by David Jan Godfroid :::29-11-2002:::
(http://static.rnw.nl/migratie/www.radionetherlands.nl/currentaffairs/region/easterneurope/bos021129.html-redirected)

by Stella L. Jatras
Special to http://www.antiwar.com/
7/31/00   

The Bosnian Serb military stands accused of committing some of the worst human rights crimes since World War II during and following the battle for Srebrenica in 1995. HOLOCAUST! GENOCIDE! ETHNIC CLEANSING! Claims of 7,000 (or 8,000, or 10,000, or whatever figure is needed to elicit the desired response) Muslim men and boys slaughtered and Dutch troops accused of failing to stop the slaughter! Five years later the allegations not only persist, but are accepted as fact by a compliant and unquestioning media. Yet in five years fewer than 2000 bodies have been discovered in an area where war raged for four years and even those bodies have not been identified as Muslim or Serb, and it has not been determined how they died.

(Monday 11 July 2005)

CHRISTOPHER JAMES questions the one-sided portrayal of the fall of Srebrenica 10 years on.

Doesn't everybody know the Srebrenica story all too well by now? One week of bloody slaughter in and around the war-torn Bosnian town, sparked by its fall to Serb forces exactly 10 years ago today.
Throughout the past decade, our media and politicians have never tired of informing us that up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered there in cold blood - an act of genocide unsurpassed in Europe since World War II.

SPIKED (UK), 3 August 2005

The West turned a bloody battle in a brutal civil war into a clash
between good and evil.

by Tara McCormack

It is 10 years since the internationally brokered Dayton Agreement
ended the civil war in Bosnia-Hercegovina, the worst of the conflicts of the
former Yugoslavia. In the West, the Yugoslav wars have became iconic symbols
of both the transformed nature of war and conflict after the end of the Cold
War, and of the moral imperative for new forms of Western intervention.

By Aleksandar Pavic

For more than 10 years, the term "Srebrenica" has been used to denote the slaughter of "innocent Muslims" at the hands of Christians – more specifically, the Bosnian Serb army, alleged to have slaughtered, according to the version currently accepted by most major media, "between 7,000 and 8,000 Muslims" when it captured that small town in eastern Bosnia in mid-July 1995. As the story goes, the Bosnian Serbs captured this "U.N.-protected zone" and proceeded to take away and execute thousands of men, women and children in the space of several days, subsequently burying them in mass graves that are still being dug up almost 12 years later.

THE GLOBE AND MAIL, Thursday, July 14, 2005

This week marked the 10th anniversary of the United Nations' second greatest failure since its creation in 1945 -- the genocide in Rwanda being the undisputed No. 1. With much fanfare, the ceremonies focused on the massacre of "up to" 8,000 Bosnian men and boys by General Ratko Mladic's Bosnian Serb army in Srebrenica in July of 1995.

In the vast majority of recent media reports, the background and responsibilities for the disaster in Srebrenica were absent. Preferred was the simple explanation: a black and white event in which the Serbs were solely to blame.

It is now part of popular wisdom throughout the western world that between 6,000 and 12,000 muslim men were massacred by the Bosnian Serbs after the fall of the “safe area” of Srebrenica on 11 July 1995.  There is, however, a volume of evidence which casts doubt on whether such a massacre took place.

A.  Srebrenica Safe Area

In common with Sarajevo, Zepa and Gorazde, Srebrenica had become, by 1993, a small Muslim enclave entirely surrounded by land controlled by the Bosnian Serbs.  Refugees temporarily boosted the population of the Srebrenica area to a peak of 60,000 and it was increasingly difficult to keep the enclave supplied with food.  General Philippe Morillon of the UN was allowed through with an aid convoy.   Subsequently, in April 1993, the UN brokered a “safe area” agreement for Zepa, Gorazde and Srebrenica on the basis that the enclaves would be demilitarised, and the Bosnian Serbs would allow free movement in and out of humanitarian convoys.  

Though the Bosnian Muslims handed over some weaponry to the UN, this was mainly obsolete and ineffective equipment.   They retained ample infantry arms, as well as anti-tank weapons and mortars.   Many independent sources, including the UN, confirm that the Bosnian Muslims launched repeated military actions from within the safe area.  A particular provocation for the Bosnian Serbs was the attack on the village of Kravica, where the entire population of 100, comprising mainly old men and women, was wiped out.   As late as the beginning of July 1995, the Bosnian Muslims were continuing to make these attacks.

B.  Political background:

The Bosnian Serb takeover of Srebrenica reinforced a widespread perception that Serbs had humiliated the international community.  Their seizure of UN hostages, which had effectively brought an end to early summer UN air strikes on Bosnian Serb positions, had made UN / NATO appear impotent.  The capture of the the UN-established “safe areas”, despite the threat of NATO air strikes, compounded this impression.   

Reports of massacres following the fall of Srebrenica, closely followed by the Market Place mortar outrage in Sarajevo, enabled the UN to justify taking sides by allowing the prolonged US air strikes in early September 1995.  These air strikes shattered the military capability of the Bosnian Serbs and prepared the way for the Dayton peace agreement in November 1995.

Summary:
In any war truth is the first casualty.  Bosnia was no exception.  World opinion believes the Serbs were to blame for starting the civil war in the former Yugoslavia.  In a crude but effective caricature the Serbs are routinely demonised as modern day Nazis in a genocidal drive to achieve a Greater Serbia.  Their territorial aggression a threat to the European order. But who says so and why?  Where is the hard evidence for this harsh judgment?  This paper will demonstrate how surprisingly little there is and how partial our view has been of a dark and bloody conflict.  It exposes the myths and misconceptions surrounding 'Serb aggression', re-examines the evidence of alleged massacres and traces the real roots of ethnic tension.  It will also analyse the reaction of the international community and question the motives behind intervention.  The Serbian experience of truth, justice and the American way has been untruth, injustice and the American way-or-else.  American PR firms and US foreign policy have been brilliantly successful in branding Serbs as mass murderers and condemning them to be outcasts from the world community.  In a complicated war it is always easier to hate than it is to understand.   But there is no monopoly of evil - in Bosnia all parties behaved badly.  The crucial point is that conflicts can only be resolved if there is understanding on all sides.  Facts are stubborn, awkward things - they may be inconvenient but we ignore them at our peril.

Most of the world believes “the Serbs” were to blame for starting the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, and bear responsibility for the vast majority of the cruelty and suffering that took place. The wars in Yugoslavia were also presented as so exceptional that it was reasonable to compare the Serbs to the Nazis.  A reassessment of the evidence available, most of which was also available at the time, shows that only a small portion of the story was told, and much of that was inaccurate.

[George Bogdanich is part of the Srebrenica Research Group which is led by author Ed Herman of the University of Pennsylvania; Herman is co-editor with Phil Hammond of a series of essays called Degraded Capability: The Media and Kosovo Crisis. Others in the group include former BBC Journalist Jonathan Rooper, former New York Press columnist George Szamuely, Diana Johnstone, author of Fool's Crusade: Yugoslavia NATO and Western Delusions, international law professor Michael Mandel of York University in Toronto, author Phil Hammond, researchers David Peterson of the US, Tim Fenton of London, George Pumphrey of Germany, Dr Milan Bulajic, former Director of the Museum Genocide and Belgrade Professor Vera Vratusa. Mr Bogdanich has also written about the Balkans for various publications including The Chicago Tribune. He was co-producer of Yugoslavia The Avoidable War, with German television reporter Martin Lettmayer.]

Srebrenica Revisited

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".

by Carl Savich

Introduction: The Smoking Gun

On Thursday, February 12, 2004, Philippe Morillon testified at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) established by the US and NATO at The Hague. Morillon was offered as the last major prosecution witness against Slobodan Milosevic. His testimony was meant to provide "the smoking gun" to prove that Milosevic was guilty of genocide in the fall of Srebrenica in 1995. Morillon was first questioned by ICTY Prosecutor Dermot Groome, then by Slobodan Milosevic, and by Branislav Tapuskovic, the Amicus Curiae.

Who was Philippe Morillon? Philippe Morillon was born on October 24, 1935 in Casablanca, Morocco, the son of a French military officer who died in World War II. He graduated from the Saint-Cyr military academy in France in 1956. From 1954-1995 he was an officer in the French Army. In the 1980s, he had been the president of the Yugoslavian-French commission for arms procurement. His first military command had been in Algeria during the secessionist/separatist war that erupted there in the mid-1950s. Morillon along with other French officers fought to keep Algeria a part of France and to prevent secession. In 1961, French president Charles de Gaulle ordered the French army to abandon Algeria and to withdraw to France proper. To Morillon, the order was "an act of treason". Thousands of pro-French Algerians were killed or fled after the French withdrawal. For Morillon and other French officers, "to them Algeria was France", an integral part of France. Morillon joined a group of officers who rebelled against the de Gaulle pullout order. Ironically, Morillon at that time was in a similar position to that of the Bosnian Serbs, who also opposed the secession of Bosnia-Hercegovina and the creation of a Muslim-dominated state. These senior French rebel officers were subsequently purged. Morillon was a middle level officer so he was spared, becoming a four star general. On July 20, 1999, he was elected to the EU European parliament. During the Bosnian civil war, he was the UN commander there in 1992 and 1993, insisting on UN neutrality in Bosnia. His policy of neutrality made him unpopular with the Bosnian Muslim faction. Morillon intervened in Srebrenica to prevent the military defeat of Naser Oric and the fall of Srebrenica in 1993. Morillon established Srebrenica as a "safe haven" but was not able to demilitarize the area. Naser Oric was able to deploy the Bosnian Muslim 28th Infantry Division in Srebrenica after it became a safe area or haven.