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Genocide or
propaganda?
Christopher James questions the one-sided portrayal of the fall of Srebrenica 10 years on. Morning Star (UK) Monday 11 July 2005 DOESN'T everybody know the Srebrenica story all too well by now? One week of bloody slaughter in and around the war-torn Bosnian town, sparked by its fall to Serb forces exactly 10 years ago today. Throughout the past decade, our media and politicians have never tired of informing us that up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered there in cold blood - an act of genocide unsurpassed in Europe since World War II. The crime was all the more appalling, it is said, because Srebrenica was a demilitarised UN safe-haven for Bosnian Muslims surrounded on all sides by a sea of Serb hostility. Furthermore, last month's presentation of a video, at the war crimes and genocide trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, purportedly showing the brutal execution of six Bosnian Muslim prisoners by Serb paramilitaries, is widely hailed as ultimate and final proof in the matter. If any lingering doubts remain, these can now be safely dispatched, courtesy of the US Congress which has, with impeccable timing, just declared the incident to be genocide. So there you go, it's official. Under such circumstances, who would deny the official Srebrenica narrative of Serb evil and Muslim victimhood? Holocaust revisionists perhaps? How about conspiracy theorists or war crimes apologists? Diehard Stalinists? Why not diehard Satanists for that matter? Well, here is what Phillip Corwin, the senior UN civilian official in Bosnia during 1995, had to say on the subject: "What happened at Srebrenica was not a single large massacre of Muslims by Serbs but a series of very bloody attacks and counter-attacks over a three-year period, which reached a crescendo in July of 1995." The official version of events, recalled Corwin in his book Dubious Mandate, has been a "campaign of disinformation that has all but buried the facts along with the bodies." Corwin's appraisal tallies with the following analysis of Muslim tactics in the 1992-95 Bosnian war from UN General Francis Briquemont. "The Bosnian [Muslim] Army attacks the Serbs from a safe area. The Serbs retaliate and the Bosnian presidency accuses UN forces of not protecting them against Serb aggression and appeals for air strikes against the Serb gun positions." Muslim forces using "safe areas" to attack Serbs? How could this possibly refer to Srebrenica which, as we are told ad infinitum, was a demilitarised civilian haven? In truth only a very small, central part of Srebrenica remained demilitarised, giving free rein for Muslim fighters to operate out of suburban and other outlying areas, from where they launched murderous raids on surrounding Serb villages. Forces under the infamous Muslim commander Naser Oric caused mass carnage between 1992-95 with their attacks out of Srebrenica, leaving at least 1,300 Serb civilians butchered and thousands wounded. Oric was "as bloodthirsty a warrior who ever crossed a battlefield," commented Toronto Star reporter Bill Schiller, who visited the Muslim warlord's home in 1994. "I sat in his room, watching a shocking video version of what might have been called Naser Oric's Greatest Hits. There were burning buildings, severed heads and people fleeing. Oric grinned throughout, admiring his handiwork." Schiller continues: "When a bullet-marked ghost town appeared without any visible bodies, Oric hastened to announce: 'We killed 114 Serbs there'." His final raid out of Srebrenica came on June 26, 1995 with an attack on the village of Visnjica where 40 perished. It was one atrocity too far for the Bosnian Serbs, who began preparations to take the town. But, when they rolled into Srebrenica on July 11 1995 there was no Naser Oric or any other senior Muslim officers. They had been pulled out, in an apparent tactical move by Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovic, whom both Muslims and Serbs later accused of deliberately sacrificing the town in order to undermine the UN and give NATO justification for air strikes against the Bosnian Serb army. Izetbegovic, an enthusiastic collaborator with nazi occupiers during World War II, had been imprisoned under Tito for his crimes. He served a further jail term in socialist Yugoslavia during the 1980s for seeking to turn Bosnia into "an ethnically pure Islamic state." Seizing the Bosnian presidency in a mysterious power grab, despite losing the election to a moderate Muslim rival, it was Izetbegovic who imported 4,000 foreign Mojahedin, fresh from their battles with Soviet troops in Afghanistan, to fight holy war in Bosnia. In her book, Fools Crusade, US academic Diana Johnstone, the outstanding left analyst of the 1990s Balkan wars, notes that chaotic scenes greeted the Serb troops on their arrival at Srebrenica as terrified, leaderless Muslim combatants clashed violently among themselves over what to do. "Some wanted to surrender, but most decided to break through Serb lines and flee. By all accounts, this chaos deepened during the long retreat. Wild scenes occurred as confused soldiers fell into Serb ambushes, sometimes fighting back, sometimes shooting each other or even committing suicide." All the above testimonies comprise part of a body of evidence compiled by the Srebrenica Research Group - an international team of academics and Balkan analysts under the leadership of University of Pennsylvania professor Edward S Herman. Its report, which aims to bring some balance to this highly charged subject, is due for publication this month. Herman, who is perhaps best known for co-authoring the seminal tome Manufacturing Consent - his collaborative study alongside Noam Chomsky into media complicity with imperial Washington policy - insists that misinformation and myth surrounding Srebrenica has proved a handy smokescreen to obscure Western intrigue in the Balkans throughout the 1990s. He contrasts the fixation of Western governments and media on Srebrenica to their complete lack of interest in Operation Storm, the 1995 ethnic cleansing of 200,000 Krajina Serbs from their ancestral lands including the murder - unlike at Srebrenica - of women, children and the elderly at the hands of US-backed Croat forces. In a manner that is reminiscent of the tale of the Emperor's New Clothes, glaringly obvious questions regarding the "Srebrenica genocide" remain unasked by Western politicians and mainstream media alike. Why, if the Serbs were so intent on genocidal murder, were the victims all males of combat age? The nazis, of course, made no allowances for women or the elderly while slaughtering their Jewish, Roma and Serb victims. The Srebrenica myth was born at the UN security council in August 1995, when US representative Madeleine Albright, in a theatrical display that was repeated eight years later by her successor Colin Powell and his infamous phial of "anthrax," produced satellite photos showing "disturbed earth" where Muslim victims of genocide were supposedly buried. These pictures have never been made public. No matter that only about 4,000 bodies have to date been recovered. No matter that the vast majority are unidentified and certainly include victims from all sides of a vicious, internecine three-year civil war. No matter that the figure includes combatants who failed to surrender - many of whom were themselves guilty of heinous crimes against civilians. No matter that the Serbs have always acknowledged that crimes were committed - that civilians accompanying Muslim regular and irregular troops had been killed in the fighting. No matter that Naser Oric's grisly snuff movies have never been shown at the West's bogus Yugoslav war crimes tribunal at The Hague, whereas last month's video evidence allegedly showing the summary execution of six Muslims - a sickening, though not unusual, crime in wartime - is aired and declared proof positive of genocide. No matter that Slobodan Milosevic, the man charged with orchestrating that genocide, had no authority over the Bosnian Serbs from 1993 and who was cleared of any involvement in whatever happened at Srebrenica by a Dutch government report in 2002. "The Srebrenica massacre is the greatest triumph of propaganda to emerge from the Balkan wars," concludes Herman. "It reigns supreme for symbolic power. It is the symbol of Serb evil and Bosnian Muslim victimhood and the justice of the Western dismantling of Yugoslavia and intervention there at many levels." . Christopher James edits the website www.free-slobo-uk.org YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS
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