Western media coverage of the 1990s civil wars in Yugoslavia was overwhelmingly based on accounts from people claiming to be eyewitnesses. So were the hearings of The Hague Tribunal, where the prosecution, having failed to carry out a proper formal investigation which would yield hard evidence, relied almost entirely on the testimony of anonymous eyewitnesses.
This article below by American journalist Charles Lane illustrates many of the classic ways in which wholly unsubstantiated allegations were morphed into an apparently authoritative and detailed account of what had happened. Our comments are in bold italics.
The New Republic
AUGUST 14, 1995
SECTION: Pg. 14
HEADLINE: THE FALL OF SREBRENICA
BYLINE: Charles Lane
HIGHLIGHT: A CASE STUDY IN POLITICAL AND MILITARY FAILURE.
Zagreb
The barking of dogs filled the air around Srebrenica on the night of Tuesday, July 11, just hours after the United Nations-declared safe area fell to the Bosnian Serbs. To Warrant Officer Be Oosterveen of the Dutch unit assigned to protect the enclave, it was clear what the sound meant: Serb soldiers were using dogs to hunt down Muslim men who had fled to the surrounding hills. After daylight, he heard the sound of shooting coming from those same hills. “It was not fighting,” he recalls. “It was shot by shot. There’s a difference between fighting and executing. You can hear that.” [Mr Lane filed his report just over a month after Srebrenica town was taken by the Bosnian Serb army. In the days just before Srebrenica fell Bosnian Muslim leaders had rung round western leaders alleging a genocide, but had then gone quiet. Now the Bosnian and Croatian propaganda teams went into overdrive. Warrant Officer Oosterveen’s story of dogs barking may well be true, but the significance he assigns to this is pure conjecture. By his own account he didn’t witness anything – just heard some barking dogs.]
Soon, there was proof. A frightened refugee boy approached Oosterveen, gesturing toward the hills and drawing a line across his throat. The boy led Oosterveen and a fellow soldier to a group of nine men, Muslim civilians, face down in a row at the edge of a stream. Oosterveen’s colleague snapped a couple of quick pictures of the bodies. Then the two soldiers, weaponless because Serb troops had disarmed them, hastened back to camp. “The Serbs were close,” Oosterveen says. “It was dangerous.” [This is not ‘proof’ of anything. The boy is not identified and there is no evidence to confirm his identity or testimony. The scene he brought Mr Oosterveen and his colleague to see, very briefly because ‘the Serbs were close’, could have been staged for their benefit].
So thorough was the Western humiliation in Srebrenica that a thirty-year veteran of a Nato army found himself reduced to furtively documenting war crimes that had occurred on the perimeter of his own base, crimes that he had been powerless to prevent. But the story is even worse: a review of the events leading to the fall of the enclave shows that it need not have fallen so easily, meaning that at least some of the horrors perpetrated against its former inhabitants were quite possibly preventable. [‘…furtively documenting war crimes’: another unsupported, anonymous claim].
There are many to blame, including Srebrenica’s Bosnian army defenders, who failed to put up a serious fight. But most of the fault lies with the rubber-willed politicians of the West and the U.N.-dominated system they devised for purportedly protecting the safe area. That hybrid of peacekeeping and warfighting made it impossible for the Dutch to use all their military assets, including Nato air power, to full advantage against the Serbs. [More than 4,000 men of the 28th division of the Bosnian Muslim Army (ABiH) were based in the Srebrenica safe area right up until the moment when they abandoned the town. The UN knew about this but did nothing. The ABiH never handed over their weapons, as they were obliged to do under the safe area agreement. Between 1992-95, under the leadership of Nasir Oric, the ABiH murdered some 3,000 unarmed Serbian agricultural workers living in remote villages within the safe area. The UN did nothing about this. The safe area was always a farce – the Bosnian Muslim leadership was only interested in Srebrenica because they knew it would be a strong bargaining counter in eventual negotiations to end the conflict. The role of the Dutch peacekeepers was not to be a fighting force to protect the Bosnian Muslims: they were there as peacekeepers to uphold the safe area agreement.]
The result was that authorized representatives of the international community stood by as certainly dozens and probably hundreds of civilians were either murdered–some by Serb forces wearing stolen U.N. garb and driving stolen U.N. vehicles–or led away to face death in Serb custody. Srebrenica is a case study in how Western dithering at the highest levels translated into humiliation and murder on the ground. [Once again, no supporting evidence is given of these accusations against the Serbs, though it does seem likely that some UN vehicles were commandeered because General Mladic’s small force was desperately short of vehicles and fuel.]
The full story of this scandal begins in Spring 1992, when Serbian paramilitaries began the ethnic cleansing of the Drina valley. The area, directly abutting Serbia, was strategically vital to Greater Serbia; yet most of its population, inconveniently, was Muslim. The majority-Muslim town of Bratunac, on the Drina just nine miles north of Srebrenica, was occupied by the Serbs on May 10. According to eyewitness testimony reported by Misha Glenny in The Fall of Yugoslavia, several hundred of the town’s Muslim men were murdered in two days; some 6,000 or 7,000 more Muslim civilians were crowded into the town’s sports stadium and then expelled. Many of them wound up down the road in Srebrenica. [War started in Bosnia when a Serb was shot by a sniper while attending a wedding. All sides immediately looked to secure their vital lines of communication. People from all sides chose to leave or were moved during this process. It has now been proved that there never was any sort of Greater Serbia policy – alone among the Yugoslav republics, Serbia wanted to preserve the Yugoslav Federation and acted accordingly. Misha Glenny’s book was published before it became clear that eyewitness accounts of massacres and claims about death camps and the rape of 50,000 Bosnian Muslim women were completely untrue – the product of a huge propaganda campaign mounted by the Bosnian Muslims and the Croatian information service, successfully using techniques taught to them by American PR firms.]
On a visit to Bratunac on May 11, 1993, one year after this pogrom, I found an eerie, half-empty town whose remaining population appeared to be entirely Serb. Most of the shops in the former Muslim quarter had been looted and their windows smashed. The mosque had been razed; goats grazed in the weed- choked Muslim cemetery. Locals told me that the mosque had been hit by a Muslim bomb. [The same happened in former Serbian areas. Regrettably, such reprisals are common in wartime.]
The sacking of Bratunac set the stage for a fierce Muslim counterattack and the most serious documented atrocities committed by Muslim forces in Bosnia. Muslim guerrillas, including survivors of the Serb rampage of the spring, operated throughout the winter of 1992-93 from Srebrenica and its surroundings, using an abandoned mine as a fortress. They burned several Serb villages and killed hundreds of Serbs; most were soldiers, but many were civilians. In February 1994 Nasir Oric, the commander of the Bosnian army in Srebrenica, showed John Pomfret of The Washington Post a videotape that, Oric proudly explained, depicted a burned Serb village and a pile of headless Serb corpses slaughtered by Oric’s men. [‘Documented atrocities’ has come to mean – and perhaps has always meant – nothing more than atrocities that have been widely reported by politicians and the media. It seldom means that there has been any kind of professional investigation supported by carefully gathered evidence. But it sounds good.]
During this period, Serb forces refused to permit humanitarian relief convoys into refugee-swollen Srebrenica. They attempted to seize the town outright in April 1993. That offensive, including a Serb shelling attack which left thirty-six people dead in a Srebrenica school yard, eventually prompted the U.N. to declare Srebrenica a “safe area.” The Serbs accepted, on the condition that the Muslim soldiers in the town relinquish their weapons to a company of Canadian U.N. troops; most of the Muslims did. For the next two years, Srebrenica’s population, stretched to about 42,000 by the continuing influx of “ethnically cleansed” Muslims from elsewhere in the Drina valley, lived in ghetto-like misery but relative quiet. Supplies came first via Nato air drops, then from U.N. convoys and the black market. [The reason the Bosnian Serbs approached Srebrenica town in early 1993 was to try to bring an end to Oric’s repeated murderous attacks on Serbian farming communities which had already led to some 1,500 killings. Almost the entire pre-war population of Srebrenica – both Muslims and Serbs – left when the war started. They were replaced by refugees from other parts of Bosnia and by others who were ordered to leave their homes and move there by the Izetbegovic government. The population of the safe area varied considerably because many who moved there soon moved themselves on somewhere else because they were so badly treated by the 28th division. At the time that Bosnian Muslims finally left Srebrenica, the consensus figure of the aid agencies was 38,000.]
Oric, who in his prewar incarnation as a Yugoslav police officer briefly served as one of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s bodyguards, established himself in the enclave as yet another of Bosnia’s Robin Hood-style warlords. Zipping around the minuscule territory in a shiny black Volkswagen, he organized a thriving trade in fuel and goods smuggled across Serbian territory with the help of Ukrainian U.N. peacekeepers in nearby Zepa. [It is true that Oric led his men like a gangster, but he was their duly-appointed ABiH commander. By all accounts, he treated the civilian population of the safe area with contempt, forcing them to pay black market prices for the Red Cross food supplies that should have gone straight to them for free.]
Oric also presided over the reinfiltration of Muslim guerrillas into the enclave–as well as their partial rearmament. This was, as the Serbs say, a violation of the safe area demilitarization agreement, though it must be added that the agreement itself had been negotiated at the point of a Serbian gun. General Ratko Mladic of the Bosnian Serb army seems to have finally gotten fed up with Oric and decided early this spring to get rid of the Srebrenica enclave once and for all. [Oric’s forces were never disarmed. Some aged military equipment was handed over, but was kept in an unguarded store and could be repossessed at a moment’s notice. The notion that the safe area agreement was negotiated at the point of a Serbian gun is nonsense – the agreement was imposed by international community to prevent the Bosnian Serbs from taking control of Srebrenica.]
But Mladic had to contend with the 400-odd soldiers of the Netherlands 13th Air Mobile Infantry Battalion, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Ton Karremans. The Dutch had replaced the Canadians in January, 1994; before the assault, though, they still only had about 60 percent of their full strength, because the Serbs had refused to allow the entire battalion to enter the enclave as previously agreed. [Mladic was constantly threatened with air strikes by the UN, but was not threatened by the Dutch peacekeepers because they were not there to fight – that was not their role at any time.]
The Serbs also exploited U.N. peacekeeping rules to cripple the Dutch military capability. According to a senior Western officer, the Dutch unit was equipped with TOW missiles capable of destroying Serb tanks. But, by the time the Serbs attacked the town, the TOWs were inoperable. Serb officers had confiscated vital TOW spare parts as the Dutch were bringing them into the enclave; U.N. procedures permitted the Serbs to do so. Nevertheless, the Dutch, with light weapons and armored personnel carriers, had succeeded in establishing observation posts around the enclave and did their best to monitor the cease-fire, to look after Srebrenica’s civilians and to deter a Serb attack. [This suggests the Bosnian Serbs were in some way wrong and malicious to insist that the UN peacekeeping rules were followed to the letter. If the story about the TOW missiles is true, the UN was flagrantly in breach of the safe area agreement.]
The Dutch were the on-the-scene embodiment of the will of the international community, and Mladic, contemptuous though he is of the West’s threats, was careful not to succumb to overconfidence. His troops began to gather around the enclave in April. Colonel Karremans reported suspicious troop movements to U.N. headquarters in Zagreb, but no special steps were taken to counter them. On June 3, the Serbs launched a brief attack on a Dutch observation post, but this, too, was dealt with passively. [We now know that the 28th Division, acting on orders from high command, abandoned Srebrenica town during the night of 10/11 July 1995. General Mladic’s small force entered the town unopposed in the morning. Not a shot was fired. There is now considerable evidence that the Muslim withdrawal was in response to remarks made earlier in the year during a visit to Bosnia by US President Bill Clinton. According to several Bosnian Muslims present, including the Bosnian Muslim mayor of Srebrenica, Clinton said that a massacre of 5,000 people would be enough to bring the US into the war on the Muslim side. This of course is precisely what happened. In early August 1995 US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright brandished half a dozen satellite photos which she claimed to be evidence of genocide. The photos were quickly withdrawn and classified for 60 years, but they were enough to enable the US to launch a sustained bombing campaign on Bosnian Serb positions and unilaterally impose the Dayton conference to end the Bosnian war. Under cover of all this, the US also approved Operation Storm where the Croatian army, with US air support and advice from a thousand US military advisers, drove more than 250,000 Serbs out of the Krijina region of Croatia where they and their forebears had lived for some 400 years – the biggest act of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the 1990s Balkan wars.]
On July 6, according to Karremans’s account, Mladic’s troops began seizing the Dutch observation posts one by one–using carefully directed tank fire that landed just close enough to threaten the Dutch but not close enough to kill them. “That was done in a very neat way by the Serbs,” Karremans recalled. “Like Pac-Man.” As the Dutch abandoned their posts (following U.N. rules of engagement that permitted them to fight back only if their lives were directly threatened), the Serbs took some of them hostage. They stole the peacekeepers’ weapons, body armor and vehicles and, in some instances, their fatigues, blue helmets and berets. [Speaking later, Karremans spoke well of his dealings with Mladic on the day the Serbs took control of Srebrenica. Mladic worked closely with Karremans throughout the afternoon and evening to plan the evacuation of 26,000 Muslim civilians to Tuzla. Both men spoke at length to the refugees to keep them informed. The evacuation proceeded quickly and smoothly. Karremans was swiftly moved to a new posting in the USA to ensure his future silence.]
The U.N. Security Council resolution establishing the safe areas permitted the U.N. to use all means, including Nato air power, to protect the enclaves and the U.N. troops in them. That included both wide-ranging punitive air strikes and close air support, defined as a carefully targeted attack on a particular weapons system threatening U.N. troops.
Close air support must be requested by a commander on the ground, approved by Bosnian theater commander Lieutenant General Rupert Smith of Britain in Sarajevo and then agreed to by U.N. special representative Yasushi Akashi and his top military man, Lieutenant General Bernard Janvier of France, in Zagreb. Then the request is communicated to nato Admiral Leighton Smith of the United States, who is based in Italy, to be carried out.
If a large-scale air attack had come, it might have been enough to shore up the Dutch and the enclave itself and to rebuff the Bosnian Serb attack. But air power did not come in an effective and timely fashion. Karremans formally asked for close air support on the afternoon of Saturday, July 8. By this time, his observation posts were collapsing and about thirty Dutch soldiers had been taken hostage. But the request, according to a senior Western military source in Zagreb, was turned down by Smith and his staff in Sarajevo.
“They felt the U.N. in Zagreb would see it as too early and not worth the risks,” specifically the risk of further hostage-taking by the Serbs, the source says. This was a reasonable fear, given that the Serbs had responded to an air strike on their capital, Pale, in May by seizing 320 peacekeepers. Janvier, who had been delegated full authority over air power by Akashi (who was out of town), spent hours in elaborate consultations with his staff in Zagreb, General Smith in Sarajevo and Admiral Smith in Italy.
By Sunday evening, the bulk of Janvier’s staff was recommending that the Dutch troops be given close air support. But he balked: European Union mediator Karl Bildt was in Belgrade trying to negotiate with Milosevic for the recognition of Bosnia, and Janvier feared that an air raid on Bosnian Serb troops would upset those talks. He argued, as one source present at the meeting puts it: “If Karremans can hold out without close air, let’s try it.”
Instead of launching close air support, Janvier ordered Karremans to set up a blocking position just south of Srebrenica town. Karremans dispatched fifty soldiers armed with light anti-tank weapons–but not the more effective TOWs. He relayed Janvier’s threat to Mladic: any attack on the blocking position will result in the use of Nato air power.
Sure enough, on Monday, July 10, Mladic’s soldiers attacked–and the Dutch drove them back. This was perhaps the crucial moment in the entire test of wills. Suddenly Mladic was knocked back on his heels. Some of Janvier’s staff advised him to seize the moment and make good on his threat of air attacks.
We will never know if the one-two punch of Dutch ground resistance and Nato air power would have bought more time for Srebrenica and its civilians. Janvier, still eager to avoid upsetting the political balance, opted not to use the planes. He justified his decision, in part, the source told me, by pointing out that the Dutch unit had already driven back the Serbs.
To be fair, Janvier’s decision was made on the basis of incomplete intelligence. U.N. peacekeeping rules require U.N. forces to operate in a neutral, “transparent” manner and, thus, forbid them from running clandestine intelligence networks. As far as Janvier knew, the Serb forces consisted solely of what Dutch troops had personally seen up to that point: a tank and about a company’s worth of infantry. In fact, as the Dutch learned Tuesday morning, when Mladic poured reserves into the fight, the Serb force consisted of 1,500 men backed by tanks–a four-to-one numerical advantage over the Dutch defenders.
Mladic attacked remaining Dutch observation posts from all points around the enclave. One post retreated, another stopped the Serbs. Unaware of the machinations in Zagreb, bewildered Dutch soldiers looked to the sky and wondered what was keeping the Nato airplanes. Finally, at noon, Janvier decided he had no choice but to order close air support. At about two o’clock, a first sortie took out a pair of Serb tanks as they were menacing a Dutch unit.
But at that point, Mladic took to the radio and gave Karremans an ultimatum of his own: any more air strikes and his artillery would flatten both the Dutch compound and the civilian population of Srebrenica. He would also execute all Dutch hostages. Monitoring the situation in Holland, Dutch Defense Minister Joris Voorhoeve immediately called Akashi and demanded that the air strikes be called off. Akashi, back in Zagreb, complied–and the battle to save Srebrenica was effectively ended before it had truly been joined. [The paragraphs above reflect the political and military confusion between the UN and Nato. This confusion was at least partly to do with the growing concerns of some of the military leaders on the ground that the western allies and Nato were supporting the wrong side. In particular, they were becoming extremely suspicious of the propaganda claims made by the Sarajevo government. The international community never came close to being impartial between factions. Nor was it an honest broker. In such circumstances it was hardly surprising that the Bosnian Serbs countered UN threats with threats of their own – US and UN actions had long since made it clear that the Serbs were always held to be in the wrong and could expect no impartiality from the western powers.]
In the aftermath, Defense Minister Voorhoeve insisted that Mladic’s threat to the Dutch hostages and to civilians had been paramount in his decision to, in effect, let the Serbs have the safe haven without further opposition. But he and other Dutch military officials also emphasized a second reason: the fact that the Bosnian army itself was mounting so little resistance. “At the moment fighting started, they all fled,” said Dutch Lieutenant General Hans Couzy. [That was not right. The 28th division was already long gone, obeying orders from Sarajevo.]
Where, indeed, were the 6,000 or so armed men of Srebrenica, who, together with a battle-ready Dutch group and Nato aircraft, could presumably have at least blunted a Serb force of 1,500 even if they were outgunned in artillery? Throughout the war, the Serbs have been notorious for their reluctance to risk casualties to their own personnel by seizing positions with infantry; their specialty is shelling civilians into submission. Besides, Nasir Oric had sworn “Srebrenica will never be Serb as long as I’m here.” [The Bosnian Serb army was a professional force, led by experienced officers. The Bosnian Muslim Army was not. It was badly led and frequently adopted suicidal tactics.]
But on the day Srebrenica fell, Oric was not in town. He was, it seems, fifty miles northwest in Tuzla, on unspecified business. Indeed, his whereabouts in the months leading up to the Serb attack are a bit of a mystery. The Dutch forces had noticed a sharp deterioration in Bosnian morale and discipline throughout the spring–a deterioration of which Mladic, whose own spying capability is unconstrained, surely was aware. [Oric had been abruptly recalled to Tuzla without explanation some two months before Srebrenica was abandoned by the ABiH. The 26th division were kept in the dark until, presumably at some point on 10 July 1995, they received the order to abandon Srebrenica].
In any case, military cooperation between the Bosnian and Dutch defenders was effectively precluded by the absurd contradiction inherent in U.N. policy toward the safe area. On the one hand, U.N. member states had refused to supply sufficient ground troops to actually defend against a Serb attack and had agreed to rules that let the Serbs weaken the capability of those troops that were introduced. On the other hand, they were supposed to enforce the U. N. arms embargo and its formal, if ineffectual, commitment to maintaining the Srebrenica safe area’s demilitarization. The implicit message to the Bosnians was: we cannot defend the safe area, but you may not defend it. According to Oosterveen, Dutch troops refused several requests from the Bosnians to fight on their behalf. Not surprisingly, this led to increased tensions between Dutch and Bosnian forces. In one incident, Couzy said, Bosnian soldiers threatened to kill Dutch troops if they ever abandoned their posts–a threat carried out on July 8, when the Bosnians killed one Dutch soldier as his unit retreated from an observation post it had just surrendered to the Serbs. [The absurdities of what happened have much deeper roots than this suggests. The international community had chosen to interfere illegally in the former Yugoslavia on the basis of claims that more than 200,000 people had died in the first six months of the Bosnian war. This unsupported and highly improbable propaganda claim was accepted without check by western leaders, who then proceeded, in very short order, to recognise both Croatia and Bosnia as independent states though neither met any of the carefully defined criteria for statehood set down in international law.]
The Bosnian men were divided between a minority for whom Srebrenica was home and a vast majority for whom defending Srebrenica would mean fighting for an unwanted refugee camp. Weak and hungry after months of Serbian siege, poorly armed, pressured by the final Serb push and without Oric around to whip them into shape, the Bosnians fell to fighting among themselves. Dutch troops witnessed two firefights between factions of the army that wanted to stay and protect the town and factions that wanted to flee. The Bosnians succeeded in mounting only a single major firefight against the Serbs before thousands of them began fleeing with their weapons and ammunition along the dangerous route through Serb-controlled territory to government lines near Tuzla. [There was no Serbian siege of Srebrenica. Food was sometimes in short supply for everyone – Oric and his men controlled supply within the safe area and frequently did not hand over Red Cross supplies to the civilian population. Economic sanctions imposed on Serbia by the US and others often had the effect of making food very scarce. The fighting that took place between the BSA and the column of men fleeing through the woods to Tuzla was occasionally quite intense, reflecting Mladic’s concern that this column might link up with ABiH forces from Tuzla led by Oric and launch attack on unprotected Serbian towns like Zvornik which lay along their path.]
What, then, has become of the roughly 42,000 people who once lived in the now-liquidated Srebrenica safe area? About 75 percent of them have made it to safety in Tuzla, according to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (unhcr). The other 25 percent appear to fall into two categories. The first consists of 5,200 men (this number comes from the Bosnian Serbs’ own Pale Radio) who were either captured as they escaped from Srebrenica with the remnants of the Bosnian Army or, in a minority of cases, remained behind in Srebrenica and were then separated from their families by the Serbs. These people have been confined by Serb forces in Bratunac. The second group consists of the remaining 5,000 or so, a figure that may include some stragglers who will turn up in Tuzla over the next few days and even a handful who may have escaped to Zepa or Gorazde. But the few reliable accounts from outside observers that have emerged so far suggest that many, many of these people are dead.
Once their brief struggle with the Serb army was over, the Dutch troops and about 15,000 refugees fell back to the Dutch compound at Potocari at the north end of the enclave. When the Serbs brought in vehicles to take people to Tuzla, the Dutch tried to negotiate for at least one Dutch soldier to ride on every truck or bus, but the request was refused. When they attempted to escort the refugee buses, the Serbs stole fourteen of their jeeps and several armored personnel carriers. As a result, the Dutch could only mount four or five stationary observation posts along the entire fifty-kilometer route the refugees were traveling. [26,000 Bosnian Muslims were safely delivered to Tuzla and recorded by UN staff. Within days a team of around a dozen UNHCR researchers arrived at the Tuzla camp to debrief survivors. In the course of more than a week they were unable to find a single refugee who claimed to have seen an atrocity committed.]
Even with their monitoring capability systematically curtailed by the Serbs, the Dutch alone saw about twenty people murdered by Mladic’s men. In addition to Oosterveen’s account, two other soldiers report witnessing atrocities while confined by the Serbs to the Dutch compound. In one case, a Muslim man was taken away to a house, put up against a wall and shot by Serb troops. In another, a Dutch officer, having earlier seen men taken away from the compound for interrogation, saw the bodies of nine dead Muslims lying in a row, shot in the back. [Such claims are very easy to make but very difficult to verify. Who were these witnesses? What checks had been made on their identity and accounts?]
The UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees), after interviewing refugees in Tuzla, has also documented that Muslims, both soldiers and civilians, were ambushed and shelled by the Serbs as they fled Srebrenica, leading to unconfirmed reports of hundreds of bodies lying scattered along the road to Tuzla. The UNHCR has confirmed cases in which a total of ninety-nine people were murdered outright, including twenty to thirty women and children killed by Serb soldiers who, wearing the blue helmets and driving the white jeeps they stole from surrendering Dutch troops, lured the refugees out of hiding to their deaths. Raymond Bonner and Stephen Kinzer of The New York Times spoke with more than 100 refugees in Tuzla and have documented cases in which a total of sixty Muslims were murdered. Kinzer’s informants recounted how, before dawn on Wednesday, Serbs dressed as U.N. soldiers took people away from the Potocari compound, and the next day the bodies of nine dead boys were found–seven with their throats cut and two hanging from a tree. Robert Block of The Independent has seen videotape taken in Srebrenica on July 13 by the Belgrade independent station Studio B; the tape shows the bodies of about twenty-five young Muslim men who have been lined up against a wall and executed.
And what about the 5,200 Muslim men from Srebrenica confined in Bratunac? There, the sports stadium is once again being pressed into service as a detention center for the ethnically cleansed. The Serbs have systematically refused access to Bratunac, despite appeals from UNHCR, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the chief of staff of UNPROFOR. In every case, the Serbs have promised access and then withdrawn the offer. No journalists have been allowed into the town.
Yet the reports that have so far trickled out of Bratunac, if they can be confirmed, suggest that most of these men have met an awful fate. Through Western diplomatic sources, I learned that unhcr in Tuzla has received the first account from a Muslim man who escaped from Bratunac. The 35-year-old man told the relief agency that he had fled Srebrenica with a group of 100 or so fellow Muslims before the town was occupied by the Serbs. But their group was captured and herded into several tiny abandoned houses outside the enclave. During the night Serbs removed men in groups of four and executed them; the man saw the bodies.
The survivors were then taken to the stadium in Bratunac, where they were held with their hands bound behind their backs and forced to look only at the ground. Mladic himself appeared and harangued the group, telling them that this is what they got for putting their faith in President Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia and trying to break away from Yugoslavia. He promised them they would be reunited with their families if they cooperated. Upon Mladic’s departure, trucks arrived and took the men to a field, where they were made to lie down. Serb soldiers opened fire on the men with machine guns. The witness, however, was only wounded and managed to escape with another Muslim by hiding in a ditch. They watched as Serbs used earth movers to cover the dead bodies. [Such stories trace back to a handful of men who claimed to have survived massacres by playing dead. These individuals spoke to many journalists. All of them gave significantly different accounts to the journalists they spoke to, apparently failing to recall the detail they had given in previous interviews.]
Though it cannot be independently confirmed, both the UNHCR aide who recorded it and the U.S. Embassy in Zagreb regard this story as credible. Rope burns around the man’s wrists and a minor head wound seem to support his account. So does additional information gathered by Block of The Independent, one of the few Western reporters covering the crisis from Belgrade. He has seen additional video footage, taken by independent Serbian TV, which shows hundreds of Muslim men standing on a football field in Bratunac with their hands tied behind their backs. He has interviewed Serb witnesses, recently returned from Bratunac, who say that these men were on their way to the slaughter. The witnesses told Block of as many as 4,000 captured Muslim men murdered by Serb troops. One woman told Block that her brother-in-law, a soldier, counted 1,600 killed on Monday, July 17, alone. Other Serbs told Block that the Serbs were using trucks to transport corpses and an earth mover to bury them in mass graves. [Once again, it is apparent on close inspection that these claims have not been rigorously tested. Details that ‘would seem to support his accounts’ do not constitute hard evidence. Neither do reports of interviews with ‘Serb witnesses’ which do not seem to have been put to any kind of test. For all we know – and apparently for all the journalists knew – these men might just as easily have been Bosnian Muslims as Bosnian Serbs.]
It is vital that the truth behind these frightening reports be established. So far, however, there has been no demand from the United Nations Security Council that the Serbs grant outside relief agencies access to Bratunac. Meanwhile, the assessment of U.N. officials and Western governments is that Srebrenica was militarily indefensible–that there was no way to prevent the enclave, hemmed in by Serb-held high ground, from falling. This is about half true. Srebrenica was militarily indefensible–but only because the U.N. military deterrent operated under ambiguous and unwieldy rules designed less to protect Bosnians than to avoid Western casualties and obscure the accountability of Western governments. It would be more accurate to say that Srebrenica fell not because it was militarily indefensible but because it was politically indefensible. Which is also a pretty fair description of the West’s policy toward Bosnia. [The final sentence of the paragraph is true. The rest is nonsense. If the 28th division had remained in Srebrenica town, they could easily have defended it. They outnumbered the Serbian force outside the town by 20:1. And thanks to repeated secret US arms shipments brought in from Tuzla, they were well-armed with state-of-the-art weaponry, including shoulder launched missiles. As for establishing the truth of what happened, the western allies, The Hague Tribunal and the UN seem to have been intent to ensure this did not happen. It suited them much better to hide behind the propaganda that had convinced the world to believe their narrative. With the invaluable aid of its corrupt Tribunal, they could buttress their frail story with convictions for genocide and war crimes that were based on unverified witness accounts, masses of hearsay and scientific evidence gathered by a body set up by Bill Clinton, always chaired by an American, which never made any of its so-called primary scientific evidence, the forensics and DNA, available to the Court, the defence teams or the scientific community. The ICTY simply accepted this ‘evidence’ as gospel from a verbal report given to the court by a manager of the misleadingly named International Commission for Missing Persons].
