Truth and Lies about the 1995 “Srebrenica Massacre” (1)

The focal political aims of current anti-Serb propaganda

The current Serbophobic propaganda to abolish Republika Srpska (RS) and to create a unitary Bosnia-Herzegovina (a neo-Ottoman Muslim Bosnian province) is coming from the ranks of the Bosnian Muslim Party of Democratic Action (Stranka Demokratske Akcije – SDA) and its Western sponsors. The propaganda, however, coincides with the final phase of The Hague war crimes trial, following so-called “arrests”[i] and express deportations for the Netherlands by at that time pro-Western Serbian Government of former wartime commander of the Army of the Republika Srpska (Vojska Republike Srpske – VRS), General Ratko Mladic, and the first President of the Republika Srpska (RS), Dr. Radovan Karadzic, at The Hague war crimes, committed in the 1990s, tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.[ii]

This anti-Serbian propaganda orchestrated in Sarajevo, Zagreb, Washington, Berlin, and Brussels aims at four basic functions:

• To finally stick the label of Nazi genocide to Serbs through the Hague verdict, perhaps even inferring it is genetically innate .
• To abolish the Republika Srpska and thus modify the 1995 Dayton Agreement.
• To annul the genocide against Serbs in the 20th century committed by Croats, Bosniaks, and Albanians.
• To finally legalize the abduction of Kosovo from Serbia and to verify the creation of Greater Albania, for which the leading political structures in Prishtina and Tirana are openly advocating.

It is indicative that the reactivation of the “Ratko Mladic case” followed immediately after the failed negotiations on the constitutional re-organization of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which would effectively annul the Dayton Agreement of November 21^st, 1995, as well as its verification in Paris in December of that year. These negotiations, sponsored by the EU, have revealed the essence of the diplomacy of the Muslim political leadership towards the Serbs westward of the Drina River: to abolish the Republika Srpska at all costs, as the basic guarantor of national identification and political-cultural autonomy of Serbs in this area. As in previous years after Dayton, the main argument of the Muslim political establishment in Sarajevo, and above all the hardened SDA hawk – Haris Silajdzic, is that the Republika Srpska is the so-called “genocidal creation” and as such must be abolished. As before, the propaganda politically plundered the case of Srebrenica from July 1995 and is taken as a moral argument for the abolition of the Serbian political entity in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but also as a formal excuse for taking Kosovo from Serbia according to the already official Hashim Thachi’s formula: “Kosovo was lost to the Serbs in Srebrenica”.[iii]

We have witnessed the “Srebrenica case” being manipulated for more than two decades by launching and abusing a media campaign accusing the Serbian side of killing nearly 10,000 Muslim civilians from the Bosnian town after the VRS captured it in July 1995. The main “trump card” is still the data obtained by American spy satellites, which forwarded photographs taken from the air showing traces of the dug soil, which served many ad hoc to declare these traces as alleged graves of executed Srebrenica Muslims.[iv] Although no graves or corpses were ever found in those places later, the American propaganda campaign nevertheless achieved two major political goals:

• It excluded criticism of the NATO pact, which violated the principle of neutrality in the Bosnian-Herzegovinian conflict in the 1990s by bombing Serb military positions and civilian facilities.
• It turned the attention of the international public from the tragic fate of about 250.000 Serbs expelled from the territory of the Republic of Serbian Krayina by the official Croatian security authorities (police and army) in early August 1995.

During the summer and fall of 1995, neither Washington nor Brussels took into account the views and explanations of Yasushi Akashi (the official representative and head of the United Nations mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina) who attributed responsibility for the events in Srebrenica to the Muslim side. Public criticism of Yasushi Akashi on his report on Srebrenica had, however, the desired effect: it showed the alleged impotence of the United Nations, and at the same time propagated the effectiveness of the new international “peacemaker” – NATO led by the United States.

As the final effect of such a propaganda game with the Srebrenica victims should be the abolition of the Republika Srpska, and in that context is, as well as, the decision of the so-called “European Parliament” to commemorate July 11^th (1995) as a day of remembrance for the “Srebrenica victims”. Of course, these are only Muslim victims, but not Serbs from Srebrenica and its surroundings. Let’s just remind one that before the war in the 1990s there were 25% Serbs in Srebrenica, and during the war none and that in the area around Srebrenica about 2.300 Serb civilians were killed by Muslims. In the wider area of ​​Srebrenica 3.267 Serbs were killed and massacred in the period from April 1992 to June 1995, while almost 6.500 Serb civilians were brutally killed by Bosniak Muslims and Roman Catholic Croats in the same area during World War II in most brutal ways..[v]

Thus, after the decision of the European Parliament (January 2009) to mark July 11^th as “Srebrenica Day”, Bosnian Srebrenica, de facto, became part of “Europe”. Given that the so-called “European Parliament”, which is in fact, the Parliament of the European Union (so, not of Iceland, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Norway, which are not Member States of the EU, but they are certainly part of Europe), made such a decision, we can conclude that Srebrenica is, after Slovenia, a second area of the former Yugoslavia that became a member of the European Union without an official application for admission (unlike Slovenia). Croatia was “Europeanized” in 2013 as the third ex-Yugoslav land. Brussels explained its decision about “Srebrenica Day” based on A. Izetbegović’s claims about Srebrenica as “the greatest human tragedy in Europe after the Second World War” when ” 7.000−8.000 people disappeared after the entry of the Army of the Republika Srpska”[vi] (or better to say after the return of the Serbs after the exodus from Srebrenica). Nevertheless, the fate of these people is little known, but the wartime President of Bosnia-Herzegovina is convinced that they were shot by the Serbs under the command of General Ratko Mladic.

The fact remains that so far 2.000 Srebrenica victims have been buried in the Memorial Center in Potochari, and the rest up to A. Izetbegovic’s figure of 7.000−8.000 have not been found until today, although more or less the whole of Bosnia-Herzegovina has been “dug up” using satellite images, etc. Based on the testimony of the participants in the “Srebrenica event” from July 1995 in the Hague Tribunal,[vii] as well as based on other memoirs, it can be concluded that not more than 2.300 (male) people from Srebrenica aged 16−66 were “shot” (i.e., official conscripts, i.e., physically potential killer warriors). In other words, about the same number as the Muslim forces from Srebrenica killed Serbs in the surrounding Srebrenica villages until the VRS entered this East Bosnian town. Whether the figures of 2.300 or 7.000−8.000 are enough for the European Parliament to declare a pan-European day of mourning and remembrance is not within the competence of the author of this article, but the fact remains that Muslim forces were only until April 1993 within, as they claimed, the “liberated zone” around Srebrenica, managed to carry out a systematic ethnic cleansing of the Serbian civilians. Consequently, only in the Srebrenica and Bratunac municipalities, out of 93 Serb settlements, 82 were destroyed.

War crimes in Yugoslavia and the ICTY

Formally, the US administration of Bill Clinton established the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, the Netherlands, by a May 1993 resolution of the UN Security Council as a step toward fostering the principle of individual responsibility for war crimes. However, Bill Clinton personally never was charged by the same tribunal for war crimes in ex-Yugoslavia for some reason. From the moral viewpoint, the ICTY is intended to deal with war atrocities committed in ex-Yugoslavia after 1991 and was the first genuinely international tribunal of its kind, the first to hold such trials since the time of the tribunals of Nuremberg and Tokyo.

However, the essence of the ICTY is that it was proclaimed to be the first to invoke the Genocide Convention primarily taking into consideration the “Srebrenica case” from July 1995. The ICTY was mandated to prosecute war crimes against humanity, violations of the laws of war, and genocide committed on the territory of ex-Yugoslavia. The court itself consists of 16 permanent judges selected by the UN General Assembly and as a formally “independent” prosecutor. However, the majority of those 16 judges and the prosecutor him/herself are coming from the countries which have quite close political, economic, financial, etc., relations with the USA and the West.

Among those indicted by the ICTY, surely the most prominent personality was Slobodan Miloshevic who was former President of Serbia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia composed of Serbia and Montenegro (FRY). He was charged with crimes committed in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and South Serbia’s Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metochia (in English Kosovo). However, his indictment included ethnic cleansing and genocide charges too. Concerning the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slobodan Miloshevic was charged with four indictments:

• Two were counted of genocide and complicity in genocide.
• Ten counts were for crimes against humanity involving persecution, extermination, murder, imprisonment, torture, deportation, and inhumane acts, i.e., forcible transfers.
• Eight counts were for grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions involving willful killing, unlawful confinement, torture, willfully causing great suffering, unlawful deportation or transfer, and extensive destruction and appropriation of property. The third indictment was mainly taking into consideration the 1995 “Srebrenica case”.
• Nine indictments have been counted as violations of the laws or customs of war involving attacks on civilians, unlawful destruction, plunder of property and cruel treatment.

However, the proceedings by the ICTY stopped as Slobodan Miloshevic was left intentionally to die in the custody for the reason that the court could not prove the accusations against him. The focal point of the court, nevertheless, was that individuals, including heads of state, must assume responsibility for acts committed by them and their subordinates that violate international law. Unfortunately, this point is asymmetrically valid across the world as, for instance, it was never applied to the cases of any US President or the top NATO commanders.

Currently, on also on trial are some other Serbian leaders from the region accused of the same or similar war crimes as it was in the case of Slobodan Miloshevic. Regarding the 1995 “Srebrenica case”, two of them are the most important. First, former political leader (President of the Republika Srpska) of the Serbs from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Dr. Radovan Karadzic, and second, General Ratko Mladic – a supreme military commander of the Army of the Republika Srpska, who is accused of directing the killing of 8.000+ Bosnian-Herzegovinian men and boys in a UN “safe area” in Srebrenica in July 1995. The Western Serbophobic propaganda is stressing all the time that it was the largest massacre in Europe since the end of WWII. However, the largest massacre in Europe since January 1^st, 1945 was the massacre of the civilians in Dresden committed by Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower. Nevertheless, General Ratko Mladic was “arrested” in 2001 and extradited to The Hague.

Nonetheless, the fundamental question arises what really happened and why inside and around the town of Srebrenica in July 1995 and before.

End of the first part.

To be continued.

Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic

Ex-University Professor

Research Fellow at Centre for Geostrategic Studies

Belgrade, Serbia

www.geostrategy.rs

vsotirovic@yahoo.com

References:

[i] On the “arrest” of General Mladic in the Vojvodina village of Lazarevo, see the report of the Russian television Russia Today. Actually, there was no real arrest, because General Mladic, in fact, surrendered himself in order to get the necessary medical care. The farce about the arrest was staged by the then ruling pro-Western puppet coalition in Belgrade in order to get the much-needed votes in the next presidential and parliamentary elections (2012).

[ii] General Ratko Mladic (born on March 12^th, 1942 in East Bosnia) was “arrested” on May 26^th, 2011. and sent to The Hague on May 31^st, 2011. The trial of the General began on May 16^th, 2012. Here, we are free to ask two crucial questions:

1. Why did the General hide in Serbia, and not in his own homeland, the Republika Srpska, in which he fought and for which he fought?
2. Why the Belgrade puppet regime did not deliver General Mladic to Banja Luka after his arrest, i.e., the Republika Srpska, where would he be tried for the alleged crimes which, if they were, have been committed not in the Netherlands but in the Republika Srpska?

It is necessary to remind that the American authorities do not recognize any international court (neither military nor civilian) where their Presidents, soldiers, and/or officers accused of war crimes around the world would be investigated. Also, during the American Civil War of 1861−1865, the federal army of the US Government committed proven crimes against humanity in the territory of the Confederate South for which no one has been held accountable so far like for the crimes of genocide against Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The US historians claim that a total of about 5 million Indians were killed in the United States. In addition, the survivors of this genocide were placed in open-air concentration camps, which are called “reserves” by American officials.

[iii] On the basis of this Hashim Thachi’s approach, Kosovo is lost to the Albanians in the Albanian-run crematorium in the Kosovo village of Klechka in August 1998, and after the Albanian-committed “March Pogrom” of the Serbs in Kosovo (March 17−19^th, 2004). Accordingly, perhaps, the Albanians have lost the last moral right to live in Europe, so under the auspices of the United Nations, they should be deported as a destructive-Nazi ethno-collective from the Balkans (and Europe) to their true homeland in East Caucasus.

[iv] Watch the documentaries Забрањена истина о Сребреници (“The Forbidden Truth About Srebrenica”) and Town Betrayed.

[v] The wars of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia were nothing more than a continuation of the previous war of 1941−1945 and this war was, in fact, a continuation of the war from 1914−1918. Dr. Radovan Karadzic made it clear that the war of the 1990s:

“… was a continuation of World War II, people remembered what this or that family had done to them and were afraid that it would all happen again, and they said: It is better for us to kill them first, than for them to kill us. People did not forget who killed their fathers, grandfathers and mothers. Everyone was afraid of revenge and started first” [Радован Караджич, Интервју, Московские новости, Москва, No. 36, 05. 09. 1993, page 11А].

By the logic of things and knowledge of South Slavic history, it can be concluded that the next war in this area will be only a continuation of the previous one from the last decade of the 20^th century. On the history of Serbs in the last five centuries between biological extinction and physical survival, see in [Милорад Екмечић, Дуго кретање између клања и орања. Историја Срба у Новом веку (1492−1992), Београд: Evro Giunti, 2010].

[vi] Alija Izetbegović, Govori, pisma, intervjui ’95, Sarajevo: TKP „Šahinpašić“, 1996, page 107.

[vii] The Hague Tribunal was established and launched by the US administration to equate Serbs in alleged crimes with Nazi Germans, as evidenced by the enormous ethnic difference in the number and years of prison sentences for Serbs compared to all other ethno-war criminals on the other hand. The tribunal’s shameful acquittals of the Bosniak butcher from Srebrenica, Naser Oric, the mass killer of Kosovo Albanian Ramush Haradinaj, as well as the Ustashi (Nazi Croat) beasts Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markach, speak best of the character of this extremely politicized Serb-hating institution. We have to keep in mind that Serge Brammertz on January 3^rd, 2013 publicly stated that on 1300 pages of the indictment against the Croatian generals A. Gotovina and M. Markach exists absolutely enough evidence for their genocidal activity.