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Conclusions
of
Srebrenica Research Group
Following
three years of research as a group and many more as individuals, the Srebrenica Research Group reports the following
conclusions:
Both
the scale of the casualties at Srebrenica and the
context of events have been misrepresented in official reports from
governmental and non-governmental organizations as well as news organizations. Senior UN military and civilian officials, NATO
intelligence officers and independent intelligence analysts dispute the
official portrayal of the capture of Srebrenica by
the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia, (ICTY) as a unique atrocity
in the Bosnian conflict. The contention that as many as 8,000 Muslims were killed
has no basis in available evidence and is essentially
a political construct.
The 8,000 figure was first provided by the Red Cross, based on their crude
estimate that the Bosnian Serb Army (BSA) had captured 3,000 men and that 5,000 were
reported "missing." It is well established that thousands of those
"missing" had reached Tuzla or were
killed in the fighting, but in an amazing transformation displaying the
eagerness to find the Bosnian Serbs evil and the Muslims victims, the
"reaching safety/killed-in-action" basis of being missing was
ignored and the missing were taken as executed! This misleading
conclusion was helped along by the Red Cross's reference to the 5,000 as
having "simply disappeared," and its failure to correct this
politically biased usage despite its own recognition that "several
thousand" refugees had reached Central Bosnia. It was also helped along by
the Bosnian Muslim leadership's refusal to disclose the names and numbers of
those reaching safety, but there was a remarkable readiness in Western governments
not only to ignore those reaching safety, but also to disregard deaths in
fighting and to take dead bodies as proving executions. The will to believe
here was limitless: reporter David Rohde saw a bone sticking up in a grave site
near Srebrenica, which he just knew by instinct was a
remnant of an execution and serious evidence of a "massacre." It was
standard media practice to move from an asserted and unproven claim of
thousands missing, or a report of the uncovering of bodies in a grave
site, to the conclusion that the claim of 8,000 executed was
thereby demonstrated.
With 8,000 executed and thousands killed in the fighting, there should have
been huge grave sites and satellite evidence of both executions, burials,
and any body removals. But the body searches in the Srebrenica
vicinity were painfully disappointing, with only some two thousand bodies found
in searches through 2001, including bodies
killed in action and possibly Serb bodies, some pre-dating July 1995. The
sparseness of these findings led to claims of body removal and reburial, but
this was unconvincing as the Bosnian Serbs were under intense military pressure
after July 1995. This was the period when NATO was bombing Serb positions and
Croat/Muslim armies were driving towards Banja Luka. The BSA was on the defensive and was extremely
short of equipment and resources, including gasoline. To have mounted an
operation of the magnitude required to exhume, transport and rebury thousands
of corpses would have been far beyond the BSA's
capacity at that time. Furthermore, in carrying out such a program they could
hardly hope to escape observation from OSCE personnel, local civilians, and
satellite observations.
On August 10, 1995, Madeleine Albright
showed some satellite photos at a closed session of the Security Council, as
part of a denunciation of the Bosnian Serbs, including one photo showing
people--allegedly Bosnian Muslims near Srebrenica--assembled
in a stadium, and one allegedly taken shortly thereafter showing a nearby field
with "disturbed" soil. These photos have never been publicly
released, but even if they are genuine they don't prove either executions or
burials. Furthermore, although the ICTY speaks of
"an organized and comprehensive effort" to hide bodies, and David
Rohde claimed a "huge Serb effort to hide bodies," neither Albright
nor anyone else has ever shown a satellite photo of people actually being
executed, buried, or dug up for reburial, or of trucks conveying thousands of
bodies elsewhere. This failure to provide evidence occurred despite Albright's
warning the Serbs that "We will be watching," and with satellites at
that time, making at least eight passes per day and geostationary
drones able to hover and take finely detailed pictures in position over Bosnia
during the summer of 1995. The
mainstream media have found this failure to confirm of no interest.
There have been a great many bodies
gathered at Tuzla, some 7,500 or more, from all
across Bosnia, many in poor condition or parts only, their collection and
handling incompatible with professional forensic standards, their
provenance unclear and link to the July 1995 events in Srebrenica
unproven and often unlikely, and the manner
of their death usually uncertain. Interestingly, although the Serbs were
regularly accused of trying to hide bodies, there has never been any
suggestion that the Bosnian Muslims, long in charge of the body search, might
shift bodies around and otherwise manipulate evidence, despite their
substantial record of dissembling. A systematic attempt to use DNA to
trace connections to Srebrenica is underway, but
entails many problems, apart from that of the integrity of the material
studied and process of investigation, and will not resolve the question of
differentiating executions from deaths in combat. There are also lists of
missing, but these lists are badly flawed, with duplications, individuals
listed who had died before July 1995, who fled to avoid Bosnian Muslim Army service, or who registered to
vote in 1997, and they include individuals who died in battle or reached
safety or were captured and assumed a new existence elsewhere.
The 8,000 figure is also incompatible with the basic arithmetic of Srebrenica numbers before and after July 1995. Displaced
persons from Srebrenica--that
is, massacre survivors-- registered with the World Health Organization and
Bosnian government in early August 1995, totalled
35,632. Muslim men who reached Muslim lines "without their families
being informed" totaled at least 3,000, and some 2,000 were killed
in the fighting. That gives us 37,632 survivors plus the 2,000 combat
deaths, which would require the prewar population of Srebrenica
to have been 48,000 if 8,000 were executed, whereas the population before July
was more like 37-40,000 (Tribunal judge Patricia Wald
gave 37,000 as her estimate). The numbers don't add up.
There were witnesses to killings at Srebrenica, or
those who claimed to be witnesses. There were not many of these, and some had a
political axe to grind or were otherwise not credible, but several were
believable and were very likely describing
real and ugly events. But the available evidence
indicates hundreds of executions, not 8,000 or anything close to it.
The only direct participant witness claim that ran to a thousand was that of Drazen Erdemovic, an ethnic Croat
associated with a mercenary group of killers whose members were paid 12 kilos
of gold for their Bosnian service (according to Erdemovic
himself) and ended up working in the Congo on behalf of French intelligence.
His testimony was accepted despite its vagueness and inconsistencies, lack of
corroboration, and his suffering from mental problems sufficient to disqualify
him from trial--but not from testifying before the Tribunal, free of
cross-examination. within two weeks of this disqualification from trial. This
and other witness evidence suffered from serious abuse of the
plea-bargaining process whereby witnesses could receive mitigating sentences if
they cooperated sufficiently with the prosecution.
It is also
noteworthy how many relatively impartial observers in or near Srebrenica in July 1995 didn't see any evidence of
massacres, including the members of the Dutch forces present in the "safe
area" and people like Hubert Wieland, the chief
UN investigator of human rights abuses, who
could find no eyewitnesses to atrocities after five days of interviewing among
the 20,000 Srebrenica survivors gathered at the Tuzla airport refugee camp. Carlos Martins Branco, former UN Deputy Director of UNMO (UN Monitors) in Bosnia, who debriefed UN monitors
assigned to Srebrenica,
writes that casualty estimates of 8,000
have been “used and manipulated for propaganda purposes…there is little doubt
that at least 2,000 Bosnian Muslims died in fighting the better trained and
better commanded BSA “ in three years of
fierce fighting. This is roughly the number of bodies (2,028) which were
exhumed by the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the
region by the year 2001. Many of these deaths occurred before the fall of Srebrenica, according to Branco.
The events of Srebrenica and claims of a major
massacre were extremely helpful to the Clinton administration, the Bosnian
Muslim leadership, and Croatian authorities. Clinton was under political
pressure in 1995 both from the media and from Bob Dole to take more forceful
action in favor of the Bosnian Muslims, and his administration was eager to
find a justification for more aggressive policies. Clinton officials
rushed to the Srebrenica scene to confirm and publicize
the claims of a massacre, just as William Walker did later at Racak in January 1999. By inflating the casualties
following the capture of Srebrenica, US officials
also diverted attention from larger-scale, US-supported Croatian attacks on
Serb populated UN Protected Areas (UNPAs) in Western Slavonia (“Operation
Flash”) and the Krajina region (“Operation Storm”) in
May and August of 1995. Having undermined a UN-European Community
agreement that would have prevented the outbreak of war (the March 1992 Lisbon
agreement) and two other negotiated settlements (the Vance-Owen and the Owen-Stoltenberg agreements) which would have ended the fighting
in 1993, US State Department hardliners were committed to imposing a military
solution, that prolonged the war till 1995.
By facilitating the
illegal transfer of weapons to Bosnian Muslim forces and turning a blind eye
toward the entry of foreign Mujahadeen fighters, the
US turned supposed safe zones for civilians into staging areas for conflict and
a tripwire for NATO intervention. Dr. Cees
Wiebes who authored the chapter on military
intelligence in the Dutch government report on Srebrenica,
notes that the US Defense Intelligence Agency facilitated the transfer of
illegal arms from Muslim countries to the Tuzla
airport using black Hercules C-130 transport planes and arranged for gaps in air surveillance by AWACs
which were supposed to guard against such illegal arms traffic. Along
with these weapons came Mujahadeen fighters from both
Iranian Shiite training camps and al-Qaeda, including
two of the hijackers involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Khaled Sheik Mohammed who helped plan the attack. Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Ladin, himself, was issued a Bosnian passport by the
Embassy of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Vienna in 1993,
according to the Bosnian Muslim publication Dani. Bin-Ladin was observed on two occasions at the office of
Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic.
Both
US and US-appointed ICTY officials
acknowledged political considerations in issuing genocide indictments, which
were announced prior to an investigation of events surrounding the capture of Srebrenica. On July 24, 1995 the UN’s chief investigator (for the UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights) Henry Wieland, who had
spoken to scores of Muslims at the main refugee camp at Tuzla
airfield told the London Daily
Telegraph “we have not found anyone who saw with their own eyes an
atrocity taking place.” Three days, later, however, the ICTY issued
indictments charging Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. In news accounts
reports of July 27, ICTY Chief Judge Antonio Cassesse praised the indictments as “a good political
result” and added that the indictment means that
“these gentlemen [Mladic and Karadzic]
will not be able to take part in peace negotiations.” The Boston Globe reported the same day:
“The Clinton Administration has not obtained independent confirmation of
atrocities [at Srebrenica],” but does not doubt that
these occurred “I realized that the War Crimes Tribunal was a very
valuable tool,” Richard Holbrooke told the BBC. “We
used it to keep the two most wanted war criminals in Europe out of the Dayton
process and we used it to justify everything that followed.”
Bosnian Muslim leaders had been struggling for several years to
persuade the NATO powers to intervene more forcibly on their behalf, and there
is strong evidence that they were prepared not only to lie but also to
sacrifice their own citizens and soldiers to serve the end of inducing intervention.
Bosnian Muslim officials have claimed that their leader, Alija
Izetbegovic, told them that Clinton had advised him
that U.S. intervention would only occur if the Serbs killed at least 5,000 at Srebrenica. The abandonment of Srebrenica
by a military force much larger than that of the attackers, and a retreat
that made that larger force vulnerable and caused it to suffer heavy casualties
in fighting and vengeance executions, helped produce numbers that would meet
the Clinton criterion, by hook or by crook. There is other evidence that the
retreat from Srebrenica was not based on any military
necessity but was strategic, with the personnel losses incurred considered a
necessary sacrifice for a larger purpose. On July 9, 1995, two days before Bosnian Serbs had captured the nearly
empty town of Srebrenica and before any serious
fighting had taken place, President Izetbegovic was
already calling President Clinton and other world leaders urging them to take
action against “terrorism” and “genocide” by Bosnian Serb Forces. This
was part of an ongoing pattern in which charges of mass rape, death camps,
staged atrocities were used to manipulate public opinion in favor of military
intervention.
Military sources confirm that the 5,500 strong Muslim
military force in Srebrenica made no effort to defend
Srebrenica against 200 Serbian troops supported by
five tanks. Tim
Ripley, a military analyst for Janes’ Defense
publications notes that Muslim forces fled from Srebrenica
to the surrounding hills before Serbs captured the nearly empty town. He writes
that Dutch troops “saw Bosnian troops escaping from Srebrenica
move past their observation points carrying brand new anti-tank weapons, still
in their plastic wrappings. This, and other similar reports, made many UN
officers and international journalists suspicious.” Former Deputy
Director of UNMO (UN Monitors) Carlos Martins Branco who debriefed the UN monitors who served in Srebrenica, writes: “Muslim
forces did not even try to take advantage of their heavy artillery, under
control of the United Nations (UN) forces at a time in which they had every
reason to do so … Military resistance would jeopardize the image of ‘victim’,
which had been so carefully constructed, and which the Muslims considered vital
to maintain.” Lt Col British Lt.-Col. Jim Baxter, assistant to UN
Commander Rupert Smith, told Tim Ripley “They [the Bosnian government] knew
what was happening in Srebrenica. I am certain they
decided it was worth the sacrifice.”
Muslim leaders from Srebrenica claim that the town was
deliberately “sacrificed” by the Presidency of the Bosnia and the
Military High Command in order to encourage NATO intervention. In their testimony before the Hague
Tribunal, Bosnian Muslim Generals Halilovic and Hadzihasanovic testified
that General Staff of the Bosnian Army abruptly removed 18 top officers of the
28th division in Srebrenica. This
was done even as the high command was ordering
sabotage operations against Bosnian Serbs. One of these was a militarily
meaningless attack on a strategically unimportant nearby Serb village of Visnica. The final operation was an attack on Bosnian Serb
Army units on the road south of Srebrenica, just days
before the Serbs captured the nearly undefended town.
Ibran Mustafic, the
head of the Muslim SDA party in Srebrenica, who had
clashed with local Bosnian Muslim military commander
Naser Oric, and was badly
wounded in two assassination attempts, told Slobodna Bosna: “The scenario for the
betrayal of Srebrenica was consciously prepared. Unfortunately
the Bosnian presidency and the Army command were involved in this business …
Had I received orders to attack the Serb army from the demilitarized zone, I
would have rejected to carry out that order without thinking and would have
asked the person who had issued that order to bring his family to Srebrenica so that I can give him a gun let him stage
attacks from the demilitarized zone. I knew that such shameful, calculated
moves were leading my people to catastrophe. The order came from Sarajevo”
In
his book Warriors for Peace, Bernard Kouchner, former
head of Doctors Without Borders, states that on his
death bed, Bosnia’s wartime president, Alija
Izetbegovic, acknowledged to both Kouchner
and former UN envoy Richard Holbrooke that he had exaggerated claims of atrocities by Serbian
forces to encourage NATO intervention against the Serbs. Specifically he mentions wartime POW camps that
all three factions in the Bosnian civil war
utilized, but which his government claimed in 1992 were really "death
camps," a charge which was widely publicized by reporters such as Newsday's Roy Gutman
(who shared a Pulitzer prize for this story) and ABC anchor Peter Jennings. Izetbegovic admitted to Kouchner and Holbrooke that "There were no extermination camps,
whatever the horror of those places. I thought my revelations [sic] would
precipitate bombing [against Serbs]."
Croatian authorities were also delighted with the claims of a Srebrenica massacre, as this deflected attention from their
prior devastating ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Western Slavonia
(almost entirely ignored by the Western media), and it provided a cover
for their already planned removal of several hundred thousand Serbs from
the Krajina area in Croatia. In “Operation Flash,”
carried out in Western Slavonia
in May 1995, the Croatians did not provide
safe passage for a huge column of Serb refugees, which included many women and
children. “Many Serbs perished in heavy Croatian tank, artillery and
aerial bombardments …as they tried to flee southward toward the Sava River bridge into Bosnia,” wrote New York Times reporter Roger Cohen,
who noted that “the estimate of 450 Serbian dead, given by Gojko
Susak, the Croatian Defense Minister appears to be
conservative.” The followup massive ethnic cleansing
operation by Croatia in Krajina was carried out with
U.S. approval and logistical support within a month of the Srebrenica
events, and it may well have involved the killing of more Serb
civilians than Bosnian Muslim civilians killed in the Srebrenica
area in July: most of the Bosnian Muslim victims were fighters, not civilians,
as the Bosnian Serbs bused the Srebrenica women and
children to safety; here as in Western Slavonia the Croatians made no such provision and
many women, children and old people were slaughtered in Krajina.
The ruthlessness of the Croats was impressive: "UN troops watched
horrified as Croat soldiers dragged the bodies of dead Serbs along the
road outside the UN compound and then pumped them full of rounds from the
AK-47s. They then crushed the bullet-ridden bodies under the tracks of a
tank." But this was hardly noticed in the wake of the indignation
and propaganda generated around Srebrenica, with the
aid of the mainstream media, whose co-belligerency role in the Balkan wars was
already well-entrenched.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia
(ICTY) and UN also had an important role to play in the consolidation of the
standard Srebrenica massacre narrative. From its
inception the ICTY served as an arm of the NATO powers, who created it, funded
it, served as its police arm and main information source, and expected and got
responsive service from the organization. The ICTY focused intensively on Srebrenica and provided important and nominally independent
corroboration of the massacre claims along with citable "judicial"
claims of planned "genocide." Although the death toll in
Operations “Flash” and “Storm” is believed to be in the thousands, in contrast with its treatment of Srebrenica, but in keeping with its role as a political
instrument of NATO, no genocide indictments
were issued by the ICTY for these ethnic cleansing operations and massacres.
The UN
is less thoroughly integrated into NATO-power demands than the ICTY, but it is
highly responsive, and in the Srebrenica case, it
came through just as the United States and its main
allies desired. Under pressure from the US, the UN employed a double standard
for reporting alleged abuses by Serb forces as compared with comparable abuses
by Croatian Muslim forces. Between May of 1992 and April of 1993,
scarcely a day went by without massacres and scorched earth attacks by Muslim
warlord Naser Oric on towns
and villages such as Sikirici, Konjevic
Polje, Glogova, Zalazje, Fakovici, Kaludra, Loznica, Fakovici, Brezani, Krnica, Zagoni, Orlice, Jezhtica, Bijlaca, Crni Vhr,
Milici, Kamenica, Bjelovac, Kravica, Skelani and Zabokvica.
"Naser Oric was a
warlord who reigned by terror in this area and over the population
itself," General Phillippe Morillon
testified at the Hague Tribunal. "He could not allow himself to take
prisoners. According to my recollection, he didn't even look for an excuse.”
Oric’s forces are responsible for 1,200-1,500 deaths
in the Srebrenica area.
Yet,
despite extensive evidence of Oric’s direct
participation in such atrocities in a report submitted to the UN by the
Yugoslav State Commission on War Crimes, the US State Department, the UN and
major news organizations were largely silent on these crimes. UN Security
Council resolutions to condemn abuses by Muslim forces or Croatian forces were
routinely thwarted by threatened veto from Madeleine Albright. The report
on Oric was submitted to the UN Commission of Experts
on War Crimes, whose chairman Cherif Bassiouni was appointed by Ambassador Albright, but Oric was not even mentioned in the
final report of the Commission. When the ICTY finally got around to indicting Nasir
Oric on March 28, 2003, very possibly to create the
image of judicial balance, he was charged with killing only seven Serbs who
were tortured and beaten to death after capture, and with the "wanton
destruction" of nearby villages. Although he bragged to Western reporters of slaughtering
Serb civilians, the ICTY reportedly "found no evidence that there were
civilian casualties in the attacks on Serb villages in his theater of
operations."
Former
NATO Deputy Commander Charles Boyd, who was in charge of intelligence
assessments, wrote in Foreign Affairs
that the Croatian attack on the UN Protected Serb-inhabited area of Western Bosnia, which preceded the capture of Srebrenica “appears to differ
from Serbian actions around the UN safe areas of Srebrenica
and Zepa only in the degree of Western hand-wringing
and CNN footage the latter have elicited. Ethnic cleansing evokes
condemnation only when it is committed by Serbs, not against them.”
Another anomaly also showing the sacred, untouchable, and politicized character
of the Srebrenica massacre in Western ideology has
been the ready designation of the killings as a case of "genocide."
The Tribunal played an important role here, with hard-to-match gullibility,
unrestrained psychologizing, problematic legal
reasoning, and the ready acceptance of trial testimony by prosecution witnesses
who committed perjury as part of plea bargains (most notably, Drazen Erdemovic and Momir Nikolic). The term
genocide, once reserved for the most horrific crime, the planned extermination
of a particular group, was manipulated by the ICTY to justify indictments that
preceded any serious investigation of events related to the capture of Srebrenica.
On
gullibility, one Tribunal judge accepted as fact the witness claim that Serb
soldiers had forced an old Muslim man to eat the liver of his grandson; and the
judges repeatedly stated as an established fact that 7-8,000 Muslim men had
been executed, while simultaneously acknowledging that the evidence only
"suggested" that "a majority" of the 7-8,000 missing had
not been killed in combat, which yields a number substantially lower than 7-8,000.
The Tribunal dealt with the awkward problem of the genocide-intent Serbs
bussing Bosnian Muslim women and children to safety by arguing that they did
this for public relations reasons, but as Michael Mandel points out, failing to
do some criminal act despite your desire is called "not committing a
crime." The Tribunal never asked why the genocidal Serbs failed to
surround the town before its capture to prevent thousands of males from
escaping to safety, or why the Bosnian Muslim soldiers were willing to leave
their women and children as well as many wounded comrades to the mercies of the
Serbs; and they failed to confront the fact that 10,000 mainly Muslim
residents of Zvornik sought refugee from the civil
war in Serbia itself, as prosecution witness Borisav Jovic testified.
Among
the other weaknesses in the Tribunal judges' argument, it was genocide if you
killed many males in a group in order to reduce the future population of that
group, thereby making it unviable in that area. Of course, you might want to
kill them to prevent their killing you in the future, but the court knows Serb
psychology better--that couldn't be the sole reason, there must have been a
more sinister aim. The Tribunal reasoning holds forth the possibility that with
only a little prosecution-friendly judicial psychologizing
any case of killing enemy soldiers can be designated genocide.
There
is also the problem of definition of the group. Were the Serbs trying to
eliminate all the Muslims in Bosnia, or Muslims globally? Or just in Srebrenica? The judges suggested that pushing them out of
the Srebrenica area was itself genocide, and they
essentially equated genocide with ethnic cleansing. It is notable that the ICTY
has never called the Croat ethnic cleansing of 250,000 Krajina Serbs "genocide" although in that case,
many women and children were killed and the ethnic cleansing applied to a
larger area and larger victim population than in Srebrenica.
(On August 10, 1995, Madeleine Albright cried out to the Security Council that
"as many as 13,000 men, women and children were driven from their
homes" in Srebrenica.) Perhaps the ICTY had
accepted Richard Holbrooke's designation of the Krajina as a case of "involuntary
expulsions." The bias is blatant; the politicization of a purported
judicial enterprise is extreme.
Media treatment of the Srebrenica and Krajina cases followed the same pattern and illustrates
well how the media make some victims worthy and others unworthy in accord with
a political agenda. With the Serbs their government's target, and their
government actively aiding the massive Croat ethnic cleansing program in Krajina, the media gave huge and indignant treatment to the
first, with invidious language, calls for action, and little context. With Krajina, attention was slight and passing, indignation was
absent, detailed reporting on the condition of the victims was minimal,
descriptive language was neutral, and there was context offered that made the
events understandable. The contrast is dramatic: the attack on Srebrenica "chilling," "murderous,"
"savagery," "cold-blooded killing," "genocidal,"
"aggression," and of course "ethnic cleansing." With Krajina, the media used no such strong language--even
ethnic cleansing was too much for them. The Croat assault was merely a
big "upheaval" that is "softening up the enemy,"
"a lightning offensive," explained away as a "response to Srebrenica" and a result of Serb leaders
"overplaying their hand." The Washington Post even cited U.S.
Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith saying the "the Serb exodus was not
'ethnic cleansing'." The paper does not allow a challenge to that
judgment. In fact, however, the Croat operations in Krajina
left Croatia as the most ethnically purified of all the former components of
the former Yugoslavia, although the NATO occupation of Kosovo
has allowed an Albanian ethnic cleansing that is rivalling
that of Croatia in ethnic purification.
Many journalists
covering Srebrenica and the Bosnian war consistently
accepted Bosnian and US government pronouncements as fact instead of
independently verifying evidence. U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel John Sray, on the scene in Bosnia, wrote in October 1995 on
“Selling the Bosnian Myth: Buyer Beware,” that while “many journalists, who
undeniably labor under dangerous and miserable conditions… have permitted
themselves to become pawns of the propaganda structure….These correspondents
frequently limit their time in Bosnia to short stays and fail to gain an
appreciation for the true nuances at play in this war. Watching and reading their
reports too often conveys the impression that they feel the pressure of
competition for a voyeuristic audience against their pampered tabloid-like
peers (such as those who covered the O.J. Simpson trial) and try to react
accordingly. This segment of the media views its job security as dependent upon
obtaining thirty seconds of good video footage accompanied with appropriate
sound bites from Muslim officials or their populace. The result, obviously,
becomes tawdry reporting that panders to the Bosniac
point of view and results in misleading news reports.”
Obviously, this
characterization does not describe all the coverage of the conflict or events
around Srebrenica, but it describes the long-standing
mainstream perspective and serves to remind us that ten years later, a highly
skewed version of what happened at Srebrenica
dominates public perceptions, and may influence decisions now being made about
the fate of Kosovo and Bosnia.
An understanding of
the events surrounding Srebrenica may also determine
if the Serbs will continue to bear the brunt of the blame for the tragic
conflict that occurred when the major powers -- the EU, the United States and
the UN -- encouraged the breakup of Yugoslavia through diplomatic recognition
of armed separatist states, despite the warning of UN Secretary-General Perez
de Cuellar. Compounding this error, the US, the most important member state of
the UN, then helped prolong the conflict by taking sides, instead of permitting
the UN to act as an honest broker, its traditional role, which was
repeatedly undermined during its mission in the former Yugoslavia.
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