Antiwar.com, July 31, 2000
"Srebrenica" - Code Word to Silence Critics of US Policy in the Balkans
by Stella L. Jatras, Special to Antiwar.com
The Bosnian Serb military stand accused of committing some of the worst
human rights crimes since World War II during and following the battle
for Srebrenica in 1995. HOLOCAUST! GENOCIDE! ETHNIC CLEANSING! Claims of
7,000 (or 8,000, or 10,000, or whatever figure is needed to elicit the
desired response) Muslim men and boys slaughtered and Dutch troops accused of
failing to stop the slaughter! Five year later the allegations not only
persist, but are accepted as fact by a compliant and unquestioning
media.
Yet in five years fewer than 2000 bodies have been discovered in an
area where war raged for four years and even those bodies have not been
identified as Muslim or Serb, nor how they died.
Why then has there been a flurry of articles in recent days regarding
the alleged massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslim fighters that occurred
over five years ago? Articles such as, "Holbrooke Mourns Srebrenica, urges
Reconciliation," (Reuters, 11 July); "The Battle of Srebrenica Is Now
Over the Truth," by David Rohde (New York Times, 9 July) and "Harrowing
pilgrimage for Srebrenica Muslims," by Rory Carroll (Guardian [London]
12 July), are all spewing their anti-Serb bias.
The Code word is "Srebrenica." Srebrenica equates to holocaust.
Srebrenica equates to genocide. Srebrenica equates to ethnic cleansing. And
because claims of mass graves and genocide in Kosovo are being discredited,
what better way to continue to demonize the Serbs than for the American
people to be reminded of Srebrenica? After all, there is still the unfinished
business of dismembering Yugoslavia by amputating Montenegro, Sanjak and
Vojvodina.
The New World Order beast will not be satisfied until its belly is full
and that requires the American people to accept NATO's next intervention in
the Balkans; however, the American people must again be prepared mentally
to accept more military action just as they accepted 78-days of dropping
bombs on an innocent people. They have to be conditioned to say once again,
"After all, the Serbs deserve it!"
During his visit to Washington, D.C. to attend a Congressional briefing
in the office of Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio on 19 July, I had a
chance to speak with former Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia, James Bissett,
who has been openly critical of his country's participation in the NATO
bombing of Yugoslavia.
Last year, he received a phone call from three Dutch
military historians who wanted to meet with him to talk about Srebrenica.
Ambassador Bissett informed them that he had not been at Srebrenica and could not,
therefore, speak as an eyewitness on the subject. However, because of
his broad knowledge of the area and the circumstances of the Bosnian War,
the Dutch historians still wanted to meet with him. Among other topics,
they spoke about Nasir Oric, the dreaded Muslim commander in Srebrenica who
had mounted commando raids against surrounding Serbian villages whose
remaining population were mainly elderly Serbs, many in their 80s, who refused to
leave their homes. Even these poor souls were not spared, but were
slaughtered by having their throats slit. Bill Schiller wrote of Oric
in the Toronto Star, 16 July 1995, "On a cold and snowy night, I sat in his
living room watching a shocking video version of what might had been called
Nasir Oric's Greatest Hits.
There were burning houses, dead bodies, severed heads, and people fleeing. Oric grinned throughout admiring his handiwork. 'We
ambushed them,' he said when a number of dead Serbs appeared on the
screen.
The next sequence of dead bodies had been done in by explosives: 'We
launched those guys to the moon,' he boasted. When a footage of a
bullet-marked ghost town appeared without any visible bodies, Oric
hastened to announce: 'We killed 114 Serbs there.' Later there were
celebrations, with singers with wobbly voices chanting his praises."
The three Dutch military historians and Ambassador Bissett recalled
that Serbian General Radko Mladic has protested the misuse of the so-called
"safe haven" of Srebrenica by Oric and warned that continued attacks on
surrounding villages would bring a response from the Serbian forces.
Forewarned, Oric had pulled his armed troops, including Mujahedin
soldiers who had been imported from many of the Islamic countries, out of
Srebrenica three days before the final push began. According to the Ambassador,
when Serbian General Mladic entered Srebrenica, he entered a city that was
mostly devoid of its fighting men. Accused of attacking a "safe haven" by the
media and Muslim propaganda, the Serbs were even vilified for putting
refugees, mostly women and children, from Srebrenica on buses and sending them to
Muslim-held territory. The tragic scenes of the refugees were shown
over and over again on TV; yet within a few days, the refugees were seen eating
fruit, smoking cigarettes, washing clothes and being housed - thanks to
the UN.
The Bosnian government refused to provide humanitarian assistance for
its own people, preferring that the world see a suffering Muslim population
as part of their propaganda ploy.
Tim Butcher of the Daily Telegraph, London (24 July 1995), wrote
regarding Srebrenica, "After five days of interviews the United Nations chief
investigator into alleged human rights abuses during the fall of
Srebrenica has not found any firsthand witnesses of atrocities."
An International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report, document
#37, dated September 13, 1995 states: "Approximately 5,000 Srebrenica Muslim
troops left the enclave prior to its fall. The Muslim government has
admitted that these men were reassigned to other units of its armed
forces.
The fact that family members were not informed of it was justified by
the obligation to keep it a military secret." The ICRC further reported
that there were indications that sporadic clashes broke out between the
Muslim soldiers who wanted to stay and fight and other soldiers and civilians
who wanted to flee. In some cases, the names of "missing" soldiers are
listed as many as two and three times. As previously stated, approximately fewer
than 2,000 bodies have been found in graves. Considering that the civil war
in Bosnia had lasted over four years, this could not exactly be called a
"genocide" when compared to other massacres taking place all over the
world such as in Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, and the Indonesia.
A representative in the Bosnian and Federal Parliaments, Ibran
Mustafic, gave an explosive interview on Aug. 15, 1996, to Slobodna Bosnia ("Free
Bosnia," A Sarajevo newspaper). Mustafic was quoted as saying that the
betrayal of Srebrenica "was consciously prepared and that the Bosnian
president and the army command were involved in this business," and
that was to sacrifice Srebrenica in order to gain the sympathy of the West. Of
his internment in a Serbian jail, he writes, "I should have died. They [the
Bosnian Muslim authorities] don't appreciate living people. They
appreciate the dead because they cannot talk."
Of course we must not overlook Pulitzer Prize winner David Rohde, who
was given a 15-day sentence for entering into Serbian territory with forged
documents. He should thank his lucky stars that he was not captured by
Muslim fighters or he would have been just another dead journalist, as
was ABC's producer David Kaplan, who, according to Yossef Bodansky
("Offensive in the Balkans") was out of range of Serbian forces when he was killed.
Regardless, Kaplan's death was blamed on the Serbs. And what earned Mr.
Rohde his coveted award? It was based merely on the discovery of "a
pair of glasses, a walking stick and a putrefying leg sticking out of the
ground," according to his book, "End Game," in an area where men had fought for
over three years. Some genocide!
The mind set of U.S. officials who were in charge of "peacekeeping"
efforts might best be understood by considering the view of our current U.N.
Ambassador, Richard Holbrooke, who spoke of "The 1995 massacre of
thousands of Bosnians Moslems in the U.N.-proclaimed 'safe area' of Srebrenica."
(Holbrooke mourns Srebrenica, urges reconciliation, Reuters, July 11).
Mr. Holbrooke fails to mention that the so-called "safe area," which was
supposed to be demilitarized, was used by the Bosnian Muslims as a
staging area to attack surrounding Serbian villages.
The same diplomat, Mr. Holbrooke, said during an interview with Ted
Koppel on November 6, 1995 (New Yorker), "The Vietcong were dedicated
ideologues, committed to a long-term struggle. These guys [the Serbs] aren't
ideologues; they're just murderous assholes." [Those are not my offensive words,
but the words coming from the bigoted and racist mouth of our well-seasoned US
diplomat who represents us at the UN!). Mr. Holbrooke praised the
communist Vietcong, who killed over 58,000 Americans and denigrated the brave
Serbian people who fought, suffered and sacrificed as our Allies during two
world wars.
Yasushi Akashi, former UN Representative in Bosnia, admitted in the
Washington Times of 1 November 1995, that "it is a fact that the
Bosnian government forces have used the 'safe areas' of not only Srebrenica,
but Sarajevo, Tuzla, Bihac, Gorazde for training, recuperation and
refurbishing their troops." In other words, the so-called safe areas were used as
military posts to train Mujahedin fighters from Afghanistan, Iran,
Syria, Turkey and the entire Islamic world, free to commit their treachery by
attacking Serbian villages and returning like thieves in the night back
to the safety of their UN protectors who conveniently looked the other way
to these violations. Prior to the events at Srebrenica, these "Holy
Warriors of Islam" had attacked 42 surrounding Serbian villages and over 3,000
Serbian villagers had been slaughtered without fear of being reprimanded or
punished by the UN Yet, when Serbs were provoked to retaliate against these
Muslim assaults from these so-called "safe-areas," they were condemned by the
entire world.
Further proof of the violations of proclaimed "safe areas" by Bosnian
Muslim forces was provided by Lt. Gen. Sir Michael Rose, former UNPROFOR
commander who stated that Muslims "shoot on the Serbs to step up the pressure and
to obtain a fresh intervention from NATO."
Yossef Bodansky, Staff Director for the Republican Task Force on
Terrorism & Unconventional Warfare, US House of Representatives, writes in his
book, "Offensive in the Balkans" that "The UN concluded that a special group
of Bosnian Muslim forces, many of whom had served with Islamic terrorist
organizations, committed a series of atrocities, including 'some of the
worst recent killings,' against Bosnian Muslim civilians in Sarajevo
[another designated "safe area"] as a propaganda ploy to win world
sympathy and military intervention. These attacks escalated into premeditated
attacks and atrocities committed against Bosnian Serb civilians trying to flee
contested areas."
Furthermore, Michael Evans and Michael Kallenbach write in the Times (1995), "Thousands of 'missing' Bosnian Muslim soldiers from
Srebrenica who have been at the centre of reports of possible mass
executions by the Serbs, are believed to be safe in the northeast of
Tuzla."
The question that no one seemed to ask was what were armed Muslim
troops doing in an area that was supposed to be a demilitarized zone. Instead,
the American media bombarded us with images of then US Ambassador to the
United Nations, Madeleine Albright in August 1995, as she frantically waved
the satellite photo over her head of the plowed field that was the alleged
massgrave of 7,000 Muslim men. Proof positive! she claimed, of those who
hadbeen slaughtered and whose bodies were lying there only waiting to be
exhumed.
While the world's attention was deliberately focused on Srebrenica by
such theatrical antics by Madeleine Albright, real ethnic cleansing of Serbs
was taking place in the Krajina where, in August of 1995, over 250,000 were
being driven from their ancestral homes, thousands slaughtered, and
those too old or infirm to flee, remained only to have their throats slit.
Approximately 650,000 Serbs have been driven out of Croatia since 1992
with little prospect of ever returning. It was US military aid and
technology that made it possible for Croatian forces to conduct "Operation Storm"
in order to achieve their goal of a pure Croatian state that Hitler could
only promise. There was no outrage from Congress when Croatian jets bombed
and strafed Serbian refugee columns. No outrage to what Charles Krauthammer
described in Newsweek (April 5, 1999) as "the largest ethnic cleansing
of the entire Balkan wars. Investigators with the war-crimes tribunal in
the Hague have concluded that this campaign was carried out with brutality,
wanton murder and indiscriminate shelling of civilians.... No
denunciation.
No sanctions. No bombing. No indignant speeches about ethnic cleansing
and the slaughter of innocents. In fact, in justifying the current bombing
of Serbia, Clinton made an indirect reference to this Croatian campaign
when he credited the 'courageous people in Bosnia and in Croatia' who 'fought
back' against the Serbs and 'helped to end the war.' Indeed, they did.
Croatia's savage ethnic cleansing so demoralized the Serbs that they soon agreed
to sign the Dayton peace accord of 1995." But where were the media when
all this was happening?
"As the media diverted themselves with satellite photos, the fate of
the Serbs from Krajina is being forgotten. The search for mass graves was
stepped up last autumn. Journalists from all over the world came to
Bosnia to look for bodies. Crews from CNN, CBS, BBC, France II, TG1 (Italy),
Dutch Television and from elsewhere arrived in August 1996. But they found
very little. Some crews did not bother at all to find the soccer field from
the satellite photo, because the journalists had already come to believe
that there was no mass grave there anyway. However, it was not reported.
Moreover, the said photo is being used as alleged evidence of the
existence of a mass grave in many articles even today." ("Missing Evidence," by
Linda Ryan, Nova, Frankfurt o/m, March-April, 1996).
So why, after five years of unsuccessful efforts to turn the casualties
of a tragic civil war, one less bloody than numerous conflicts around the
world, into claims of holocaust and genocide, is the specter of Srebrenica
being raised again? The answer is that this is an attempt to intimidate and
silence the "revisionists" who are questioning our failed foreign
policy in the Balkans, a policy based on lies about atrocities in Bosnia and
Kosovo and executed in violations of international law, the NATO treaty and
the US Constitution.
As a career military officer's wife, Stella Jatras has traveled widely
and has lived in many foreign countries where she not only learned about
other cultures but became very knowledgeable regarding world affairs and
world politics. Stella Jatras lived in Moscow for two years where her
husband, George, was the Senior Air Attachй), and while there, worked in the
Political Section of the US Embassy. Stella has also lived in Germany,
Greece and Saudi Arabia. Her travels took her to over twenty countries.
She is the author of the "Open Letter to General Michael Short," which
antiwar.com carried on 11/3/99, and "From Camp Swampy to Camp
Bondsteel!" on 4/6/00.
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