The Srebrenica Massacre;a Hoax?

[Ako-Heka]

http://4international.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/more-answers-to-the-serb-traitors-in-parliament-re-yesterday%c2%b4s-vote/

         

 

« ANSWER TO SERB TRAITORS…YOU VOTED FOR AN IMAGINARY “MASSACRE”AMERICAN ORDINARY PEOPLE ARE SUPPORTING ISRAEL AND OPPOSE OBAMA »MORE ANSWERS TO THE SERB TRAITORS IN PARLIAMENT RE YESTERDAY´S VOTE

THE OFFICIAL DUTCH REPORT THAT WAS BURIED BY THE MEDIA

March 5, 2010

We have noted the comment made by Peter Makara re the Serb report on the Muslim massacre of Serbs in Srebrenica and that this report was buried by the Media.

Also buried by the Media was the official Dutch report into the so called massacre of 1995 and in August 3, 2008 we on 4international did some work on this Dutch report

[start 4international work on the Dutch report here]

They claimed 8000 men and boys murdered by the Serbs in Srebrenica. Sometimes 7000 but not quite so often. It was usually 8000.

In reviewing the Irish newspaper of record, The Irish Times, they have written from 1995 to the present in major articles referring to this Srebrenica Massacre where the Serbs murdered 8000 men and boys, going now up to 500 times since 1995, indeed using my limited maths I make that perhaps a major article every 10 days or so.

Are there 2000 such papers and magazines etc in the world doing this? I think so and much more but if so that makes it a million such vital articles broadcast into humanity. All saying the same thing, the endless repetition, that the Serbs murdered 8000 Muslims in Srebrenica.

But there is also The Dutch Report which these media outlets seem to have stuffed deep into the unknown recesses of their filing cabinets. Thanks to Mick Tanzer a regular reader for sending details of this report to 4international.

“Then there is this astonishing and explosive material from the Dutch “Netherlands Institute for War Documentation” Report [from 2002]This blows the lid off of how Clinton, Albright, the Western media and NATO created the Srebrenica Big Lie:

http://193.173.80.81/srebrenica/toc/p4_c05_s017_b01.html“

This report by obviously staid conservative type people has been an absolute eye-opener. This is material that the liars on Harry’s Place will never ever go near.

It is written in a certain way but if time is spent on it there is all the evidence therein that the Media, Dutch and British politicians or one can say almost the whole EU political class, created this Srebrenica Hoax story between them.

I placed my comments in brackets. This is really an analysis of some parts of the report where I draw out some things that seemed to me specially significant. It is not so easy to follow and place all the pieces together. To help I have started by naming some of the main characters which I have simply culled from the story.

First… 2 organizations that the report tends to lump together…UNHCR and the International Red Cross

From Zagreb, a combined team of the Human Rights Office of Civil Affairs and the UN Centre for Human Rights

The ‘Bosnian State Commission for the collection of information on war crimes’

The Tribunal,

Amnesty International

A number of smaller NGOs.

(The Dutch Report adds the following little comment about these groups and note we have a NEW group presented to us…how many were there operating like scavengers in that Tuzla. Tuzla was under the control of the US Imperialists, by the way…Some of these were eager to publicize their findings as soon as possible. As early as 31 July, for instance, the US Committee on Refugees published an extensive report on the ‘death march’ from Srebrenica based on interviews conducted by its staff member Bill Frelick in Tuzla and the surroundings)

UNHCR Protection Officer Manca de Nissa

Christoph Girod of the International Red Cross

Again and for my emphasis…a mixed team from Civil Affairs/Human Rights Office (HRO) and UNCHR mostly from Zagreb

And from there…

Ken Bizer from Civil Affairs

HRO staff member Peggy Hicks. (Please note this name very carefully. When the evidence was showing no killings at all by the Serbs, and she admitted this, she began to claim the very opposite in her reports)

Swiss investigator R. Salvisberg, UNCHR Bosnia coordinator based in Sarajevo

T. Mazowiecki, the Special Rapporteur for Human Rights who arrived in Tuzla on 22 July, and was required to facilitate a visit to Izetbegovic’s military men, that is military men from the “safe area” which was Srebrenica.

We said in the article that the Dutch report was written in “careful” language. These are no revolutionaries who write this report but I am reminded of something that Leon  Trotsky stated about the Social Democrats (Labourites) in Norway where he sought refuge for over a year in the 1930s. Trotsky was of the opinion that the older more traditional conservative had more principles than the new whipper snappers (Blair’s New Labour comes to mind also). This is how I feel about this report also. They are no revolutionaries but they do have certain principles and a tendency towards truth which appeals to us. Consequently they the writers of the report use a reserved style. Nevertheless what they are saying, and sometimes it needs a little reading between the lines, is of great importance for our argument that the whole Srebrenica Massacre claim is a total hoax. If they sometimes lose their nerve at the enormity of what they are saying and who they are challenging then we will be ready to step in and take up the slack.

Without going over the whole report word for word I will take the first two paragraphs of the section dealing with the refugees in Tuzla. You will notice the reserved, almost understated, style that is used, but I hope to show that despite this their meaning is crystal clear if the reader only takes the time to ponder on the thought therein.

[begin quote here]

Investigations among Displaced Persons

These methodological problems, as well as the hindrances created by the Bosnian authorities, also confronted the interviewers who approached the Displaced Persons for information on behalf of various organizations.

(Methodological problems indeed! And the report writers get straight to the point, and the jugular, of the Islamist Bosnian leaders. If they were claiming a massacre then why on earth if there was a massacre would the Islamist leaders be placing “hindrances” in front of the investigators. By all the laws of common sense that does not make sense of any kind. Except it was phoney and they were “constructing” a massacre, a fake massacre. Think about it!)

Important roles were assigned to UNHCR and the International Red Cross, but they were joined from Zagreb by a combined team of the Human Rights Office of Civil Affairs and the UN Centre for Human Rights. Furthermore various other bodies were active, such as the ‘Bosnian State Commission for the collection of information on war crimes’, as well as the Tribunal, Amnesty International and a number of smaller NGOs.

(The vital two words in the above are “but” and “Furthermore”. It is the grammar which conveys the message. The first two organizations mentioned had “important roles” which “were assigned” to them and then there is the “but” and the “furthermore”. There is no doubt that the report is extremely annoyed with the plethora of groups all with their own agenda who descended upon Tuzla. This will become very clear as we go further.)

Some of these were eager to publicize their findings as soon as possible. As early as 31 July, for instance, the US Committee on Refugees published an extensive report on the ‘death march’ from Srebrenica based on interviews conducted by its staff member Bill Frelick in Tuzla and the surroundings.[1]

(And publishing as soon as possible in the eyes of the report means publishing on the basis of biassed evidence, because the rule of the game is that they were only talking to biased Muslims. The seriousness of this becomes clear later)

Due to the nature of their work most of the organizations were cautious about publicizing politically sensitive information. UNHCR was less reserved in this respect and several times its spokespersons released details from the ‘unconfirmed reports’ by Displaced Persons.

(Look at what has happened! The report began with 2 main investigating organizations, plus a lot more that they definitely are in conflict with. But within the space of a few sentences one of these two is failing miserably their test of intellectual rigour. That is the UNHCR. In the eyes of this report that leaves just the one, the Red Cross. But later it too seems suspect on some issues so that leaves…well precisely none!)

This included the suspicion that the VRS had used Dutchbat uniforms to mislead refugees.[2] Serious research, however, was commenced only on 21 July after Protection Officer Manca de Nissa had arrived in Tuzla. He submitted his report a week later, based on 70 interviews with both normal Displaced Persons and survivors of the march. Manca de Nissa did not however draw any conclusions about possible large-scale murders.[3]

(And there you have it. The only “serious research” strictly opposes any 0409_feel of “massacre”)

(It is all very understated, very reserved, but I tell you these people behind this report are creating the best defence that Radovan Karadzic could ever find)

[end quote here]

Yet, as you might expect, the report does have weakness and contradiction.

Take this which follows immediately on from the above paragraph There are many things here, most good, not all.

[start quote here]

It was much more difficult for an organization such as the International Red Cross to publicize findings. The strictly observed neutrality ruled out any statements that could be given a political slant. (Which raises the question what other way is there to carry out investigations. That they mention like this shows how they disapprove of what was taking place under the name of journalism) Another factor in this case was that the delegates were too familiar with the Bosnian propaganda (this is the Islamist leadership of Izetbegovic who dates back to Himmler and El Husseini in the Holocaust) and thus usually regarded the rumours issuing from Tuzla with great suspicion. (They are not beating around the bush here. The report is saying that the Red Cross is aware of the dishonesty of the Islamists)In a communiqué on 14 July, three days after the fall of the enclave, nothing was said about missing persons or possible summary executions. Nevertheless, staff of the International Red Cross had already gathered much information by this time. Although the International Red Cross had no official access to the men who arrived in Tuzla from 16 July onwards, staff had in fact spoken to several of them. A communiqué of 19 July however mentioned only that the International Red Cross demanded of the Bosnian Serbs that it be given access to prisoners. Still no mention was made of deaths. (So after much investigation by 19 July not a word about deaths. Why not? Because there was no unbiassed evidence that there were deaths, meaning massacres)But according to Christoph Girod of the International Red Cross the pressure was increasing.[4] Consequently, at a press conference on 31 July, Girod referred to the fact that there were 5000 to 6000 missing persons with the statement: ‘We have no indications of this whatsoever’. (They are flagging the pressure from the lies of the Media. They make a mistake in the above, surely they mean “allegation” not “fact”. Otherwise it doesnot make sense)It was only on 14 August that the International Red Cross first dared to publicly mention the possibility of executions.[5] (Note the “possibility” of executions. Who is arguing! But possibility is very far from fact! Surely!

[end quote here]

Then the conflict between the Red Cross and the UN groups from Croatia. The real reason is not given here.

There is the mention that Tizer was refused permision to visit Srebrenica. That is Tizer from the Croatian base. Why did the Serbs do this? Real reason is that Tizer and this whole mob from Croatia’s Zagreb were CIA. In investigating Roy Gutman, the journalist who wrote those false stories for the New York Times, the same issue came up. These are also the days when the US cum CIA are beginning (or more accurately finessing) their cooperation with the Fascist ethnic cleansing of the Krajina, the biggest single such act since the last world war!

But this report in very short measure lays bare the whole truthful mechanism of where this Srebrenica Hoax stary was constructed step by step. Armed as we are with that evidence that Clinton and Izetbegovic hatched the of a Massacre of 5000 Muslims by the Serbs in taking Srebrenica long before…we can see this being put in place in these two devastating paragraphs. Sure there are plenty more details to come but essentially it is all here.

[begin report here]

Salvisberg’s team initially took a random approach, with evaluations taking place each day, after which the work became more systematic. The investigators chose a gentle, passive approach. They asked who wanted to talk to them, and then interviewed these people. According to Salvisberg they were not after ‘sexy stories like the ones in the press’.[10] A total of five women came forward who said they had been raped. In general the stories of those who had been transported away in buses were relatively ‘uneventful’. They had experienced few incidents. A picture gradually emerged, but the main question was whether the reported executions were isolated incidents or indications of a widespread phenomenon. It was also very difficult to gain a picture of the number who had been executed, but things certainly gave cause for concern, according to the investigator Peggy Hicks of the Human Rights Office of Civil Affairs in Zagreb.[11]

After about a week the investigators of the two UN organizations noticed that their respondents had been told what to say; they suspected that these instructions came from the Bosnian authorities. The gist of these prompted stories was that the Serbs and the UN (not specifically the Dutch) had been the bad guys, who had ‘sold out’ the people of the enclave. At this time Salvisberg had not yet heard any criticism of the actions of the people’s own Muslim soldiers. It was to be some days before the first stories emerged which also assigned blame to the Bosnian government.[12]

[end quote here]

Do I have to comment on that? I hardly think so!

THE VISIT TO THE MUSLIM SOLDIERS WHO HAD ESCAPED FROM SREBRENICA

After a few days the team of investigators started looking for men who had entered the Safe Areas following the march. They visited a camp full of soldiers outside Tuzla. This proved a difficult affair: the authority of T. Mazowiecki, the Special Rapporteur for Human Rights who arrived in Tuzla on 22 July, was required to facilitate this visit. This solved only part of the problem: the interviewers were not permitted to approach people themselves but were ‘accompanied’ by the Muslim authorities. ‘They were presented to us’, reported the investigator Hicks. This was supposedly to save the investigators’ time. ‘It made me feel very uneasy’, said Hicks later[13]

Other investigators shared her experience. According to R. (Roman) Wieruszewski of the UNCHR office in Sarajevo, one of the consequences of this ‘accompaniment’ was that everyone with whom he and his colleagues spoke claimed that he had been unarmed. In later interviews conducted independently of the authorities the interviewees generally declared that of course they had carried weapons, otherwise they would not have survived the march.[14] Sometimes it was women who said that of course the soldiers had been armed. Salvisberg recounted: ‘They even laughed at us when we asked about this.’ He and the other researchers calculated that of the Muslim men, about one-third had been armed and about two-thirds had been unarmed. They gained the impression that there had been an element of organization in the distribution of the available weapons: ‘You get one, you don’t’, which according to them led to conflicts. Other Displaced Persons reported fights between the Muslim soldiers. There were also reports that Bosnian Muslims had executed Serbs.

The impression gained by the research team was that the soldiers had several prepared standard stories, such as a mass murder of 25 people conducted by the Bosnian Serbs, in which the respondent kept under cover or pretended to be dead. ‘We heard this story ten times or so’, said Salvisberg.[15] Although the reconstruction of the march presented problems, the biggest problem proved to be establishing what had happened to the group in Srebrenica and Potocari.[16]

In the first report send by Hicks on 21 July, she nonetheless concluded that there was sufficient basis ‘to believe that significant human rights violations occurred both before and during the transport from Srebrenica’.[17] Much remained unclear, however. In the final report finished by Hicks on 31 July, the issue of numbers remained open. She could do nothing else than to conclude that further investigations were required.[18] It was only in October 1995, following new revelations in the press, that even she realized what the probable scale of the murder had been.[19]

[end quote here]

Let us look at a few interesting things in the above

1.The Muslims of Izetbegovic were promoting the Massacre story following the blueprint laid down by Clinton and Izetbegovic that the Serbs must do a massacre of at least 5000 in order to sway American opinion for the US to bomb the Bosnian Serbs

2.In that case would you not expect free access

3.So why were the Islamist watchers always watching over what the soldiers said

4.The thought that they were doing this to help the investigators, make thing flow more smoothly, is a good example of Takkiya (Islamist lies or Islamic deception permitted in the cause)

Let us look at the evidence coming out about a massacre and executions and how Ms Hicks reacted rather strangely

1.      ‘They were presented to us’, reported the investigator Hicks. This was supposedly to save the investigators’ time. ‘It made me feel very uneasy’, said Hicks later. SAYS THE BOULD HICKS!

2.      Anything else making her uneasy? Well, just this little detail:  “The impression gained by the research team was that the soldiers had several prepared standard stories, such as a mass murder of 25 people conducted by the Bosnian Serbs, in which the respondent kept under cover or pretended to be dead. ‘We heard this story ten times or so’, said Salvisberg”.

3.      Meaning according to them at least on 10 different times, maybe more, 10 different Muslim soldiers reported that a batch of 25 were shot, and each time the character crawled out when the coast was clear and made his way to Tuzla to tell his story, and his, and his, and his etc etc. The response ov any sane investigator to this might be “What a f…ing concoction”

4.      Yet Hicks does not write up anu of this when she comes to report but she joins in the Islamist lie machine “In the first report send by Hicks on 21 July, she nonetheless concluded that there was sufficient basis ‘to believe that significant human rights violations occurred both before and during the transport from Srebrenica’.”

THE SPECIAL REPORTEUR FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

This fairly caught my eye but like much else in this Dutch report it is mentioned in passing and no examination of the implications.

So consider the following:

“After a few days the team of investigators started looking for men who had entered the Safe Areas following the march. They visited a camp full of soldiers outside Tuzla. This proved a difficult affair: the authority of T. Mazowiecki, the Special Rapporteur for Human Rights who arrived in Tuzla on 22 July, was required to facilitate this visit.”

I remember a pop song of about 20 years ago. It was about a guy who was “living next door to Alice” for about 20 years and all about his angst. Anyway it was recut and interposed at regular intervals was the almost scream “Who the F…k is Alice!”

And here I felt like screaming “Who the f..k is T. Mazowieki”.

This Special Rapporteur for Human Rights, who was this guy, as the only one who could get the investigators in to talk to the Muslim soldiers from Srebrenica. The report tells us nothing. Does not even raise an eyebrow at this but it cries out for an explanation. They are a strange lot, these investigators!

I would want to know everything about this Human Rights guy, and as somebody with obvious sway with the Izetbegovic, what on earth was he doing investigating the Serbs committing war crimes!

THE STRANGE COLLISION OF VIEWS BETWEEN PERUVIAN UN TOP GUY AND MAZOWIECKI

So it appears that Mazowiecki had something that no other investigator had. He had the ability to enter the investigating group into the Muslim soldiers camp. There the investigators could talk to the soldiers if the soldiers had somebody from the Muslim side Islamist leadership watching.

After that then why am I not so very surprised at all that this then happened

[begin quote here]

Remind you again about this Human Rights character

After a few days the team of investigators started looking for men who had entered the Safe Areas following the march. They visited a camp full of soldiers outside Tuzla. This proved a difficult affair: the authority of T. Mazowiecki, the Special Rapporteur for Human Rights who arrived in Tuzla on 22 July, was required to facilitate this visit.

And the conflicting reports:

Typical of the problems in defining the events shortly after the fall were the statements made by two high-ranking UN officials in Tuzla. The Peruvian diplomat H. Wieland, the highest official of the UN Centre for Human Rights in the region, said on 23 July that ‘we have not found anyone who saw with their own eyes an atrocity taking place’.[20] On the same day, however, the Special Rapporteur for human rights, Tadeus Mazowiecki, also declared in Tuzla that ‘barbaric’ acts had taken place

[end quote here]

Either one of these two is lying. Which do you believe? Do you believe the UN guy from Peru? Or do you believe the Human Rights guy who has a special relationship with Islamofascist Izetbegovic?

No. don’t answer! I am just teasing! Even to a 9 year old it is a no brainer! The “Special Reporteur of Human Rights, Tadeus Mazowiecki, smelled to high 0409_feel and was obviously a piece of human garbage which Soros had picked up somewhere!

And there you have the quandary that the Serbs side were in. No matter the evidence, or total lack of evidence, the Hicks and Mazowieckis of this world were going to knife the Serbs.

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[Ako-Heka]

"The Srebrenica Massacre": A Hoax?

By George Pumphrey

Bonn, Germany

November 1998

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Part 1

The "massacre of Srebrenica", where 8,000 Muslim males of military age are reported to have been summarily executed by Bosnian Serbian troops in the aftermath of the takeover of the town, has been termed the worst war crime in Europe since World War II. Most significantly, it has been deemed not merely a crime of war, but evidence of a campaign of genocide, the worst war crime imaginable.

The case of Srebrenica, and the subsequent genocide indictment, can be seen to have brought about a major change in the political and social rules of conduct in international relations, and not only for this region of Europe. A new set of factors have been introduced into world politics. Some of the most important changes are:

the discrediting of the United Nations for supposedly having stood idly by, allowing a "genocide" to take place on territory under its authority, which was a prerequisite for:

promoting NATO as the world's new "peace keeping" force, allowing the US-led military alliance to strike and eventually occupy sovereign states or to take sides in civil wars outside the constraints of the democratic and peace-oriented principles of the United Nations Charter;

the relativisation and resulting trivializing of Nazi barbarism, a prerequisite for releasing Germany from its obligations to seek reconciliation with its World War II victims and allowing it once again to exercise military force anywhere in the world;

creating public acceptance of inquisitorial methods of journalism and judicial inquiry, denying the accused not only the presumption of innocence and the benefit of the doubt, but of long-established democratic rights to proper legal defense;

undermining journalistic standards of fairness in favor of propaganda in a media industry organically linked to dominant economic and military powers;

the imposition of a discriminatory "moral" double standard of "human rights", selectively applied in favor of particular national, social, cultural or "ethnic" groups, leaving others without "rights" worthy of respect by Euro-American powers, and therefore:

growing acceptance of treating a whole nation or people as inherentlly criminal and therefore unworthy of basic rights of equity before the law.

In short, with Srebrenica important mainstays in the international political order of the post-war period were ushered out the door. This has all been made possible through a massive propaganda campaign spreading the story of a yet-to-be-proven massacre, which has become the key piece of evidence for an also yet-to-be-proven campaign of genocide. Momentous political decisions have been based upon and justified by the supposition that a huge massacre took place in Srebrenica, decisions determining the welfare of the peoples of this region and beyond.

Three years later, in 1998, the effort to find evidence was still underway, as yet more areas in the vicinity of Srebrenica were being dug up in search of the "mass graves" presumed to contain the remains of the victims of the "Srebrenica massacre." As with previous years' excavations, representatives of the UN Security Council's ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia held its press conference at the beginning of the dig.

Information from this press conference, as reported in the New York Times, provokes questions about the basis of the juridical work of this ad hoc tribunal. Mike O'Connor, reporting on the beginning of a dig in the village of Kamenica, in the spring of 1998, writes that "Exhumations in 1996 [the first year of digging] recovered 460 bodies, (...) 7,500 others were still missing from the town of Srebrenica. Finding the others has been the goal of war-crimes investigators for more than two years." Anonymous investigators (investigators for the Tribunal spoke to the reporter "on condition of anonymity") say that what they hope to find "will bolster the cases against [the] 2 Bosnian Serb leaders" Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Radko Mladic, indicted for genocide by the tribunal.1

Two months later, the NY Times reported that the total number missing was 7,300, that 1,000 bodies had been found, but that "only about 15 bodies have been identified.2 Other reports have given similar, though slightly inconsistent, figures.3 This inconsistency is based on the different sources of the figures given. Whereas O'Connor sticks to the quasi-offical (because least partisan) figures given by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the author of the second Times article, David Rohde, relies on figures from the "survivors" of Srebrenica, meaning Muslim (usually government) sources. That the Muslim authorities have every reason to exaggerate the number of victims on their side of the conflict is without question and therefore to be taken with more than a grain of salt. Already throughout the course of the war their estimations of the numbers of dead - widely reported in the press without verification - have had to be revised downward.4 For this paper, the Red Cross figures will be taken.

But if finding the other 7,000 has been the goal of war crimes investigators for more than two years, the question should be raised: on what did the Tribunal base its charges of "genocide" if they did not even have the proof that the massacre for which the two Serb leaders are charged ever occurred? If they now - three years later - are still trying to scrape together enough bodies to make their indictment plausible, on what was their indictment based? O'Connor writes that they now have to try to "prov[e] that the soil around the bodies came from the original mass graves."5 Does this mean that what they had considered to be "the original mass graves" were either empty or sheltered too few bodies to justify their charges?

Under such circumstances, it appears that the Tribunal charged Karadzic and Mladic according to the principle: "Indict now. Look for evidence of a crime later". And even when the evidence is not found, there is no suggestion that perhaps the proper course would be to revise the indictment or drop the charges.

Diana Johnstone, who has been closely following the developments in the Balkans noted in The Nation:

"When, in the early months of the war which raged across Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992, the Muslim-led government in Sarajevo, seconded by Croatian agencies in Zagreb, presented Western media with reports indicating that the Serbs were pursuing a deliberate policy of genocide, a basic principle of caution, essential to justice was rapidly abandoned. That is the principle that the more serious the accusation, the greater the need for proof, since otherwise accusations will become an instrument of the lynch mob."6

In the media, each succeeding generation of speculation - even falsification - is built upon preceding generations of unproven reports, many of which were set in motion as deliberate disinformation by secret services and public relations agencies. Once they have been repeated over and over as certainty, anyone who would dare to venture upstream to the source and demand substantiating evidence runs the risk of being verbally lynched for having denied something as obvious as the earth's surface being flat.

Given the fact that the number of persons alleged to have been summarily executed could make the difference between a charge of "genocide" and a charge of "war crime", and faced with the difference between the 8,000 alleged to have been killed and the 460 dead bodies actually found, the first step in beginning to sort out fact from fiction would be to clear up this discrepancy in numbers.

Playing the Numbers:

The International Committee of the Red Cross published a press statement on September 13, 1995, in which it was stated:

"The ICRC's head of operations for Western Europe, Angelo Gnaedinger, visited Pale and Belgrade from 2 to 7 September to obtain information from the Bosnian Serb authorities about the 3,000 persons from Srebrenica whom witnesses say were arrested by Bosnian Serb forces. The ICRC has asked for access as soon as possible to all those arrested (so far it has been able to visit only about 200 detainees), and for details of any deaths. The ICRC has also approached the Bosnia-Herzegovina authorities seeking information on some 5,000 individuals who fled Srebrenica, some of whom reached central Bosnia."7

The September 15, 1995, New York Times gives another accounting:

About 8,000 Muslims are missing from Srebrenica, the first of two United Nations-designated 'safe areas' overrun by Bosnian Serb troops in July, the Red Cross said today. (...) Among the missing were 3,000, mostly men, who were seen being arrested by Serbs. After the collapse of Srebrenica, the Red Cross collected 10,000 names of missing people, said Jessica Barry, a spokeswoman. In addition to those arrested, about 5,000 'have simply disappeared,' she said.8

Aside from simply adding the 3,000 Muslim men in Srebrenica upon arrival of the Bosnian Serb military (who the Serbs then took as prisoners of war) and the 5,000 Muslim men, reported to have left Srebrenica before the arrival of Bosnian Serb forces, to inflate the figures - and therefore the gravity of the accusation - this report makes no mention of the fact that by mid-September 1995 a sizable portion of the group of 5,000 had already reached Muslim territory and safety. And the fact that the Red Cross was asking the Bosnia-Herzegovina [Muslim] authorities for information about the 5,000 (the original figure) - "some of whom [had already] reached central Bosnia" - has completely disappeared from the news. The entire 5,000 of the one group and the 3,000 of the other are still today - 3 years later - being counted as "missing" and therefore presumed dead.

The Red Cross report was, itself, lacking the objectivity that one would have hoped for from a non-partisan organization. Its very off-hand "some of whom reached central Bosnia" gives the impression that only a handful could be accounted for by mid-September. But again the press gave another picture. Within a week of the takeover of Srebrenica (July 18, 1995) one learns that:

"Some 3,000 to 4,000 Bosnian Muslims who were considered by UN officials to be missing after the fall of Srebrenica have made their way through enemy lines to Bosnian government territory. The group, which included wounded refugees, sneaked past Serb lines under fire and crossed some 30 miles through forests to safety."9

Similar reports appeared in other journals at the time. On August 2, 1995, The Times of London published the following:

"Thousands of the "missing" Bosnian Muslim soldiers from Srebrenica who have been at the centre of reports of possible mass executions by the Serbs, are believed to be safe to the northeast of Tuzla. Monitoring the safe escape of Muslim soldiers and civilians from (...) Srebrenica and Zepa has proved a nightmare for the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross. For the first time yesterday, however, the Red Cross in Geneva said it had heard from sources in Bosnia that up to 2,000 Bosnian Government troops were in an area north of Tuzla. They had made their way there from Srebrenica "without their families being informed," a spokesman said, adding that it had not been possible to verify the reports because the Bosnian Government refused to allow the Red Cross into the area.10

The Washington Post explains: "The men set off at dawn on Tuesday, July 11, in two columns that stretched back seven or eight miles."11

Two weeks before the Red Cross representatives Angelo Gnaedinger and Jessica Barry gave their numbers to the press, another spokesperson for the International Red Cross in Geneva, Pierre Gaultier, provided an important detail. In an interview given to the German journal Junge Welt, he explained:

"All together we arrived at the number of approximately 10,000 [missing from Srebrenica]. But there may be some double counting... Before we have finished [weeding out the double countings] we cannot give any exact information. Our work is made even more complicated by the fact that the Bosnian government has informed us that several thousand refugees have broken through enemy lines and have been reintegrated into the Bosnian Muslim army. These persons are therefore not missing, but they cannot be removed from the lists of the missing (...) because we have not received their names."12

Since the number of "missing" (and therefore assumed dead) has remained at roughly 8,000 throughout the past 3 years, it can be reasonably assumed that the Muslim government has never furnished the Red Cross with the names of those who reached Muslim lines. Also to be noted is that when Prof. Milivoje Ivanisevic at the University of Belgrade took a close look at the Red Cross list, he discovered it contained the names of 500 people who were already deceased before Bosnian-Serb troops entered Srebrenica. Even more interesting, when comparing the Red Cross' list with the electoral list for the 1996 fall elections, he also found that 3,016 people listed by the Red Cross as "missing" were on the electoral lists the following year.13 This leads to one of two possibilities: either the Muslims were having their dead vote, meaning that the voters were bogus, and the election a fraud; or the voters were in fact alive, in which case, here is an additional piece of evidence that the massacre is a fraud.

Early in the war, journalists of Time magazine saw through the game being played on the press and international organizations. They wrote: "Bosnian Muslims, fighting at the raw level of their rivals, are likewise guilty of barbarism--and of inflating horror stories about the Serbs to win sympathy and support."14 It appears that they were not without success.

With deliberately inflated figures clearly being used to fuel a major propaganda campaign to make "Srebrenica" a symbol of Serbian "genocide", some Red Cross spokespersons in effect became a party to the conflict by failing to bring important information to public attention. It is difficult to understand how correspondents such as Mike O'Connor and their editors could be unaware of the extremely misleading and inaccurate content of the reports they published.

Both Red Cross and UN officials knew that thousands were safe. Yet neither corrected the communique given in September. And both failed to report that Ms. Barry's 5,000 who "simply disappeared," had simply disappeared back into the ranks of the Bosnian army. The propaganda put into circulation by representatives of the Bosnian government was allowed to stand uncontested even by organizations otherwise seen as non-partisan.

Within days of the take-over of Srebrenica, Zepa, a second Moslem enclave (and UN Safe Area), was also captured by Bosnian Serb forces. Among the defenders of Zepa were hundreds of the "missing" soldiers from Srebrenica. The New York Times recounts:

"The wounded troops were left behind, and when the Bosnian Serbs overran the town on Tuesday, the wounded were taken to Sarajevo for treatment at Kosevo Hospital. Many of them had begun their journey in Srebrenica, and fled into the hills when that 'safe area' fell to the Bosnian Serbs on July 11. These men did not make it to Tuzla, where most of the refugees ended up, but became the defenders of Zepa instead. 'Some 350 of us managed to fight our way out of Srebrenica and make it into Zepa,' said Sadik Ahmetovic, one of 151 people evacuated to Sarajevo for treatment today.(...) They said they had not been mistreated by their Serb captors."15

It might seem strange that the Muslim soldiers of Zepa would abandon their wounded comrades and that 5,000 Srebrenica soldiers would abandon their women and children to an enemy with a reputation - at least in the media - of being sadists, and rapists seeking to commit "genocide". Could it be that these Muslim soldiers knew that they need not be particularly worried about their women, children and wounded comrades falling into the hands of their Serbian countrymen? The Serbian forces had the wounded Muslim soldiers evacuated behind Muslim lines to their Muslim hospital in Sarajevo. Is this how one goes about committing genocide? Is this the military force compared to Nazis? What a trivialization of Nazi barbarism!

The London Times article quoted above mentions that 2,000 Srebrenica soldiers made their way to the north of Tuzla "without their families being informed". Were their families ever informed? Other than the very few articles that took notice of their resurrection from the presumed dead, the public at large was never informed that they were in fact alive. On the contrary. And the women of Srebrenica continue to demonstrate demanding information about their loved ones, whom they believe are still alive.

To maintain the hoax, it is not only necessary to create the illusion that the proof of a massacre exists, but it is also necessary to suppress any evidence that it did not happen. Not only must the 5,000 never be accounted for, but not too many of the 3,000 listed by the Red Cross as prisoners of war must be allowed to return "from the dead."

On January 17, 1996, the British daily "Guardian" published an article concerning one group of the former Muslim POWs from Srebrenica and Zepa, who, once liberated from a POW camp, were flown directly to Dublin:

"Hundreds of Bosnian Muslim prisoners are still being held at 2 secret camps within neighboring Serbia, according to a group of men evacuated by the Red Cross to a Dublin hospital from one camp - at Sljivovica.(...) A group of 24 men was flown to Ireland just before Christmas [1995](...). But some 800 others remain incarcerated in Sljivovica and at another camp near Mitrovo Polje, just three days before the agreed date for the release of all detainees under the Dayton peace agreement on Bosnia(...). The Red Cross in Belgrade has been negotiating for several weeks to have the men released and given sanctuary in third countries. A spokeswoman said most were bound for the United States or Australia, with others due to be sent to Italy, Belgium, Sweden, France and Ireland.(...) Since late August, the Red Cross has made fortnightly visits from its Belgrade field office.(...) Teams from the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague have been in Dublin to question and take evidence from the men."16

Why would prisoners of war, whose normal first wish upon being freed would be to be reunited with their families and to restart their interrupted lives in peacetime, be rushed off to Dublin, with "papers to remain in Ireland"? Why would the Red Cross - usually known for reuniting families - be seeking to secretly spirit them out of their homeland, away from their family and friends? Were their families ever informed?

The ex-prisoners were widely dispersed. To a second country...:

[The] US decided to accept 214 Bosniaks who, (...) had been detained in Serbian camps and give them refugee status.17

Why have neither the Red Cross (which has been visiting the prisoners since August), nor the Tribunal (in its search for evidence of a "genocide" in Bosnia, for which Srebrenica is slated to be the key incriminating evidence), nor the American government made mention since August 1995 of these men being held as war prisoners?

And a third country... The pro-government [Muslim] news agency TWRA reports:

"[One] Hundred-three Bosnian soldiers who were recently released from prisons in Serbia, were sent to Australia against their will", claims their commander, Osmo Zimic. Zimic also criticizes the UNHCR, whose spokesman claimed these soldiers demanded departure to Australia and by no means return to Bosnia for they would allegedly face criminal charges as deserters there. "This is not true", says Zimic. Australian immigration & ethnic affairs office spokesman says he was informed [of] Zimic's allegation from the Bosnian embassy in Canberra and that the investigation was initiated."18

"The Bosnian Embassy in Australia requested the Hague International Tribunal (ICTY) to start an investigation on the deportation of Bosniaks (800 persons) from Serbia to Australia and Europe in which, supposedly, UNHCR assisted, instead [of] involving Bosniaks in the exchange of prisoners, esp. for they had been in the camps in Serbia which claimed not to be involved in the war in Bosnia. The principal witness for the prosecution is Osmo Zimic, a Bosnian Army Officer, one who had been deported to Australia against his will."19

It seems as though the Red Cross, the UNHCR, and a host of "western" governments around the world were engaged in hiding the fact that these men were not massacred. Who stood to gain?

As a result of the Srebrenica hoax, a new order of the world is beginning to take shape, where the UNHCR assists in creating refugees, where the Red Cross helps separate families and where tribu nals indict first and look for crimes later.

Before discovery of conclusive evidence that the alleged crime has even been committed, the indictment alone is made to serve as punishment. This reverses the principle of "innocent until proven guilty" and amounts to inquisitorial "justice". For three years the Tribunal has been searching for evidence of an alleged "genocide" which has already largely served its political purpose. Now the search is on for a retrospective judicial fig leaf.

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Endnotes:

1) O'Connor, Mike; Mass Graves in Bosnia Bolster War-Crimes Cases; IHT (NYT-Services), 14.5.98

2) Rohde, David; "In Bosnian Town Where Thousands Died, Ethnic Hate Overwhelms Small Kindnesses" New York Times, July 25, 1998.

3) As noted below, early reports used the figures 10,000 and then 8,000. The Washington Post gives 12,000 as the original number of missing.

4) "News organizations and specialists, after three years of war, talk of 200,000-250,000. The Bosnian government in April 1995 lowered its previous estimate to just over 145,000, about 3 percent of the pre-war population."(my emphasis. gp) David Owen, Balkan Odyssey, Harcourt Brace, 1995, pg. 80;

5) ibid

6) Johnstone, Diana, Selective Justice in The Hague: The War Crimes Tribunal on Former Yugoslavia is a Mockery of Evidentiary Rule; The Nation, 22.9.97

7) Former Yugoslavia: Srebrenica: help for families still awaiting news; ICRC News 37

8) AP; Conflict in the Balkans; 8,000 Muslims Missing; New York Times; Sep 15, 1995; p. 8.

9) Chris Hedges; Conflict in the Balkans: In Bosnia; Muslim Refugees Slip Across Serb Lines; New York Times; July 18, 1995, p. 7.

10) Evans, Michael and Kallenbach, Michael; Missing' enclave troops found; The Times; 02 August 1995 p. 9.

11) Dobbs, Michael/ Spolar, Christine; 12,000 Muslims Massacred In July Srebrenica Exodus; Washington Post, October 27, 1995.

12) Pierre Gaultier (interview), Wo sind die Vermißten aus Srebrenica? Junge Welt, 30.8.95

13) Faux électeurs... ou faux cadavres; Balkans Infos, Paris; Oct. 1996 (No. 6); See also Ivanisevic, Milivoje; "Un Dossier qui pose bien des Questions"; Balkans Infos, Paris; Dec. 1996 (No.8).

14) McAllister, J.F.O. et al; Specters of barbarism in Bosnia compel the US and Europe to ponder: Is it time to intervene?; Time Magazine Aug. 17, 1992.

15) Hedges, Chris; Bosnia Troops Cite Gassings At Zepa; New York Times, Jul 27, 1995

16) Vulliamy, Ed; Bosnia: The secret War - Serbs 'run secret camps': Men freed from clandestine detention tell Ed Vulliamy of random beatings and 'mobile torture machines'; Guardian, 17.1.96

17) S.K., Another Two Mass Graves Discovered, Press TWRA, Jan 19,1996

18) A.S.; Bosnian Soldiers in Australia Against Their Will; Press TWRA, Feb 6, 1996

19) A.S.; Investigation on Deportation of Bosniaks Requested; Press TWRA, March 9, 1996

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Part II

Part III

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THE TRUTH ABOUT THE SERBS AND YUGOSLAVIA

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[Ako-Heka]

"The Srebrenica Massacre": A Hoax?

By George Pumphrey

Bonn, Germany

November 1998

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Part 2

A Satellite's view of Srebrenica

The charges against the Bosnian Serb leadership stem from the August 10, 1995 closed session of the Security Council where Madeleine Albright, then US ambassador to the UN, for the first time showed aerial spy photos purporting to show that the Bosnian Serbs in the aftermath of the takeover of Srebrenica "committed widescale atrocities against Muslim civilians". (Ms. Albright's disdain for precision is evident in her allegation that the supposed atrocities were committed against "civilians", when she must have been aware that she was referring to Muslim soldiers.)

The Clinton Administration made public three of the eight photos shown in the Security Council. As a New York Times journalist complained, the US government refused "to let reporters see the satellite photographs(...) which were said to include pictures of people crowded into a soccer field. American officials said the satellite photographs were classified, although Ms. Albright showed them to the other 14 members of the Security Council."20 This striptease sort of procedure, in itself, should provoke questions concerning the credibility not only of these photos but also of the journalists who base their reports on satellite photos they themselves have never seen.

"According to one American official who has seen the photographs, one shows hundreds and perhaps thousands of Muslim men and boys in a field near a soccer stadium about 5 miles north of Srebrenica. Another photo taken several days later shows a large area of freshly dug earth, consistent with the appearance of known mass graves, near the stadium, which is empty."21

Given the fact that the photos are "classified", the anonymous American "official" must have been from or close to the intelligence community - a reason for his anonymity. What he declares, should be taken as being what the intelligence community wants us to believe. Still his version of what is on those pictures is of interest. Some of the questions that arise are:

Why are photos, purported to be the most important - those showing "Muslim men and boys" - hidden from the public? Do they actually show what the US administration claim that they show?

How does the US secret service discern the difference between "hundreds and perhaps thousands of Muslim men and boys" from the same number of Serb or Croatian males - and that from a high altitude? If they could not count the figures precisely (to tell "hundreds" from "thousands"), how could they identify them as "Muslim men and boys"? The Security Council members apparently saw something different on these photos: Following the presentation to the Security Council a New York Times journalist reports: "The photographs showed a stretch of fields at Novo Kasaba, near Srebrenica, where Bosnian Muslim families were apparently herded together."22 A mere detail? Which is the true story? The version "Muslim men and boys" given by the anonymous "official" the day before, or the one of "Bosnian Muslim families" the day after members of the Security Council viewed the pictures with their own eyes? Had they realized that they were viewing mainly women and children (perhaps being "herded together" to prepare to be taken by bus to Tuzla)? Is this not an indication that perhaps the surveillance photos will not stand up under independent appraisal? Could this embarrassing discrepancy be the main reason why this surveillance photo was made inaccessible to the public?

How closely were diplomats of the Security Council able to examine (for authenticity, manipulation, falsification) the photos? Did they have their intelligence experts on hand or did they have to view the photos with the eyes of non-experts? Were they forced to appraise the photos quickly? Were they allowed to keep copies of the photos?

The assumption that several days after having seen a full soccer field, an empty one would signify that those formerly seen there had been executed, is so farfetched, that it could be dismissed out of hand. How many soccer stadiums remain filled overnight, or days at a time? Or were they thinking of Santiago de Chile, autumn 1973? If those seen had in fact been captured Muslims, why not assume that they had been taken to a prisoner of war camp?

Satellite surveillance is carried out on a permanent basis, observing the targeted area without interruption for any meaningful interval. Where then were the other more conclusive photos showing people in the process of being shot, dead bodies being removed, open pits being dug or already filled with bodies or being covered?

One of the photos that were made available to the public and reproduced in several newspapers may give a clue as to the level of credibility of the other photos that remain hidden. It could also shed light on journalists' level of critical treatment of this tidbit of image. Questions to be raised about the photo of possible Mass Graves; Kasaba/Konjevic Polje Area, Bosnia are:

Why was the original photo taken by the reconnaissance aircraft not shown to the Security Council? Photos from reconnaissance cameras show built-in time and the geographical settings. The labeling that accompanied the published photo: "Possible Mass Graves" was added after the photo was taken and time and geographical settings of the original were edited out of the picture. Arrows and other written interpretations of what one is supposed to see were edited onto the photo. Without such indications, the same photo could be interpreted to show something having nothing to do with either warfare or the Balkans. How does one even know that the photo was taken near Srebrenica, or at the time that it is claimed to have been taken?

Could it be that the US government knows that the origin of this "disturbed soil" has nothing to do with "Mass Graves"? Could this be the reason why the photo is entitled: "Possible Mass Graves"? Would this not also explain why the State Department and CIA found it necessary to launch rumors that Serbs had allegedly removed the thousands of bodies that were supposed to have been buried under this and similar "disturbed soil" - albeit without any satellite photos to back up their new rumors?

Making use of its superior technological development particularly in the area of global hi-tech espionage, the US government blackmails any and all into bowing to its wishes because it "knows". "Knowledge, more than ever before, is power," is how Joseph S. Nye, Jr., the Clinton Administration's former Chairman of the National Intelligence Council and Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Affairs, and Admiral William A. Owens, former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Clinton Administration, introduced their important essay on the role of info-techology in US foreign policy strategy. They write:

"These technologies provide the ability to gather, sort, process transfer, and display information about highly complex events that occur in wide geographic areas. However, this is important for more than fighting wars. In a rapidly changing world, information about what is occurring becomes a central commodity of international relations, just as the threat and use of military force was seen as the central power resource in an international system overshadowed by the potential clash of superpowers. (...)In this setting, the emerging US capabilities suggest leverage with friends similar to what extended nuclear deterrence once offered. The nuclear umbrella provided a cooperative structure, linking the United States in a mutually beneficial way to a wide range of friends, allies, and neutral nations. It was a logical response to the central issue of international relations(...). Now the central issue is ambiguity about the type and degree of threats, and the basis for cooperation is the capacity to clarify and cut through that ambiguity. (...) These capabilities point to what might be called an information umbrella. Like extended nuclear deterrence, they could form the foundation for a mutually beneficial relationship. The United States would provide situational awareness, particularly regarding military matters of interest to other nations. Other nations, because they could share this information about an event or crisis, would be more inclined to work with the US.23

Having a quasi monopoly on this "knowledge" means that no one can prove the contrary of what the US alleges.

By imposing surveillance photos upon the Security Council, and therefore upon the rest of the world, photos that the Clinton Administration had apparently no intention of voluntarily making available to independent, impartial scrutiny, and in the knowledge that no authority exists to force them to publicize the other photos, the US Administration has created a lawless and law-free realm for itself. The US government can fabricate, manipulate, present or suppress evidence at will and with impunity and call it legal proof. (See also Sidebar 1: KAL 007.) Any country or other institution allying itself with the US can also enjoy a bit of this "freedom" from the restraints of international codes of conduct and national standards of rule of law, provided the interests they pursue do not conflict with those pursued by the US.

As in the case of Srebrenica, the US government finds it unnecessary to come forward with evidence in support of its claims about situations elsewhere in the world, for example that Iraq poses a "threat to the peace" in the Middle East, that Bin Laden was in any way connected to - let alone responsible for - the bombings near US embassies in Eastern Africa, or that the factory in Khartoum was producing anything other than pharmaceutical products for healing people and animals. These unproved claims have been used to justify the US government literally "getting away with murder" of distant peoples.

A second question is: what objective was the US pursuing in making these allegations against the Bosnian Serb leadership?

The day Ms. Albright made her exhibit at the Security Council, the New York Times shed light on the intentions behind the scenes.

The timing of the Administration's disclosure of the photos,(...) coincided with a new American plan to broker peace in the Balkans. Anthony Lake, the President's national security adviser, arrived in London today to begin talks with European allies.24

Alongside Lake's trip to London, a second reason for Ms. Albright's spectacular stage management became apparent: "Ms. Albright's presentation today came as thousands of Serbian refugees fled their homes after a Croatian military offensive, carried out with tacit American approval, overran an area of Croatia previously held by rebel Serbs."25

To distract attention from the largest ethnic cleansing of the entire Yugoslav civil war, with not only "tacit American approval" but with active American assistance, the Clinton Administration put on a spy photo "peep show" for the UN Security Council. A supplementary objective must have been to dissuade Security Council members from seeking to impose sanctions against an ally of the United States for a criminal offensive in the Krajina on a far greater scale than the Serb capture of Srebrenica. The US government hoped to spare itself the politically embarrassing situation of having to veto any such initiative. A US veto would have meant giving up its official position of impartiality, which it needed to be a credible chaperon for the negotiations.

To monopolize attention, the crimes attributed to Serbs had to be more horrendous than those known to be committed by Croats or Muslims. From then on the well-tested Big Lie method of "waving the bloody shirt" serves to prepare the lynch mob.

Nye and Owens provide confirmation in the article quoted above. They write: "The negotiation of the Bosnian peace agreement at Dayton, Ohio, last fall illustrated a diplomatic dimension of information power. The United States succeeded in getting an agreement where for years other negotiating parties had failed in part because of its superior information assets."26

The advantage of a US "knowledge" (intelligence) monopoly is supposed to be based on its "real-time" instantaneous availability. The US government claims to be able to observe events thousands of miles away at the time they are taking place. But what happened with Srebrenica? Why does the US only come forward with "incriminating" evidence one month after the events are supposed to have taken place?

The Tribunal receives a large portion of its "evidence" from the media. The fact that neither the media nor the Tribunal were ever given access to all of the photos, means that the Tribunal's charges against Karadzic and Mladic linked with Srebrenica are primarily based on faith. The Bible defines faith as "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen". The indictments were based on faith in the journalists' faith in the Security Council's faith in the CIA and its spy photos.

The first of the two indictments on charges of genocide eliminated Karadzic and Mladic as partners in the Dayton negotiations. That this was the political intent behind the indictment can be inferred from a statement made during the July 1995 genocide indictment hearings by Antonio Cassese, then president of the International Criminal Tribunal. Cassese said: "The decision [to indict on charges of genocide] represents a decisive step. Let us see who will sit down at the negotiating table now, with a man accused of genocide." He concluded: "That gentleman will not be able to take part in peace negotiations."27 That this was no mere idle threat can be seen from the fact that the Serbs of Bosnia had to content themselves with Slobodan Milosevic to represent their interests. But then other questions arise: What was Milosevic's role? Why did he keep silent during the campaign around Srebrenica?

But once the indictment was handed down, once the Bosnian Serb leaders were shut out of negotiations and once the Serbian President Milosevic was under effective blackmail (that he too could suffer indictment like his Bosnian Serb brethren if he doesn't play by US rules), the Clinton Administration showed little interest in helping "further the cause of justice".

Apparently realizing that with the Dayton negotiations about to get underway, the Tribunal would no longer be needed as a fig leaf, its chief prosecutor Richard Goldstone, desperate to main- tain the Tribunal as an international institution, pressured the US government for assurances that the indicted leaders of the Bosnian Serbs would be extradited to The Hague for trial. Also desperately searching for evidence to justify the second "genocide" indictment arising from the Srebrenica legend, Goldstone wrote a letter to the US Embassy in The Hague, asking the US government to come forward with the "evidence" it had evidently promised, but not delivered. His letter was quoted in the Washington Post. Describing the "quality and timeliness" of the information provided by the U.S. government as 'disappointing' he expressed "dissatisfaction with the quality of U.S. responses to requests for information and the failure to hand over reconnaissance photos that could help in identifying mass graves" believed to have appeared after the fall of Srebrenica. He also complained that much of the information furnished by the US was largely "open-source material" not relevant to the original request.28

(The reference to "open-source material", simply means that the US government provided the Tribunal with media reports as "evidence", some of which were obviously propaganda plants.) The White House spokesman, Michael D. McCurry, and other US offi- cials responded to Goldstone's complaints by saying:

"There are certain types of intelligence information that our Government cannot share with the international community. Mr. McCurry cited 'national security reasons' as the reason the United States would withhold some evidence, and criticized the complaints by the prosecutor, Judge Richard Goldstone, as 'unfortunate.' (...) In defending their level of cooperation with the tribunal, Administration officials insisted that Judge Goldstone is getting most of his data from the United States and there would be no war crimes tribunal if not for the United States.29

With this statement, US "administration officials" actually confirmed what critical observers have been saying from the beginning: that the Tribunal is an instrument of US foreign policy, manipulated by the US to serve its interests. This Tribunal is supposed to proceed on the basis of "evidence" that is never produced and unverifiable "data" selectively provided by a single Superpower which (by its support to Croatian and Muslim operations against Serbs) has become a party to the conflict it is judging.

It has been reported that in the New York central headquarters of the UN, all files relevant to Srebrenica have been classified "secret" for the next 30 to 50 years and are not to be made available even to the Tribunal. This decision was taken at the demand of three permanent members of the Security Council, the USA, France and Great Britain, to protect the secrecy of government documents.30

By what right does the US classify, as a "national security secret," evidence that it claims to possess, concerning what is often referred to as "the worst war crime committed in Europe since World War II"? Does this not make the US government party to the obstruction of justice, if not to its outright perversion? How does the US justify classifying evidence of "crimes against humanity" committed by those it designated as "enemy forces"? Is the US administration hiding proof of a crime or proof that it has no proof of a crime? Is the helplessness of the Tribunal in the Hague in this situation not simply another indication that this body is merely a poodle on the US government's leash? Most disturbing of all is that amid all the clamor for "Human Rights", no one appears interested in raising these and other important questions.

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Sidebar 1: KAL-007 before the Security Council

Madeline Albright's show for the Security Council was certainly not the first of its kind. In 1983 another US ambassador to the UN, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, put on a show that also had a very wideranging effect on the international situation in Europe and the world. September 1, 1983 the Soviet Union's air defense shot down a passenger plane, Korean Air Lines jet number 007, as it passed through Soviet air space over the militarily sensitive areas of the Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin Island. All 268 persons aboard were killed in the crash. Sept. 6 the UN Security Council was shown a video put together by US Information Agency television. Made on orders from and using an audio tape of the Soviet pilot's communication before he shot the jetliner down furnished by the State Department, Alvin A. Snyder, then director of USIA-TV, admits that "the tape supported the contention that the Soviets wantonly shot down what they knew to be a passenger plane."1 He goes on to explain that "the video became a key factor in what Secretary of State George Shultz promised in a memo to President Ronald Reagan would be a massive public relations effort to exploit the incident.(...) The video was powerful, effective and wrong." Former US officials involved in the cover-up told Snyder, that "monitoring data was intentionally withheld from [the] UN tape. Beyond the propaganda value, the United States did not wish to tip off the Soviets to the sophistication of its intelligence along the Soviet border."2

Snyder was later to learn that the raw material, given to him by the State Department for the video, had been manipulated to remove all exonerating evidence showing that the Soviets in fact had not known that the plane being targeted was a passenger airliner but had taken it to be an electronic espionage RC-135 plane, in flight patterns 24 hrs/day off the Soviet coast. But this was not the only thing that Snyder was not told.

Also kept from both Alvin A. Snyder and the Security Council is the fact that the airliner flew a completely false route soon after leaving Alaska, a route taking it toward the militarily sensitive area of the Soviet Union and the grave consequences every pilot knows could be awaiting if he violates Soviet airspace. According to affidavits submitted by attorneys of the families of the victims, someone in the Air Route Traffic Control Center in Anchorage, Alaska, said, "We should warn him" as the jet deviated from its course.3 Evidently no one did - a full 2½ hours before it was shot down.

While headed toward the Soviet border, an RC-135 electronic surveillance plane approached and flew alongside the KAL for 10 minutes before again veering off away from Soviet territory, leaving the passenger plane to continue its course toward the Soviet border and its death. (This maneuver of flying alongside the passenger plane for 10 minutes created a pea-in-a-shell game for the Soviets at their radar screens: 2 blimps become one, and then 2 again: "now figure out which one is the spy plane. Only 1 guess.")

RC-135s pick up, record and relay not only ground-to-air-to-ground communications and other signals, they also can tell when allied planes get picked up by enemy radar, and can warn the pilots to get out before getting shot down. Why was there no warning from the RC-135 to the KAL?

Two former US Air Force communications intelligence specialists, who flew on RC-135 reconnaissance flights, questioned the official Reagan version of events leading to the catastrophe. They summarized:

"We have precise reasons to believe that the entire sweep of events - from the time the Soviets first began tracking KAL flight 007, to the "confusion" with the American reconnaissance aircraft, to the moment Soviet fighters sitting on Soviet airfields were ordered to go from "standby" to "alert" status, to the time of the shootdown - was meticulously monitored and instantaneously analyzed by US intelligence. Without sounding like apologists for Soviet actions, we believe, based upon our experiences, that the official version of events is incomplete and misleading. There are serious questions about what role the capabilities of the RC-135 played and why they were not used to try to head off the tragedy."4

Someone must have stopped the air route traffic controller in Anchorage and the RC-135 crew from trying to warn the pilot of KAL 007. Someone had an interest in having the catastrophe happen. The only one in a position to influence both is the US government. But why would US officials allow a passenger plane - with 268 people aboard - fly head-on to its doom? Snyder gives a hint at part of an answer:

"The intent was to link the incident to nuclear disarmament issues. Raising concerns about Soviet integrity could do serious damage to the Kremlin's peace campaign to dissuade NATO allies in Europe from placing upgraded American nuclear weapons on their soil."5

Half a world away a major battle was being waged in Europe between forces in favor of the installation of a new generation of first-strike American nuclear weapons and those who were opposed, and favoring peaceful coexistence with the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. The focal point of this dispute was West Germany. Not only because the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) had the longest and most fortified borders to the socialist countries, or even because the West German peace movement was the strongest and best organized of the West European peace movements, but also and above all, because if the government of the FRG refused the installation of the American missiles on its territory, the other nations of Western Europe had made it known that they too would refuse.

The governments of the FRG and the US were not at all sure that they could democratically - through the parliamentary vote in the fall of 1983 - win the dispute and have the parliament approve installation.

At the beginning of 1983 the SINUS Institute in Munich published opinion polls showing that 61% of the population of the FRG were for putting off the installation of the missiles even if the negotiations in Geneva do not bring concrete results; 58% felt their government should refuse these additional missiles if the US does not negotiate seriously and 85% wished a continuation of the détente policy vis à vis the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries. 75% of the SPD partisans and 53% of the CDU partisans were not in agreement with the Reagan policy.

Exactly this credibility gap between the policies of the US and Soviet Administrations had to be bridged. This is what the State Dept. was referring to when it spoke of "Soviet integrity" and "the Kremlin's peace campaign." The policy of the US Government - and NATO - was probably best explained in a letter (stamped "NATO SECRET") from the Supreme Commander of NATO, Gen. Alexander Haig, to NATO's General Secretary, Joseph Luns dated June 26, 1979. Haig writes:

"We will never be able to put into effect our joint plans in this vital area unless quite exceptional efforts are made to check European tendencies toward neutralism, pacifism and unilateralism. To achieve this, it is necessary, I feel, to emphasize the theme that the nuclear weapons balance, particularly in the European theater, has changed sharply in favor of the East. We should constantly bear in mind the necessity of continuously directing attention to the Soviet military threat and of further activizing our collaboration with the mass media. If argument, persuasion and impacting the media fail, we are left with no alternative but to jolt the faint-hearted in Europe through the creation of situations, country by country as deemed necessary, to convince them where their interests lie. This would call for appropriate and effective action of a sensitive nature which we have frequently discussed and I have been greatly encouraged by the absence of disagreement between us regarding priorities."6

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Endnotes--Part 2:

20) Op cit: Crossette, Barbara; U.S. Seeks to Prove (...) The New York Times; 11.8.95

21) Schmitt, Eric; Spy Photos Indicate Mass Grave at Serb-Held Town, US Says; NY Times, Aug. 10, 1995

22) Op cit: Crossette, Barbara; U.S. Seeks to Prove (...) The New York Times; 11.8.95

23) Nye, Joseph L. Jr./Owens, William A.; America's Information Edge, The Power Resource of the Future, Foreign Affairs Vol. 75 No. 2 March/April 1996 pg. 20, 24, 26, 27

24) Schmitt, Eric; Spy Photos Indicate ob cit

25) Crossette, Barbara; U.S. Seeks to Prove Mass Killings; NY Times, Aug 11, 1995

26) Nye, Joseph L. Jr./Owens, William A.; America's Information Edge, ob cit

27) Nasa Borba, July 27, 1995, Quoted in Cavoski, Prof. Dr. Kosta; "The Hague against Justice Revisited: The Case of Dr. Radovan Karadzic; Serbian Sarajevo 1997, pg. 19

28) Dobbs, Michael; War Crimes Prosecutor Says U.S. Information Insufficient; Washington Post, Nov 7, 1995

29) Sciolino, Elaine; US Says It Is Withholding Data From War Crimes Panel; NY Times, 8.11.95

30) Zumach, Andreas; UN-Tribunal kritisiert französische "Totalblockade": Paris verbietet Zeugenvernehmung Janviers und anderer französischer Offiziere in Den Haag; Tageszeitung (Berlin), 17.12.97

Sidebar 1: KAL-007

1) Snyder, Alvin A.; We Were Wrong About Flight 007; IHT Sept. 2, 1996 (reprinted from the Washington Post).

2) ibid

3) Foley, Tom; "KAL 007 investigation: 'We should warn him' said US air Controller" Daily World Sept. 6, 1985.

4) Eskelson, T. Edward, Bernard, Tom; RC-135 + KAL 007 = Some Questions; International Herald Tribune, Sept. 16, 1983(Reprinted from the Denver Post).

5) Snyder, Op.Cit.

6) Typed from the facsimile of the document appearing in the article: "Was Haigs geheimer Brief enthüllt"; Unsere Zeit, 7.5.82

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Part I

Part III

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THE TRUTH ABOUT THE SERBS AND YUGOSLAVIA

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[Ako-Heka]

"The Srebrenica Massacre": A Hoax?

By George Pumphrey

Bonn, Germany

November 1998

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Part 3

The vanishing corpses:

Franklin Zimring, director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute at the University of California at Berkeley described statistics on murder as "important because homicide is by far the best measured crime, given the difficulty of hiding bodies", he added "also because homicide is the crime that most alarms the public."31 With this statement, Mr. Zimring touched the heart of the Srebrenica question. Wanting to secede from Yugoslavia like Slovenia and Croatia before it, the Muslim leadership in Bosnia was confronted with a very special set of circumstances. Having neither a majority of the population nor control of the greater part of the territory, and without having the military power to offset those disadvantages, President Alija Izetbegovic's Islamic party (the Party of Democratic Action, or SDA) in power in Sarajevo, set out to alarm international public opinion in order to pressure the US government and NATO to come to its aid. To do this the Sarajevo government had to cry "bloody murder" in every possible variation.... only to run up against the fact that for "bloody murder" there has to be a proof in the form of dead bodies. The Tribunal and the media, having generally - and uncritically - propagated the "bloody murder" line, found themselves obliged either to produce the bodies or come up with an excuse for being unable to do so.

In November 1995, the icy winter ruled out the possibility of digging in search of evidence. As the spring thaw approached, the Tribunal and its chief prosecutor at the time, Richard Goldstone, be gan to get nervous. The US government was still not forthcoming with more conclusive evidence of a massacre. At one point, Goldstone warned that "the exhumation of the graves may become neces sary in order to determine the identity of the corpses and the time and cause of death and to obtain the necessary evidence."32 What Goldstone formulated here should have been - if the tribunal were functioning as a normal court of law - the most logical first step in order to determine that the alleged crime had in fact been committed, in other words a prerequisite for an indictment, not a result. (See Sidebar 2: Erdemovic).

The fact that the Tribunal's investigators have found so little proof of a large-scale massacre ought to suggest that the story of a giant massacre is a fabrication. But Mike O'Connor prefers a different explanation. The New York Times journalist writes in the article quoted above, that:

"7,500 Muslim men were hidden to try to thwart the prosecution of Bosnian Serb leaders for genocide. (...) When the original sites were inspected in 1996, investigators suspected most of the bodies had been moved."33

Despite the absence of proof, O'Connor never doubts that many thousands of men and boys were executed by Bosnian Serbs. It is apparently out of the question that an unexpectedly small number of bodies might mean that fewer people were killed. If fewer people were killed, then even if summary executions did take place, but not on the mass scale that the media and the government in Sarajevo allege, then that would indeed constitute a war crime, but not "genocide", and certainly not "the worst atrocity since World War II". Furthermore the discovery of hastily buried bodies in an area where civil war raged on and off for over three years is to be expected.

Another assumption deserves attention. There is a widespread but mistaken impression that finding a "mass grave" means having found victims of a mass execution. Both in wartime and in peace time, deaths in such large numbers making immediate burial impossible, may be dealt with by the interim mass grave burial solution, at least until orderly burial is possible. When in October 1998, an oil pipeline exploded in Nigeria, killing more than 600 people, the Nigerian government, to avoid widescale contamination, had the victims buried in mass graves until the fire could be extinguished and a proper burial could be arranged. The same is common practice in warfare, where battlefield victims of the opposing side may be disposed of in this way, until a transfer of the remains can be negotiated with the other side, to avoid the health problems that their decomposition on the surface might cause, particularly in summer.

Even before exhumation got underway, the media began to prepare public opinion for the disappointment that would come when the "mass graves" failed to produce the promised incriminating evidence.

Already while showing her pictures to the Security Council, Ms. Albright had an excuse prepared for the lack of evidence to support her charges. She warned:

"We will keep watching to see if the Bosnian Serbs try to erase the evidence of what they have done."34

Explanations for the shortage of corpses were sought and found. O'Connor :

"Doubts were cast on American military's satellite surveillance, with some investigators charging at the time that slipshod monitoring had allowed Bosnian Serb authorities to move the bodies undetected. Now, however, tribunal officials say the bodies were moved in October 1995, before the pinpoint satellite surveillance was requested by the tribunal. Once the original sites were discovered to have been tampered with, American satellite photographs of the region were reviewed and were found to show trucks and earth-moving equipment at the original burial sites, according to tribunal officials."35

But if the surveillance photos show what they claim to show, why have they not been made public? Why have they not been turned over to either the Tribunal or the press? He also explains that the US had provided surveillance satellites that can locate bodies decomposing underground to aid the search. If so why have they not found more corpses over the 3 years?

Several rumors have been put into circulation. One of the first rumors for the vanishing corpses was that "the Serbs" used a corrosive agent. Once again the anonymous "American officials" were behind the rumor:

"American officials said today that they suspect Bosnian Serb soldiers may have tried to destroy evidence that they killed thousands of Muslim men (...). The Serbs are suspected of pouring corrosive chemicals on the bodies and scattering corpses that had been buried in mass graves, the officials said. The suspicions first arose in early August, after Central Intelligence Agency experts analyzed pictures of the area taken in July by reconnaissance satellites and U-2 planes."36

So instead of omnipresent sky spy "knowledge"/intelligence, Serbs are - merely - "suspected" of having destroyed evidence. As with the "possible" mass graves photo, rumor is enough to convict in a lynch-mob climate. This rumor circulated in October 1995, months before the first "mass grave" exhumations. It was forgotten in the climate of optimistic anticipation as the graves began to be opened in 1996, only to be revived when the graves' yield was disappointing. At the end of the first year's hunt for mass grave bodies and the exhumations, the Tribunal's investigators began asking: "Where have all the bodies gone?"

"Of the thousands of men and boys from the UN safe area who were executed by Bosnian Serbs in July 1995, only a few hundred - less than 10% of the 7,000 Muslims missing - have been dug up."37

Still, this journalist is convinced that the crime had taken place.

"The empty graves speak volumes about the conspiracy by Bosnian Serbs to cover up the massacre at Srebrenica. Their leadership claims that few bodies have been found because the stories of atrocities there were exaggerated. The more plausible theory is that bodies have been made to "disappear". As long as a year ago, American spy satellites first revealed evidence of tampering at several grave sites which, when later exhumed, yielded fewer corpses than expected. [...] One explanation for the empty graves is that the bodies may have been dug up and taken to an aluminium factory at Zvornik to be chemically dissolved. American satellite images from between September 27 and October 2 last year show unusual activity both at the aluminium plant, which officially was shut down, and at the grave site itself. The aluminium factory had the capability to dissolve human flesh because it was using sodium hydroxide to convert bauxite ore into aluminium. Sodium hydroxide is highly toxic and, according to Abdulah Sacerbegovic, a Muslim and the plant's former manager, it easily dissolves human flesh, leaving virtually no trace except a sludge."38

Before the crime can be proven to have taken place, the culprit has been identified. Throughout the summer's digging, there had been no mention of sludge. Even in the absence of sludge (how would "the Serbs" then dispose of that much sludge?), the journalist still finds CIA legends "more plausible." Another explanation was simultaneously being circulated: "the Serbs" had simply dug up and reburied bodies somewhere else.

This excuse has its advantages: no sludge to find, and Bosnia is large. With a "needle in the haystack" search for "mass graves", the public could be kept in anticipation - and at bay - year after year for quite a while. But also its disadvantages. How does one "plausibly" remove thousands of buried, decomposing bodies without being seen by Madeleine Albright's "sky-eyes" of aerial surveillance? Undismayed by such problems of factual detail, the Tribunal (and media) continued their course.

In November 1995, the Dutch Minister of Defense, Joris Voorhove, accused Serbs of "trying hastily to destroy the evidence of the massacre they committed against thousands of Bosniaks around Srebrenica. " Citing "intelligence services" as his source, he claimed in a TV interview, that "these days Serbs have been exhuming the corpses from the mass graves in order to remove the evidence of their crimes."39

It should be remembered that "these days" the United States - according to Mike O'Connor - already had its satellite surveillance in place, a satellite surveillance able to find decomposing bodies under the earth's surface. Where was the proof furnished by "intelligence services" that incited Joris Voorhove to make such an allegation? Why in three years have they been unable to locate the corpses that they claim were in the area since July 1995? Also missing is any explanation as to how "the Serbs" were able - "plausibly" - to dispose of 7,500 decomposing corpses, in the time and space that this presumably would entail, without having been photographed by the super-hi-tech US aerial surveillance.

Washington Post journalist John Pomfret visited sites that "according to a Western investigator, could be two of several mass graves in the region believed to hold corpses of some of the estimated 12,000 Muslim fighters". Pomfret observes that: "while dirt obviously had been moved recently around the sites in Glogova, if Serbian gunmen had attempted to tamper with it or destroy evidence, they did not do a thorough job. Bones were readily visible on the clay dirt, as were bandages, shoes and other things that obviously once belonged to the men buried below."40 Besides his inflationary figure of "12,000 Muslim fighters", pulled out of thin air, Mr. Pomfret readily attributes recently "moved dirt" to "Serbian gunmen". Had Serbs come back with guns rather than shovels to "tamper"? No wonder they didn't do a thorough job. Another explanation could be that dirt was moved to make it appear as though someone had "attempted" to tamper. Since the region was being watched by American IFOR forces, if they didn't catch the "would be tamperers" in the act, there is no way to know whether they were Serbs... or Americans. This is all very vague, but fortunately Mr. Pomfret has his "Western investigator" to put the right "spin" on it.

It is noteworthy how many correspondents have a privileged source: their anonymous "investigators" and "government officials" - may well be intelligence agents or some other partisan informants pursuing foreign policy objectives with the dissemination of disinformation, which is why the information should be taken with a critical "grain of salt". The civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina has produced many brutal encounters among Serbs, Muslims and Croats. The Srebrenica area was a site of such encounters throughout the war. Muslims had driven out Serb inhabitants early on. Contrary to the assumption that a "UN protected area" was a demilitarized zone for civilian refugees, Srebrenica was used for years by Muslim fighters as a protected military base from which to launch attacks on nearby Serbian villages.41 Serb forces that took the town in July 1995 were no doubt looking for Muslim soldiers who had taken part in those murderous raids. Knowing this would happen, most Muslim soldiers fled. Others remained. Although exactly what happened remains unclear - deliberately unclear, so long as all facts must be distorted to lend credence to the notion of a massive "genocide". Even the fact that the Serbs provided safe passage to women and children is interpreted as sinister, when it is proof that "genocide" was not happening.

* * *

The International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague has not sought to render justice in a non-partisan manner, which might have contributed to reconciliation among the peoples of the region. Instead, a biased approach only exacerbates the feeling among each ethnic group of being the victims: the Muslims, of being victims of Serbian "genocide", as their leaders claim; the Serbs, of being victims of unjust accusations. The Tribunal was set up on the assumption that one side in the Bosnian conflict, and one side only - the Bosnian Serbs - were guilty of "genocide". The Tribunal is a political instrument used by the United States to demonstrate support for the Muslim side and put pressure on the Serbs. The bias was built-in, and those media that were a contributing source of that bias have spared the Tribunal any serious critical scrutiny of its methods or results. Instead, it has been widely praised as an example of what is needed on a more global basis as an answer to the problems of "war crimes" and "genocide". Viewed as a tentative first step toward a brave new system of world justice, the Tribunal is not held to any normal judicial standards. Yet the fact is that neither the Tribunal (nor the press) have yet produced solid evidence that genocide was ever either planned, attempted or carried out in Bosnia or that a crime against humanity on the level of "genocide" ever took place in Srebrenica. And still the indictments stand.

Should the standards promoted by this Tribunal ever become international legal norms, humanity will be set back to a period predating the French and American Revolutions. Even the best national system of jurisprudence would be corrupted and undermined by the pressure of an overriding international jurisprudence that has abandoned such safeguards as the assumption of innocence until proven guilty, and the need to produce material proof that an alleged crime has actually been committed. Standing at the threshold of absolute domination, following the end of the world socialist system, deciding literally over the life and death of entire populations, the United States and its "western world" allies cloak themselves in a moralist fig leaf and call their dictate to the rest (the majority) of the world "law." The tribunal is designed merely to lend an aura of "justice" and permanence to the unabashed return to the realm of the mighty, "governed" by the arbitrary law of the jungle.

GP.

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Sidebar 2: The Eyewitness, Erdemovic

Apparently not anxious to exhume suspected graves, but needing other material proof of mass executions, to make a plausible indictment of the Bosnian Serb leadership, the tribunal turned to "Eyewitness'" testimony as its fundamental form of "evidence". Eyewitness testimony though widely used is one of the most unreliable forms of evidence. Based on memory of the witness and open to interpretation, this form of evidence proves to be one of the easiest to be manipulated and tailored to fit desired circumstances or discredited. It is also the form of evidence that proves often difficult - when lacking other corroborating evidence - to prove false, and therefore which goes a long way toward reversing the basic rule-of-law maxim: "proof of a guilt lies with the prosecution".

The "eyewitness" to the mass execution in Srebrenica, Drazen Erdemovic, came forward, in March 1996, asking to go the the Hague as a witness. In a confession to the French daily, "Le Figaro", Erdemovic described himself, as having been a "soldier in the Bosnian Serb Army" and as such had participated in mass executions of Muslim civilians from Srebrenica. In vague details, spiced with bits of concrete information, he told how he participated in the execution of 1,200 people from Srebrenica on a farm in Pilica. According to him the executioners "used 7,62mm bullets,"1 and that the bodies were disposed of in mass graves on the same farm.

With this concrete information, one would think that the Tribunal would finally have absolute proof, provided Erdemovic was telling the truth. They would simply have to go to the scene - with Erdemovic - let him show what happened, where the bodies were buried and exhume the bodies. A forensic examination could verify if they had, in fact, been killed with 7,62mm bullets from what angle and distance. That is of course, if the tribunal really wanted to learn if Erdemovic was a reliable witness or simply giving false testimony.

(In fact Reuters News Agency published the following information in the spring of 1998: during "the opening of a mass grave in Bosnia, according to the United Nations, experts found the remains of skulls, clothes and hundreds of spent rounds." Further down in the article, one learns that "more than 1,500 spent rounds have been discovered in this area over the past two years."2 One sees that the tribunal is lacking both bodies and bullets. Or are we to believe that with each shot more than 5 people were killed?)

Erdemovic's story raises many questions. Born of Serbo-Croatian parents, he identifies himself as a Croat. In 1992, Erdemovic first served in the military police of the HVO (the ultra-nationalist, paramilitary Croatian Council of Defence) in his native Tuzla, before he crossed over to the Bosnian-Serbian side following punishment for allegedly having helped Serbs escape to Republika Srpska.3 According to his testimony he was then mustered into the Serbian military and was present at the takeover of Srebrenica. Erdemovic, who had been an ordinary soldier, said, that after a falling out with his commander in Bosnia, he decided to move to Serbia and tell his story, "apparently in revenge" writes the International Herald Tribune.4 In Serbia he first came in contact with correspondents of (US) ABC-TV station, and the (French daily) Le Figaro, to whom he offered his story, asking them to help him "escape to The Hague."5

Is Erdemovic a reliable witness? Is it plausible that a Croatian nationalist, an ex-HVO military policeman, would have joined - or even been accepted - in the Bosnian Serb army? Already as a military policeman of the HVO, he helps "the enemy". Runs into difficulty with his superiors and runs to the other side. Serves under arms with the Serbian forces, gets into difficulty again with his superiors, and again changes sides. Did he go straight to the correspondents, or did he first go to the Muslim government to offer his services? Being someone who seemingly touches all bases, this could be a plausible explanation for his asking to "escape to the Hague" - how many common soldiers seek out the Hague? The only ones to gain from his testimony, would be those in the government in Sarajevo, and apparently this is the only one of the 3 civil war contenders against whom he does not (yet) have a grudge. Would this not also help explain the "anonymous" witness (an alleged survivor of the execution) who testified before the tribunal that Erdemovic stopped other soldiers of the Serbian troops from killing him?

Likewise this could help explain why it was Le Figaro that is credited for breaking this story, even though it was the "scoop" worth a Pulitzer Prize. Why didn't ABC-TV take this "scoop" of a lifetime? This resounds of an often used CIA "black propaganda" method: Plant a hoax in a reputable foreign paper, to avoid suspicion of its American origin. The American press then carrys it as a reprint. In comparison to the German and American media at the time, the French press was far less fanatically anti-Serb. All speculations. But nevertheless questions that should have at least made experienced judges begin to doubt the credibility of a Drazan Erdemovic.

It has also been reported - and denied - that among the offers made Erdemovic by former chief prosecutor, Richard Goldstone were benefit of the "state's witness" regulation, freedom from prosecution for himself and a guarantee of a new life abroad in exchange for his valuable testimony6 against the Serbian leadership.

Erdemovic arrived in the Hague as a witness and became a defendant charged with crimes against humanity, for his role in the executions that he had described.

In her article in "The Nation", Diana Johnstone described the conviction as being:

"heralded as a great "first" in establishment of global justice. [The Erdemovic] case is considered of great importance to the Tribunal since his confession of taking part in executing over a thousand Muslims after the Serb capture of Srebrenica is considered prime evidence in the Tribunal's "main event", the future trial of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic.7

Mirko Klarin, journalist for Nasa Borba discribed the trial as follows:

"To the prosecution, Erdemovic is above all a "valued collaborator". (...) The defendant further helped the investigators to identify about 10 persons who had perpetrated or ordered these crimes, whose identity, the prosecution admitted, would have remained a mystery without Erdemovic's cooperation. Also in his favour was the "voluntary, courageous and public testimony" in the Rule 61 hearings on the indictments of Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, where Erdemovic appeared as the leading witness for the prosecution."8

But as Johnstone further points out, there was a catch:

"(...) inasmuch as he confessed to his crimes, there was no formal trial and no presentation of material evidence to corroborate his story. In any case, since he had turned "state's evidence", there would have been no rigorous cross-examination from either a contented prosecution or a complaisant defense regarding the discrepancy between the number of Muslims he testified having helped execute at a farm near Pilica -- 1,200 -- and the number of bodies actually found there by the Tribunal's forensic team: about 150 to 200.9

He was originally sentenced to ten years in prison. Upon appeal, the judges accepted his change of plea from "guilty to a crime against Humanity," to one of "guilt of a war crime." Citing his "honest disposition; [...] supported by his confession and consistent admission of guilt"10 among other things, his sentence was reduced from 10 to 5 years.

The question remains: does the "honest disposition" cited by the tribunal, signify that those who insist upon and defend their innocence will be examplarily punished, especially since the tribunal makes no effort at verifying the evidence in their defense?

GP.

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Endnotes--Part 3:

31)Butterfield, Fox; Serious Crime Recedes Further in US, But 4-Year Downtrend Masks a Surge of Violence by Teenagers; IHT (NYT), May 6, 1996

32) god/cha, UN-Tribunal will Massengräber in Bosnien öffnen lassen; Goldstone: Exhumierung notwendig zur Beweissicherung, Agence France Presse (Deutschland - AFD) 19.01.1996 - 17:54

33) O'Connor, Mike; op cit

34) Weiner, Tim; U.S. Says Serbs May Have Tried To Destroy Massacre Evidence; NY Times, Oct. 30, 1995

35) O'Connor, Mike; op cit

36) ibid.

37) Swain, Jon; Empty Bosnian graves baffle UN; The Sunday Times, Nov. 3, 1996

38) ibid.

39) Serbs Try To Remove Evidence Of Massacre In Srebrenica, TWRA - Daily Bulletin, Nov 18, 1995

40) John Pomfret, Bosnia Killing Fields Reveal A Grisly Demise, Mass Graves near Srebrenica, IHT / WPS, 20.1.96

41) The UN Secretary General, Butros Butros-Ghali complained in his Report to the Security Council - 6 weeks before the "fall of Srebrenica" that Muslim government armed forces were intensifying their attacks against Serbian forces in the surrounding area with "unprovoked attacks" launched from the safe area jeopardizing UNPROFOR's defense of the civilian population. See Security Council document, S/1995/444 (May 30, 1995)

Sidebar 2: Erdemovic

1) Vanessa Vasic-Janekovic, A Man Who Knows Too Much (Covjek koji zna previse), quoted in the ARZIN index-60, 15.3.96

2) lae/gwa; Schädelreste und Kugeln in Massengrab in Bosnien; Reuters (Germany) Apr. 20, 1998 - 19:39

3) Klarin, Mirko; Defendant for the Prosecution: To the Prosecutors, Erdemovic is above all a valued witness; The Institute of War and Peace Reporting 1996

4) Jane Perlez, Milosevic is expected to Aid in a War crimes Case; 2 Bosnian Serbs may face court, IHT, 14.3.96 (emphasis added)

5) Klarin, Mirko; op cit

6) cd sg Bosnien/UN/Jugoslawien; Tribunal verlangt in Belgrad Auslieferung von Srebrenica-Zeugen, dpa 12.03.1996 - 12:57

7) Johnstone, Diana; Selective Justice in The Hague: The War Crimes Tribunal on Former Yugoslavia is a Mockery of Evidentiary Rule; The Nation, 22.9.97

8) Klarin, Mirko; op cit

9) Johnstone, Diana; Ibid

10) Drazan Erdemovic sentenced to 5 Years imprisonment; Press Communiqué of the ICTY; http://www.un.org/icty/pressreal/p299-e.htm

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Part I

Part II

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THE TRUTH ABOUT THE SERBS AND YUGOSLAVIA

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[Ako-Heka]

http://arirusila.cafebabel.com/en/post/2009/07/19/Srebrenica-again-Hoax-or-Massacre

Almost since the beginning of the Bosnian war in the spring of 1992, there have been persistent reports -- readily found in the European media but little reported in the United States -- that civilian deaths in Muslim-held Sarajevo attributed to the Bosnian Serb Army were in some cases actually inflicted by operatives of the Izetbegovic regime in an (ultimately successful) effort to secure American intervention on Sarajevo's behalf. These allegations include instances of sniping at civilians as well as three major explosions, attributed to Serbian mortar fire, that claimed the lives of dozens of people and, in each case, resulted in the international community's taking measures against the Muslims' Serb enemies. (The three explosions were: (1) the May 27, 1992, "breadline massacre," which was reported to have killed 16 people and which resulted in economic sanctions on the Bosnian Serbs and rump Yugoslavia; (2) the February 5, 1994, Markale "market massacre," killing 68 and resulting in selective NATO air strikes and an ultimatum to the Serbs to withdraw their heavy weapons from the area near Sarajevo; and (3) the August 28, 1995 "second market massacre," killing 37 and resulting in large-scale NATO air strikes, eventually leading to the Dayton agreement and the deployment of IFOR.)

[Ako-Heka]

http://emperors-clothes.com/sreb/branco-1.htm

UN Military Officer asks, “Was Srebrenica a Hoax?”

Article by Carlos Martins Branco

With minor text editing and comments by

Jared Israel and Petar Makara

[Ako-Heka]

http://balkania.tripod.com/resources/geostrategy/bodansky_offensive.html

Ironically, despite evidence of the Izetbegovic administration's responsibility for the killing of one of its senior staff, the US ABC network continued to support the Sarajevo leadership and to demonize the Serbs.

The UN concluded that a special group of Bosnian Muslim forces, many of whom had served with Islamist terrorist organizations, committed a series of atrocities, including "some of the worst recent killings", against Bosnian Muslim civilians in Sarajevo "as a propaganda ploy to win world sympathy and military intervention". These attacks escalated into premeditated attacks and atrocities committed against Bosnian Serb civilians trying to flee contested areas. In early September 1992, UN security officials in Geneva pointed out that the shooting down of the Italian transport "was in line with a growing number of Muslim actions intended to scuttle moves toward peace and to provoke outside military intervention". They added that "the Muslims have targeted United Nations troops and even other Muslims in the capital of Bosnia to throw blame on the Serbs

[Ako-Heka]

http://darko-trifunovic-bosnian-muslim-terrorist-propaganda.blogtownhall.com/

[Ako-Heka]

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=1&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rusk.ru%2Fnews_rl%2F2007%2F07%2F09%2Fserby_ne_prichastny_k_vzryvu_na_saraevskom_rynke%2F&sl=ru&tl=en

[Ako-Heka]

Srebrenica

And the Politics of

War Crimes

Findings of the Srebrenica Research Group

into the allegations of events and the background leading up to them, in Srebrenica, Bosnia & Herzegovina, in 1995.

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:

1.

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.

2.

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. 

3.

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.

4.

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.

5.

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.

6.

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.

7.

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.

8.

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.

9.

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.”

10.

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]."

11.

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.

12.

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.

13.

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.”

14.

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.

15.

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.

         

[Ako-Heka]

http://serbianna.com/blogs/savich/?p=518

CARL SAVICH Blog | Saturday, April 3, 2010   

 

Fact versus Delusional Fantasy: The Bosnian Muslim Government Reformed the Nazi SS Division Handzar

April 19, 2009 – 12:58 pm

[Ako-Heka]

http://www.juliagorin.com/wordpress/?p=1698

September 07th 2008 04:36:59 PM

Today’s “Palestinians” Include Bosnians and Albanians

Posted by Julia Gorin

From Midstream magazine, December 1992 by author Paul Ginieweski: “The Palestinian-Bosnian Connection”

In several respects, two contemporary conflicts, the Serbo-Bosnian War in former Yugoslavia, and the Arab-Israeli struggle, are intertwined. Their linkage should be explained.

First, a well known fact, documented in detail in specialized literature, is largely ignored by the general public and neglected by the media all over the world: a number of present-day Palestinians, who consider themselves and qualify or pose as “Arabs,” are recent descendants of Muslim immigrants from European lands, from Bosnia-Herzegovina in particular.

When the Ottoman Empire lost Bosnia to Austria in 1878, huge numbers of Bosnians were resettled in the Middle East, in the framework of a general policy of Muslim colonization of Turkey’s troubled areas. Quoting from various former studies, the historian Bat Ye’or explains how Ottoman law granted lands in Palestine to the Muslim colonists, with a 12-year exemption from taxes and military service. In the Carmel region, Galilee and the plain of Sharon and Caesarea, lands were distributed to the Muslim Slavs from Bosnia and Herzegovina; Georgians were settled around Kuneitra on the Golan Heights and Moroccans in lower Galilee.

…

At the same time, measures were taken against non-Muslim immigrants. In the same year 1887, a law was passed forbidding Jews to immigrate to Palestine, to reside there, to buy land, to restore houses, or to live in Jerusalem. It applied only to Jews….

In the course of the 19th century and well into the 20th, the Turkish authorities settled over two million Muslim colonists from the Balkans and Crimea in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Armenia and Anatolia, in order to Islamize these countries and to undermine the national aspirations of the indigenous populations…

The pretense of the Palestinian “Arabs” to be the only natives in a country where Jews are deemed newcomers and intruders, is a myth. Great numbers of Palestinian “Arabs” are Arab in name only, and immigrants of more recent date than many Jews, whose presence in the land of Israel goes back 3,500 years. Many “Palestinians” immigrated even after the mainwaves of Zionist Jews: they came to the land of Israel in the thirties of the 20th century, attracted by the economic prosperity engendered by the Zionists.

Other facts ignored in good faith by some, or concealed and fabricated, belong to the history of a recent Palestinian-Bosnian partnership in war crimes.

In 1942, during World War II, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin El-Husseini, leader of the Palestinian Arab activists, settled in Berlin in order to add to the German war effort and to pour fuel on the flames of the Shoah. (He was later listed as a war criminal by the Western democracies.) The mufti met Eichmann, Himmler and Hitler and visited the extermination camps. Many relevant written documents have survived about the mufti’s role, including exhortations to speed up the deportation of the Jews and to prevent their escape. In 1943, the mufti created a legion of Waffen-SS, the “Legion Handjar [alternate spelling: Handzar; Hanschar],” recruited among Muslims from Bosnia. These 19,000 murderers were…abundantly utilized in the Nazi media and the propaganda war. A number of photographs depict the Muslim German-clad muftis and mullahs. The military value of the legion appears to have been close to nil. But the Muslim SS committed various atrocities against the Resistance and the Jewish population in Yugoslavia. They participated in the guard of the railway link between Auschwitz and the Balkans…

It happened half a century ago. But the Palestinian Arabs have neither forgotten nor forfeited their link with their Muslim brothers in Bosnia. During the summer of 1992, a delegation of Arab Israelis visited former Yugoslavia, pledging to establish a camp for Bosnian children in the Jewish State.

…

The Muslim Bosnians are strongly connected with the Arab-Muslim world. They supported Saddam Hussein during the Kuwait crisis and the Gulf War. [Recall that Yasser Arafat did the same, briefly becoming a pariah in the Muslim world.] Libya is assisting them militarily.

From this past May in the San Francisco Sentinel, by Seth J. Frantzman, a doctoral student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose MA thesis was on the Christian Arabs in the 1948 war: Fascist Muslim Group Expected to Loot Tel Aviv in 1948

On a pleasant Thursday in December 1948, Emilio Traubner, a correspondent for The Palestine Post, found himself near Abu Kabir, not far from Jaffa. Trenches and expended cartridges were strewn about, reminders of the fighting between units of the Irgun and local Arab forces that had taken place there seven months previously. There was a large Arab villa from where Traubner recovered a diary. It turned out to be the daily record of Yusuf Begovic of Pale, a town near Sarajevo in modern-day Bosnia-Herzegovina. In it Begovic had described his activities as a cook for the “Arab Army of Liberation.”

Traubner described who Begovic had been serving: “35 Yugoslav Muslims who had a good reason to expect to be among the first to occupy and loot Tel Aviv, were part of a group of some thousands who came to the Middle East to join the jihad against Israel.”

What were Yugoslav Muslims doing in Jaffa in 1948? How had they managed to get themselves all the way to the Holy Land? What had motivated them? Who had recruited them? What was the Bosnian or Albanian connection to the Palestinians, if there was one?

There was a Bosnian connection: Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, had been in Bosnia in the 1940s. Had he recruited these men? What had become of them?

It turned out that in 2005 a Bosnian had given an interview in Lebanon to a Croatian newspaper and claimed to have fought in the 1948 war. The story began to crystallize.

The Long Shadow of Haj Amin

In October 1937, Haj Amin al-Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem and leader of the Arab Higher Committee, was hiding from the British authorities in the Haram al-Sharif, the holy sanctuary atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. On October 13, disguised as a Beduin, he fled to Lebanon via Jaffa. In Lebanon he received sanctuary from the French mandatory authorities but he fled again with the outbreak of war in 1939. This time he made his way to Baghdad disguised as a woman. In Baghdad in 1940 and 1941 he increased his contacts with Germany, offering to aid the Nazis in return for their help in gaining independence for the Arab states. The Italians helped him enter Turkey, and then he made his way to Rome on October 11. He met with Mussolini and then with Hitler on November 28. After the failure of various schemes to create an Arab military unit he eventually settled for recruiting Muslim volunteers to aid the Nazis from the Balkans, Bosnia and eventually Kosovo.

In speaking to potential recruits, Husseini stressed the connections they had to the Muslim nation fighting the British throughout the world: “The hearts of all Muslims must today go out to our Islamic brothers in Bosnia, who are forced to endure a tragic fate. They are being persecuted by the Serbian and communist bandits, who receive support from England and the Soviet Union… They are being murdered, their possessions are robbed and their villages are burned. England and its allies bear a great accountability before history for mishandling and murdering Europe’s Muslims, just as they have done in the Arabic lands and in India.”

Three divisions of Muslim soldiers were recruited: The Waffen SS 13th Handschar (”Knife”) and the 23rd Kama (”Dagger”) and the 21st Skenderbeg. The Skenderbeg was an Albanian unit of around 4,000 men, and the Kama was composed of Muslims from Bosnia, containing 3,793 men at its peak. The Handschar was the largest unit, around 20,000 Bosnian Muslim volunteers. According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, “These Muslim volunteer units, called Handschar, were put in Waffen SS units, fought Yugoslav partisans in Bosnia and carried out police and security duties in Hungary. They participated in the massacre of civilians in Bosnia and volunteered to join in the hunt for Jews in Croatia.” Part of the division also escorted Hungarian Jews from the forced labor in mine in Bor on their way back to Hungary. The division was also employed against Serbs, who as Orthodox Christians were seen by the Bosnian Muslims as enemies.

The Handschar division surrendered to the British army on May 8, 1945. As many as 70,000 Bosnian Muslim POWs and their families were moved by the British army to Taranto in Italy. The creation of Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia at the end of the war meant that former Bosnian Muslim volunteers in the German SS units could not return home for fear of prosecution or internment. George Lepre, a scholar on the history of the Handschar and author of Himmler’s Bosnian Division: The Waffen-SS Handschar Division 1943-1945 describes their fate: “Those Bosnians who elected to remain in the camps eventually found asylum in countries throughout the Western and Arab worlds. Many of those who settled in the Middle East later fought in Palestine against the new Israeli state.”

But first they had to get to the Middle East.

The formation of the Bosnian unit in 1947

The Bosnian Muslims, usually referred to as “Yugoslavs” in period newspaper accounts as well as in intelligence reports, remained in DP camps in Italy until 1947, when it was reported in The Palestine Post on April 18 that there was a “request from the Syrian government for the transfer of 8,000 Bosnian Moslem refugees at present in Italy. Yugoslav quarters here say that the Arab League has written to all Arab states, urging them to assist these Moslem DPs, and that some financial help has already been received. Yugoslav officials say that they too want these 8,000 Moslems back, as they are the Handschar Division of the German Wehrmacht which surrendered to the British… The Yugoslavs state that they view with the gravest concern the possibility of the transfer of this group to the Middle East.”

By December 1947 a nucleus of former Handschar officers had made their way to Syria and were beginning to reconstitute their unit in Damascus. A report by Israel Baer in the Post noted that “the latest recruits to the Syrian army are members of the Bosnian Waffen SS… It is reported that they are directing a school for commando tactics for the Syrian Army.”

No doubt the fledgling Syrian army which had been born in 1946 was in need of officers and trainers with experience. Emilio Traubner, writing on December 3, 1947, noted that the International Refugee Organization (IRO) was even convinced to fund the travel of Bosnian Muslims from Italy to the Middle East so that they could find homes since they refused to be repatriated to Yugoslavia.

In January 1948 Arab agents were working to recruit Bosnians for the fight in Palestine. On February 2, it was reported that 25 Bosnian Muslims had arrived in Beirut and were moving to Damascus to join 40 other Bosnians already there. A report by Jon Kimche on February 4 further noted that up to 3,500 were being transferred to Syria to fight alongside Fawzi Kaukji’s Arab Liberation Army (ALA) in its invasion of Palestine. On March 14 a party of 67 Albanians, 20 Yugoslavs and 21 Croats led by an Albanian named Derwish Bashaco arrived by boat in Beirut from Italy. They were hosted by the Palestine Arab Bureau and made their way to Damascus to join the ALA. In the first week of April another 200 Bosnians arrived in Beirut.

A lengthy report by Claire Neikind on March 2 described the procedure by which Arab agents were recruiting volunteers among the DPs in Italy. Men between 22 and 32 were sought and in return they would receive free passage to Beirut and their families would receive maintenance. According to Neikind, 300 men had already arrived and 90 Croatian Ustashi were also making there way. Fifty-seven were sent to Amman. Between December 1 and February 20 a total of 106 were sent to Syria. Neikind noted that “as soon as their families are settled, they enter Arab military service.”

If one accepts merely the low totals from newspaper accounts it appears that there were at least 520 Bosnians, 67 Albanians and 111 Croatians in Syria or Beirut, as well as 135 Bosnians on their way to Egypt and 57 Bosnians in Jordan. Thus 890 volunteers from Yugoslavia and Albania were in the Middle East by April 1948, before Israel’s declaration of independence on May 15, 1948.

Upon arrival the volunteers found their way to a camp at Katana, a military base west of Damascus that the Syrian army had provided for use by the Arab Liberation Army being assembled to invade Palestine. Here they met their commander, Fawzi Kaukji for the first time. Kaukji, 58, was a former Ottoman soldier who had fought in the Arab Revolt. Hagana intelligence estimated as many as 4,000 volunteers had joined his army.

In December of 2005, Hassan Haidar Diab, a journalist in Bosnia, was able to locate Kemal Rustomovic, a Bosnian who had served with the Yugoslav volunteers. He claimed to have been a member of the Arab Salvation Army where 150 of his fellow Bosnians served under a Bosnian officer named Fuad Sefkobegovic.

The Role of the Bosnians in the War of Independence

Since the fall of 1947 Arab forces under Abdel Khader Husseini and other locals had harassed Jewish traffic and supplies moving from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. A mixed Bosnian-Arab unit of the ALA had been dispatched to aid in the siege of Jerusalem and this unit found itself embroiled in the battle for Castel between April 3 and 8, 1948. This battle was part of the Hagana’s Operation Nahshon which was intended to relieve the siege of Jerusalem. It is not clear what became of the Bosnians who fought at Castel. Some may have retired to Ramallah, where it was reported on April 16 that Muslim foreigners including Yugoslavs had taken over the best hotels and “molested” the local population.

The next battle that the Bosnian units participated in was at Jaffa between April 25 and May 5. Jaffa had been allotted to the Arab state in the UN partition plan, but it was surrounded by territory allotted to the Jewish state. The battle began when the Irgun launched an attack on the city. According to the Hagana, there were 400 “Yugoslavs” and 200 Iraqis defending Jaffa. On April 28, Michel Issa, the Christian Arab commander of the Ajnadin Battalion, received orders from Kaukji to move from the Jerusalem foothills to relieve the siege of Jaffa. On the same day, Hagana intelligence noted that there were 60 “Yugoslavs” among the defenders of Jaffa. Issa arrived in Jaffa on April 29 ; the commander of Jaffa, Maj. Adil Najmuddin, deserted the city on May 1, leaving Issa and his Yugoslavs. According to Issa’s telegram to Kaukji, “Adil left [the] city by sea with all [the] Iraqis and Yugoslavs.” Prior to their departure the Yugoslavs had been billeted at local homes and their unit even included a cook.

Kemal Rustomovic recalled in his interview that he had first been at Nablus, then Jaffa and finally at Jenin. Between the evacuation of the Yugoslavs by sea from Jaffa and their reunion with the ALA, the State of Israel was born on May 15, 1948. On the same day five Arab armies invaded Israel and the war became much wider.

The ALA became a disorganized and largely spent force by the time it saw fighting again around Nazareth again in July. During the fighting in the North, Kaukji’s army of 2,500 men was reduced to only 800 and it was driven from Nazareth into northern Galilee. Rustomovic was one of these men according to his interview. The Post reported that the ALA still included “Yugoslavs.” On July 18 the Post reported that the British government’s intelligence had acted to “systematically sabotage [the] Palestine partition scheme” and provided as evidence the fact that England was aware of the presence of Bosnian volunteers in Syria. [This briefly mentions how the Brits helped terrorize both Jews and Serbs.]

During the fighting in October the IDF conquered the entire Galilee and parts of Southern Lebanon. A report on November 1, detailing the capture of the Galilee, noted that some “Yugoslavs” had been captured during the fighting that had driven the ALA and the Lebanese army from Palestine and actually found the IDF in Lebanon.

The Bosnians and the 1948 war, strange bedfellows?

It is not known what became of the Bosnians who served with the Arab forces in the 1948 war. Rustomovic, who was born in the village of Kuti in central Bosnia in 1928, joined the Lebanese army in 1950. He served his adopted country for 30 years, married a local woman and had seven daughters and five sons with her. He was granted Lebanese citizenship, unlike the Palestine refugees who fled to Lebanon, and retired from the army in 1980. According to him, none of the Bosnians who had served in the SS ever returned to Yugoslavia. Some ended up in the US, Australia and Canada. It is assumed that some also settled in Syria or elsewhere in the Middle East. Today many would be in their 80s and 90s and it is doubtful that many of them survive.

In the 1990s during the Balkan wars, Arabs would journey to the Balkans to participate in war between Bosnians and Serbs. In a strange twist they would be repaying the debt incurred when 900 or more Bosnian Muslims gave up their homes and past to come to the Middle East to serve the Muslim Arab cause. The involvement of these Bosnians may be seen as an early version of the linkage of Muslim conflicts throughout the world. This has gained increased exposure lately due to the involvement of foreign Muslim volunteers in the Algerian, Lebanese, Kashmiri, Sudanese and Afghani conflicts among others.

From “The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism by Chuck Morse:

The mufti was also a mentor to Yasser Arafat, who is believed to be Husseini’s nephew. Overlooked in the history books is the fact that about 100,000 European Muslims fought on the Nazi side in World War II. They included two Bosnian Muslim Waffen SS Divisions, an Albanian Waffen SS Division in Kosovo and Western Macedonia, the Waffengruppe der-SS Krim, formations consisting of Chechen Muslims from Chechnya, and other Muslim formations in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Bosnian Muslims, who were in the Croatian pro-Nazi Ustasha, were especially brutal toward the Christian Serbs. In 1943, a report on Ustasha activities stated:

“The Ustasha terror began in Mostar. The Ustashi, the majority of them local Mohammedans, are arresting, looking, and shipping off Serbs or killing them and throwing the bodies in the Neretva River. They are throwing Serbs alive into chasms and are burning whole families in their homes. Outside of Zagreb the strongest Ustasha hotbed is Sarajevo. The Muslims committed unbelievable barbarities for they murdered women and children even with scissors.”

As to the Bosnian wartime leader whom the U.S. threw its support behind, and for whom organized American Jewry lobbied for, here is a snippet about him from Srdja Trifkovic’s recent piece “Karadzic’s Arrest: Bosnian Myths Rehashed“:

Already as a young man during World War II, Izetbegovic was a member of the Young Muslims organization (Mladi Muslimani). His was a radical Islamic political organization inspired by the teaching of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Al Husseini, who toured the German-occupied Europe preaching that the Third Reich and the Muslim world had a natural community of interests that demanded personal commitment of every able-bodied Muslim. Izetbegovic’s ideas subsequently matured into a comprehensive, programmatic statement in the Islamic Declaration (1970), the document that led to his imprisonment by the communist authorities in 1983.

The Declaration became Izetbegovic’s de facto political platform. Reprinted in Sarajevo at a key moment in 1990, it startled the public. In the language familiar to the students of militant jihad everywhere, it called for Islamic moral and religious regeneration, and for the strengthening of different types of Islamic unity—up to, and including, armed struggle for the creation of an Islamic polity in countries where Muslims represent the majority of the population.

And from Andrew Bostom:

Mr. Izetbegovic was a youthful recruiter for Himmler’s Nazi Bosnian Muslim Handschar Division….Here are some of Izetbegovic’s “moderate” views, including his wish to destroy Israel (“occupied Palestine”), as expressed in this 1970 Islamic Declaration… “under the leadership of Zionists, started an action in Palestine which is not only inhumane and ruthless but also shortsighted and adventuresome. This politics takes in account only temporary ratio of power and forgets about overall ratio of power between Jews and Muslims in the world. This politics in Palestine is a provocation to all Muslims of the world. Jerusalem is not only a question of Palestinians, neither is it a question of Arabs only. It is a question of all the Muslim nations. To keep Jerusalem, the Jews would have to defeat Islam and the Muslims, and that — thank God — is outside their power.”

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http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13130

The successful demonization of the Serbs, making them largely responsible for the Yugoslav wars, and as unique and genocidal killers, was one of the great propaganda triumphs of our era. It was done so quickly, with such uniformity and uncritical zeal in the mainstream Western media, that disinformation had (and still has, after almost two decades) a field day

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The Real Srebrenica Genocide

The REAL Srebrenica "Genocide" NOT reported by the corrupt,racist pro-Islamist Nazi Western corporate controlled media, was the brutal mass murder - using axes,knives,daggers,sledgehammers,iron bars,flamethrowers and explosives - of 3,870 Serbian elderly men, women and young children in and around the town of Srebrenica and its adjoining villages(Bratunac,Skelani,et al) as well as the town of Gorazde

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Serbian Orthodox Church Destroyed by Muslims