Reviewing contemporary media reports about Srebrenica, at the time and right after its capture by Bosnian Serb forces in July of 1995, and before the official narrative had been constructed, is both instructive and refreshing.

Slobodna Bosna, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Hercegovina, 7/14/96

Ibran Mustafic, representative in Bosnian and Federal Parliaments, founder of SDA in Srebrenica and the captive of the Serb Army after the fall of this town, talks about the events about which he had unsuccessfully tried to speak in the Bosnian Parliament.

by George Pumphrey

The "massacre of Srebrenica", where 8,000 Muslim males of military age are reported to have been summarily executed by Bosnian Serbian troops in the aftermath of the takeover of the town, has been termed the worst war crime in Europe since World War II. Most significantly, it has been deemed not merely a crime of war, but evidence of a campaign of genocide, the worst war crime imaginable.

by Konstantin Kilibarda

"The international press…made the battle for Srebrenica sound like Stalingrad. There is a kind of dialectical relation between the attention of a great power and the power of the media. It creates a distortion in our work. What I am trying to do, without great success, is to correct this distortion."- Comments by UN Secretary General Boutros-Boutros Ghali at the time of Srebrenica's capture by Bosnian Serb troops.
For all intents and purposes the "Srebrenica Massacre" has become for many advocates of the "New Interventionism" the sine qua non of the Western presence in the Balkans. The notion that the Bosnian Serb Army or Vojska Republike Srpske (VRS) organized and executed a premeditated slaughter of 7,000 unarmed Bosnian Muslim civilian males has become a crucial element in portraying Serbs, collectively, as genocidal aggressors.
However, one need not look too deep, or even to the Serbian side, for another, non-CNN, perspective on this chapter of the Balkan story. A completely different narrative emerges from within the ranks of the Armija Bosne i Hercegovine (ARBiH), in other words the army of the US-backed Islamist faction in Bosnia.