I.
Prelude to the Capture
of Srebrenica
By George
Bogdanich
rom the very outset of the war in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Srebrenica was the locus of tragic events, a fiercely
contested strategic outpost near the Drina River that very quickly became known
as the base of Muslim warlord Naser Oric. It was from Srebrenica that Oric
and his allies launched methodical, scorched-earth attacks against the civilian
population in 192 Serbian villages beginning in May of 1992. These attacks continued after Srebrenica was declared a safe zone
in 1993 by a Security Council resolution, until it was captured by the Bosnia
Serb Army BSA in July 1995.
In the course
of the conflict, Srebrenica would become a focal point of the propaganda battle
between the warring sides where tragedy would become entwined with myth, both in
public perception and in the official histories written by the UN,
non-government agencies, the court documents of the ICTY and news organizations.
While local forces, both Serb or Muslim, must bear responsibility for wartime
abuses they committed in the Srebrenica-Bratunac region from 1992-1995, the
major powers, particularly the US policymakers, bear substantial responsibility
for protracting the war and for the violent end of the safe zones and UN
Protected Areas (UNPAs) in Bosnia and Croatia in 1995.
In taking sides in the conflict, the US eschewed the
role of the honest broker and undermined three UN and European Community
negotiated settlements which could have prevented the war altogether in March of
1992, (the Lisbon Plan) or ended it in late 1992 or 1993 (the Vance-Owen and
Owen-Stoltenberg plans). While the public impression is that the US brought the
war to a halt, a wealth of evidence suggests that by undermining diplomatic
efforts by others, the US bears a great responsibility for the length of the
conflict and the suffering by all sides.
“From the
spring of 1993 to the summer of 1995, in my judgement, the effect of US policy,
despite its being called ‘containment’, was to prolong the war,” writes European
Union mediator David Owen in Balkan Odyssey. Writing in Foreign Affairs USAF
General Charles Boyd, who served Deputy NATO Commander in Europe and the head of
intelligence until the final months of the war observes:
The US
approach to the war in Bosnia is torn by a fundamental contradiction. The United
States says that its objective is to end the war through a negotiated
settlement, but in reality what is wants is to influence the outcome in favor
the Muslims.
At a time
when NATO’s historic mission had vanished with the collapse of the Soviet Union,
US policymakers were anxious to maintain a major role in Europe, which meant a
new role for NATO had to be found. If the Yugoslav conflict were resolved
diplomatically without the US, the need for NATO would be further diminished and
might be replaced (as originally envisioned by President Dwight Eisenhower) by a
European alliance. Indeed, high level discussions of the Western European Union
military alliance had been going on in 1992 between Germany and France.
In Balkan
Tragedy, Susan Woodward observes that “while the Bush administration chose
to abdicate leadership in the early stages of the Yugoslav conflict, both the
Bush and the Clinton administrations were also unwilling to remain uninvolved,
leaving the situation entirely to Europeans. Whenever developments toward the
Yugoslav conflict seemed to challenge the U.S. leadership role in Europe, it
stepped in.”
Despite the
violence that accompanied the successful separatist campaigns in Slovenia and
Croatia the previous year, senior diplomats believed that war in Bosnia was
avoidable. UN Secretary General
Perez de Cuellar, former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and European
Community mediator Lord Peter Carrington all warned that diplomatic recognition
of armed separatist republics would damage chances of a peaceful settlement of
the conflict.
Germany’s
plan to recognize Croatia and Slovenia was initially opposed by the US, until
Germans succeeded in pressing a reluctant European Community to join them. At
this point, the first Bush administration, under pressure from the leaders of
Saudi Arabia to recognize Bosnia as a future Muslim led European state,
persuaded the Europeans to extend diplomatic recognize Bosnia on April 6, 1992
in return for US recognition of Slovenia and Croatia. This was done despite the
fact that there was no agreement among the Serbs, Muslims and Croatians. To
secede legally from Yugoslavia, the assent of all three sides -- Serbs, Muslims
and Croats -- was required under the Bosnian constitution. The move for a
separatist state would fracture the fragile consensus that kept had kept the
peace following World War II, when Croat and Muslim leaders allied with the
German invaders embarked on an extermination campaign against Serbs, Jews and
Gypsies, which killed hundreds of thousands of
civilians.
The ruling
Muslim-dominated Bosnian government controlled less than forty percent of
Bosnian territory at the time of recognition. Moreover, as George Kenney of the
US State Department acknowledged, “the [US] intelligence agencies were unanimous
in telling us that if you recognize Bosnia it will blow up.”
Realizing
that recognition without agreement between the parties could lead to disaster,
EU mediator Lord Peter Carrington and Portugese Foreign Minister Jose Cutillero,
tried to soften the impact, by brokering an agreement among Bosnian Serb, Muslim
and Croat leaders known as the Lisbon Agreement , establishing three Swiss style
semi-autonomous ethnic cantons under a central government. The Lisbon agreement
was signed by all three parties on March 20, but two days later US Ambassador to
Yugoslavia Warren Zimmerman encouraged Bosnia’s Muslim President Alija
Izetbegovic to disavow his signature on the treaty. Two weeks later, war broke
out. Roger Cohen of the New York Times later noted that international
recognition under these circumstances, was “as close to criminal negligence as a
diplomatic act can be. Indeed international recognition and the outbreak of the
Bosnian war were simultaneous: The world put light to the fuse.”
US
recognition for the Muslim President of Bosnia was accompanied by a media
campaign that targeted the Bosnian Serbs as the aggressor, although the first
attacks in Bosnia, reported by the pro government newspaper Oslobodjenje,
took place on March 26 when Croatian forces crossed the Sava River from Croatia
and attacked the Serb inhabited village of Sijekovac near Bosanski Brod in
Northern Bosnia. The village was burned and five Serbian families were
slaughtered initiating a cycle of fear and revenge that was watched with
apprehension throughout Bosnia. The first killing in Sarajevo took place on
March 1, 1992, a month before the official start of the war when two Muslims and
Croat gunmen stalking a Serbian wedding in the downtown section of Saarajevo,
known as Bascarsija, killed Nikola Gardovic, father of the bridegroom. The
failure of officials of the ruling SDA party to arrest the killers, who were
well known, helped set the stage for the battles that erupted the following
month.
“By
organizing parties along national lines, all three communities bear
responsibility for the country’s appalling fate,” observed Misha Glenny in the
Fall of Yugoslavia. The pattern was set, however, by the Muslim faction,
which was the first to organize a nationalist party, the SDA. On March 31, 1991,
a year before the civil war began, the SDA established the Patriotic League, the
first party army since the Axis parties of World War II. According to General Sefer Halilovic,
Commander of the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina, by the time the war began, Bosnian
Muslims had “120,000 people under arms.”
Both the Bush
and incoming Clinton administrations portrayed President Izetbegovic as defender
of a mult-ethnic Bosnia, a description at odds with a strongly expressed
pan-Islamic views and actions. Izetbegovic had begun his career as recruiter for
the SS Handschar party which Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler set up for Bosnian
Muslims and which was led by the fanatically anti Semitic Mufti of Jerusalem.
Izebegovic was later jailed for his intolerant writing by Yugoslavia communist
leader Josip Broz Tito. While cultivating a tone of moderation in dealing with
Western leaders during the Bosnian conflict, Izetbegovic remained a fervent
admirer of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and frequent traveler to Iran.
Izetbegovic’s Islamic Declaration, first circulated in 1970 and published
in time for his 1990 campaign for the presidency of Bosnia Herzegovina
stated:
There can be
no peace or coexistence between the "Islamic faith" and non- Islamic societies
and political institutions… Islam clearly excludes the right and possibility of
activity of any strange ideology on its own turf.
Thousands of
copies of the Islamic Declaration.were distributed to members of the Army
of Bosnian Herzegovina. Significantly, President Izetbegovic never disavowed his
stated views during the war or afterward while fighting to consolidate control
over a republic in which Serbs and Croatians together held a numerical majority
over Muslims, who were the largest single ethnic group. Within the first few
months of war, Yossef Bodansky Chief of Staff of the Sub Committee on Terrorism
and Unconventional Warfare published a report detailing the assistance the
Bosnian Muslim faction had been receiving from Islamist extremist organizations,
especially Iran (“Iran’s European Springboard?”)
On two
occasions in 1993, Der Spiegel’s respected Balkan correspondent Renate
Flottau encountered Osama Bin-Ladin in the waiting room the office of Bosnian
President Alija Izetgevovic. Bin-Ladin, then based in Sudan, had received a
Bosnian passport thru the Vienna embassy of Bosnia Herzegovina according to the
Bosnian Muslim daily Dani.
Bin-Ladin and his military chief of Staff Ayman al-Zawahiri helped
establish the Mujahadeen fighters as a force in Bosnia, mostly as special forces
of the 7th Corps of the Bosnian Army in Central Bosnia. Bodansky
notes that support for the Bosnian Muslims was the first time that Shiite and
Sunni Muslim terrorist organizations worked together.
Yet, despite
the presence of these extreme elements, and opposition from CIA Director James
Woolsey, the Clinton administration would give the green light to an increase in
arms shipments from Iran. The policy to facilitate illegal arms imports was
promoted by US National Security Advisor Anthony Lake and US Ambassador to
Croatia Peter Galbraith. Amsterdam University Professor Cees Wiebes, who
documented the role of intelligence agencies in Bosnia in the Dutch report on
Srebrenica, states that the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was given the
responsibility of enabling the accelerated transfer of weapons and personnel
from Iran and other Islamist regimes, from Malaysia to Algeria.
Why would the
US resort to measures that violated UN resolutions, alienated former allies such
as Britain and France which had UNPROFOR troops on the ground and which risked a
longer war? General Boyd wrote:
The linchpin
of the US approach has been the underinformed notion that this is a war of good
versus evil, of aggressor against aggrieved. From that premise, the United
States has supported UN and NATO resolutions couched in seemingly neutral terms
– for example, to protect peacekeepers – and then has turned them around to
punish one side and attempt to affect the course of the war. It has supported
the creation of safe areas and demanded their protection even when they have
been used by one warring faction to mount attacks against another...It has
supported the legitimacy of a leadership that has become increasingly
ethnocentric in its makeup, single-party in its rule, and manipulative in its
diplomacy.
General
Phillipe Morillon, who served as UN Commander in Sarajevo, observed: “The aim of
the Presidency of Bosnia, from the very outset
was to ensure the intervention of the international forces for their own benefit
and this one of the reason why they never were inclined to engage in talks.”
Morillon’s predecessor, Canadian General Lewis
MacKenzie often criticized Serbs for their use of heavy weaponry around
Sarajevo, but upon leaving his post in Sarajevo, wrote that 19 ceasefires he
negotiated, were broken by Muslim forces, “because their policy was, and is, to
force the West to intervene.”
Given the
Serbs’ initial superiority in heavy weapons, they gained control of substantial
territory in the first three months of war that they hoped to trade for peace.
“The Serbs think they won already and want the war to end,” observed General
Boyd. “The Muslims know they have not, and are seeking ways to continue
it.”
BBC reporter
Misha Glenny observed that “the Bosnian government was quick to understand that
most of the world viewed them as innocent victims. Thoughout the war, they used
this perception to undertake offensive actions” and then portray themselves as
victims. The Bosnian government strategy was immeasurably aided by the US.
Secretary of State James Baker, who writes
that he instructed his Press Secretary Margaret Tutwiler to help Bosnian Foreign
Minister Haris Silazdzic utilize Western mass media to build support in Europe
and North American for the Bosnian cause.
“I also had her talk to her contacts at the four television networks, the
Washington Post and the New York Times.” [FN] George Kenny, who served on the State
Department’s Yugoslavia desk confirms that he was asked to help “gin up” public
opinion favorable to the Bosnian government and draft material for the spokesman
Margaret Tutwiler who was “always looking for something inflammatory.”
These efforts
were highly successful and it was often hard to tell where State Department
and Bosnian governement press releases on
events in Bosnia left off, and where news reports by major news organizations
began. The misuse of casualty figures by the mainstream media was underway long
before events at Srebrenica in 1995. For example, through December of 1992, the
bloodiest year of the conflict, Bosnian government stated that there had been
17,000 casualties in the conflict.
Two months later, in the dead of winter, when fighting in this
mountainous terrain had nearly ground to a halt, the Bosnian government abruptly
began using a figure of 200,000 “killed or missing” which was used by such
reporters as John Burns of the New York Times and John Pomfret of the
Washington Post. Shortly thereafter, the phrase “or missing” was dropped
from news accounts. Thus, the number of casualties claimed by the Bosnian
government was brazenly multiplied ten fold in two months, as an obliging press
adopted the new numbers. Incredibly, the 200,000 fatality figure remained
constant over the next two years.
Similarly,
Bosnia’s Foreign Minister Silajdzic made headlines around the world when he
appeared on NBC’s “Today Show” in December of 1992, claiming that up to 40,000
Muslim women were being held in camps where they were raped and are being raped,
even as we speak now.” In fact, as interested reporters might have confirmed
with the International Committee of the Red Cross, the number of prisoners held
by the Bosnian Serbs were overwhelmingly male and had numbered less than ten
thousand at the peak of incareceration, five months previously. Jerome Bony for
the French program “Envoye Special” reported his experience in tracking the rape
story: "When I was at 50 kilometers from Tuzla I was told, 'go to Tuzla high
school ground (where) there are 4,000 raped women'. At 20 kilometers this figure
dropped to 400. At 10 kilometers only 40 were left. Once at the site, I found
only four women willing to testify."
By 1994,
following further investigation, the official number of rape victims by all
three sides, was revised downward to an estimated 2400 victims based on 119
documented cases according [TO] a report by UN
Special Rapporteur Tadeusz Mazowiecki. By then, however, public impressions had
been made and corrective news accounts were given little prominence. Writing in
October of 1995, Lt.-Col. John Sray, US Army military analyst described a
“prolific propaganda machine” made up of “public relations (PR) firms in the
employ of the Bosniacs, media pundits, and sympathetic elements of the U.S.
State Department, who have managed to
manipulate illusions to further Muslim goals.” Sray goes on to add:
Another
persistent element of the propaganda onslaught involves legitimate ownership of
land. The BSA [Bosnian Serb Army] could never have "overrun, seized, or
captured" 70 percent of the country as Bosniac government verbal gimmicks state.
While they controlled 70 percent of the territory during much of this conflict,
the BSA certainly did not possess the military manpower to overrun, seize, or
capture it. The media and PR firms employ these inflammatory words only to
obfuscate the pre-war situation. Due to their agrarian way of life, the Serbs
formed a plurality in 64 percent of the territory at the beginning of the war
while the more urban Muslim business-oriented
people resided in the cities.
There is
substantial testimony from senior military and diplomatic officials that Muslim
forces undertook operations that would portray them as victims. European Union
negotiator Lord David Owen, who took over from Lord Peter Carrington following
the London Conference in 1992, wrote that
Muslim forces would from time to time shell the airport to stop relief flights
and focus world attention on the plight of Sarajevo. Owen wrote also that UN
observers noted that Bosnian Army forces fired mortar weapons from aside the Kosevo
hospital to provoke retaliatory fire from Serbian forces, events which credulous
reporters invariably described as Serb shelling of the Kosevo hospital.
A pattern of
staged incidents to engage world sympathy was revealed in a classified UN report
leaked to the London newspaper, The
Independent, which reported:
“United
Nations officials and senior Western military officers believe some of the worst
killings in Sarajevo, including the massacre of at least 16 people in a bread
queue, were carried out by the city's mainly Muslim defenders — not Serb
besiegers — as a propaganda ploy to win world sympathy and military
intervention. . . . Classified reports to the UN force commander, General Satish
Nambiar, concluded . . . that Bosnian forces loyal to President Alija
Izetbegovic may have detonated a bomb. ‘We believe it was a command-detonated
explosion, probably in a can,’ a UN official said then.”
The
successful attempt by Muslim forces to cast suspicion on Serbs for a staged
atrocity – which came to be known as the ‘breadline massacre” — seriously
affected the outcome of conflict, because it gave strong impetus to the passage
three days later of Security Council Resolution 757 which placed international
sanctions on Serbia, the most important ally of the Bosnian Serbs. The sanctions
were proposed by the US to punish the remainder of Yugoslavia for the alleged
presence of Yugoslav troops in Bosnia.
But, in fact,
a UN report received two days earlier, confirmed that the Yugoslav National
Army, the JNA, had “withdrawn already into Serbia and Montenegro” some eleven
days before it was required to do. By contrast, the UN report noted that, “in
the case of the Croatian Army,” which was also required to leave, “no such
withdrawal had occurred.” The Chairman of the Security Council, Austria’s
Ambassador Peter Hohenfellner, received the report two days before the vote on
US sponsored sanctions, but the report was kept from other members of the
Security Council until one hour after the vote for sanctions against Yugoslavia.
Several delegates complained to reporters that they had been misled, but the US
had prevailed its efforts to target the Serbs indelibly as the villains and
Muslims would be encouraged to continue the war as sanctions wore down the
Serbs. British diplomat Cedric Thornberry, Assistant UN Secretary General, who
personally investigated atrocities committed by each of the warring sides,
writes:
“By early
1993, a consensus developed — especially in the United States, but also in some
West European countries and prominently in par parts of the international
liberal media — that the Serbs were the only villains, all through Yugoslavia,
and that the victims were overwhelmingly or even exclusively the Croats and
Muslims. This view did not correspond to the perceptions of successive senior UN
personnel in touch with daily events throughout the area; as a kindly soul at
the UN headquarters in New York, ear to the diplomatic grapevine, warned me,
take cover – the fix is on.”
These
observations describe the political and military climate that developed as
events were unfolding in Eastern Bosnia when Srebrenica first gained
international attention in 1993.
Naser Oric’s
Reign of Terror
ost of the world first heard of
Srebrenica in March of 1993, when UN Sarajevo Commander General Phillip
Morillon, acting without the approval of his superiors, made a risky visit to
open a humanitarian convoy route to the city in Eastern Bosnia where fierce
fighting had been taking place between the predominantly Muslim forces of the
Army of Bosnian Herzegovina and the largely Serbian BSA.
Despite
Morillon’s willingness to take risks to help the Muslim civilians who sought
relief, the UN Commander was taken hostage as a way of publicizing a
humanitarian crisis to force Western military intervention. “The fact that they
held me as a prisoner in Srebrenica was orchestrated in Sarajevo,” Morillon
later stated in testimony at the Hague. It was Srebrenica warlord Naser Oric,
Cammander of the 28th Division of the Bosnian Army that received the
order to hold General Morillon as a hostage. “Naser Oric was a warlord who
reigned by terror in this area and over the population itself,” Morillon
observed, “He could not allow himself to take prisoners. According to my
recollection, he didn’t even look for an excuse.”
General
Morillon understood clearly that Naser Oric’s murderous forays against Serbian
villages and numerous civilian massacres since May of 1992-93 were the reason
that Serb military forces had blockaded Srebrenica. “I wasn’t surprised, when the Serbs took
me to a village to show me the evacuation of
the bodies of the inhabitants that had been thrown into a hole, a village close
to Bratunac.” Both Morillon and Lt. Col Thomas Karremans, who commanded the
UN’s Dutch battalion at Srebrenica prior to its eventual capture, drew a very
clear connection between the murderous attacks of Oric on civilians populations
of Bratunac, Skelani, Kravica, Milici and numerous other towns and villages and
the events of 1995.
In August of
1995, when unsubstantiated media accusations against the Serb forces around
Srebrenica had reached a reached a crescendo, Lt. Col Karremans reminded
reporters that the “Muslims had burned around 192 surrounding (Serbian)
villages” and “that there are no good guys or bad guys.” General Morillon was
asked directly by Judge Patrick Robinson at the War Crimes Tribunal: “Are you
saying, then, General, that what happened in 1995 was a direct reaction to what
Naser Oric did to the Serbs two years before? Morillon replied: “Yes your
Honour. I am convinced of that.”
There is
ample evidence that in fiercely contested Eastern Bosnia, both Serbian and
Muslim forces engaged in serious abuses. But in a civil war where fear and
revenge created a fertile climate for atrocities, the cruelty and scale of Naser
Oric’s attacks became well known across Bosnia. By June of 1993, a detailed
report by the Yugoslav State Commission on War Crimes accepted as a UN document
detailed a pattern of attacks in which entire villages were burned and all
civilians murdered. Internationally recognized forensic pathologist Zoran
Stankovic, currently Director of the Belgrade Military Hospital performed full
autopsies and forensic reports on victims in a number of villages where Muslim
troops led by Oric and his deputy Zulfo Tursunovic massacred the towns
inhabitants.
Typical
victims in Dr. Stankovic’s extensive files are elderly women and men born
between 1915 and 1930. Photos accompanying these reports reveal throats slashed
from ear to ear. Some of these (mostly) female corpses are pictured as they were
found, dressed in military uniform jackets many sizes too large, a grotesque
effort by their executioners to suggest that these elderly victims died actively
defending their homes.
Writing in
London-based South Slav Journal, reporter Joan Phillips visited the town
of Fakovici a year after it had been attacked by Oric’s Muslim forces for the
first time on July 12, 1992. The same town had been razed to the ground in World
War II and its inhabitants slaughtered by the Croatian-led Ustasha. “In this
war, Fakovici was once again the scene of a terrible massacre, on October 5,
1992, in which a quarter of its inhabitant were killed…There used to be 115
people living in Fakovici before the war. By the time of the massacre, the
number had dwindled. And then 25 or 26 were killed on the same day.”
One survivor
of the attack interviewed by Phillips was Andrija Markovic, whose grandfather
had led the Partisan resistance to the Fascists from the hills around Fakovici
in World War II. On the day of the attack, the Markovic family lost 57-yer old
Olga Markovic, 61 year old Slavka Markovic and 51 year old Radoje Markovic, 53
year old Radomir Markovic and several cousins. Having lost 16 members in the
previous war, the Markovic family had now lost 10 more to the soldiers of the
28th Division of the Army of
Bosnia-Herzegovina.
“Naser Oric’s
reign implied a thorough knowledge of the area held by his forces.” Morillon
testified. “ It appeared to me that he was respecting political instructions
coming from the Presidency” in Sarajevo.” Oric and his Deputy Zulfo
Tursunovic were installed by the Izetbegovic government despite the wishes of
Srebrenica’s moderate Muslim leader Township Assembly President Besim Ibisevic
who was trying to reassure Serbs. Oric, himself, acknowledged to
Olslobodjenje that he had to hide in forests together with his allies and
obtain food secretly because most muslim residents did not share the views of
the extremists who would take over. Since the end of 1991, however, the Muslim
National Council was preparing armed insurgents with rifles and uniforms and
began to deployed hardened criminals to serve as paramilitaries, a tactic later
used by some Serb and Croat leaders.
Born in
nearby Potocari, Oric had worked as a Belgrade policeman, and for two years as a
bodyguard for Serbian President Milosevic, but had been fired for theft at the
end of 1991 and returned to Bosnia. Tursunovic was in jail in Zenica, part way
through a 15 year sentence for murdering three Muslims in 1986, when he was
released from prison at the end of 1991 by President Izetbegovic and assigned to
be Deputy Commander in Srebrenica. He and Oric slipped into Srebrenica in the
spring of 1992. The attacks on Serbs began almost immediately. On May 6, the
nearby Serb villages of Gniona and Bljeceva were burnt and plundered. The
following day, seven Serbs who tried to escape from Srebrenica were ambushed and
killed. On May 8, Judge Goran Zekic, President of the Serbian SDS Party and
representative to the Bosnian parliament was murdered, triggering a mass exodus
of the 1500 remaining Serbs in Srebrenica. At this point, scarcely a day went by
without scorched earth attacks on towns and villages such as Sikirici, Konjevic
Polje, Glogova, Zalazje, Fakovici, Kaludra, Loznica, Fakovici, Agoni, Brezani,
Krnica, Zagoni, Zelazije, Orlice, Jezhtica, Bijlaca, Crni Vhr, Milici, Kamenica,
Bjelovac, Kravica, Skelani and Zabokvica.
The massacre
of Serbs at Kravica, typical in most ways of these attacks, gained notoriety
mainly because it occurred on Orthodox Christmas January 7. The total number is
of those massacred was unknown, but Dr Stankovic examined 48 corpses of people
who had been murdered on their most important holiday. According to Phillips, by
March 31 1993, 1200 Serbs had been killed and 3,000 wounded, adding:
“Today, there
are virtually no Serbs left in the entire Srebrenica municipality. Out of 9300
Serbs who used to live there, less than 900 remain. Out of the 11,500 Serbs who
used to live in the Bratunac munipality, more than 6000 have fled. In the
Srebrenica municipality, only three Serbian villages remain and around 26 have
been destroyed; in the Bratunac municipality, about 24 Serbian villages have
been razed. The last major Serbian villages in the vicinity of Bratunac and
Skelani were attacked and destroyed on January 7, 1993.”
US intelligence agencies were well aware of Oric’s activities
and his close coordination with the Bosnian President. Transmissions of
conversations between Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic and Nasir Oric were
monitored by US intelligence and Oric himself acknowledged that he was in
constant radio communication with General Sefer Halilovic the Muslim Commander
of the Army of Bosnia Herzegovina “who knew exactly what was happening.” While
the US State Department churned out press releases and briefings citing Muslim
reports of abuses by Serbs, Naser Oric’s reign of terror was almost entirely
absent from press briefings and human rights reports. Similarly, Madeleine
Albright, the US Representative on the UN Security Council regularly sponsored resolutions and reports
criticizing Serbian abuses, but used her veto power to block condemnation of
Muslim abuses according to UK representative Sir David Hannay and Russian
representative Yuli Vorontsov.
Oric clearly understood that with uncritical US support for
the Izetbegovic government, he could act with impunity. He even videotaped some
of his butchery, including severed Serbian heads, and showed these videotapes to
John Pomfret of the Washington Post and Bill Schiller of the Toronto
Star. Schiller writes that Oric was “as bloodthirsty a warrior as ever
crossed a battlefield” and then recounts a visit to the warlord’s home in
January 1994:
“On a cold and snowy night, I sat
in his room, watching a shocking video version of what might have been called
Naser Oric’s Greatest Hits. There were burning houses, dead bodies, severed
heads and people fleeing. . Oric grinned throughout, admiring his handiwork. ‘We
ambushed them,’ he said. The next sequence of dead bodies had been done in by
explosives: ‘We launched those guys to the moon,’ he boasted. When footage of a
bulletmarked ghost town appeared without any visible bodies, Oric hastened to
announce. ‘We killed 114 Serbs there.’ Later, there were celebrations, with
singers with wobbly voices chanting his praises.”
It speaks
volumes that, despite massive and detailed evidence about the crimes of Naser
Oric, Zulfo Tursunovic and other commanders of the 28th Division, the
Ad Hoc Tribunal on Yugoslavia did not indict Nasir Oric until 2003, and then,
only on the relatively minor charge of mistreatment of prisoners. By contrast,
the quick decision to charge Serbian leaders with genocide after the capture of
Srebrenica involved the much disputed, and as yet uninvestigated, fate of
military age men who refused safe passage and fled across Bosnian Serb held
territory with the well armed 28th division.
That
the systematic slaughter of the Serbian civilian population in the area west of
the Drina by Oric’s forces did not qualify as a crime against humanity, says a
great deal about the politcal agenda of
the sponsors of the Hague Tribunal, most notably then Madeleine Albright, who
arranged the appointment of top prosecutors of the Tribunal Cherif
Bassiouni as the head of the Commission of
Experts on war crimes. Bassiouni, an Egyptian expert on Islamic law who taught
at DePaul Law School in Chicago did not even mention Oric’s attacks from
Srebrenica in the Final Report of the Commission of Experts established pursuant
to Security Council Resolution 780 submitted on May 27, 1994, though he had been
provided the forensic evidence from Dr. Stankovic’s extensive files on crimes.
Bassiouni’s
decision and the pattern of the indictments by the Tribunal reflected the
political goals of the US, which dominated the Security Council on the Bosnia
issue, and which viewed the Tribunal as another weapon to mobilized on behalf of
the Bosnian government, rather than an impartial judicial body. Because the US
and other permanent members of the Security Council had veto power, the work of the ICTY was inherently political and even the most brazen
crimes by Muslim units were given a low priority. Antonio Cassese, the first
President of the Tribunal, and US envoy Richard Holbrooke stated publicly that
the indictment of Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko
Mladic on charges of genocide immediately following the capture of Srebrenica
was justified on the grounds that this charge would remove them from upcoming
negotiations over territory. By contrast, officials of the Tribunal let
investigations of Bosnian President Izetbegovic and Croatian President Franjo
Tudjman drag on until their deaths. Spokesperson for the Tribunal simply
announced that no information would be made public about these investigations
and imminent indictments, because the deceased were unable to defend
themselves.
Oric’s
destruction of Serbian villages created two major problems for those under his
command in 1993. Srebrenica had depended on pillaging Serb villages for food but
these sources had been destroyed. Meanwhile Serbian survivors of the massacres
along Muslim supply lines did their best to block international aid convoys.
Muslim refugees inside Srebrenica complained that food was being diverted to
Oric who set up a lucrative black market. International aid officials encouraged
the refugees to elect one of their own to distribute foods, but a day after a
man was elected to carry out this function, he was murdered.
The second
problem for Oric developed following the massacre at Kravica on Orthodox
Christmas, when Bosnian Serbs formed the Drina Corp to protect surviving Serb
inhabitants and to destroy Oric’s forces. After defeats in Cerska and Koljevic
Polje, Oric was pushed back to Srebrenica. If not for the intercession of UN
troops,” wrote John Pomfret in the Washington Post, “Oric would either be
dead, in a prisoner of war camp or living in the hills.” Instead, the warlord
used the civilians that depended on him, as a shield.
Manipulating
the Safe Areas
ric was allowed to remain in
Srebrenica, because, as Lord Owen states, “the Security Council fatefully
decided to demand that Srebrenica and its surroundings be treated as a safe area
to be free from armed attack, while neither demilitarizing nor demarcating the
boundaries of the area.” He adds: “The main flaw to the concept of ‘safe areas’
from the perspective of the UN military, was that the UN Security Council were
allowing the Muslims to evade any demilitarization provision. This made the
whole concept unsafe.” The agreement, which preserved Muslim control of
Srebrenica and enabled residents to receive humanitarian aid shipments, was
immediately subverted by the government.
“Following negotiations, Halilovic writes “I returned to
headquarters and issued an order to Srebrenica and Zepa that not a single
functional piece of weaponry should be handed over or a single usable bullet.
After that, I went to see Izetbegovic and was given congratulations for
success." Oric confirms that “when the order on demilitarisation of the
town itself was issued, the commander [General Sefer Halilovic] explained to me
that we should hand over only non-functional and faulty weaponry, the ones that
we could not hide, heavy weapons, which is what I did.” Halilovic put the number
of troops in the 28th division in Srebrenica at 5803.
In testimony
before the War Crimes Tribunal, General Halilovic acknowledges using helicopters
to resupply and further militarize the supposed “safe area.” Reminded that the
safe area agreement specifically prohibited flights from Tuzla to Srebrenica and
Zepa to provide military supplies, Halilovic testified defiantly: “It is correct
that I sent eight helicopters with ammunition, and if could have, I would have
sent 180.”
Despite the
fact that Srebrenica was not successfully demilitarized, the Security Council
extended the safe area concept to Sarajevo, Gorazde, Bihac, Zepa, Tuzla and
their surroundings. Of course, these “safe areas” had never been safe for the
Serb residents. As UNHCR maps reveal, with the exception of Sarajevo, the
majority of Serbs had been cleansed from these areas by the summer of 1992, much
as Muslims were being expelled from towns with Serb and Croat majorities.
Sarajevo Serb neighborhoods, though reduced by fighting between Serb and
government held sections of the city, would survive until they were placed under government control, following the
Dayton agreement.
The
militarization of the safe zones — in violation of stated UN policy — would have
been impossible without US assistance. Newsweek’s military correspondent
David Hackworth states that the illegal supply of heavy weapons from Iran and
other Islamic countries to the Tuzla airport by C-130 Hercules military transport aircraft had
turned into “a regular shuttle” facilitated by the US, which scheduled lapses in
surveillance coverage by AWAC radar to coincide with the flights of illegal
arms. This increasing stream of sophisticated weapons, along with a clear grasp of US policy, gave the
Bosnian government confidence in their ability to prolong the war and prevail
militarily with assistance from both the US and their Islamic allies.
On February
5, 1994, another bloody staged incident in Sarajevo, enabled the US to pressure
the UN to adopt a tripwire system in which a Serb attack on safe zone would
trigger a NATO airstrike against the perceived threat. This shift in policy
occurred after a mortar shell had killed 49 people at the Markale marketplace
and injured two hundred more. The State Department and US representative on the
Security Council Madeleine Albright was quick to blame the Serbs for the mortar
and the Muslim faction tried to break off talks, but this time General Sir
Michael Rose, the UN Commander in Sarajevo, who had forwarded a technical report
indicating that Muslims were responsible for the carnage, went to the office of
the Bosnian President Izetbegovic and threatened to make the report public if
Muslims did not return to negotiations. Lord Owen, who knew about the report
acknowledge that he helped suppress the report because “if the slightest hint
that the Muslims were thought to be responsible” had emerged, the Bosnia Muslims
would have cut off the talks.
On February
71994, UN Commander Francis Briquemont reported to the civilian head of the UN
mission Yasushi Akashi that “in Sarajevo, the Bosnian Army provokes the Serbs on
a daily basis. Since the middle of December, the Bosnian Army jumped another
step by launching heavy infantry attacks from Sarajevo to the Serb held suburbs
of the city.” Briquemont then
describes a pattern of manipulation that would recur in Gorazde, Bihac and
Srebrenica:
The Bosnian
Army attacks the Serbs from a Safe Area, the Serb retaliate, mainly on the
confrontation line, and the Bosnian Presidency accused UNPROFOR of not
protecting them against Serb aggression and appeals for air strikes against the
Serb gun positions.
Two months
later, following attacks by Muslim units from Gorazde against nearby Serbian
villages, the Bosnian Serbs began shelling Muslim units inside the Gorazke [SP]. Press reports quoted government claims that
the 700 people had been killed and up to 2000 wounded and that the hospital was
being destroyed. US officials demanded NATO airstrikes and General Rose, ordered
a pinprick attack on a Bosnian Serb position. When Rose arrived in Gorazde,
however, he observed a very different reality. The New York Times reported that senior
UN officials had found “the hospital which had been reported as virtually
destroyed, operative with just one shell through the roof. There was no evidence
of 700 corpses.”
Reports on
Gorazde were deliberately exaggerated into order to shame the world into doing
something, … A dangerous overreaction was stirred up in international capitals,
the talk of wider use of NATO power, hitting ammunition dumps and and
infrastructure… would have turned the UN forces here into combatants.
The senior
official quoted in this unusually frank criticism of the manipulation of the UN
and press by the Muslims and US policymakers,
was almost certainly General Rose, who went on to make these same points to John
Simpson of the BBC at end of his term as UN Commander in Sarajevo. But Muslim
government forces would be encouraged by their success in drawing NATO attacks,
however limited, against the Serbs.
A similar
strategy was employed in Bihac in November of that year, with Government forces
using the safe zone as a staging area to attack and occupy the Serb inhabited
Grabez plateau region. When Serbs responded by bringing their forces to the edge
of the zone, Bosnian Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic, told a startled press
conference in Sarajevo that 70,000 people had been killed. As fighting subsided
and General Rose and UN officers journeyed to Gorazde, the Bosnian government
lowered their casualty count to 14,000. John Simpson of the BBC reported that
Muslim forces threatened the lives of UN officials who used lower casualty
figures, but that the UN estimated that “fewer than 1000” people had been killed in fighting around Bihac, that had been
initiated by the Muslim side.
Preparing a
Sacrifice
he failure of the safe area concept had become increasingly
apparent to international officials involved in mediation efforts by the end of
1994. The crucial question was: Would the fate of these areas be resolved by
diplomacy, or by military means? Because US military and political support for
the Muslim government had repeatedly undermined efforts to end the war through
negotiations, the European Union and UN officials encouraged the US to become
more deeply involved in negotiations through the Contact Group, which also
included Russia. Diplomacy, however, made little headway, despite the efforts of
US envoy Robert Frasure, because the Bosnia’s Muslim leaders were increasingly
confident they could prevail militarily, thanks in large part to American
support.
As early as
1993, in discussions with Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, Bosnian Serb
leader Radovan Karadzic proposed the exchange of Serb-held Vogosca, a suburb of
Sarajevo, for Srebrenica. Eventually, this idea was taken up by mediators.
“There was a consensus amongst the negotiators (the US, the UN and European
governments) that it was impossible to maintain three Muslim enclaves, and that
they should be exchanged for territories in Central Bosnia.,” writes Carlos
Martin Branco who served with UN Secretariat in Bosnia.:
“Madeleine
Albright suggested this exchange on numerous occasions to Izetbegovic, based on
the proposals of the Contact Group. The truth is that both the Americans and
President Izetbegovic had tacitly agreed that it made no sense to insist in
maintaining these isolated enclaves in a divided Bosnia…In 1995, the month
before the military operation in Srebrenica, Alexander Vershbow, Special
Assistant to President Clinton stated that ‘America should encourage the
Bosnians to think in terms of territories with greater coherence and
compactness.’”
The problem
for Alija Izetbegovic was that he felt he could not publicly acknowledge these
discussions or he would lose the hardline support that had brought him to
power.
In an
interview with the Bosnian Muslim publication Dani, Hakija Meholic, the
police chief of Srebrenica, recalls that at the Bosniak conference in Sarajevo
in September 1993, Izetbegovic claimed to have discussed various scenarios for
Srebrenica with President Clinton. According to Meholic, an ally of Naser
Oric:
We were
received there by President Izetbegovic, and immediately after the welcome he
asked us: "What do you think about the swap of Srebrenica for Vogosca [a
Sarajevo suburb]?" There was a silence for a while and then I said: "Mr.
President, if this is a done thing, then you should not have invited us here,
because we have to return and face the people and personally accept the burden
of that decision." Then he said: "You know, I was offered by Clinton in April
1993 that the Chetnik forces enter Srebrenica, carry out a slaughter of 5,000
Muslims, and then there will be a military intervention."
Meholic,
subsequently gave an interview about Izetbegovic’s startling statement to a
Dutch documentary that was shown as evidence in the War Crimes Tribunal. Here,
Meholic explains that Izetbegovic told the Srebrenica delegation that he “had
learned that a NATO intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina was possible but could
only occur if the Serbs would break into Srebrenica are killing at least 5.000
of its people.” According to the film, President Izetbegovic was questioned by
UN investigators about these alleged statements which he denied making, while
stating that he had accepted an opinion from the delegation on the exchange of
territories.
While there
is no evidence, nor any way to confirm that President Clinton actually made such
a proposal to Izetbegovic, however hypothetical, there were at least eight
surviving witnesses to confirm what Izetbegovic told the Srebrenica delegation.
Nor would it have been out of character for Izetbegovic to approve a plan would
sacrifice lives of his citizens for the cause or to inflate the number of
casualties from a provoked engagement with Serbian forces. When it came to
casualty counts, Deputy NATO Commander Boyd observed, “the Bosnian Government
has an interest in portraying the number as high as possible.” US Army analyst
Lt.-Col. John Sray, noted that staged incidents such as Markale had approval at
the highest level.:
“Given the proximity of the
Markale Market Square to the Presidency (Bosniac White House), who granted
permission to launch these brutal and insane attacks? Surely, it almost had to
have been President Alija Izetbegovic or Vice President Ejup Ganic.”
Before his
death in a road accident in Bosnia, US envoy Robert Frasure worked on a
diplomatic solution that would have traded the putative safe areas, Srebrenica,
Zepa and Gorazde for the Serb-held suburbs of Sarejevo. But the same hardline US faction that
arranged illegal arms for Muslim forces, helped a diplomatic solution negotiated
by UN envoy Robert Frasure in the spring of 1995. Thus, the US “watched
approvingly as Muslim offensives began,” according to General Boyd, “even though
these attacks destroyed a cease-fire Washington has supported.” As EU envoy Carl
Bildt would later observe, “there would be no peace in Washington until there
was war in the Balkans.”
Instead, of a
diplomatic solution, the map changes sought by Washington for a settlement in
both Croatia and Bosnia, would be achieved by military means and the uprooting
of hundreds of thousands of refugees. In November of 1994, the US had licensed a
private military contract firm MPRI, including “retired” four star generals, to
prepare and organize the Croatian army for attacks on the UN Protected Areas
(UNPA’s) of Croatia where more than 200,000 predominantly ethnic Serbs
lived. Unlike the safe areas of
Bosnia, which served as staging areas for attacks against surrounding
territories, the UNPA’s remained quiet except for several attacks against them
by Croatian forces in 1993. Restraint by the Krajina Serbs, however, would not
save them from US sponsored Croatian military attacks, “Operation Flash” in May and “Operation Storm” in August, which were the largest
ethnic cleansing campaigns of the war to date, involving more than 200,000 Serb
refugees.
The effect of
pressure from US negotiators became clear to knowledgeable observers as summer
approached, when the Bosnian Serb military withdrew troops from Western Bosnian
towns such as Bosanki Grahovo and Glamoc leaving Serb inhabited Western Bosnia
vulnerable to Croatian and Muslim attacks. These areas would soon become the
staging area for “Operation Storm”[,] the Croatian assault on the UN Protected Areas,
in the adjacent Croatian Krajina region and the subsequent joint Croatian-Muslim
military campaign to drive the Serbian population out of the Bosnian Krajina
region.
At the same
time, a month before the Serb capture of Srebrenica, the Bosnian government
abruptly withdrew eighteen of their top commanders from Srebrenica. General
Halilovic confirmed that President Izetbegovic himself persuaded Naser Oric to
leave Srebrenica along with his fellow commanders, supposedly for training
sessions in Zenica.
But in
testimony to the War Crimes Tribunal Halilovic acknowledged that the government
“should have been aware of the consequences of such a move, that is, that the
combat readiness and defence capability of Srebrenica would be significantly
affected.” Had the Bosnian Government chosen to defend the town, the 5500 armed
troops would have still been more than enough to repulse the force of 200
Serbian VRS troops supported by four tanks which were allowed to capture the
town on July 11. According to British military analyst Tim Ripley, Dutch troops
later “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.”
Following the
departure of the 18 commanders, the General Staff of the Bosnian Army instructed
the 28th division in Srebrenica to launch a series of actions to draw
in a Bosnian Serb forces. As General Halilovic testified: “In those days, there
were a large number of orders for sabotage operations from the safe areas.” This
included a militarily meaningless attack on a strategically unimportant nearby
Serb village of Visnica. The final operation was an attack on Serbian VRS 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 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 a catastrophe. The
order came from Sarajevo and Kakanj.
As British
Lt.-Col. Jim Baxter, assistant to UN Commander Rupert Smith, observed told Tim
Ripley “They [the Bosnian government] knew what was happening in Srebrenica. I
am certain they decided it was worth the sacrifice.”
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