Posted by Julia Gorin

As the world bows its collective head this week in shame to mark the 16th anniversary of not rescuing Muslim soldiers from the Serbs they were slaughtering, the Netherlands’ largest internet news portal, NRC, was audacious enough to challenge the official version of the sacred, unquestionable, meticulously constructed lie known as the “Srebrenica Genocide,” heralding a significant change in attitude toward the nature of the incident. As Stefan Karganovic of the Srebrenica Historical Project put it, “The expression of such heretical views would have been unthinkable in Holland [or anywhere else] a short time ago.” Herewith, the translated version:

Srebrenica: new insights By Rene Gremaux

…Hans Blom (June 1, continued in his interview with The Times of May 28) correctly argues that the Bosnian Serb entry was not planned well in advance, and even less so the mass executions. According to [Blom,] the former head of the NIOD [Netherlands Institute for War Documentation] investigation into the July 1995 Srebrenica events, Mladić was enraged about the surreptitious departure of the majority of Muslim men from the enclave. His objective was to take prisoners of war. The shooting of the captured Muslims of fighting age was an unintended consequence, according to Blom. What started spontaneously in unexpected circumstances, was then systematically continued and completed. That is the core of the professor’s argument.

Thе fact that this historian dared to offer an analytical framework to explain the cruelties of the Bosnian war, which was contrary to the moralistic Dutch image on Srebrenica, reflects some progress on that issue. Yet his comments on the [role] of Mladić’s anger are not convincing. This requires a review of the context in which Srebrenica occurred, which I will now try to sketch on the basis of results of my own investigations in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia.

In the hot summer of 1995 the untenability of Srebrenica and other enclaves painfully came to light. Earlier, the Muslim government in Sarajevo refused to alleviate the plight of tens of thousands of refugees in Srebrenica by [dis]allowing their evacuation to Central Bosnia. As evidenced by his contribution to the NRC last June 7, Joris Voorhoeve, Minister of Defence at the time, was originally in favor of this solution. In Sarajevo, however, his initiative was flatly refused, [ostensibly] because this would imply cooperation with ethnic cleansing. What the outside world preferred to misperceive as a humanitarian issue, for the Republika Srpska was a very serious military and strategic question. Repeatedly, the Srebrenica enclave, which was demilitarized in name only, was used by the Islamists inside it, sometimes reinforced by civilian men and women, as a base for provocative and murderous military assaults on the surrounding Serb villages. To combat and prevent the joining of Srebrenica and the neighbouring southern enclave of Žepa with the rest of the Muslim-dominated areas, many Bosnian Serb forces were tied down, while their army along the main front lines was facing the full burden of conducting the war hampered by a great shortage of military personnel.

Given the situation as outlined above, the Bosnian Serb leadership were keen to find a solution. Great was the surprise when in the second week of July 1995 Srebrenica was captured by a relatively small, not very heavily armed force, which was actually operating only on the south side of the enclave. What actually happened? The leadership of the 28th Division in Srebrenica-based Muslim army was ordered back to Sarajevo.

Thus the protection of tens of thousands of Muslims in the enclave in fact was largely left to the small and weak Dutch battalion. Apparently the political and military leadership of Bosnian Muslims were not really afraid of Serbian revenge and arbitrariness, let alone of the implementation of any genocidal plan.

Or could it be that they were left behind deliberately to be sacrificed for a “higher” purpose? [It turned out to be the latter, with the disappearance of the battalion helping create the impression that the Serbs were attacking an unarmed “safe zone.”]

Shortly before July 11th the vast majority of the male Muslim population of fighting age, led by active military, took to flight, refusing to assemble in the Dutch base in Potočari. Firstly, there was fear of being called to account for atrocities committed against Serb prisoners of war and civilians. At the same time, the main Muslim army did not want to lose men unnecessarily as prisoners of war. Everyone was desperately needed for the combat that was going on elsewhere. After a long, terrible trek barely half of perhaps 15,000 in Srebrenica men and older boys who left managed to reach Muslim-controlled territory, mostly around Tuzla.

But what happened to the rest, who did not reach safety, one could ask? The Dutch media invariably point to mass executions as their only cause of death. According to Mr. Blom[,] the alleged Serbian murderousness following the fall of Srebrenica is explained by Mladić’s intense anger about the military age men’s escape. Yet there is much that is inconsistent in the image of Mladić as a man of great wrath who wanted to put all Muslim men to the sword. The head of the hospital located in Milići [extended] medical care to wounded Muslims from Srebrenica. I spoke with him and found out that after recovering many patients later expressed their gratitude. In Tuzla I was told by young Muslim men from Srebrenica who actually had fallen into the Serbs’ hands as prisoners of war, that they were treated correctly. When Mladić shortly after the capture of Srebrenica went on to Žepa, he refused to take with him men who had reason for revenge. The Serbian takeover of the nearby small Muslim enclave went with little or no bloodshed. For an explanation of the terrible crimes committed in the aftermath of the takeover of the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, we should consider something else besides the possible criminal intent of Mladić and his men. For instance, not infrequently, small numbers of Serb guards were put in charge of hundreds of Muslim men who had surrendered. In at least in one such case a Muslim from the crowd of prisoners managed to kill a guard, after which all hell broke loose.

It is obvious that Srebrenica fell when the Western powers were looking for a pretext to enter the conflict on the side of the Bosnian Muslims, as well as the Croats, which would enable them to give their protégés massive and open military assistance. It is unlikely that Mladić would in such circumstances knowingly hand his opponents a casus belli on a silver platter. There was simply no chance that crimes of the scope as alleged could be effectively concealed. It soon turned out that for Mladić Srebrenica was a Pyrrhic victory and actually became the long-sought stick with which to beat the Serbs. Soon, with NATO air support elsewhere in Bosnia-Herzegovina Muslims and Croats were on the march. All the more reason to investigate in greater detail evidence of the involvement of intelligence services in the Srebrenica massacre. Several witnesses refer to the fact that the shadowy figures involved in death squad killings were rewarded with gold or money. If that is true, then neither the bloodlust and the desire for revenge attributed to the Serbs, nor the alleged fury of their commander, can serve as a sufficient explanation for these events.

That last part is a reference to the mostly false testimony of the Hague prosecution’s “crown witness” Drazen Erdemovic, a Croatian mercenary who confessed to committing executions of Srebrenica Muslims and named half a dozen other individuals who had been members of his multi-ethnic mercenary group called “Pauk,” all paid to execute Muslims — though Erdemovic “forgets” by whom. In 2000, the Milosevic government arrested several Pauk members and charged them with war crimes for killing Muslim POWs, but when the Western-backed opposition took over, they were released. Leader of the Serbian Radical Party, Vojislav Seselj, testified in 2005 that the mercenary executioners were acting on orders from French intelligence. The fact that today Pauk members’ whereabouts are known to Western governments, that they obtain passports without hindrance and travel freely, serving in other conflict theaters including as part of the French Foreign Legion — and that the Hague has never sought to prosecute any of them despite the testimony of its star witness — makes the assertion hard to dismiss. While such a Western frame-up of the Serbs for “genocide” in Srebrenica could account for the bulk of executions (though nowhere near 8,000), it is not to the exclusion of individual acts of revenge, which despite the Serb military issuing strict orders to soldiers to behave in line with international law in their treatment of civilians and POWs — as even Erdemovic testified. One example is given on a news site in the context of a 1997 interview that Radovan Karadzic gave to the newspaper Vecernje Novosti:

No one is denying that there were individual crimes on the Serb side. Nonetheless, no one can credibly claim that these crimes were a result of the Serb leadership’s policy.

Here is an example. While investigating what really took place in Srebrenica, surrounded by the media fog in which lies, mythomania, and truths met each other, I interviewed a number of direct participants in the events [in Srebrenica]. The testimony by M.R., member of the Republic of Srpska Army who participated in the capture of Srebrenica is typical for most of them.

“They woke us up around midnight. They said, get up, get in truck, straight to Srebrenica. ‘What are we going to do there?’, I asked. The commander responded ‘you’ll see when we get there’.

“When we arrived, Srebrenica had already fallen, and thousands of [M]uslim prisoners were there. I was ordered to escort a bus full of [M]uslim prisoners. There was a full bus of them and I was alone…Then, I spotted two guys from my village (gives the name of the village). They were in the group which burned down my house, raped my sister, and killed my mother. I took them out of the bus and killed them right there, those Turkish mother****ers…”
…
Most of the prisoners in Srebrenica, soldiers from the Eight Operative Group, took part in the [M]uslim devastation and slaughter in east Bosnia in 1992 and later. The commander of the Operative Group was the war criminal Naser Oric who had been promoted to a brigadier and decorated by Izetbegovic with the highest decoration in the muslim Army “Golden Lilly”.

“Our soldiers were never decorated for crimes. We do not decorate our criminals. We try them,” said Karadzic.

The preceding lays the foundation for much of what is in the 2010 film “Srebrenica: A Town Betrayed,” which follows interviews and revelations by Bosnian-Muslim investigative journalist Mirsad Fazlic, who doesn’t appreciate the fictitious, black-and-white version of the Bosnian war that is perpetuated by the international community and by Bosnian officialdom, which still honors wartime president Alija Izetbegovic as a national hero when Fazlic and others know he was the opposite. The film really begins only at the four-minute mark, and its main shortcoming is the ubiquitous, stubborn marriage to the notion that the number “7-8,000 killed” is anything other than a concoction that the world has been working backwards for 16 years to make seem real.

Among numerous of the film’s jaw-dropping revelations — including the fact that the humanitarian convoys which the Serbs were allowing to pass to Srebrenica were being intercepted by Bosnian “hero” Naser Oric and sold on the black market (and including Srebrenica police chief Hakija Mehovic describing the meeting at which the Bosnian leadership floated a proposal by Bill Clinton that 5,000 Srebrenica residents be sacrificed) — are the following:

1. “Mladic had four tanks and 400 men. In reserve he also had 1600 armed locals. But Mladic didn’t trust them since they lacked discipline and would use every opportunity to revenge [Srebrenica warlord] Oric’s attacks on the villages. The Serbs were outgunned by NATO’s fighter aircraft, 450 Dutch peacekeepers and Oric’s 5,500 soldiers.” (The first fact is important as a contradistinction to the Mladic that has been presented to the public, and there is more in the film in that regard. The latter factoids are important to illustrate that Srebrenica was set up for the Serbs to overpower, with the Muslim side “winning by losing,” as Nebojsa Malic calls it.)

2. In reference to the 50 Serbian villages that were being attacked by the Muslims of Srebrenica: “Especially disturbing was a religious dimension to the killings. Men were castrated in an anti-Christian gesture of circumcision. Pregnant women were disemboweled with cuts in the form of a cross. Some people were crucified, nails driven through their hands.”

3. “In April 1993 military chiefs from both sides — General Sefer Halilovic and General Ratko Mladic — signed a UN plan for Srebrenica and the other cities to become demilitarized zones. The Muslims promised on their side to stop the aggression against the Serbs around the enclaves and against the 15,000 Serbs still living in the capital Sarajevo.” (The Muslim side naturally didn’t hold to their end of the bargain, but what makes the excerpt exceptional is the word “aggression” for once attributed to the correct side of the Bosnian war.)

4. “Islam will win, since Bosnia is an Islamic country.” (Graffiti on the walls of a destroyed building in Kravica, where on January 7, 1993 — Orthodox Christmas — Muslims destroyed the town, killing 49 men, women, and children.)

On the point of crosses being cut into Serb women’s skin, a reader recently brought my attention to the following Bosnian incidents:

I found interesting your choice of words – “Roasting Mladic” – because Dr. Zoran Stankovic had examined the charred bodies of Bosnian Serbs roasted on spits with their limbs cut off, which Bosnian Muslim soldiers jokingly termed “Bosansko Jagnje” (Bosnian Lamb).

That July 7, 2005 article [linked above, in Serbian] also mentions a boy Dr. Stankovic also examined, whom he just names Stojanovic, who left his fleeing family and returned to his home in Zvornik to look for his dog. He was later discovered with his chest ripped open in the shape of a cross.

In newer articles we see that he was an 11 year old Slobodan Stojanovic. The murderer was also revealed not to be a Bosnian Muslim soldier, but in fact Elfeta Veseli (AKA Hosovka), a 45 year old ethnic Albanian woman from the neighboring town of Vlasenica. Born in Urosevac, Kosovo & Metohija, she is the daughter of Rahman, a forester. Elfeta was recently tracked down living freely in Switzerland with her brother Muhamed Veseli. Bosnian authorities have made no request for her arrest and extradition.

Back to Srebrenica. If one can’t spare an hour to watch “A Town Betrayed,” below is a seven-minute primer on the subject matter:

In the clip above, look for the sentence by the apparently confused narrator: “Oddly enough, the Serbs cooperated.” One encounters these sorts of surprised musings about Serb reasonableness quite often, since the starting premise of the journalistic and political classes are wrong. Consistently throughout the Balkan wars, the Bosnian Serbs, like Serbian Serbs, were the side that wanted solutions and peace, including supporting every initiative to terminate hostilities in Bosnia (e.g. the “Town Betrayed” film mentions the Owen-Stoltenberg plan of 1993 which was rejected by Clinton, making the Muslims believe they could get more land in a better deal — as was the case when they rejected the 1992 Lisbon plan that would have stopped the war almost before it started.) Indeed, the book To End a War by the late professional Serb-loather Richard Holbrooke demonstrates this fact vividly as he spits venom, accusations, and condemnations at Milosevic even as he describes rather contradictory behavior, with Milosevic jumping through hoops for us and the Muslims. An example from the clip:

The Bosnian Parliament met in a hotel in Sarajevo to discuss the division of Bosnia. The session was used as a chance to invite a delegation from Srebrenica and tell them about the proposal to give up the Muslim enclaves in exchange for a free Sarajevo. Nine prominent Muslims from Srebrenica were invited to Sarajevo including Chief of Police [Hakija] Mehovic, Suljo Hasanovic and commander Naser Oric. They must fly over hostile territory. Mehovic is scared. “Initially the plan was to land in Han-Pijesak or Romanija for inspection. We refused, and then the Serbs let us straight through.”
…
[Oric didn’t come. No one knows why. Perhaps he thought it was a Serbian trick, because “that year, his Srebrenica fighters had killed many Serbian civilians.”] Others say it was because he already knew about the proposal.
…
[Chief of Police Mehovic:] “Alija told us about Clinton’s proposal. Chetniks [Serbs] would occupy Srebrenica and kill off 5,000 Muslims. A military intervention would follow. What did we think of that? We rejected this proposal. We thought it was outrageous to murder 5,000 people.”

The idea of an American president proposing that Serbian troops attack Srebrenica and carry out a massacre to justify a military intervention seemed utterly ludicrous. But the UN investigation shows Hakija’s words are not unfounded. UN report: “Some surviving members of the Srebrenica delegation have stated that President Izetbegovic also told them that he had learned that a NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina was possible, but could only occur if the Serbs were to break into Srebrenica, killing at least 5,000 of its people.”

President Izetbegovic denied having made any such remark. He did admit he asked for an opinion on the land exchange.

Next is a short and shocking video clip titled “Hiding Genocide; Before the Srebrenica Massacre: Jihad In the Balkans”

And in the video below, part of the documentary film “The Avoidable War,” the speakers aren’t named in the segment. In order of appearance, they are:

1. Nik Gowing, an anchor and foreign affairs expert at Britain’s Independent Television News (ironically the network responsible for the skinny-Bosniak-man picture that fooled the world)
2. James Jatras, at the time an analyst for the Senate Republican Policy Committee
3. George Kenney, former desk officer at the State Dept.
4. Colonel David Hackworth, Army veteran and at the time Newsweek’s military correspondent (later becoming a Fox News military analyst who in 1999 told Albanian propagandist Joe DioGuardi that his war wasn’t worth a single American life and that he would drive his son to Canada if he were to be called up for it.)
5. Susan Woodward, at the time working for the Brookings Institution in Washington (and making few friends in D.C. thanks to her dissenting view on the Balkan wars)
6. Ted Galen Carpenter, of the Cato Institute
7. Haris Silajdzic (appearing in a news clip), Bosnian wartime foreign minister and serving as President Izetbegovic’s chief propagandist
8. Alexandra Stiglmayer, then a journalist and later hired by the Office of the UN High Representative in Bosnia (After writing an article for Newsweek about rape in Bosnia, here she answers the question, “Do you believe the numbers [30-50,000 women raped] are credible?” with the following: “They seem very high to me, and I don’t believe the sources because as I’ve investigated, they always go back to one government or another.” As the film exposes, “The European Community Commission, which estimated that 20,000 had been raped, dropped this claim from its final reports. After an exhaustive investigation, the UN concluded that 2,400 rapes had been committed by all three sides in the Bosnian conflict.”)
9. John Peter Maher, linguistics professor emeritus, Fulbright lecturer and formerly of the US Army Counter-Intelligence Corps

Continued:

This part of the film opens with British ambassador Lord David Owen, who recalls asking French UN General Philippe Morillon why he didn’t make public the UN report warning that the Bosnian government was behind staged attacks such as the Markale bombings, which were being blamed on the Serbs and getting the latter bombed by NATO. To which Morillon replied, “We have to live here.” Indeed, there had been three attempts on Morillon’s life by Muslim forces. In his book The Fall of Yugoslavia, BBC reporter Misha Glenny observed that the majority of UN and relief workers who had died in the conflict were victims of Muslim units. “The Bosnian government was quick to understand that most of the world viewed them as innocent victims. Throughout the war, they used this perception to undertake offensive actions and then portray themselves as victims.”

There is also a clip of recently departed former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger on TV saying that “Muslims are being killed in Bosnia-Hercegovina and this government has tried to demonstrate to the Moslem world we care about that, and want to try to do something about it.”

The last speaker introduced is Canadian General Lewis MacKenzie.

Finally, below is a clip from the film “Sarajevo Ricochet,” which came to my attention upon the release by INTELWIRE of declassified State Dept. cables in late November. INTELWIRE is run by J.M. Berger, author of the new book Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam. First came the following alert:

Previously Classified Documents On Srebrenica Massacre And More

If you support government transparency, but don’t support the indiscriminate release of classified information, forget Wikileaks and check out the documents below.

The PDF binder linked [here] contains 2,000 pages of previously classified State Department documents on the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica…The cables also describe…the alleged killing of a U.N. peacekeeper by a Bosnian soldier around the time of the attack. [”When the battles for Srebrenica began, one of our thugs, probably on order, killed a soldier from the Dutch battalion. This helped dissolve the entire system of Dutch responsibility.” — wartime Bosnian MP Ibran Mustafic, “Planned Chaos“] …

Then came the “Sarajevo Ricochet” alert:

Declassified Cable From INTELWIRE Expands Wikileaks Revelation Of Iranian Arms Smuggling

It’s only a 13-minute video (full version here), but to transcribe the most salient parts:

…UN peace negotiator in Bosnia Thorvald Stoltenberg witnessed the arms smuggling and claims the United States directly supplied the Bosnians. “We saw Iranian planes and American planes coming in with arms and military equipment…I saw it myself, the planes.”

Every American official interviewed by Berger denies that the United States directly provided weapons to the Bosnians, but most admitted that all other arms suppliers were welcome.

…By 1995 some 2000 jihadists had traveled to Bosnia according to the research of Esad Hasimovich. Soon, the jihadists also started to kidnap and kill soldiers and civilians serving in the UN peacekeeping mission to Bosnia. They created gruesome propaganda videos executing prisoners of war….

[Ambassador Peter Galbraith: ‘Mujahedeen atrocities weren’t a big issue.’]

But Esad’s investigation shows that mujahedeen war crimes rose to new levels in Bosnia during the last year of the war. Serb prisoners were tortured and executed in public places then buried in mass graves.

For Esad, this is not just a Bosnian story. This is a story about the spread of global jihad. “It was something different from the war, because the Bosnian war was over in December of 95. But it was my mistake. For these groups, war was not over.”

…[Former NSA chief analyst John R. Schindler]: “By 1995 there were already European governments that were very concerned about some of the al Qaida footprints in Bosnia that [were] now spreading out across Europe. It’s not an accident that after 9/11, many of these governments quietly told Washington, ‘We told you, we were warning you about this a half decade ago and you called us crazy, not a team player, being difficult, paranoid.’ But the reality is it was several European governments who in the mid to late 1990s were far more proactive than the U.S. government in fighting al Qaeda and in my mind they’re allowed to say ‘Hey, we’ve been in this fight longer than you have, we got it long before you did. It was your policies that…facilitated a lot of this badness.”
…
On December 14th, 1995, the same day as the Dayton accord was to be signed, a key leader of the mujahedeen was conveniently killed. The Egyptian Anwar Shaban, commander of the mujahedeen forces and an ally of Osama bin Laden, was ambushed near the Bosnian border. In his bullet-ridden car, a notebook was found. Esad Hasimovic got a copy of the notebook and it reveals the discussions and postwar plans of the mujahedeen. It says they were prepared to attack the NATO forces that were coming into Bosnia to replace the UN peacekeepers. The mujahedeen wanted to use the country as a new European base for the global jihad.

For president Alija Izetbegovic this notebook would have been a devastating political scandal. Shaban had invited the president to several meetings with the mujahedeen shortly before the Dayton accord was signed. Shaban filmed the meetings and made detailed transcripts. In defiance of the terms he agreed to during the Dayton negotiations, Izetbegovic continued to promise the mujahedeen fighters they could stay in Bosnia. The record of these meetings was a nightmare for the Bosnian intelligence service. They knew Shaban planned to use the transcripts and photos to blackmail the Bosnian leadership. They also had another reason to be worried. Propaganda videos that included footage from one of the meetings carefully edited out the face of a man sitting next to the president. But the original picture reveals the man was Abu Mali, one of Osama bin Laden’s top allies in Europe. And Bosnian intelligence documents showed that the leaders of the mujahedeen, Shaban and Mali, were in close telephone contact with al Qaeda operatives and with Osama bin Laden personally.

More details, from the INTELWIRE alert:

…The plane was “fully loaded with arms,” including a number of barrels believed to contain chemical or biological weapons. It was not the first Iranian shipment of arms to Bosnian Muslims either.

The Iranian and Bosnian governments had previously asked permission from Tudjman to ship arms through Zagreb. The last time, Tudjman had said no, so this time all the supplies in the plane was labeled as humanitarian aid from the Red Crescent.

The 20 to 40 mujahideen fighters on the plane were more difficult to conceal. It’s important to note that these were probably not all (or even mostly) Iranians. Iranian nationals in Bosnia functioned more as trainers and intelligence agents, but Iran helped smuggle in fighters from around the Muslim world.

American military veterans were also flying into Bosnia to serve as trainers to the Bosnian mujahideen during the same period. Never-before-reported details of this program will be revealed in my forthcoming book on American jihadists…

As usual, the day after the well-attended ceremony for dead Muslim soldiers this week, Serbs mourned their dead civilians and soldiers alone, to press coverage that continues to vilify them as well as perpetuate all the mythology and inversions. Such as in this AP report by some idiot or Muslim named Radul Radovanovic:

Bosnian Serbs commemorate their dead

BRATUNAC, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) – Some 2,000 people turned out to remember Serbs – many of them soldiers [most not] – killed by Bosnian forces on Tuesday, claiming their suffering has been ignored as the world focuses on the notorious 1995 Serb slaughter [sic] of 8,000 [sic] Muslim Bosnians [soldiers] at Srebrenica.

The ceremony was held just 6 miles (10 kilometers) north of the site of the massacre and came just a day after 40,000 people solemnly [cowardly] paid their respects on the 16th anniversary of the worst crime in Europe since the Nazi era.

Ethnic Serbs [sic: Muslims] kept Muslim Bosnians in Srebrenica besieged throughout the 1992-95 war for Serb dominance [sic: Muslim dominance] of Bosnia, culminating in the murder of thousands [sic: hundreds] of Muslim men and boys [of fighting age]. The International Court of Justice has ruled [sic: parroted] that the Srebrenica massacre was an act of genocide [sic: of war, revenge and frame-up] and that Serbia could have prevented it. [It already did once.]

However, many ethnic Serbs in Bosnia see themselves as the victims of Bosnian aggression, claiming [there’s that word!] that over 3,000 Serb soldiers and civilians were killed in attacks. Neither the Serbian public nor those living in the Serb part of Bosnia have been ready to fully accept their role in the crime.

Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik complained at the military ceremony that while several Serbs are jailed for Srebrenica, nobody has stood trial for crimes committed against Serbs. [Correction: Naser Oric did, and was promptly acquitted.]

Dodik did not attend Monday’s ceremony, as has been the case for Bosnian Serb leaders for 16 years….The Serb commemoration has previously been used by some participants to insult Muslims by wearing T-shirts with the image of Ratko Mladic – the Serb general who led [sic] Srebrenica massacre. Though he is now facing a genocide trial, many Serbs still see him as a national hero.

Police said two Serbian Parliament lawmakers came from Belgrade carrying flags with Mladic’s image.

Jonathan Moore, the deputy to the U.S. Ambassador in Bosnia, said embassy representatives attended the commemoration for victims in Srebrenica but not the one in Bratunac a day later because they do not attend commemorations for soldiers on any side [What?], particularly not one that honors “criminals who committed offenses against civilians.” [So then what was the main ceremony if not precisely that?]

But, Serb family members of the dead mourned next to their loved ones’ graves. Slavka Matic said she lost two daughters and her husband in a Muslim attack on her village in 1993.

“I am alone in this world since then, and I don’t know what to do,” she said, and then broke into tears.

Even better was this part of an earlier, also inverted AP report:

…Serbs are bitter because the world honors Muslim victims annually but ignores the commemoration for Serbs a day later.

Serbs kept Bosnians in Srebrenica besieged throughout the 1992-95 war. In return, [sic: As a result of the fact that] Bosnians raided the surrounding Serb villages looking for food and weapons. Serbs say 3,267 of their soldiers and civilians were killed in those attacks, two-thirds of them civilians.

So that’s why one rapes, dismembers and beheads: because one is hungry. Only a Tanjug/B92 report was less shameless:

“High time for crimes against Serbs to be prosecuted”

BRATUNAC — It is high time for crimes committed against Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina to be prosecuted, Serb Republic (RS) President Milorad Dodik has stated.

He was attending a commemoration in Bratunac, honoring Serbs killed by Muslim forces under command of Naser Orić’s from Srebrenica during the war in Bosnia.

“We nurture no hatred or desire for revenge, but it is high time for monstrous crimes against Serbs to be prosecuted,” Dodik said, and added that selective justice cannot be accepted as was the case up until now, that is for the Serb side to be considered guilty for everything while no one is held responsible for the numerous Serb victims.
…
During the three years of conflicts, over 1,300 Serbs were killed in the territory of Srebrenica, Zvornik, Milici, Bratunac, Vlasenica and Osmaci, while a total of 3,267 Serbs, most of them civilians, were killed in the region of the Drina River and Birač.

Nobody has yet been held accountable before Bosnian courts for the crimes committed against Serbs in the region of the Drina River and Birač.

Not mentioned in any of the foregoing is of course the consistent inconsistency in treatment by the international community between the Muslims and the Serbs. The Number One Balkans rule is that what’s good for the goose is never good for the gander. Just one small example — though every international serving in Bosnia probably has a list — comes from retired NYC Police Lieutenant Robert Leifels, who served in Bosnia with the International Police Task Force in 1997-98 in the Zvornik region including Srebrenica:

I am very familiar with the Srebrenica Mothers. We had several operations dealing with their “weeping.” We needed interpreters but all their signs were in English with not a misspelled word. [i.e. international puppet masters] I am also familiar with the Serb moms who never complained.

We also had a couple of larger operations escorting Muslims around Zvornik region [today in Bosnia’s Serb Republic] so they could see their homes and get the “treasures” they hid before fleeing. Some Serbs asked me personally if UNHCR could do the same for them in the [Bosnian-Croat] Federation. The UNHCR flatly told me “We don’t do that.” I asked why and she just repeated herself.

Displaced Persons from Federation were given the royal treatment by the International Community; the Republika Srpska Displaced Persons got ignored.

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This is an open thread. Feel free to discuss other topics, including the budget and Fast & Furious.

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