Preserving the Srebrenica Myth
Every year since 1996 the anniversary of the fall of Srebrenica on 11 July 1995 to the Bosnian Serb Army has been accompanied by a new wave of worldwide coverage of the ‘worst war crime since World War Two’. This year will be no exception.
This 3’25” BBC news report to mark the 25th anniversary of Srebrenica in 2020 succinctly presents the main cornerstones: https://youtu.be/Jo1sEUn5y24
Our comments on the report:
None of the claims made in this report is based on substantiated fact. The international Commission for Missing Persons has never allowed anyone to see the primary forensic and DNA information it claims to have gathered. Nor has it allowed its search for mass graves and claimed recovery of bodies to be closely examined. ‘Discoveries’ were invariably presented via carefully stage-managed press facilities which gave little scope for investigation.
Laws passed in Croatia and Bosnia have given the ICMP complete immunity to deny any request for access to this information. Not even The Hague Tribunal has been allowed access. All the so-called evidence supporting The Hague Tribunal convictions was based on uncorroborated ‘eye witness evidence’, massive amounts of hearsay evidence and a great deal of evidence given in exchange for plea-bargain deals.
Every aspect of the official Srebrenica story springs from the widespread perception that the root of all evil was a Serbian plan to create a ‘Greater Serbia’. An alleged Serbian policy paper entitled ‘Operation Horseshoe’ was cited as proof.
This soon started to unravel when alert readers noticed that the paper was littered with Croatian spellings, and was dealt a mortal blow in 2001 when the German government admitted that it was a forgery created by the German intelligence service. Yet the notion that Serbia was pursuing a policy of rampant nationalism somehow persists.
Another great myth is the charge that the UN and international community failed in their duty to protect the population of Srebrenica against the Bosnian Serb Army.
It was never the role of the UN to do this – their role was to keep the peace. In any case, until they abandoned Srebrenica town during the night of 10/11 July, there were more than 4,000 well armed Bosnian Muslim troops in Srebrenica town, well able to defend themselves against a Serbian force numbering only a few hundred. Srebrenica fell without a shot being fired because it was, quite intentionally, left entirely undefended.
The reality was that Slobodan Milosevic was the only leader of a Yugoslav republic who wanted to keep the Federal republic of Yugoslavia together. And he did so right up until the moment that Germany illegally and unilaterally decided to recognise Croatia and Bosnia as independent sovereign states. By contrast, Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman and the Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic were both ardent nationalists. Tudjman wanted Croatia to be populated only by Croatians. Izetbegovich wanted Bosnia to become a Muslim-only state. Milosevic was the only leader who believed in multiculturalism and Serbia remains by far the most multicultural state that was part of the former Yugoslavia.
References to ‘ethnic cleansing’ are endlessly repeated despite the fact that Croatians, Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Serbs and all other Serbs are of the same ethnicity. The differences between the different factions in the Bosnian war were essentially religious (Croatia is overwhelmingly Catholic, Serbia is Orthodox Christian and Muslim Bosnia is of course Muslim) and political in the sense that both Croatia and Muslim Bosnia wanted their own, independent states.
We are never likely to know the full detail of what happened in the days after 11 July. But we do know that 35,600 survivors were recorded by the UN at Tuzla and that some 3,000 Bosnian Army soldiers from Srebrenica were seen safely behind Muslim lines by UN observers before they were redeployed to other parts of Bosnia ‘without their families being informed’. So we have at least 38,600 official survivors. As the consensus population figure of the various aid agencies for Srebrenica in July was 38,000, the claimed massacre of 8,000 people is quite simply mathematically impossible.
A final comment on the suggestion that everyone who challenges the official Srebrenica narrative is guilty of genocide denial, as illustrated by the ridiculous link suggested in the report between Srebrenica and a deranged extremist in New Zealand. Serbs have been demonised by relentless propaganda pumped out by the sophisticated PR operations set up by the Croatian and Bosnian Muslim governments on the advice of major US PR firms. Croatia alone is reported to have spent $100 million on this advice.