ANNIVERSARY OF "OPERATION STORM" THAT ENDED SERBIAN FASCISM IN THE BALKANS

VIDEO: Serbian Chetnik Goran Hadzic, former leader of now defunct "Republic of Serbian Krajina", is on trial for crimes committed by Serbs against Croats several years before the Operation Storm. Take a look at this man. All this time he was protected and sheltered by elements close to the Serbian Orthodox Church, one of the worst criminal organizations on a territory of former Yugoslavia.

Operation Storm was a large-scale military operation carried out by Croatian Armed Forces, in conjunction with the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, to gain back control of parts of Croatia which had been forcibly occupied by separatist ethnic Serbs, since early 1991. The operation was strongly motivated by the July 1995 Srebrenica Genocide. 

Heavily armed Croatian Serbs from the so called 'demilitarized' safe area of the 'Republic Serbian Krajina' constantly attacked Bosniaks in the besieged Bihac enclave. Croatian Serbs committed horrendous war crimes against Bosniak and Croatian civilians on both sides of the border. They burned hundreds of undefended Bosnian Muslim villages around Bihac and in northwest Bosnia in general. Former Croatian Serb leader, Goran Hadzic, was recently captured and transferred to the International Criminal Tribunal at the Hague (video above).

After the 1995 Srebrenica Massacre, there were concerns that there would be a repeat of the massacre in the Bihać pocket area, where the population of Bosniaks was four times larger than in Srebrenica and which was surrounded and under attack by Bosnian Serb and Croatian Serb forces, as well as by several thousand Islamic peasants (led by Serbian spy Fikret Abdic)  who were aided by the Serbs.

The Operation Storm lasted 84 hours. It was documented as the largest European land offensive since World War II. This military operation effectively ended the campaign of Serbian fascism in the Balkans. 

Serbian leadership strongly influenced Serbs to leave their territories, so they could blame Croats for "ethnic cleansing." More than 3 years before the Operation Storm,  Serbs expelled hundreds of thousands of Croatian and  Bosniak civilians on both sides of the border. At the request of the NATO, Bosnian and Croatian armies stopped in front of Banja Luka, capital of then self-proclaimed so called "Republika Srpska." Perhaps the biggest historical mistake was not overtaking the entire "Republika Srpska."

Croatian and Bosnian armies conducted themselves professionally and honorably and did not commit any systematic murders against the Serbs. Some individual killings occurred, just like in any war, but no mass murders happened. 

In World War II, Serbs collaborated with fascists (just like Croats). In just a few days of February 1943, the Serbian Chetniks under the leadership of Draza Mihailovich systematically slaughtered 20,000 Bosniak Muslims in the Podrinje area (around Srebrenica region). Serbian Chetniks admitted killing over 9,000 people in this genocidal campaign alone, 8000 of them Bosniak women and children. Serbs also assisted Germans and Ustasha's in gassing Jews.