The July 1995 massacre and murder of 8000 Bosnian men and boys in the eastern Bosnian city of Srebrenica, Bosnia-Hercegovina continues to be a stain on humanity as more than seventy major mass graves have been located in Bosnia-Hercegovina containing civilians killed during the worst war crimes in Europe since the days of World War Two.
While there has been partial accountability for these terrible crimes of mass slaughter and ethnic intolerance that took place during the final months of the civil war and genocide in Bosnia-Hercegovina, efforts to more fully hold those responsible accountable have progressed slowly in the fifteen years since the tragedy.
Former Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic is serving a twenty nine year prison term in Great Britain after being found guilty of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal For The Former Yugoslavia (I.C.T.Y.) But Krstic is only one of several high ranking Serbian officials and military leaders who are blamed for responsibility for the ethnic cleansing and executions of thousands of Bosnian civilians in Srebrenica during the 1992-1995 conflict in Bosnia-Hercegovina.
Radovan Karadic was the highest ranking civilian and military leader of the Bosnian Serbs in Bosnia-Hercegovina and is currently on trial in the International Criminal Tribunal For the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague, Netherlands, on charges including genocide and murder.
Former Serbian General Ratko Mladic, who is also charged with genocide and other crimes for his responsibility in Srebrenica, remains at large and is believed to be protected inside Serbia. Serbia itself was found guilty of failing to prevent the genocide that took place in Srebrenica and these prior convictions for co-conspirators of Radovan Karadic weigh heavily against Karadic in his current trial.
Current Bosnian Serb leaders continue to be problematic for the international community in dealing with the Srebrenica Massacre, as Prime Minister Milorad Dodik has stated that the Srebrenica killings are fabricated and never took place. Dodiks statements drew staunch criticism from British and American governments as being cruel and destructive to peace and reconciliation efforts in Bosnia-Hercegovina.
Today in Srebrenica bad memories continue for both Serbian residents and Bosnian survivors alike who regard the eastern Bosnian city once known for being a place of youthful rejuvenation and health spas as the scene of a horrible episode of cruelty. These scars on Srebrenica are deep and are unlikely to heal for generations as both perpetrators and victims continue to live in a country fragmented by a violent civil war and genocide.
What you’ve written is a bald faced LIE! Dodik never denied the military operation in srebrenica took place, he states quite plainly if you bother to actual read/hear his statements that he states that the number of victims were inflated and the fact the women and children were evacuated and the casualties were all men and boys of fighting age. This is nothing more that journalistic hit piece with no merit whatsoever.
Let me answer your question why WOMEN were not killed. Here is the answer from the Krstic appeal judgement:
“In contrast to the killing of the captured military men, such an action could not easily be kept secret, or disguised as a military operation, and so carried an increased risk of attracting international censure… Constrained by the circumstances, they [Bosnian Serbs] adopted the method which would allow them to implement the genocidal design while minimizing the risk of retribution.”
http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com/2008/08/can-genocide-be-committed-by-letting.html
The writer has a B.A. and is boasting about it. HAHAHAHAHA. Hey it’s been over 3 years since you completed one year of “graduate studies”. Let me guess; you never graduated.
Seriously kid, how old are you? You weren’t in Bosnia. This article is nothing but a clear expression of ignorance. You’ve taken sides and that’s obvious. Good for you. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that people buy into this article. The “Bosniaks” were killing Serbian women and children all around Srebrenica using the “safe haven” as a place to run to when the Bosnian Serbians would counter attack.
Bosnia is at best a synthetic state with corruption in the “Federation”. I’ve attached a link below to a blog that has more quality in one sentence than your whole article. Maybe after reading it you can go back and complete your degree at Grad School. Maybe after that you can write a letter of apology to Bosnia for being so ignorant. —
http://lvb-research.blogspot.com/2010/07/biggest-lies-of-our-time-part-one.html
When did Mr Beck first report or hear of “Srebrenica Massacre”? When did the story break? Who broke it? When did commentators first start using the formulation, the catch phrase, “The Srebrenica Massacre [of x-thousands of Muslim men and boys]”? No reports from 10 July 1995 and the immediately ensuing days and weeks ever refer to “the massacre of 8000 (or 7000 etc) Muslim men and boys”.
From Iran, there was no mention of a massacre having taken place:
“Iranian foreign minister [Velayati], in a message to the UN secretary-general, has asked for immediate action to prevent a massacre of the defenceless people of Srebrenica by the Serb rebels. SOURCE: Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1, Tehran, in Persian 0930 gmt 11 Jul 95; Source: Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1, Tehran, in Persian 0930 gmt 11 Jul 95; SECTION: Part 4 Middle East; THE MIDDLE EAST; IRAN; ME/2353/MED. Message to UN secretary-general. Text of report by Iranian TV on 11th July.
From the front, there was no mention of a massacre having taken place:
Reports from the front in mid-July 1995, e.g. Chris Hedges in the New York Times of 18 July 1995, reported that thousands of armed Muslim fighters “slipped” through Serb lines under fire and arriving safe in Tuzla, held by Muslim forces (and site of a US garrison).
The lag time between as yet unbaptized “Srebrenica Massacre” in mid July 1995 and the first press reports is two months. David Rohde, who spearheaded the story that became known as “the Srebrenica Massacre”, did not himself use any such phrase or make such a claim. he never spent much time in eastern Bosnia, but hung out far from the front, in Zagreb (Croatia). On 19 August 1995 he wrote the unconvincing “…I saw what appeared to be a decomposing human leg protruding from freshly turned dirt…”
Beck overlooks that “United Nations official estimate that 4,000 to 6,000 Muslim men are still missing in the wake of the Srebrenica and Zepa assaults.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski:
The news would have still been hot when Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote an Op-Ed piece in “The New Republic” of 7 August 1995, under the headline: AFTER SREBRENICA. Zbig Brzezinski says only that something awful “might” happen.
Nowhere does Brzezinski mention a “Srebrenica massacre”.
That catch phrase does not appear until weeks after the alleged event. It will not be found in the press until the American-sponsored Croatian “Storm” (Oluja) on Serb Krajina in August-September 1995. You can ask soldiers of the Princess Pats who were attacked by Croatian forces at the Medak Pocket.
(In)Consistency: Madeleine Korbel Albright, US ambassador to the United Nations told a closed session of the Security Council that 2,000 to 2,700 missing Bosnians from the Srebrenica enclave might have been shot by the Bosnian Serbs.– She did not use the formulation “Srebrenica massacre.” For months, even years the press is full of stories about women from Srebrenica demanding from Muslim Bosnian officials to learn where their missing men were. Put your staff to work.
The search engine LEXIS-NEXIS now permits us to track press reports on whatever story. Readers can see for themselves what results turn up in searches dated between 10 July 1995 and the beginning of October 1995, using parameters such as:
Srebrenica AND massacre
Srebrenica AND missing
Srebrenica AND 7000 OR 8000
7000-8000 men and boys …
Koranically, once boys attain the age of fifteen, they are “warriors” for Islam.
Did the Srebrenica Massacre” happen? The story is as fake as Adolf Hitler’s broadcast on 1 September 1939 that Poland had attacked Germany.
Listen ‘Tracy’, you don’t even have any education. You’re miles below Mr. Kevin Becks intellectual level. He is a fine and educated man. You can’t even compare to him. It’s like comparing God with the Devil. Mr. Beck is high above you. Tracy, you ‘re just a discredited, worthless, intellectually deficient Srebrenica genocide denier. End of story.
Srebrenica Genocide, I welcome open discussion. You are free to post comments and state your opinions. However, please limit your arguments to a discussion of the facts. Ad hominem argumentation is not fruitful, and posts consisting wholly of personal attacks won’t be tolerated. Thanks.
Kevin Beck reveals that his research and interest in human rights is warped. To write about Srebrenica 15 years later and to totally ignore the fact that Nasir Oric and his goons and thugs used the so called “Safe-Haven” of Srebrenica to launch nightly attacks on surrounding Serb villages is written with duplicity.
What led Serbian forces to take Srebrenica was the destruction of 32 Serb villages and the violent slaughter of over 3,000 Serbian victims who Beck simply ignores, or worse helps the Muslims sweep these ugly war crimes under the nearest rug. Irresponsible yellow journalism is at play here as after Srebrenica fell the so called 8,000 victims was immediately reduced to 7,000. Witnesses during those first two weeks never once said that their relatives were taken out, lined up and shot. Those descriptions come years later with little evidence to support such crimes.
Bill Schiller of the Toronto Star sat in the living room of Nasir Oric and was encouraged to watch an appallingly violent video of Oric and his thugs decapitating their Serb victims. The video showed Oric blowing up Serbian houses and if anyone manage to survive the blast he then executed them. Bill Schiller called the video, “Orich’s Greatest Hits.” Yet this man was set free at The Hague by this appalling a Kangaroo court that seems only interested in Muslim victims much like Mr. Beck whose hidden agenda is all too apparent.
Apparently in Beck’s sloppy and irresponsible research talents he totally ignores the report by John Pomfret of the Washington Post who documented that he had witnessed “…Nearly 4,000 Muslim troops who managed to make their way through the forest to safety in Tuzla,” written two weeks after the fall of Srebrenica. Beck also ignores the fact that women and children were removed from Srebrenica before the Serbs took the village by storm. He also never mentions that 830 Muslim troops were captured and taken to Belgrade where they were held in a railway station as a makeshift prison. These facts fly in the face of Genocide charges and any alleged “mass” murder eludes any real evidence except for about 1,250 bodies. That hardly amounts to the largest genocide since WWII as Beck would have us believe while he again totally ignores the fact that 220,000 Serbs were ethnically cleansed from Croatia in 1995 or that a Serb population of 22% in Kosovo 15 years ago is now 5%.
There are currently 1.2 million Serbian refugees from Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, that number is twice the Croat and Muslim refugees so it is quite obvious who was the most successful at ethnic cleansing in these Civil Wars, yet Beck and his mindless minions manage to look the other way.
Missing quite obviously from this story and hundreds of others like it is any human rights concerns for the 3,000 Serbs killed at Srebrenica as though they do not deserve any justice. Such contempt for equal justice and equal human rights is simply outrageous and totally irresponsible yellow journalism.
Bill Dorich, stop self-promoting yourself on Wikipedia. All your arguments were tested in court and international judges dismissed them. It is not true that Naser Oric killed 3000 Serbs. The international courts dismissed that allegation because it did not happen.
In order to justify Srebrenica genocide, Serbian propaganda – under the leadership of right-wing nationalist Milivoje Ivanisevic – claimed that over 3,000 Serb civilians were murdered around Srebrenica. What are the facts? Read here:
http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com/2007/03/falsification-of-serb-victims-around.html
P.S. I am the author of 5 books on Balkan history including my 1992 book, Kosovo, the first book published in the United States on this region of the world.
You’re nothing. You have no education William Dorich (aka: Bill Dorich). Your books are nothing but crap. You have not intellectual or academic background. You have nothing. You’re discredited genocide denier. Nothing more, nothing less. A man who reduced himself to Srebrenica genocide denial and propagation of 700,000 lies about Jasenovac.
http://bosniakandjewishfriendship.wordpress.com/2010/07/27/dr-josip-pecaric-on-serbian-manipulations-with-jasenovac-camp-victims/
DID YOU KNOW? Three years before the genocide, Serbs destroyed hundreds of Bosnian Muslim villages around Srebrenica and committed horrendous massacres against Bosniak civilians (SEE PHOTOS!). Serbs never demilitarized around Srebrenica, despite of being required to do so under the 1993 agreement. In July 1995, Serbs perpetrated genocide: 30,000 Bosniaks were forcibly expelled and 8,100 summarily executed (DNA confirmed). Now you know…
http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com/
Absolutely ludicrous article – so contemptuous of fact that Beck should reconsider completing his graduate school at the “online school” he only completed one year at… Makes one wonder how these articles get printed… I think Tracy is on to something.
‘Steven O’ = ‘William Dorich’. Stop hiding behind nicknames and insulting decent people. Kevin Beck is smart and intelligent; he recognized the reality and he tells as it is. According to Judge Theodor Meron [Polish-American Jew], and quoting from the Krstic Appeal judgement, Serb forces “targeted for extinction the 40,000 Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica.”
Accept it or shut up!
Bill Clinton, Madeleine Korbel Albright, Tony Blair and Richard Holbrooke are Lies Damned Lies!
Clinton, Albright and Holbrooke were all a party to these outragous fabricated stories in the major newspapers during the break-up of former Yugoslavia. They should be standing in the dock at The Hague.
Remember the “60,000 Bosnian Rape victims” ?
When the story broke I immediately called Tom Post. I asked him how many Bosnian women did he interview for the story… he replied “20.” How then did you determine that 60,000 were raped I asked?… “I got the figure from the Izetbegovic government in Sarajevo,” he explained. And the world believed!
Roy Gutman received half a Pulitzer for his story on the Omarska Camp. But he knows that was pure fiction so when he wrote his book entitled “Witness to Genocide” an oxymoron title since he never saw a single death in Bosnia. Here is what Gutman wrote in his foreword to that stupid piece of journalistic crap: “Having set such lofty standards, I immediately made an exception and wrote about the Omarska camp which I had not visited, based on the secondhand witness account.” Lofty my ass, he lied, he fabricated a story and when he knew he would get caught he covered his tracks. That Pulitzer, like the one given and taken away from Janet Cooke should also be taken away from Gutman. Oh and by the way, Gutman was the man responsible for bringing the alleged Serbian rape victim, Jadranka Cigelj to the United States to testify before the House and Senate and to appear on numerous television interviews. It was later discovered that she was disqualified to testify at The Hague because she had filed rape charges under 5 other assumed names. We now know that Ms. Cigelj was in the CIC, the notorious propaganda organization of the Tudjman government. It was also discovered later that the Croats translated Gutman’s book into the Croat language and that they sponsored his appearances in Croatia, surely an ethical violation of any journalist.
The only document at the United Nations since 1991 on rape is document #S24491. That document is the video taped deposition of 600 Serbian rape victims, many of whom identified their perpetrators… and then guess what happened, 3 weeks later, Tom Posts writes this hideous 60,000 rape story in Newsweek… Why? No doubt to counter the ugly truth that Clinton and Albright knew about?
If you will recall these lunatic journalists who wrote the articles during this time period all said that the “Serbs raped Muslim women six and seven times a day until they became pregnant, then held them prisoner for 9 months so that they would be forced to give birth to a Serbian baby.” The fact that only 660 actual babies were born reveals this propaganda, and omits the fact that one-third of those rape babies were born to Serbian women.
Do any of you recall the Bosnian woman who fled to Switzerland and was an alleged “victim of Serbian rape?” In her ninth month she became a radio celebrity and was interviewed numerous times including when she entered the hospital for labor. Then there was dead silence… a week later it was revealed that she gave birth to a black baby. The only blacks in Bosnia were NATO troops from Africa. So this promiscuous Muslim girl blamed the Serbs for her sexual proclivities.
Then we have the Markale Market “massacre” used by Albright to place sanctions on Serbia in which even food and medicine was withheld from 7 million Serbs. But, we now know that the people were killed by their own Muslim government who planted claymore mines in the food stalls and blamed the Serbs for what turned out to be an impossible rocket attack where all of the injuries of the victims were below the waste, so unusual that a Muslim doctor even claimed in the New York Times that “he had never seen such injuries before.”
Then of course we have the infamous “Destruction of Dubrovnik” lie that hit all of the magazine covers and front page stories around the world. In reality we now know that auto tires were burned throughout the walled city then photographed with a telephoto lens to compress the range so that it appeared that Dubrovnik was burning… NO…IT WAS ONLY SMOKING.
The “Racak Massacre” used as the pretext to bomb the Serbs was another major lie by the Muslims who claimed the Serbs not only killed 45 Albanians but brutally mutilated them during their executions. 4 forensic experts from 4 different countries have since describe these stupid lies by revealing that “the 45 Albanians were killed during battle with the Serbs the previous day; the bodies were moved to a near bloodless crime scene; their military uniforms were exchanged for street clothing; and the bodies were mutilated after they were dead.” And who was the stage manager of this grotesque political drama? None other than US Ambassador William Walker who told CNN that he “Only cried twice in his life… when his mother died and when he saw the victims at Racak.” Well listen up folks, this is the same American ambassador of El Salvador where the goons and thugs decapitated thousands of Salvadorian victims and placed their heads on pikes that dotted the countryside. And why did Ambassador Walker not cry then? Because those thugs were trained and equipped on American military bases.
Are you beginning to see a pattern here of lies, distortions, manipulations and down right contempt by a bias media who have been a party to covering up the facts for their immoral bylines? Most of these hypocrites are in the pay of the CIA. Someday we will all be treated to the truth.
Ya ya ya ya… Bill Dorich. Cow fart has more credibility than you. All your allegations were tested and discredited in the courts. As I said, everything you said was tested and discredited in the courts. So, when will you stop spreading lies? Never? I thought so!
William Dorich, you’re uneducated and irrelevant liar and distortionist. Your books are crap, not a single trace of academic research. Your Srebrenica genocide denial arguments were tested in court and proven wrong.
As for 700,000 lies about Jasenovac, the US Holocaust Memorial Museumputs the number of dead Serbs to 40-50,000 and even that number is overblown.
Memorial signs with claims of victim counts, situated on the Bosnian side of the Sava river at Gradina:http://sz2604-max.blogspot.com/2011/06/holocaust-in-kroatie-1941.html
Glad to see a lively discussion taking place.
This topic is one on which I have extremely little knowledge. My curiosity is with regard to the International Criminal Tribunal. Was this a sham kangaroo court, or did it judge according to the evidence?
Would like to see both Beck’s and Dorich’s views on that.
“Sham” court? Who are you to judge what is a sham court? What kind of international legal background do you have? Have you ever worked as an international judge? What’s your academic background? Who are you? Where you came from? Why are you writing for Counterpunch, discredited genocide denial web site? You smell like a genocide denier to me. If there is a smoke, there is a fire. The only “kangaroo” here is people like you, people who deny genocide and take upon themselves to discredit World Courts. Yeah, there is a “world conspiracy” going against the jerks like you. Go ahead and try convincing us in your conspiracy theories.
I didn’t say it was a sham court. Nor do I believe that it was. It was a question. You need to slow down and read comments with less prejudice.
By: Dr. Josip Pecaric
The Serbian Ministry of Information, in conjuction with a nationalist ‘researcher’ Dr. Milan Bulajic [Srebrenica genocide denier] and the Serbian Orthodox Church, took a leading role in propagating the myth of Jasenovac. For a vast majority of Serbs, maintaining a grossly exaggerated number of ‘700,000′ Jasenovac deaths was absolutely central to their national self-identity. A high number ‘proved’ that Serbs were one of the ‘primary victims’ of the World War II, rather than Nazi collaborators (Chetniks) responsible for genocide over the Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) and Jewish population in the Second World War.
http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com/2010/07/serbs-in-jasenovac-camp.html
In conjunction with the war in former Yugoslavia, Serbia has undertaken a campaign to persuade the Jewish community of Serbian friendship for Jews. This same campaign portrays Croats as a common threat to both Jews and Serbs, in an attempt to gain Jewish sympathy and support at a time when most nations have isolated Serbia as a Balkan pariah. However, even as Serbia courts Jewish public opinion, their propagandists conceal a history of well-ingrained antisemitism, which continues unabated in 1992. To make their case, Serbs portray themselves as victims in the Second World War, but conceal the systematic genocide that Serbs had committed against several peoples including the Jews. Thus Serbs have usurped as propaganda the Holocaust that occurred in neighbouring Croatia and Bosnia, but do not give an honest accounting of the Holocaust as it occurred in Serbia.
http://bosniakandjewishfriendship.wordpress.com/2010/06/19/serbian-involvement-in-the-genocide-of-jewish-people/
whoever this “Srebrenica Genocide” blogger is needs to take some chill pills. Nice try with trying to scare people with the “Genocide denier” label. Calling Srebrenica a genocide is an offence to the Jews that suffered a real genocide, despite what the ICJ ruled. It was a war crime. No different than the massacres that have happened in many wars with prisoners of war. The real tragedy here is that it happened under a civil war context between former neighbors, “kumovi” and friends. Armchair “experts” like you who read this stuff from a thousand miles away with an arts or science degree wouldn’t understand this stuff unless you were actually on the ground and actually were affected by it.
“Discredit world courts”?? what the hell is that supposed to mean? of course someone has the right to challenge the judgment of ANY court and ESPECIALLY a court like the ICJ, which has made some pretty weird judgments lately. (honestly though, I think that Jeremy was asking a simple question about their views on the court before you attacked him). I think you’re just pissy that he didn’t ask for your opinion.
one last point. Both Dr. Josip (Mengler) Pecaric and “Srebrenica Genocide” post as supporting links to their arguments stuff from Bosniak or anti-Serbian sites (e.g. “Srebrenica Genocide” and “Bosniak Jewish Friendship” {are-you-kidding-me-dot-com})
dudes. Seriously. Stick to your day jobs. You really are bad at arguing your case. It’s almost like you work for the Serbian government. :-D
The author of this piece, if educated, should know so very well that there is a lot of lying spin by the most militarily powerful, in order to grasp a foothold in distant parts of the world. That is precisely what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s, and as we well know it’s happened in Iraq and elsewhere. No doubt there will be blowback for the stupidities. Stay tuned.
Its a very deep view of whole situation in conection with Srebrenica 1992-1995. Against that is something most stupid what i read ever in blog on down adress
http://bosniakandjewishfriendship.wordpress.com/2010/07/27/dr-josip-pecaric-on-serbian-manipulations-with-jasenovac-camp-victims/
Some bosnian mujahedins too much “love” a jews, and they create a parallel history.
1. Oh, I love your blog, I’ve never seen like this prior to. It is very consistent and precise. Nevertheless, I will think about these as other choice or maybe alternative in some way.
General Krstic’s defence, on appeal, argued that he could not be held responsible for crimes that he was unaware were actually occurring. The ICTY argued that for criminal responsibility to be established it was unnecessary to conclude that the defendant knew what was happening: ‘it was sufficient to show that he was aware that those acts outside the agreed enterprise were a natural and foreseeable consequence of the agreed joint criminal enterprise, and that the accused participated in the enterprise aware of the probability that other crimes may result.’ By this rationale, of course, any participation in war is a criminal enterprise, as in all wars it is fairly certain that crimes such as rape, murder and maltreatment of prisoners of war will be committed. Furthermore, the actual definition of genocide as employed by the Tribunal is not as might be commonly understood: as the intention to destroy such a substantial part of a group as to affect the entirety. In order to establish genocide the ICTY firstly argued that the Bosnian Serb army had targeted all of the Bosnian Muslim inhabitants of Srebrenica and the surrounding area, some 40,000 people, not just those murdered. This leads to a strange situation whereby those who were not murdered contribute to the verdict of genocide.Therefore, Krstic’s trial revealed serious flaws in the presentation of the fall of Srebrenica as an act of genocide. The ICTY was unable to establish that the commander of the army unit that captured Srebrenica had any intention to, or knowledge of, any murders. Furthermore, in order for the murders to be classified as genocide, the ICTY embarked upon a complicated definition of genocide that is not dependent on showing either intent to commit genocide, nor upon the numbers of people actually killed. Thus, under this definition of genocide the murder of some individuals, even soldiers in a combat situation, counts as genocide.From Kosovo in 1999 to the Congo in 2005, Srebrenica is held up as conclusive proof that the West is morally obliged to intervene militarily in conflict situations. Jack Straw argued in defence of Western intervention in Macedonia in 2001, on the basis that Srebrenica showed what happened when the West was reluctant to intervene. Liberal commentator David Aaronovitch used the same argument to explain his support for military action in Iraq. When discussing the killing of 60 Congolese soldiers by UN troops, UN General Patrick Cammaert argued in favour of robust military intervention, because of ‘the lessons of Srebrenica, Somalia and Rwanda.The Joseph Goebbels Nazi style “Big Lie”was spread world-wide with the mainstream media-connected resources of a multi-million dollar funded American “public relations”& lobbying firm called ‘Ruder Finn’ – whom also worked as a lobbying group in Washington on behalf of the Islamist Nazi terrorist KLA and Tudjman’s HDZ Fascist neo-Ustasha Nazi racist government responsible for the ethnic cleansing of over 350,000 Krajina province Serbs from 1990 to 1995 and for the murder of at least 15,000 Serbs during the same period.
Clinton’s Big Lie: “Srebrenica Massacre”:http://szrzlj3.blogspot.com/2011/06/clintons-big-lie-srebrenica-massacre.html
My response to Kevin Beck and his article about Srebrenica.
Omission Journalism is always suspect…equally insulting to the victims is Advocacy Journalism.
This article “Srebrenica 15 Years Later reveals a Partisan approach to a very difficult and challenging subject…claiming war crimes by those of us who were not there and rely on “Hearsay” or worse, do not speak or read the language of the Balkans and interpret events through a distorted lens is not ethical journalism. The writer begins his article with a lie about “8,000 victims” yet he makes no effort to reveal that within the first week of this event that number was instantly dropped by the international media to 7,000 victims. Ten days after the fall of Srebrenica the Washington Post carried a story by John Pomfret who was a witness. He wrote: “About 4,000 Muslim troops from Srebrenica made their way through the forest to safety in Tuzla.” The ICRC released a memo two weeks prior to the fall of Srebrenica that disclosed: “About 4,000 Bosnian troops in Srebrenica were reassigned to other military duty kept secret even from their own families.” If you add this 4,000 to those seen by Pomfret plus the alleged 7,000 victims this totals more than 15,000 victims, a-third of the Bosnian army in a NATO protected safe haven? If this writer actually set foot in Srebrenica it would clearly reveal the size of this village was not capable of housing 7,000 Muslim “troops” much less 15,000. And why did NATO commanders allow Nasir Oric to utilize Srebrenica as a safe haven in which to retreat each night after his deadly gang of goons and thugs did their slaughter of Serbian victims who, according to this article have been made invisible?
Bill Schiller, a writer with the Toronto Star in Canada gave blow by blow testimony from the mouth of Nasir Oric, this war criminal, who over a period of 7 months liquidated over 3,200 Serbian victims. If this article is opposed to “Genocide” that accusation needs to be even handed not selective reported. Here are the words written by Bill Schiller: “I was forced to sit in the living room of Oric and watch his home made video of himself decapitating his Serbian victims.” Schiller called that video “Oric’s Greatest Hits.” The Hague Tribunal watch that hideous video and set Oric free, revealing the contempt this Kangaroo court had for the kind of “Equal Justice Under the Law” as inscribed over the doorway of the United States Supreme Court. In scenes of houses being blown up Oric would grin from ear to ear and exclaimed, “we launched them to the moon.”
As late as 2002, the killing fields in Bosnia were still being selectively excavated by forensic teams from the United Nations who sifted the remains for evidence to be used in the selective prosecution of alleged war criminals at The Hague. Since mass graves were dug up, beginning in 1996, about 3,500 corpses, in varying degrees of decay and unidentifiability, were stacked in body bags, seven-tiers deep, in a warehouse at Tuzla as of late 2002.
But, in an apparent unexplained surge of forensic zeal, nearly half again as many were apparently unearthed by late summer 2003—less than a year later as the Associated Press reported “5,000 bodies have been recovered from areas near Srebrenica. Of those, 1,083 had been identified using DNA.” Why, we should ask has The Hague Tribunal allowed the families of these alleged victims from sharing the DNA results?
And, curiously, by the end of the decade, cadavers from various regions of Bosnia were being quietly transported around the country and, U.N. officials and others suspected, were being lumped together as “Srebrenica victims”! Many of the green coffins in that image have a leg, a hand, a head but few had entire bodies. Many of the alleged victims were killed in other areas of Bosnia and utilized for the Public Relations stunt of the burial of 500 coffins with massive international coverage…The explanation from Bosnian officials was that bodies were retrieved in other graves where they were first buried to hide their identification as victims from the July 1995 “massacre” at Srebrenica. But, the grisly inventory at Tuzla likely included other corpses that pre-dated the July 1995 killings and bore enough signs that they were not Muslims—but local Serbs murdered earlier by Bosnian Muslim troops and mercenaries!
On the eve of the trial of indicted Bosnian Muslim commander Nasir Oric, forensic scientists from The Hague were noticeably silent about any exhumations of the nearly 1,000 Serb civilians killed at Bratunac and at nearby Serb villages that provoked the retaliation and killings of Muslims at Srebrenica. This reminds me of the media driven phrase… “All sides are guilty, but Serbs are more guilty.”
For 8 years Americans read in their papers about “250,000 victims in Bosnia.” After the war, 4 international human rights organizations combed through the victims lists and admitted “They were having difficulty coming up with 96,400 victims on all sides.” President Clinton who perpetrated these dismemberment wars in former Yugoslavia proclaimed in his last inaugural address that “300,000 had been killed in Bosnia” making these claims even more absurd… there was a deliberate orchestration in the U.S. and our State Department to elevate these crimes for a political agenda and they all lied.
The principal writer of the Newsweek piece was Tom Post, who admitted later he had never been to Yugoslavia. Contributing correspondents included researcher Alexandra Stiglmayer (who had said less than a week earlier in a National Public Radio interview that the numbers of rapes were unconfirmed), Charles Lane conceded reluctantly a year later that the media routinely digested such whoppers from the Bosnian government and its PR handlers.
I personally called Tom Post and asked him how with interviews of only 23 women according to his article in Newsweek that he was able to extrapolate “50,000 rapes.” he said the numbers were given to him by the Izetbegovic government… The omission was contrasted by the lone account from French journalist Jerome Bony, who described in a February 4, 1993; broadcast his trek to Tuzla, which gained notoriety as the most prominent Bosnian town for finding Muslim rape victims:
“When I was fifty kilometers from Tuzla I was told to ‘go to the Tuzla gymnasium (high school) (where) there are 4,000 raped women.’ At twenty kilometers this figure dropped to 400. At ten kilometers only forty were left. Once at the site, I found only four women willing to testify.”
Considering this appalling level of contempt for the truth and the hideous lies, fabrications and propaganda by the Bosnian government the Humanitarian Law Centre in Belgrade reveals an eagerness to step into that cesspool to betray the human rights of their own people, they hardly need outside journalists to add their disinformation and lack of expertise to this hideous mix.
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William Dorich is the author of 9 books, six on Balkan history. His newest books are Serbia: Faces & Places and Memoirs of a Serbian-American Dissident. He is the recipient of The Order of St. Sava, the highest recognition bestowed on a layperson by the Holy Synod of Serbian Orthodox Bishops. His articles have appeared in the International Herald Tribune, The Washington Post, The Arizona Republic and in a number of Serbian publications. He is a double victim of Balkan Genocide, 17 relatives were burned to death in the Serbian church in Vojnic, Croatia in 1942 and the killing of the last 5 relatives of his name during “Operation Storm” in Croatia in 1995.