Milosevic in memorium: Srebrenica.: Politics of War Crimes
Brian | 13.03.2006 01:27
Now that Milosevic has died, its time to examine the main event that he was accused of Srebrenica. the Srebrenica ResearchGroup has the following Report.
Extract from Conclusions:
'1.
Both the scale of the casualties at Srebrenica and the context of events have been misrepresented in official reports from governmental and non-governmental organizations as well as news organizations. Senior UN military and civilian officials, NATO intelligence officers and independent intelligence analysts dispute the official portrayal of the capture of Srebrenica by the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia, (ICTY) as a unique atrocity in the Bosnian conflict. The contention that as many as 8,000 Muslims were killed has no basis in available evidence and is essentially a political construct.
2.
The 8,000 figure was first provided by the Red Cross, based on their crude estimate that the Bosnian Serb Army (BSA) had captured 3,000 men and that 5,000 were reported "missing." It is well established that thousands of those "missing" had reached Tuzla or were killed in the fighting, but in an amazing transformation displaying the eagerness to find the Bosnian Serbs evil and the Muslims victims, the "reaching safety/killed-in-action" basis of being missing was ignored and the missing were taken as executed! This misleading conclusion was helped along by the Red Cross's reference to the 5,000 as having "simply disappeared," and its failure to correct this politically biased usage despite its own recognition that "several thousand" refugees had reached Central Bosnia. It was also helped along by the Bosnian Muslim leadership's refusal to disclose the names and numbers of those reaching safety, but there was a remarkable readiness in Western governments not only to ignore those reaching safety, but also to disregard deaths in fighting and to take dead bodies as proving executions. The will to believe here was limitless: reporter David Rohde saw a bone sticking up in a grave site near Srebrenica, which he just knew by instinct was a remnant of an execution and serious evidence of a "massacre." It was standard media practice to move from an asserted and unproven claim of thousands missing, or a report of the uncovering of bodies in a grave site, to the conclusion that the claim of 8,000 executed was thereby demonstrated.
...
In his book Warriors for Peace, Bernard Kouchner, former head of Doctors Without Borders, states that on his death bed, Bosnia’s wartime president, Alija Izetbegovic, acknowledged to both Kouchner and former UN envoy Richard Holbrooke that he had exaggerated claims of atrocities by Serbian forces to encourage NATO intervention against the Serbs. Specifically he mentions wartime POW camps that all three factions in the Bosnian civil war utilized, but which his government claimed in 1992 were really "death camps," a charge which was widely publicized by reporters such as Newsday's Roy Gutman (who shared a Pulitzer prize for this story) and ABC anchor Peter Jennings. Izetbegovic admitted to Kouchner and Holbrooke that "There were no extermination camps, whatever the horror of those places. I thought my revelations [sic] would precipitate bombing [against Serbs]."
...
11.
Croatian authorities were also delighted with the claims of a Srebrenica massacre, as this deflected attention from their prior devastating ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Western Slavonia (almost entirely ignored by the Western media), and it provided a cover for their already planned removal of several hundred thousand Serbs from the Krajina area in Croatia. In “Operation Flash,” carried out in Western Slavonia in May 1995, the Croatians did not provide safe passage for a huge column of Serb refugees, which included many women and children. “Many Serbs perished in heavy Croatian tank, artillery and aerial bombardments …as they tried to flee southward toward the Sava River bridge into Bosnia,” wrote New York Times reporter Roger Cohen, who noted that “the estimate of 450 Serbian dead, given by Gojko Susak, the Croatian Defense Minister appears to be conservative.” The followup massive ethnic cleansing operation by Croatia in Krajina was carried out with U.S. approval and logistical support within a month of the Srebrenica events, and it may well have involved the killing of more Serb civilians than Bosnian Muslim civilians killed in the Srebrenica area in July: most of the Bosnian Muslim victims were fighters, not civilians, as the Bosnian Serbs bused the Srebrenica women and children to safety; here as in Western Slavonia the Croatians made no such provision and many women, children and old people were slaughtered in Krajina. The ruthlessness of the Croats was impressive: "UN troops watched horrified as Croat soldiers dragged the bodies of dead Serbs along the road outside the UN compound and then pumped them full of rounds from the AK-47s. They then crushed the bullet-ridden bodies under the tracks of a tank." But this was hardly noticed in the wake of the indignation and propaganda generated around Srebrenica, with the aid of the mainstream media, whose co-belligerency role in the Balkan wars was already well-entrenched.
etc
http://www.srebrenica-report.com/conclusions.htm
'1.
Both the scale of the casualties at Srebrenica and the context of events have been misrepresented in official reports from governmental and non-governmental organizations as well as news organizations. Senior UN military and civilian officials, NATO intelligence officers and independent intelligence analysts dispute the official portrayal of the capture of Srebrenica by the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia, (ICTY) as a unique atrocity in the Bosnian conflict. The contention that as many as 8,000 Muslims were killed has no basis in available evidence and is essentially a political construct.
2.
The 8,000 figure was first provided by the Red Cross, based on their crude estimate that the Bosnian Serb Army (BSA) had captured 3,000 men and that 5,000 were reported "missing." It is well established that thousands of those "missing" had reached Tuzla or were killed in the fighting, but in an amazing transformation displaying the eagerness to find the Bosnian Serbs evil and the Muslims victims, the "reaching safety/killed-in-action" basis of being missing was ignored and the missing were taken as executed! This misleading conclusion was helped along by the Red Cross's reference to the 5,000 as having "simply disappeared," and its failure to correct this politically biased usage despite its own recognition that "several thousand" refugees had reached Central Bosnia. It was also helped along by the Bosnian Muslim leadership's refusal to disclose the names and numbers of those reaching safety, but there was a remarkable readiness in Western governments not only to ignore those reaching safety, but also to disregard deaths in fighting and to take dead bodies as proving executions. The will to believe here was limitless: reporter David Rohde saw a bone sticking up in a grave site near Srebrenica, which he just knew by instinct was a remnant of an execution and serious evidence of a "massacre." It was standard media practice to move from an asserted and unproven claim of thousands missing, or a report of the uncovering of bodies in a grave site, to the conclusion that the claim of 8,000 executed was thereby demonstrated.
...
In his book Warriors for Peace, Bernard Kouchner, former head of Doctors Without Borders, states that on his death bed, Bosnia’s wartime president, Alija Izetbegovic, acknowledged to both Kouchner and former UN envoy Richard Holbrooke that he had exaggerated claims of atrocities by Serbian forces to encourage NATO intervention against the Serbs. Specifically he mentions wartime POW camps that all three factions in the Bosnian civil war utilized, but which his government claimed in 1992 were really "death camps," a charge which was widely publicized by reporters such as Newsday's Roy Gutman (who shared a Pulitzer prize for this story) and ABC anchor Peter Jennings. Izetbegovic admitted to Kouchner and Holbrooke that "There were no extermination camps, whatever the horror of those places. I thought my revelations [sic] would precipitate bombing [against Serbs]."
...
11.
Croatian authorities were also delighted with the claims of a Srebrenica massacre, as this deflected attention from their prior devastating ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Western Slavonia (almost entirely ignored by the Western media), and it provided a cover for their already planned removal of several hundred thousand Serbs from the Krajina area in Croatia. In “Operation Flash,” carried out in Western Slavonia in May 1995, the Croatians did not provide safe passage for a huge column of Serb refugees, which included many women and children. “Many Serbs perished in heavy Croatian tank, artillery and aerial bombardments …as they tried to flee southward toward the Sava River bridge into Bosnia,” wrote New York Times reporter Roger Cohen, who noted that “the estimate of 450 Serbian dead, given by Gojko Susak, the Croatian Defense Minister appears to be conservative.” The followup massive ethnic cleansing operation by Croatia in Krajina was carried out with U.S. approval and logistical support within a month of the Srebrenica events, and it may well have involved the killing of more Serb civilians than Bosnian Muslim civilians killed in the Srebrenica area in July: most of the Bosnian Muslim victims were fighters, not civilians, as the Bosnian Serbs bused the Srebrenica women and children to safety; here as in Western Slavonia the Croatians made no such provision and many women, children and old people were slaughtered in Krajina. The ruthlessness of the Croats was impressive: "UN troops watched horrified as Croat soldiers dragged the bodies of dead Serbs along the road outside the UN compound and then pumped them full of rounds from the AK-47s. They then crushed the bullet-ridden bodies under the tracks of a tank." But this was hardly noticed in the wake of the indignation and propaganda generated around Srebrenica, with the aid of the mainstream media, whose co-belligerency role in the Balkan wars was already well-entrenched.
etc
http://www.srebrenica-report.com/conclusions.htm
Brian