Forgeries And The Truth About Srebrenica (I)

Author : Vladislav B. SOTIROVIC | Editor : Anty | June 08, 2021 at 03:03 AM

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 (perhaps even genetically innate) to Serbs through the Hague verdict.
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 21st, 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 case of Srebrenica from July 1995 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 destroying 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 was 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 was turned out 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 11th (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 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 (on the most brutal ways).[v]

Thus, after the decision of the European Parliament (January 2009) to mark July 11th as “Srebrenica Day”, Bosnian Srebrenica (in Latin Argentina), de facto, became part of “Europe”. Given that the so-called the “European Parliament”, and, 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 from 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. Izetbegovi?’s claims about Srebrenica as “the greatest human tragedy in Europe after the Second World War” when “disappeared 7.000−8.000 people 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.

Ratdko Mladic in Srebrenica in 1995

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 has 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 no 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/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 very moral viewpoint, the ICTY is intended to deal with war atrocities committed in ex-Yugoslavia after 1991 and was by words 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.

Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic appears at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands on February 12, 2002

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 counted of crimes against humanity involving persecution, extermination, murder, imprisonment, torture, deportation, and inhumane acts, i.e., forcible transfers.
Eight were counted grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions involving wilful killing, unlawful confinement, torture, wilfully 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 have been stopped as Slobodan Miloshevic was left intentionally to die in the custody for the very 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 the same 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 1st, 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?