearly, the purpose of the "genocide" charge is not to punish
the perpetrators but to incriminate the Bosnian Serb, and the
Yugoslav Serb, chain of command right up to the top.


Srebrenica As Myth

The transformation of Srebrenica into myth was illustrated last
July by an article in the Italian leftist daily Liberazione
(close to the "Communist Refoundation" party) reporting on a
semi-documentary film entitled "Srebrenica, luci dall'oblio"
("Srebrenica, lights from oblivion"). The title suggests that the
film-makers have rescued from oblivion a tragically neglected
event, when in fact, rarely in the history of warfare has a
massacre been the focus of so much attention.

Here we have the usual self-flagellation: "...what happened in
Srebrenica: the massacre of 9,000 civilians, in the most total
silence/absence on the part of the world institutions
[responsible for] peace..." The author accepts without question
the term "genocide" and raises the figure of victims to new
heights. "Around 9,000 men between the ages of 14 and 70 were
transported by truck to nearby centers where they were massacred
and buried in mass graves..." This was "the greatest mass
genocide committed since the days of Nazism until today"... What
is the point of this exaggeration, this dramatization? Why is
Srebrenica so much more terrible than the war that ravaged
Vietnam, with countless massacres and devastation of the countryside
by deadly chemicals, or the cold-blooded massacre of surrendering
Iraqis at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991? But that is
a genuinely forgotten massacre-not only forgotten, but never even
recognized in the first place, and the "international community"
has not sent teams of forensic scientists to find and identify
the victims of U.S. weapons.

In all probability the film-makers, aspiring artists and
"genocide experts" who consider "Srebrenica" suitable material
for touching the emotions of the public believe that they are
serving the interests of peace and humanity. But I would suggest
quite the contrary. The misrepresentation of "Bosnia" as scene of
a deliberate "genocide" against Muslims, rather than a civil war
with atrocities on all sides, contributes to a spirit of "conflict
of civilizations". It has helped recruit volunteers for
Islamic terrorist groups.

The political exploitation of Srebrenica has turned the Bosnian
war into a morality pantomimew between pure good and pure evil, a
version of events which the Serbs can never really accept and the
Muslims have no desire to give up. This stands in the way of
unbiased investigation and serious historical analysis.
Reconciliation is in fact ruled out by the moralistic insistence
that a stark distinction must be made between "aggressor" and
"victim". This stark difference exists between NATO and
Yugoslavia, or between the U.S. and Iraq, where an overwhelmingly
superior military power deliberately launched an aggressive war
against a sovereign country that neither attacked nor threatened
it.

But the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina was not of that nature. The
war there was the result of an extraordinarily complex legal
situation (an unsettled small Federal Republic constitutionally
composed of three "nationalities": Serb, Muslim and Croat, itself
part of a disintegrating larger Federal Republic) exacerbated by
myriad local power plays and the incoherent intervention of Great
Powers. Moreover, this occurred in a region where memories of
extremely bloody civil war during World War II were still very
much alive. To a large extent, the fighting that broke loose in
1992 was a resumption of the vicious cycle of massacres and
vengeance that devastated Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1941-44, when the
Nazi occupation broke up Yugoslavia and attached
Bosnia-Herzegovina to Greater Croatia, which proceeded to
eliminate Serbs.

Today it is an unquestioned dogma that recalling atrocies is a
"duty of memory" to the victims, something that must be endlessly
repeated, lest we forget. But is this really so obvious? The
insistence on past atrocities may simply prepare the next wave,
which is what has already happened in the Balkans, and more than
once. Because in reality, the dead victims cannot profit from
such memories. But the memory of victimhood is a moral and
political capital of great value for the heirs of victimhood and
especially for their self-appointed champions. And in the case of
Bosnia, it promises to bring considerable financial gain. If
Milosevic, as former president of Serbia, can be convicted of
genocide, then the Bosnian Muslims hope to win billions of
dollars in reparations that will keep Serbia on its knees for the
foreseeable future.

* * *

The obsessive reference to "Srebrenica" has a negative effect far
beyond the Balkans.

The "Srebrenica massacre" is part of a dominant culture discourse
that goes like this: We people in the advanced democracies have
reached a new moral plateau, from which we are both able and have
a duty both to judge others and to impose our "values" when
necessary. The others, on a lower moral plateau, must be watched
carefully, because unlike us, they may commit "genocide". It
is remarkable how "genocide" has become fashionable, with more
and more "genocide experts" in universities, as if studying
genocide made sense as a separate academic discipline. What
would all these people do without genocide? I wonder what is
behind the contemporary fascination with genocide and serial
killers, and I doubt that it is a sign of a healthy social psychology.

In the world today, few people, including Bosnian Muslims, are
threatened by "genocide" in the sense of a deliberate
Hitler-style project to exterminate a population-which is how
most people understand the term. But millions of people are
threatened, not by genocidal maniacs, but by genocidal conditions
of life: poverty, disease, inadequate water, global climate
change. The Srebrenica mourning cult offers nothing positive in
regard to these genocidal conditions. Worse, it is
instrumentalized openly to justify what is perhaps the worst of
all the genocidal conditions: war.

The subliminal message in the official Srebrenica discourse is
that because "we" let that happen, "we" mustn't let "it" happen
again, ergo, the United States should preventively bomb potential
perpetrators of "genocide". Whatever happened in Srebrenica
could have best been prevented, not by U.S. or NATO bombing, but
by preventing civil war from breaking out in Bosnia Herzegovina
to begin with. This prevention was possible if the "international
community", meaning the NATO powers, Europe and the United
States, had firmly insisted that the Yugoslav crisis of 1990
should be settled by negotiations. But first of all, Germany
opposed this, by bullying the European Union into immediate recognition
of the secession of Slovenia and Croatia from Yugoslavia, without
negotiation. All informed persons knew that this threatened
the existence of Bosnia Herzegovina. The European Union proposed
a cantonization plan for Bosnia Herzegovina, not very different
from the present arrangement, which was accepted by leaders of
the Bosnian Muslim, Serb and Croat communities. But shortly
thereafter, Muslim president Alija Izetbegovic reneged, after the
U.S. ambassador encouraged him to hold out for more. Throughout
the subsequent fighting, the U.S. put obstacles in the way of
every European peace plan. [6] These years of obstruction enabled
the United States to take control of the eventual peace settlement
in Dayton, in November 1995.

This rejection of compromise, which plunged Bosnia-Herzegovina
into fratricidal war, was supported at the time by a chorus of
humanitarians- not least politicians safely ensconced in the
European Parliament who voted for "urgent resolutions" about
situations of which they were totally ignorant-claiming that
Bosnia must be a centralized State for the sake of
"multiculturalism". These were the same humanitarians who
applauded the breakup of multicultural Yugoslavia-which in fact
created the crisis in Bosnia.

Clearly, whoever executes unarmed prisoners commits a very
serious crime whether in Bosnia or anywhere else. But when all is
said and done, it is an illusion to think that condemning
perpetrators of a massacre in Bosnia will ensure that the next
civil war somewhere in the world will be carried out in a more
chivalrous manner. War is a life and death matter, and inevitably
leads people to commit acts they would never commit in peacetime.

The notion that war can be made "clean", played according to
rules, should not be the main focus of international law or of
peace movements. War first of all needs to be prevented, not
policed.

The false interpretation of "Srebrenica" as part of an ongoing
Serb project of "genocide" was used to incite the NATO war
against Yugoslavia, which devastated a country and left behind a
cauldron of hatred and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. The United
States is currently engaged in a far more murderous and
destructive war in Iraq. In this context, the Western
lamentations that inflate the Srebrenic massacre into "the
greatest mass genocide since Nazi times" are a diversion from the
real existing genocide, which is not the work of some racist
maniac, but the ongoing imposition of a radically unjust
socio-economic world order euphemistically called "globalization".


Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato, and
Western Delusions [
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/158367084X/counterpunchmaga ]
published by Monthly Review Press. She can be reached at:
dianajohnstone @ compuserve.com

NOTES

1. Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to General Assembly
Resolution 53/35 (1998), Section IV, paragraph C.115.

2. Bernard Kouchner, "Les Guerriers de la Paix", Grasset, Paris, 2004,
pp. 372-375.

3. "Srebrenica: The Politics of War Crimes", by George Bogdanich,
Tim Fenton, Philip Hammond, Edward S. Herman, Michael Mandel,
Jonathan Rooper and George Szamuely. See
http://www.srebrenica-report.com/politics.htm.

4. Germinal Civikov, "Kalaschnikow und Einzelfeuer: Der Fall
Drazen Erdemovic", Freitag, 16 September 2005.

5. Davide Turrini "Il genocidio jugoslavo rivive sullo schermo",
Liberazione, 12 July 2005.

6. See David Owen, Balkan Odyssey, Victor Gollancz, London, 1995.
Lord Owen, who, as co-chairman of the steering committee of the
International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia, attempted from
August 1992 to June 1995 to negotiate a peace settlement in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, concludes (Indigo paperback, p.400): "From
the spring of 1993 to the summer of 1995, in my judgement, the
effect of US policy, despite its being called 'containment', was
to prolong the war of the Bosnian Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina."

---

www.counterpunch.org

CounterPunch - November 5 / 6, 2005

A Response to Certain Criticisms of My Recent Essay
Srebrenica: Using War as an Excuse for More War

By DIANA JOHNSTONE

Anyone foolhardy enough to write a dissenting view about former
Yugoslavia in general and Srebrenica in particular has to know
what she's in for: misinterpretation, outrage, accusations of
being an apologist for genocide. All this is to be expected, but
unpleasant nevertheless, and illustrative of the fact that the
supposed efforts by the "International Community" to foster a
spirit of multicultural reconciliation have been a dismal
failure--and that is putting it mildly.

Thus, despite NATO's war to give Kosovo over to armed rebels
with notorious criminal connections, an Albanian-American writes
indignantly that the Serbs "still stain" Kosovo -- apparently by
their drastically reduced presence in terrorized ghettos. The
symbol of "the Srebrenica massacre" helps keep such hatred
burning, hatred which still has political uses in the Balkans.
At the global level, it is shorthand for the "humanitarian
intervention" imperative, Washington's favorite excuse for
neoimperialist interventions, when "terrorism" and "weapons
of mass destruction" lose credibility.

That symbol was the subject of my essay.

Some months ago, I was invited to join a group of writers
forming a "Srebrenica research group". I declined, explaining
that I had already said all I was capable of saying on the
subject in my book Fools' Crusade.

As I pointed out: There are two sides to writing about Srebrenica.

1-The plain facts: body counts, forensic evidence, etc.

2 -Analysis of the propaganda and political significance.

The analysis is the part that actually interests me the most,
and that I emphasized in my book. In contrast, evaluating the
evidence is beyond my capabilities, nothaving the resources or
the expertise to pursue body counts or seek out survivors.

I would have let it go at that, but an Italian publication,
Giano, recently invited me to write a response to an article in
the Rifondazione comunista newspaper Liberazione, which spoke of
"the massacre of 9,000 civilians", well above even the highest
possible estimates, and dwelt heavily on the charge of
"genocide". This was only one example of an extraordinary media
campaign on the tenth anniversary of the Serb capture of
Srebrenica. Isn't it rather strange that Western media pay more
attention to events in a small town in Bosnia ten years ago than
to the destruction of cities in Iraq which is happening now? It
is clear that "Srebrenica" as a symbol has a propaganda life of
its own, apart from whatever happened there in 1995. However,
that distinction is obviously one that many people find
impossible to make.

Most attacks on my piece center on three terms:

1."Humanitarian intervention."
Although used as an argument in favor of "humanitarian
intervention", the Bosnian war may better be seen as an
illustration of what is wrong with the notion. The idea of
"humanitarian intervention" suggests that Great Powers -- and
given today's relationship of forces, this means the United
States -- can be persuaded to act decisively in the interest
of others. Not only is this an illusion, but the type of
intervention employed by the United States, based on high
altitude bombing, is by its nature totally unsuited to
"humanitarian" missions. The prospect of calling in
"humanitarian intervention" risks exacerbating conflicts in
the hope of drawing in U.S. military power on the side of one
group or another. Had Alija Izetbegovic not been led to
believe that he could obtain U.S. intervention, he might have
worked for a compromise agreement. Without unnecessary
prolongation of the Bosnian conflict, the 1995 Serb capture of
Srebrenica would not have taken place.

2."Civil war."
Despite arguments to the contrary, the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina was
most certainly a civil war, fought mainly between local Muslims,
Serbs and Croats. The fact that all three sides received help
from outside Bosnia-Herzegovina, both from other parts of
former Yugoslavia (Croatia openly sent in its army to fight
for Bosnian Croats) and from farther afield (the Muslims
received arms and fighters from Muslim countries, with
clandestine U.S. help), does not make it any less a civil war.
Foreign intervention in civil wars is not unusual. And the
argument that it was not a civil war because one party (the
Serbs) was stronger than others makes no sense.

3."Genocide."
Some Bosnian Muslims seem to think that labeling Srebrenica "genocide"
is necessary to pay sufficient respect to victims of whatever
happened there. Perhaps some day they may realize that the
charge of "genocide" has nothing to do with extra respect
for victims, and everything to do with pinning the "supreme
crime" on Milosevic for political reasons: to justify NATO's
totally unjustifiable aggression against Yugoslavia in 1999.
The real nature of the Kosovo problem, and the possibilities
for peaceful compromise, were hidden behind the myth of "Srebrenica"
as proof that the Serbs in general, and Milosevic in
particular, were out to commit "genocide" against non-Serbs.
This total fiction enabled Madeleine Albright to get the war
she wanted: the war to initiate NATO into its new mission of
"humanitarian intervention" and thereby reassert U.S. military
dominance of Europe.


Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato, and
Western Delusions [
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/158367084X/counterpunchmaga ]
published by Monthly Review Press. She can be reached at:
dianajohnstone @ compuserve.com


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