Dmitar Stoyanov, Bulgarian EU parliament deputy

         The pressure to do the right thing sometimes can indeed be great. So great, in fact, that one’s own institutional procedures are hastily violated, not to mention disregarding such marginal principles such as allowing time for calm deliberation or giving all interested parties an opportunity to have a say.
          It was done with such irreproachable politically correct haste that on January 15, 2009, the European Parliament by a lopsided Supreme Soviet majority of over 500, with 22 abstaining and only 9 opposed, voted to declare July 11 a day of remembrance of the genocide in Srebrenica. The curious thing is that the various drafts of the Srebrenica genocide resolution had been tabled barely three months earlier and that under the circumstances the normal legislative path of the initiative would have been not just the draft reconciliation process but—more importantly—public hearings that should have been called by committee with broad participation of all interested parties to discuss its merits. That such a course should have been followed is, at least, the distinct impression left by Rule 114 (2): “Such proposals shall be referred to the committee responsible for consideration. Where appropriate, the Committee shall refer the matter to Parliament in accordance with the procedures laid down in these rules.”

Paragraph 3 of the same rule goes on: “Where it presents a report, the Committee responsible shall submit to Parliament a proposal for a recommendation to the Council, together with a brief explanatory statement…”
          Rules of this sort, encouraging basic democratic practices such as “consideration” [perhaps in Euro-English this is another word for “deliberation”],  seem not just sensible but perfectly consonant with European Parliament’s own Rule 96 (1), which mandates with eloquent simplicity that: “…Parliament shall ensure the utmost transparency of its activities…” [See EU parliament Rules of procedure, 16th edition, October 2008 - [PDF 1.16 MB] ].  
          Attention to the resolution’s details does indeed offer some clues why fast track procedure might have been thought by its sponsors to be the optimal course. It talks, for instance, of the “carnage after the fall of Srebrenica, [of] more than 8000 Muslim men and boys [who] were summarily executed” by Bosnian Serbs. It  throws in, for good measure, deportation “of thousands of women, children and elderly people and the rape of a large number of women.”
          If a public hearing on the merits of the resolution had been held, the parliamentary committee would undoubtedly have been informed that 8000 Muslims were not lined up and shot and that the utmost number of victims of the Srebrenica massacre in July of 1995 is around 3400, assuming that each forensic report is taken at its face value as proof of execution, something that is not even theoretically possible. That is because slightly over 50% of those post-mortem reports refer to body fragments, such as a jaw or a femur, which zealous ICTY forensic experts elevated to the status of “cases” but from which no credible conclusions about the cause and manner of death can be drawn. In fact, in about 50% of the cases, ICTY forensic specialists themselves stated in their reports that they are unable to determine the cause and manner of death, notwithstanding their obvious motivation to present satisfactory results to the institution which hired them.
            But the resolution does contain at least one statement that is basically correct: “… in spite of the enormous efforts made to date to discover and exhume mass and individual graves and identify the bodies of the victims, the searches conducted until now do not permit a complete reconstruction of the events in and around Srebrenica.” True enough, there is a mass of unanswered questions, but having recognized that why the rush to draw categorical conclusions and to apportion guilt?
          The fact that in the plenary “debate” on the floor of the European Parliament, out of 785 potential participants barely a dozen took part who were mainly from the ranks of the proponents, reinforces the conclusion that what went on was a staged performance and not a genuine exercise in parliamentary procedure which could serve as an example to the young democracies of Eastern Europe.
          Not that those who did take the floor were necessarily a credit to Western parliamentarism. Witness Diana Wallis, parliament vice-president and one of the resolution’s sponsors on behalf of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats group: “…we all feel complicit having witnessed some of the scenes of July of 1995 on our own TV screens and felt so helpless.”
          But in fact, Ms. Wallis seems to suffer from an overheated, though indisputably politically correct, imagination. She could not have seen any grisly scenes on her own  TV screen in July of 1995 because none were broadcast and therefore no one saw them. The reason is simple, and it has to do with the chronology of the relevant events somewhere in the misty past of fourteen years ago.
          It may be difficult to visualize now, after “Srebrenica genocide” had become virtually a household word, and Ms. Wallis may be forgiven for her lapse, but it took two months for the Srebrenica Massacre story to break.  The New York Times headline of 18 July 1995 (by-line Chris Hedges) claimed that 3,000 to 4,000 Muslims who were reported missing after the fall of Srebrenica (11 July 1995) had “slipped” through Serbian lines to safety in Tuzla. Hedges himself did not employ this oxymoron: he wrote that the Muslim fighters were armed and fighting the 50 some miles through enemy country to Muslim-held territory. US Ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, told a closed session of the Security Council on 11 August 1995 that 2,000 to 2,700 Bosnians from the Srebrenica enclave were missing and might have been shot by the Bosnian Serbs. The Red Cross reported — two months after the purported event — in September 1995, that 8000 Muslim men were missing. This suggests rather strongly that the first mention of the phrase “Srebrenica Massacre of 8000 men and boys” that might have reached the horrified senses of Ms. Wallis, could not have appeared on her TV screen in July, because it became current only in late September 1995.
          As it happened, however, the honor of the European Parliament was in the end saved, if barely, by the intervention of one of its Bulgarian members. Dmitar Stoyanov admonished his sophisticated European colleagues that the “text before us is but half of the story….you mention there some world famous names: Ratko Mladic, Radovan Karadzic, Krstic, etc. But we do not see there the names of Muslims who had committed crimes in Srebrenica during that appalling conflict. Where is the name of Naser Oric, commander of the Muslim 28th Division? Why does this resolution fail to mention the slaughter in the Christian village of Kravica on Christmas Day in 1993? Why did you not give due mention to dozens of Christian villages which were torched around Srebrenica by Muslim soldiers? We should avoid advocating a biased position and imposing double standards when discussing such horrible events. Whoever asserts that only Christians were killing Moslems in Bosnia and Hercegovina, but that the reverse did not happen, is a hypocrite. Did you send anyone there to check out what really happened? It says here that Srebrenica is full of mass graves, and that is true. But was anyone sent out there to check how many of those who were buried in those mass graves are Christians?
          “Let it not be forgotten that what occurred there was reciprocal, and let us not pretend that Christians do not exist and do not have human rights, as if they were some sort of animals.”