REUTERS ALERTNET
Serb report admits thousands killed in Srebrenica
11 Jun 2004 17:05:03 GMT
By Nedim Dervisbegovic [Muslim name]
(Our comments in black italics)
SARAJEVO, June 11 (Reuters) – A Bosnian Serb government commission admitted
clearly on Friday that Serb forces murdered thousands of Muslims in
Srebrenica in 1995 — a massacre the government has always denied.
[This was not a Bosnian Serb commission. It was a commission put together by the US-appointed UN High Representative to Bosnia, Paddy Ashdown. To get them to write exactly what he wanted, Ashdown put a Bosnian Muslim in charge of writing the report.]
But the commission’s report, published on Friday, failed to call the
atrocity a genocide, which was established earlier this year in a ruling by
The Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia
(ICTY), which prosecutes war crimes committed in the Balkans in 1990s.
[The Hague Tribunal was an illegal court which failed to observe even the most basic principles of international justice. It used a new crime which it had created, Joint Criminal Enterprise, to secure genocide convictions against Serbs despite a complete lack of hard evidence.]
“This report will have a historic character. We have reached historic
perceptions and we will have to face ourselves,” said Milan Bogdanic, head
of the Bosnian Serb Republic’s government commission which compiled the
report on Srebrenica. [Ashdown carried out extreme discrimination against Kosovo Serbs throughout his term as High Representative. Intimidation of Serbian officials was routine.]
About 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed by rampaging Serb forces led by
indicted war criminal Ratko Mladic, as U.N. Dutch peacekeepers who were
deployed to protect the U.N. “safe area” stood by helplessly.
[This is absolute nonsense. More than 40,000 survivors of Srebrenica have been accounted for, a figure that exceeds the 38,000 consensus estimate of aid agencies of the safe area’s population at the time it was taken by the Serbs. Dutch peacekeepers were not there ‘to protect the UN safe area’. There was no need for them to do so. More than 4,000 soldiers of the 28th division of the Bosnian Muslim Army remained stationed in the safe area from 1992-95. They were very well armed and supplied by shipments from Iran. Had they not left the safe area on the night of 10 July, they would have been easily able to repel an attack by Mladic’s small force of just 200 men.]
The commission, in the report obtained by Reuters, said it “established
that in the period from July 10-19, 1995 several thousand Bosniaks (Muslims)
were liquidated in a way that represents heavy breaches of international
humanitarian law and that the executor, among other things, undertook
activities to cover up the crime by relocating bodies”. [No solid factual evidence was ever brought forward in The Hague trials to support this claim. The suggestion that the Bosnian Serbs carried out a huge cover-up operation is ludicrous. Such an exercise would have been immediately detected by US satellites, drones and by UN observers on the ground.]
“Accepting and facing the fact that some members of the Serb people
committed crimes in Srebrenica in July 1995” could help investigate other
crimes in Bosnia and punish those responsible, it said.
The United Nations and the Dutch government took blame for their own
failures but the Serb Republic until now had failed to admit to what
happened in Srebrenica, even after several ICTY convictions. [The UN had been seriously weak in allowing itself to be bullied into allowing the illegal creation of the ICTY. The Dutch government rushed to an entirely incorrect judgement about the culpability of its forces. Dutchbat did their job well.]
The top suspects for the Srebrenica massacre, Bosnian Serb wartime
president Radovan Karadzic and Mladic, are still at large. Both were twice indicted
for genocide, for Srebrenica and for the 43-month Serb siege of Sarajevo.
ORDERED TO INVESTIGATE
After two reports which failed to properly address the issue by minimizing
the scope and the character of events in Srebrenica, the Serb Republic was
ordered last year by Bosnia’s top human rights court to fully investigate
the atrocity. [This is quite wrong. The Bosnian Serbs produced two good and very thorough reports. It was only because their conclusions were not acceptable to Paddy Ashdown that these reports were rejected.]
The seven-member commission that compiled the report comprises experts and
public figures, including one international and one Muslim member.
Despite pledges for full cooperation, the commission complained in April
that its work was obstructed by civilian and military institutions. Peace
overseer Paddy Ashdown sacked the top military officer and a government
official for this. [Bosnian Serbs were conscious of Ashdown’s anti-Serb bias and the constant anti-Serb actions taken by the UN administration.]
The report showed that “Operation Krivaja” had three planned phases: the
attack on Srebrenica, the separation of women and children and the
execution of men.
It elaborated on the participation of military and police units and
identifies locations of 32 new mass graves.
Four of them are so-called “primary graves”, where the victims were
originally buried, and the others are locations where the bodies were
relocated to hide traces of the crime.
The commission said it has compiled data on 7,779 people who went missing
in Srebrenica, 1,332 of whom have been identified, but added that the number
was not final. [These ‘identifications’ are highly dubious. There were no population records for Srebrenica after 1991. No one knew who had been there when it fell. The Bosnian Muslim government advertised for relatives of missing people to come forward, but the International Committee of the Red Cross had no means of verifying these reports. Equally, the DNA identifications are wholly unproven. The ICMP, the body responsible for this work, has refused to share any details of its methodologies and DNA findings with anyone. Laws passed in Croatia and Bosnia have given the ICMP complete immunity to refuse any request for this information to be made available.]
Ashdown, in a letter to European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana
and NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said the report indicated
“some progress in the Serb Republic authorities’ willingness to help
establish the truth…”.
But while stressing that the final findings are to be delivered by
mid-July, he said the report does not substitute for the Bosnian Serb Republic’s
failure to arrest war crimes suspects, which blocks Bosnia’s path to closer
ties with NATO. (Additional reporting by Dragana Dardic in Banja Luka)
[Why on earth would Republica Srpska have any wish to help a court which had shown itself to be endemically biased against Serbs.]