Srebrenica Genocide Blog

KRSTIC: GENOCIDE CONVICT TRANSFERED FROM BRITISH PRISON TO HAGUE

2011-12-22T12:54:00.000-08:00

PHOTO: Gen. Radislav Krstic with the
Serb leader Radovan Karadzic in 1992.

We learn from sources close to the Hague Tribunal that General Radislav Krstic -- convicted for his involvement in the 1995 Srebrenica Genocide -- has been transferred from the British prison to the ICTY detention unit in Scheveningen, Netherlands.

He was complaining that food, accommodation and security at the British prison were bad. In May of 2010, he was attacked and, allegedly, his throat was slashed (some sources reported it was only a minor cut). The Hague Tribunal will try to find another prison for him.

General Radislav Krstic is a monster. Instead of being hanged like Nazi war criminals, the Hague Tribunal is doing everything they can to accommodate the needs and comfort of this monster.

In July 1995, the Army of Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina's intelligence units intercepted Krstic ordering the killings of Srebrenica men and boys. In the intercept, Krstic stated that "Single one must not be left alive!". Krstic's instructions to his troops echoed the order that Radovan Karadzic gave to Miroslav Deronjic, "Miroslav, they must all be killed... All and every one you find there."

Here is the excerpt from the Krstic intercept:

General Krstic: Are you working down there? [executing men and boys]

Major Obrenovic: Of course we're working.

General Krstic: Good.

Major Obrenovic: We've managed to catch a few more, either by gunpoint or in mines.

General Krstic: Kill them all, God damn it!

Major Obrenovic: Everything is going according to a plan.

General Krstic: Single one must not be left alive.

Major Obrenovic: Everything is going according to a plan. Everything.

General Krstic: Way to go, chief. The Turks are probably listening to us. Let them listen, the mother-f-----s. (Turks is a derrogative name for Bosnian Muslims)

MLADIC PRESENT DURING THE ORAHOVAC MASSACRE

2011-11-26T14:59:00.001-08:00

In his evidence at the trial of Radovan Karadzic, a witness testifying under the pseudonym KDZ 039 described the three days he spent in detention in Potocari and Bratunac and an execution in Orahovac on 14 July 1995. The indictment against Radovan Karadzic alleges that about 1,000 Bosniaks captured after the fall of Srebrenica were killed in the incident. When the sun set, the execution continued under the headlights of backhoes, the witness recounted.

SENSE TRIBUNAL — With the evidence of a witness testifying under the pseudonym KDZ 039, the prosecution case entered its final stage at the trial of Radovan Karadzic. The prosecution will now try to prove that the former Republika Srpska president is responsible for the genocide in Srebrenica. The witness, a survivor of an execution in Orahovac in the summer of 1995, has already testified at all Srebrenica trials before the Tribunal.

The summary of the evidence the witness gave in November 2007 at the trial of the Bosnian Serb military and police officers was admitted into evidence today. According to the summary, after the fall of Srebrenica on 11 July 1995 the witness headed towards Potocari with the female members of his family. The next day the witness was separated from his family. He was detained with a large group of elderly men in an unfinished house in Potocari. There, the witness saw General Ratko Mladic for the first time. He was bareheaded and wearing a camouflage uniform. He greeted the prisoners saying ‘hello, neighbors’. Mladic told the prisoners they would be exchanged for the captured Serbs.

That same night, the witness and the remaining prisoners were taken to Bratunac by bus where they were detained in an abandoned warehouse near the Vuk Karadzic school. About 400 persons were brought there by midnight. During the night, Serb soldiers took out about 40 prisoners. Once they were taken out, the men inside could hear the blows, wails and screams, the witness said. Some prisoners returned to the warehouse badly beaten and bloody; others didn’t return.

The next day, on 13 July 1995, the prisoners were given water and they were allowed to remove from the warehouse the five men who had died during the night as a consequence of the beatings. As the witness recounted, behind the warehouse they saw a pile of dead bodies. More prisoners were taken out and about 40 prisoners were killed by the end of the day. A prisoner was beaten with an iron bar in front of the witness and was then finished off with an axe blow to his back.

The surviving prisoners were taken to Orahovac in six buses in the night of 13 July 1995. The witness saw Mladic again. Mladic told the bus driver to follow a ‘red car’. In Orahovac, the prisoners were detained in the primary school gym. By 10 am the following day, there were about 2,500 men in the gym, the witness estimated.

General Mladic visited the prisoners there too, this time brining new promises. Instead of taking them ‘to Fikret [Abdic’s territory]’ as they were promised, the prisoners were made to board the buses. They were blindfolded and were taken to a nearby execution site in groups. There, they were shot to death. At one point, the witness took off his blindfold and saw many dead bodies around him. When a burst was fired in his direction, the witness fell and remained on the ground, buried under dead bodies. The witness saw Serb soldiers bringing in new groups of people in trucks. The newcomers were taken out and executed. General Mladic stood there and watched it all, the witness claims.

When the night fell, the execution continued. The area was lit by the headlights of two backhoes. When it was done, the witness and two other survivors ran away from the execution site. On 19 July 1995, the witness crossed into the BH Army-controlled territory.

At the beginning of the cross-examination, Karadzic wanted to hear from the witness how Mladic was dressed and how big the warehouse in Bratunac was. Karadzic also asked him how and why the prisoners were taken out of the warehouse in the night of 12 July when about 40 persons were killed. Karadzic’s case is that the prisoners were taken out mainly because individuals wanted to take their revenge on them for crimes against Serbs in the villages around Srebrenica.

Karadzic will continue his cross-examination of the witness on Monday, 28 November 2011.

AUSTRALIA REMEMBERS SREBRENICA, HON. MP TONY SMITH

2011-11-22T15:32:00.000-08:00

Honorable MP, Tony Smith

Commonwealth of Australia
Parliamentary Debates
21 November 2011
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
PROOF MOTIONS
Srebrenica Remembrance
Speech by MP Tony Smith

[Note by the Bosnian Genocide Blog team: We thank MP Tony Smith for his Srebrenica advocacy in the Parliament of Australia. A minor correction: Forensic evidence compiled by the International Commission on Missing Persons indicates 8,100 killed in Srebrenica, not 7,000 (7,500 quoted by the ICTY represents minimum number of victims, not the total.). Overall, Mr. Smith's speech was excellent. Thank you.]

Speaker Mr TONY SMITH

Mr TONY SMITH (Casey) (20:1 0): I appreciate the opportunity to speak on this motion moved by the member for Melbourne Ports to commemorate the terrible massacre of Srebrenica. The 18th century Anglo-Irish conservative philosopher Edmund Burke famously wrote: ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’ And evil was indeed ascendant on those sunny July days 16 years ago when 7,000 unarmed prisoners were slaughtered at Srebrenica during the Bosnian War of the 1990s.

The direct perpetrators of this war crime were military units of the Republika Srpska, the breakaway Bosnian Serb state within the former nation of Yugoslavia. In fact, the commander of those units, General Ratko Mladic, and the former president of the Republika Srpska, Radovan Karadzic, are currently on trial in the Hague for this and other abominations.

But, beyond the writing of yet another chapter in the long bloody saga of man’s inhumanity to man, the Srebrenica massacre demonstrates two great verities: one ageless and the other current to our present age. The eternal truth arises from the fact that, in international affairs, as in physics, a power vacuum will always be filled. The only question is by whom: the benign or the malign? It is an ugly world—a world where wickedness regards weakness with contempt; a world where foulness will exploit feebleness to do a devil’s dance on the graves of the innocent.

If the crime of Srebrenica teaches us anything it is that, if the benign lack the will to exert power that is constructive, the malign will surely step into the breach to deploy power that is destructive. We learn that, without strength, the forces of decency will be swamped by indecency. And it was indecency incarnate that broke with all its fury over the 7,000 innocent men and boys who were shot down without mercy.

The atrocity that took place at Srebrenica in July 1995 was horrible enough in its own right, but the horror was made more acute and more profound by the fact that those killings took place almost literally under the noses of an international force posted to keep the peace where there was no peace to be found. A battalion of Dutch peacekeepers, understrength and underarmed, was unable to halt the mass murderers as they went about their grisly business.

There is little question as to how these war criminals committed this horrendous massacre. The record in that regard has been copiously documented, including by the member for Melbourne Ports. Witnesses have been deposed and forensic evidence has been gathered. Nor is there really any doubt about the why of the Srebrenica slaughter: it was just another dark page in the same bloody saga of bigotry induced bloodbath that has marred the annals of human history.

The real question isn’t why the Serbians murdered unarmed Muslim prisoners; it is why the army of an advanced Western nation was unable to stop it. To understand that we must transport ourselves back a decade and a half in time. This was the era of Francis Fukuyama’s so-called ‘end of history’. The Berlin Wall had fallen six years previously. The Cold War was won and the triumph of the West was supposedly assured. It was a time for optimism. It is true that the social democracies of continental Europe felt there was no longer anything to fear and thus no need to keep up military spending, and the Netherlands were no exception to this trend. The so-called peace dividend was used in the early 1990s to reduce the budget of the Dutch armed forces. In the euphoria of Cold War victory, the Netherlands and other European nations allowed themselves to forget a cardinal Latin adage that has rung true since the legions of Julius Caesar marched into Gaul: ‘If you desire peace, prepare for war.’ As we enter a new period of global instability and international power rivalry, this eternal lesson, retaught so cruelly by the slaughter at Srebrenica, is one we in this place should well and truly heed.

Complementing these ageless truths is another verity that is a product of our current age. It demonstrates, as we have heard, how the United Nations was unable to act decisively in the face of genocide. You see, the Dutch troops whom I previously mentioned were wearing blue helmets during their posting to Srebrenica. They were in the Balkans as part of a UN peacekeeping operation and, as such, they answered to a chain of command that extended all the way to the UN secretariat in New York. So, when out-gunned and out-numbered, the Dutch seeing the killings unfolding before them, tried to call for close air support. These Netherlands troops begged and pleaded for air strikes to target the Serb positions and bring the slaughter to a halt. But air strikes were postponed for hours as the Serbian mass murder operation progressed. When the aircraft finally arrived, it was too little too late. A grand total of two bombs were dropped with a zero deterrent effect. The Dutch battalion were then withdrawn, leaving the local Bosnian Muslim population to the none-too-tender mercies of the advancing Serb forces.

Even more outrageous was the fact that the Srebrenica massacre took place just a year after one of the worst acts of genocide to occur since the Holocaust —and the member for Melbourne Ports referred to this. Between April and July 1994, roughly 800,000 people in Rwanda were hacked, burned and stabbed to death, while another UN force was left hapless and hopeless. And as in Srebrenica, the UN commander in Rwanda, Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, begged for reinforcements and support from UN headquarters in faraway Manhattan. And, as in Srebrenica, he received nothing of the kind. You would think the bloody lessons of Rwanda might have been absorbed by the high mandarins at UN secretariat. But, tragically, the past of Rwanda turned out to be the prologue for Srebrenica

The United Nations bureaucracy, unfortunately, was channelling spirit of Tallyrand’s famous quip about the post-Waterloo Bourbon monarchy: ‘They forgot nothing and they learned nothing.’ From early 1992 to mid-1995 the UN tried and failed to bring an end to the Balkans war, a war which killed hundreds of thousands of people in a conflict that knew no rules, a conflict where the laws of war were honoured more in the breech than the observance.

The failure of the UN in Rwanda and the Srebrenica is not contested. As the member for Melbourne Ports outlined, in fact, it is accepted by the United Nations itself. Indeed, on the 10th anniversary—the member for Melbourne Ports mentioned the fifth—of the Srebrenica massacre, then Secretary General Kofi Anan issued a statement, where he said:

… we made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality and non-violence which, however admirable, was unsuited to the conflict in Bosnia. That is why … the tragedy of Srebrenica will haunt our history forever.

But such mea culpas do not account for much if they are unaccompanied by real reform.

An end to the Balkan slaughter of the 1990s was not brought about by international diplomacy or UN facilitation. The war was finally ended by brute military force. Brute military force brought to bear by a US-led campaign of air attacks under the auspices not of the UN but of NATO. Starting in late August 1995, US and NATO aircraft flew over 3,500 combat sorties against over 330 Serbian targets. The Serbs were bombed into submission, pure and simple. If the UN did not learn from the Rwandan genocide, US President Clinton certainly did. In a speech on the Balkans crisis delivered in November 1995, Clinton said:

We cannot stop all war for all time but we can stop some wars. We cannot save all women and all children but we can save many of them. We can’t do everything but we must do what we can.

America’s 42nd President learned that, at times, the only way to stop the triumph of evil is for good men to vanquish it through the moral and focused application of armed force. That is the real lesson of Edmund Burke applied to Srebrenica—a lesson we should all seriously ponder.

STRIJELJANJE: POREDALI SMO IH, PA PUCALI U LEĐA

2011-11-22T15:26:00.000-08:00

Sud Bosne i Hercegovine

Franc Kos o strijeljanju Srebreničana: Ljudi su mirno stajali, a mi smo pucali u leđa

FENA — Svjedočeći u svoju korist na suđenju za genocid u Srebrenici, optuženi Franc Kos je kazao da su zarobljenici na Vojnoj ekonomiji Branjevo prvo ubijani iz mitraljeza, a onda kratkim rafalima iz pištolja, te da su u strijeljanju učestvovali svi optuženi.

Franc Kos je rekao da su pripadnici Desetog diverzantskog odreda Glavnog štaba Vojske Republike Srpske (VRS), pucajući iz mitraljeza, strijeljali zarobljenike koji su prethodno u grupama izvođeni iz autobusa.

-Ja sam postavio mitraljez, a Goronja je stajao pored. On je ispalio deset metaka i onda je pao. Znam da mu je Z1 rekao: ‘Mali, šta čekaš, hajde opleti’. U drugu grupu zarobljenih rafalno je pucao Z1, i tu je bilo puno ranjenih. Tada je drugooptuženi rekao: ‘Nemojte tako pucati’, pa je dogovoreno da se u grupe od po deset ljudi ispaljuju kratki rafali, kazao je Kos.

Tužilaštvo BiH tereti Kosa, skupa s Stankom Kojićem, Vlastimirom Golijanom i Zoranom Goronjom za genocid u Srebrenici, odnosno za učešće u ubistvima više od 800 muškaraca i dječaka u julu 1995. godine na Vojnoj ekonomiji Branjevo.

Prema optužnici, Kos je bio komandir Prvog voda Desetog diverzantskog odreda Glavnog štaba VRS-a, a Kojić, Golijan i Goronja pripadnici istog odreda, te su svi zajedno strijeljali zarobljenike, od kojih su neki imali poveze na rukama i očima.

Kos je ispričao kako su pripadnici Desetog diverzantskog odreda učestvovali u ubistvima oko 300 zarobljenika, nakon čega su došli pripadnici neke druge jedinice koji su nastavili sa strijeljanjem ostalih zarobljenika.

-Ti vojnici su galamili na nas, rekli su: ‘Sada ćemo vam pokazati kako se to radi’, i počeli su tući zarobljenike. Otišao sam i sjeo u kombi. Neko je rekao da i vozači, i ostali ljudi koji su na Branjevu, trebaju ubiti po jednog ili dva zarobljenika, kako ne bi bilo svjedoka. Vozači su morali strijeljati kad im je puška bila uperena u leđa, rekao je Kos.

Na upit Sudskog vijeća kako su zarobljenici izgledali prilikom odvođenja na likvidaciju, optuženi Kos je kazao da su uglavnom šutjeli.

-Neki su šutjeli, neki su nešto pričali u sebi, neki su i psovali. Mirno su išli do mjesta likvidacije. Ljudi su stajali u redu i mi smo ih strijeljali pucajući im u leđa, ispričao je Kos, dodavši kako su svi optuženi učestvovali u strijeljanju na Branjevu.

Četiri dana nakon strijeljanja na Branjevu, Kos je, kako je kazao, vidio komandanta Milorada Pelemiša i pitao ga šta se desilo, na šta mu je Pelemiš kazao da je to “viša sila”.

Prema kazivanju optuženog Kosa, Pelemiš mu nikada nije rekao od koga je dobio naredbu da pripadnike Desetog diverzantskog odreda pošalje na Branjevo.

- Nakon Branjeva, nama je rečeno da idemo u Pilicu. Došli smo do jedne kafane koja se nalazila kod Doma kulture u Pilici, a kada sam izašao, vidio sam da u Domu ima leševa, a čula se i pucnjava, rekao je Kos, prenosi BIRN Justice Report.

Naredno suđenje zakazano je za 29. novembar.

PROSECUTORS TO CUT MLADIC'S INDICTMENT BY 46% TO SPEED UP HIS TRIAL

2011-11-18T18:18:00.001-08:00

By Mike Corder

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Yugoslav war crimes tribunal prosecutors proposed Friday drastically cutting back the amount of evidence they present to support charges in Ratko Mladic’s indictment, in an attempt to speed up his trial.

In a proposal sent to judges at the U.N. court, prosecutors said they will keep all 11 charges, including two counts of genocide, in Mladic’s indictment, but can cut back the number of crimes they seek to prove by more than 45 percent.

The allegations prosecutors will present “reasonably and appropriately reflect the criminal conduct of the accused and establish a basis for conviction on all 11 counts of the indictment,” the proposal says.

The 69-year-old former commander of the Bosnian Serb army is accused of masterminding atrocities by his forces throughout the Bosnian War.

He has refused to enter pleas to the charges so judges entered not guilty pleas on his behalf. No date has been set for his trial to start.

The proposal aimed at streamlining Mladic’s trial comes amid concerns about his health. Judges asked prosecutors to trim down the indictment in October.

Judges this week ordered a full medical checkup of Mladic, who has been experiencing pain from a kidney stone, had surgery for a hernia and been hospitalized with pneumonia since he was arrested in May and transferred to a cell in The Hague. His lawyers and family also say he had two strokes during his years as a fugitive.

Prosecutors at the tribunal typically present evidence of several crimes to prove a single count in an indictment, leading to trials that can last years.

Under Friday’s proposal, they would not call evidence in just under 46 percent of crimes currently listed in Mladic’s indictment.

The biggest cut would come in evidence about Serb-run concentration camps where non-Serbs were held, a reduction of just over 70 percent.

The smallest proposed cut is in evidence concerning the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, where Serb forces killed 8,000 Bosniak men and boys. Prosecutors had planned to present evidence of 22 separate crimes making up the massacre and proposed reducing that to 20 crimes, a cut of just 9 percent.

DUTCHBAT III RAISED THREE FINGERS IN SREBRENICA (TRADITIONAL SERBIAN NATIONALIST SALUTE)

2011-11-15T00:15:00.000-08:00

In this photo belonging to Dennis Keizers, obtained by Sarajevo-based Dnevni Avaz, his Dutchbat III colleagues raise three-finger salute -- a salute expressing Serbian ethnic nationalism. This is another example of a shameful involvement of the pro-Serbian Dutch UN peacekeepers (Dutchbat) in the besieged Srebrenica. They were raising three-fingers, saluting Serb ultranationalist soldiers, just days before Gen. Ratko Mladic's hordes of evil systematically executed 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, brutally raped many women, and -- with the help of Dutchbat -- expelled 25,000 enclaves residents, effectively making Srebrenica "ethnically pure Serb land."

We also invite you to see Dutch Graffiti in Srebrenica, yet another shameful exhibition of the "neutralist" United Nations in the besieged Srebrenica.

HOLANDSKI UNPROFOR DIZAO TRI PRSTA U SREBRENICI

2011-11-15T00:03:00.000-08:00

Holandski UNPROFOR u Srebrenici dizao tri prsta u slavu četnicima i to nekoliko dana prije pada Srebrenice.

Autor: A. Keserovic

Dnevni Avaz

Fotografija pripadnika holandskog bataljona UNPROFOR-a Denisa Kejzersa (Dennis Keizers) na kojoj njegove kolege, pripadnici holandskog bataljona, u julu 1995. godine u Potočarima poziraju s podignuta tri prsta, još je jedan dokaz sramne uloge ove jedinice u genocidu nad nesrpskim stanovništvom u Srebrenici.

Svakodnevne scene

Ovo je samo jedna od fotografija, koju ekskluzivno objavljuje “Dnevni avaz”, iz perioda pada Srebrenice, a koju je Kejzers postavio na svom Facebook profilu “u znak sjećanja na vojnu službu u Bosni”.

Sramnija je još jedino činjenica da su Holanđani razdragano dizali tri prsta tek nekoliko dana prije četničkog genocida nad muslimanima, kakav Evropa nije upamtila od Hitlera i Drugog svjetskog rata.

Nedžad Handžić, član Udruženja preživjelih žrtava genocida “Drinski talasi”, kaže za naš list da su ovakve scene u Srebrenici bile skoro pa svakodnevne.

- Mnogi od njih su i urinirali pred ženama, starcima i djecom. Bez ikakvog ustručavanja. Bilo je i onih koji su otvoreno govorili da ne vole muslimane, da im smrde.

Ali, najporaznije od svega je što su još u maju 1995. doslovno otpisali jugozapadni dio Srebrenice. Predali su ga četnicima – sjeća se Handžić.

Mašine i rovovi

Ne samo da su Holanđani, nastavlja Hanžić, te godine mašinama zatrpali rovove u Srebrenici koji su služili Armiji RBiH za odbranu grada i golorukog stanovništva, te bez ikakve borbe četnicima predavali osmatračnice, lično je, kaže, slušao i zastrašujuću komandu, šefa holandskih snaga u Srebrenici Toma Karemansa (Thom Karremans).

- Nakon što smo im mi, lokalno stanovništvo, kazali da im četnici ulaze s desne strane i da su već među izbjeglicama, tada su vojnici kontaktirali bazu u Potočarima i razgovarali s Karemansom, koji im je doslovno rekao: “Ostanite gdje jeste i ne poduzimajte ništa!” Ovime je sve jasno ko je bio na čijoj strani – govori Handžić.

Da holandski vojnici nisu štitili civilno stanovništvo u zaštićenoj enklavi Srebrenica, svjedoči i stravična sudbina 14-godišnje djevojčice koju su zajedno s dvije godine mlađom rođakom silovali četnici.

Djevojčica je pronađena obješena 14. jula 1995. u Srebrenici.

- Ona nije vojnik, pa zašto nisu nju Holanđani zaštitili? Brojna silovanja i mučenja u Srebrenici su počinjena i u odijelima holandskih vojnika. Otvoreno sumnjamo da uniforme nisu samo davali četnicima nego da su neki od njih i sami učestvovali u silovanjima srebreničkih žena – govori Handžić.

ED VULLIAMY SPEAKS THE TRUTH

2011-11-10T22:35:00.000-08:00

Photo of Ed Vulliamy testifying at the Bosnian Genocide trial.
Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadzic.

Ed Vulliamy testified at the trial of Radovan Karadzic. In early August 1992 Vulliamy was in a group of British journalist who visited the Omarska and Trnopolje concentration camps at the invitation of the Republika Srpska president, now defending themselves on double genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina.. When Karadzic claimed Vuillamy was ‘anti-Serb’, the witness replied ‘I don’t want to be neutral’ in cases involving racist violence.

Ed Vulliamy was in a group of foreign journalists who were the first to enter the Omarska and Trnopolje concentration camps in the Prijedor region in early August 1992. It was Radovan Karadzic who personally invited the foreign journalist to come and see that it was all, as Karadzic put it, ‘fabrication of the Muslim propaganda’.

Bosniak civilians in Serb-run Trnopolje concentration camp in August 1992.
Credits: RON HAVIV, Blood & Honey.

At the Karadzic trial, Vulliamy recounted that the British journalists were only allowed to enter the camp mess, and not the rooms where prisoners were held. Later he learned that about 80 prisoners ‘who were in better shape’ were selected by Serbian gurds to be paraded before the media. The prisoners were starved and scared to death. ‘I don’t want to lie to you, but I can’t tell you the truth’, a prisoner told the British journalists.

After Omarska, journalists were taken to the Trnopolje concentration camp. The camp was surrounded by barbed wire on three sides and prisoners were held inside. A prisoner told Vulliamy that he had been brought in from Keraterm where about 200 persons had been killed in a single night. The prisoner said that even more people were killed in Omarska.

***

Concentration Camps

By Ed Vulliamy

The laws governing warfare and conflict make no reference to concentration camps. But for more than a century, concentration camps have been a venue for wholesale war crimes and the symbol of the worst abuses against civilians in wartime.

It was a Spanish general, Valeriano Weyler, who established the first reconcentrados or “concentration centers” in Cuba in his drive to suppress the 1895 rebellion. Britain introduced concentration camps on a massive scale during the Boer War from 1899 to 1902. To deny the Boer guerrillas food and intelligence, Gen. Lord Kitchener ordered the British Army to sweep the Transvaal and Orange River territories of South Africa “clean.” Civilians—women, children, the elderly, and some men of fighting age—were herded from their homes and concentrated in camps along railway lines, with a view to their eventual removal from the territory. The Boers, to whom these camps became a symbol of genocide, called them laagers.

The Nazis developed a vast network of Konzentrationslager, using them at first to hold political prisoners, later slave labor, and finally to annihilate European Jewry and to kill large numbers of Poles, Russians, and Gypsies. Of the nearly 6 million Jews killed under Hitler’s “Final Solution,” 2 million died in Auschwitz, the main extermination center.

No one in the post–World War II generation could have anticipated the reappearance of such camps in Europe. On that August 1992 day when my colleagues and I from the British television network ITN alighted from our vans, it was hard to gauge who was more amazed to see whom. Before us, there was a landscape of human misery that seemed to recall another time: men, some of them skeletal, lined up behind a barbed wire fence, with lantern jaws and xylophone ribcages visible beneath their putrefied skin. They, in turn, saw a camera crew and a clutch of reporters advancing across the withered summer grass.

This was Logor Trnopolje, a teeming mass of wretched humanity—scared, sunburned, and driven out of house and home. Among them was the figure of Fikret Alic, whose emaciated torso behind sharp knots of wire would become the enduring symbol of Bosnia’s war, of its cruelty and its echo of the worst calamities of our century. Alic had come from yet another camp, Kereterm, where he had broken down in tears, having been ordered to help clear up some 150 corpses, the result of the previous night’s massacre.

I ventured into Trnopolje, past families crammed against one another on the floor of what had been a school, past stinking holes dug into the ground for what were intended to be cesspits. “I can’t tell you everything that goes on,” said one young inmate, Ibrahim Demirovic, “but they do whatever they want.” A gracious doctor, Idriz, had been put in charge of a “medical center” where he gave us an undeveloped film—it showed his patients, beaten literally black and blue.

The day after the discovery of Trnopolje and Omarska, I shied from calling them concentration camps because of the inevitable association with the bestial policies of the Third Reich. I reasoned that we must take extreme care in relating genocides of our lifetime and the Holocaust, which was singular and inimitable. While thousands were purposefully killed in the gulag of Serbian camps, did that equate with the Nazis’ industrial mass murder of Jews and others?

On reflection, concentration camp is exactly the right term for what we uncovered that day. For here civilian populations were literally concentrated —frog-marched in columns or bused to locations for illegal purposes of maltreatment, torture, abuse, killing, and, crucially, enforced transfer, or ethnic cleansing. Indeed, The UN’s independent Commission of Experts determined after a year long study that Trnopolje was a concentration camp, and Omarska and Keraterm “de facto death camps.”

In general, the laws which would apply to concentration camps address the topic piecemeal, and the principal element is unlawful confinement, a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Confinement of civilians is not necessarily unlawful. “Foreign” civilians who pose a threat to a party to a conflict may be put in “places of internment” or given an “assigned residence.” However, the threat they pose must be genuine, evidenced by some clear action, not merely by their nationality. It is also lawful to remove civilians for their own security in an emergency, such as an impending battle, and set up temporary shelters for them. Even so, they must be returned home as soon as it is safe to do so and be well cared for in the meantime. Also, some civilians may be held or imprisoned as suspects or criminals, so long as they are given due process. In an internal conflict, noncombatants may be interned but are entitled to humane treatment and the judicial protections guaranteed by a regularly constituted court. None of these safeguards exist in concentration camps. Confinement under such conditions is thus unlawful. The arbitrary imprisonment of large numbers of civilians during conflicts—internal or international—can be a crime against humanity.

The themes of the “concentration” and “clearance” of civilians came to dominate the last phase of the Boer War, just as they dominated the entire Bosnian War, most notably in its early stages. As we know, the removal of Bosniaks and Croats from Serbian terrain was not a by-product of a war between armies, it was the raw material, the declared aim, of the Serbs.

The Boer War concentration camps aroused outrage and fury back in Britain, led by temperance crusader Emily Hobhouse. She described “deportations… a burned-out population brought in by hundreds of convoys… semi-starvation in the camps… fever-stricken children lying on the bare earth… appalling mortality.”

The camps provoked Lloyd George to thunder, “When is a war not a war? When it is carried on by methods of barbarism.” Even the all-woman Fawcett Committee, which supported the British war but made intrepid inspections of the concentration camps, was struck by the conditions at Mafeking, where women were washing clothes in water fouled by excreta, or at Brandfort, where an epidemic killed 337 people in three weeks. These places were by no means Auschwitz or Belsen, but they were concentration camps.

The term concentration camp implies not so much a prison or assigned residence for POWs or even civilians, but a role in an overall process of “clearance.” The fact that the Serbs sought to defend Trnopolje by describing it as a “transit camp” confirms the point: there is an entwinement between concentration camps and the forced movement or clearance of population.

In their description of Trnopolje in the trial verdict against Dusko Tadic, judges in The Hague noted that “there was no regular regime of interrogations or beating, as in other camps, but beatings and killings did occur.” They referred to testimony about “dead people wrapped in paper and wired together, their tongues pulled out… and the slaughtered bodies of young girls and old men.” The judges acknowledged that some inmates were allowed to forage for food in the village beyond the camp. But this “in effect amounted to imprisonment,” since many were killed during these excursions, and survivors feared repeating them.

Moreover, “because this camp housed the largest number of women and girls, there were more rapes at this camp than any other. Girls between the ages of 16 and 19 were at the greatest risk… the youngest girl being 12 years of age.” One girl serially raped by seven Serbian soldiers suffered “terrible pains… and hemorrhaging.”

But what hallmarked Trnopolje was the fact that the camp was, as the judges said, “the culmination of the campaign of ethnic cleansing, since those Bosniaks and Croats who were not killed at the Omarska and Keraterm camps were, from Trnopolje, deported.” This is one of the defining essences of concentration camps—that the detaining power wishes to be rid of their inmates, either by killing them, or else by enforced transit elsewhere.

In the case of Trnopolje, these transits—the concentration camp’s purpose—were utterly terrifying. I went on one of them, in this instance of Bosniaks from the town of Sanski Most. Because they were internal displacements, from Serb-controlled northern Bosnia into government-held regions, they attracted little attention aside from the news media.

A year later, in September 1993, I found myself uncovering another concentration camp: Dretelj. This time the inmates were Bosniaks, their guards Bosnian-Croat. Most of the prisoners were locked away in the dank darkness of two underground hangars, dug into facing hillsides. The metal doors had been slid open for our visit, but many men preferred to stay inside, staring as though blind into the ether. “We’re not really allowed out,” said one. These men had been locked in here for up to seventy-two hours at a time, without food or water, drinking their own urine to survive. They all remembered the night in July 1993 when the Croat guards got drunk and began firing through the doors—between ten and twelve men died that night; the back wall of the hangar was pockmarked with bullets.

The plan was simple; the Bosnian Croat authorities explained them to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) at a meeting in the coastal resort of Makarska during the week before our discovery of the camp. The proposal was to ship fifty thousand Bosniak men to a transit camp at nearby Ljubuski, and thence to third countries. The Croatian Foreign Minister Mate Granic said his country would do all it could to help. Would the UNHCR? The aid workers were flabbergasted, caught in a heinous dilemma: to cooperate with the aim of Dretelij and three other concentration camps, or else to leave the men festering in conditions which had been hidden from the International Committee of the Red Cross for two months.

Any such fulfillment of the concentrations camps’ goal is illegal deportation anyway. But in addition to its laws on confinement, the Geneva Convention of 1949 does regulate the transfer of internees—to take the Serbs’ and Croats’ own sanitized description of their concentration camps. This shall, says Article 127, “always be effected humanely,” and as a general rule by rail or other means of transport. “If, as an exceptional measure, such removals have to be effected on foot, they may not take place unless the internees are in a fit state of health.”

The convention continues: “When making decisions regarding the transfer of internees, the detaining power shall take their interests into account, and in particular shall not do anything to increase the difficulties of repatriating them or returning them to their own homes.” At the time of writing, that provision, with regard to those “concentrated” at Trnopolje and Dretelj, remains infamously and horribly unfulfilled.

KINGORI: BOSNIAKS HAD NO ADEQUATE ARMS TO RESIST SERBIAN WAR CRIMES IN AND AROUND SREBRENICA

2011-11-10T22:14:00.000-08:00

BIRN — At the trial of defendants charged with genocide in Srebrenica, a witness for the Prosecution of Bosnia and Herzegovina said that Muslims in Srebrenica did not have weapons which they could use to put up resistance to Bosnian Serbs in July 1995.

Joseph Kingori, former UN military observer in Srebrenica, said that Bosniaks in Srebrenica only had light firearms and because of that they were not able to put up meaningful resistance to the army of Bosnian Serbs.

“The weapons Muslims had could not have been used for resistance, because Bosnian Serbs during the attack used rockets and tanks. Bosnian Serbs attacked targets first with rockets and tanks and then ground troops came in to those territories. I think we cannot call that real resistance,” said the witness.

Kingori gave his statement at the trial of Franc Kos, Stanko Kojic, Vlastimir Golijan and Zoran Goronja, charged by the State Prosecution with genocide in Srebrenica, or, in other words, participation in the murder of over 800 men and boys in July 1995 at the Branjevo military academy.

According to the indictment, Kos was the commander of the First Platoon of the Tenth Commando Unit with the main headquarters of the Army of Republija Srpska, while Kojic, Golijan and Goronja were members of the same unit, and all together they executed prisoners, some of whose hands were tied and eyes blindfolded.

Witness Kingori said that members of UNPROFOR did not direct the population from the territory of Srebrenica to go towards Potocari, but that the civilians headed there because of the shelling.

”UNPROFOR never instructed civilians to go to Potocari. They had to leave the villages in which they lived because of the bombing and come to Srebrenica. When they realised it is not safe there either, they headed towards Potocari,” said the witness.

Kingori said that Srebrenica was shelled before July 11, 1995, and that during those several days in that territory there have been between 20 and 30 wounded persons, and five dead.

”In that period we could not reach some of the areas in the enclave because of the shelling. That is why in those areas we could not check whether there were dead or wounded,” said the witness.

Asked by Slobodan Peric, lawyer of the second defendant Kojic, whether upon arrival to Srebrenica he learned anything about the suffering of the Serb population [note: this is a common tactic of vicious Serbian propaganda], the witness said that he did not receive any reports on the suffering of Serbs in that area.

The next trial is scheduled for November 4 this year, when the examination of two witnesses for the defence of first defendant Kos is planned.

FRANC KOS: VUJADIN POPOVIC ORDERED THE MASSACRE

2011-11-10T22:11:00.001-08:00

BIRN — At the trial for genocide in Srebrenica, indictee Franc Kos says that an officer, whose name, as he found out later on, was Vujadin Popovic, said that the prisoners, who were brought to Branjevo military farm, should be shot, because they were war criminals.

Testifying in his defence before the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kos said that he had never hidden the fact that he participated in the shooting of Bosniaks on Branjevo military farm in July 1995. However, he said that he did not participate in the extermination of the Bosniak population, but he just acted on orders.

“When a bus brought prisoners to Branjevo, an officer, whose name, as I found out later on, was Vujadin Popovic, said that those men should be shot, because they were war criminals,” Kos said.

Indictee Kos said that he was told that he should participate in the shooting of prisoners, who were held in the Cultural Centre in Pilica, as well, but, after that he said that he could not do it any more.

Popovic, former Chief for Security with the Drina Corps of the Republika Srpska Army, VRS, was sentenced, under a first instance verdict pronounced by The Hague Tribunal in June 2010, to life imprisonment for genocide committed in Srebrenica.

The Prosecution of Bosnia and Herzegovina charges Kos, Stanko Kojic, Vlastimir Golijan and Zoran Goronja with genocide in Srebrenica and participating in the murder of more than 800 men and boys on Branjevo military farm in July 1995.

The indictment alleges that Kos was Commander of the First Unit with the Tenth Reconnaissance Squad of the VRS Main Headquarters, while Kojic, Golijan and Goronja were members of that Squad. It further alleges that they jointly shot prisoners, some of whom were tied and blindfolded.

When asked by Defence attorney Dusko Tomic what would have happened had the soldiers refused to carry out the order and shoot people on Branjevo, indictee Kos said that nothing would probably have happened to them at that location, but something could have happened later on.

Kos told the Court that members of the Tenth Reconnaissance Squad of VRS participated in an attack on Srebrenica too. “When we came to a mount near Srebrenica, we found out where we would be going,” Kos said, adding that indictee Kojic and protected witness Z1 participated in that operation.

At this hearing the Prosecution of Bosnia and Herzegovina presented parts of witnesses’ statements given before The Hague Tribunal.

State Prosecutor Dubravko Campara read parts of statements given by former members of the Dutch Battalion based in Srebrenica related to the happenings in Srebrenica from July 9 to 13, 1995.

The Prosecution of Bosnia and Herzegovina presented a part of statements given by Momir Nikolic, former Assistant Commander for Security with the VRS Bratunac Brigade, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison after admitting guilt for participating in the crime in Srebrenica, and Dragan Obrenovic, former Deputy Commander of the First Zvornik Brigade of VRS, who was sentenced to 17 years’ imprisonment.

The next hearing is due to be held on November 11 this year, when the examination of indictee Kos will continue.

SNIMAK SRPSKOG PLJAČKAŠKOG POHODA NA SREBRENICU

2011-11-10T22:10:00.000-08:00

Snimak Srpskog Pljačkaškog Pohoda u Srebrenici koji je napravio Carlos Steiner (VIDEO)

Holandski vojnici zabilježili kako civili i četnici kradu imovinu dok su srebrenički muškarci ubijani

A. Keserović

Dnevni Avaz

Karlos Robert Stajner (Carlos Steiner), veteran kanadske vojske, prošle je sedmice Međunarodnoj komisiji za ljudska prava pri UN-u u Ženevi uputio pismo u kojem vojnike UNPROFOR-a optužuje za sramnu diskriminaciju koju su od 1993. godine provodili nad Bošnjacima u Srebrenici, saznaje “Dnevni avaz”.

Istražiti genocid

Stajner, koji je bio stacioniran na položajima oko Srebrenice, u pismu, čije dijelove ekskluzivno objavljujemo, naglašava da želi izvršiti veći pritisak na međunarodnu zajednicu i UN da se istraži genocid počinjen u Srebrenici, kako bi građani BiH konačno došli do pravde.

- Imam dokaze o kanadskoj odgovornosti u demilitarizaciji Srebrenice 1993. godine, ali i o zločinima protiv čovječnosti koje sam u okolici Srebrenici gledao vlastitim očima – navodi, između ostalog, veteran kanadske vojske.

On je, kako saznajemo, prilikom nedavne posjete BiH dostavio srebreničkim udruženjima i dokazni materijal, videosnimke iz enklave dok su srpske snage provodile genocid. Na obimnom videomaterijalu, koji je u posjedu našeg lista, a koji su, najvjerovatnije, snimali vojnici holandskog bataljona stacionirani u Srebrenici, između ostalog snimljena je i brutalna pljačka domova Srebreničana dok su bošnjačke žene i djeca protjerivani, a muškarci ubijani.

Na jednom od snimaka jasno se vidi kako civili i vojnici pljačkaju muslimanske kuće i imovinu nedugo nakon što su autobusima odvezeni, protjerani i izmučeni Srebreničani.

Žene i starci mahom su krali tepihe, slike i odjeću, dok su naoružani četnici grabili stoku!

Upletenost Kanade

Kanadski vojnik nije otkrio kako je došao do snimaka, ali u pismu upućenom Komisiji za ljudska prava objašnjava da želi podnijeti službenu tužbu radi istrage o upletenosti Kanade, odnosno njenih jedinica pri UNPROFOR-u, u zločine počinjene od 1991. do 1995., posebno od maja do septembra 1993. godine.

- U narednih nekoliko dana sve dokaze koje imam dostavit ću u elektronskoj formi. U tužbi koju podnosim tražit ću finansijsku naknadu za daljnje finansiranje istraživanja o tome šta se desilo u Srebrenici i sjeveroistočnoj Bosni. U ovom postupku sam srcem i više nikada neću napustiti bosanski narod – poručuje Stajner u izjavi za naš list.

Ponižavajući odnos vojnika

Sabra Kolenović, članica Udruženja “Majke enklava Srebrenica i Žepa”, kaže za “Dnevni avaz” da se dobro sjeća diskriminacije koju su kanadski i holandski vojnici provodili nad Srebreničanima te da zbog toga pozdravlja Stajnerove napore u borbi za istinu i pravdu.

- Za razliku od Holanđana, Kanađani su morali sami praviti WC. Veliku nuždu iznosili su u vrećama na smetljište. Misleći da je riječ o bačenoj hrani, gladni narod rovio je po vrećama. Vojnici su im se za to vrijeme smijali, čak ih i slikali. Znali su uzeti i dvije školjke jaja i bacati ih preko rijeke prema ženi koja je u tom trenutku radila poslove oko kuće. Ona je širila dimije da ih uhvati, ali jaja su padala oko nje i razbijala se – priča Kolenović.

Kliknite OVDJE da pogledate snimak!

CARLOS ROBERT STEINER: KRAJNJE NEETIČKI ODNOS KANADSKOG UNPROFOR-a U SREBRENICI PREMA BOŠNJACIMA U OPKOLJENOJ SREBRENICI 1993 GODINE

2011-11-06T14:17:00.000-08:00

Carlos Steiner na polozaju oko Srebrenice 1993. Srpski zlocinci su drzali Srebrenicu u brutalnom okruzenju, paleci bosnjacka sela i ubijajuci bosnjacke zene i djecu 1993 godine.

Faksimil jednog od dokumenata

Bivši pripadnik UN-a iz Srebrenice tuži Kanadu: Stajner: Vojnici UNPROFOR-a muslimane su zvali "džigabu"!

Imali naredbu da ne pomažu "muslimanu starijem od 15 i mlađem od 60 godina"

AVAZ -- Karlos Robert Stajner (Carlos Steiner), veteran kanadske vojske, Vijeću za ljudska prava u Ženevi ovog mjeseca će podnijeti tužbu protiv kanadske vlade zbog diskriminacije koju su nad muslimanima Srebrenice 1993. godine u sklopu misije Ujedinjenih naroda (UN) provodili pripadnici kanadskog bataljona, saznaje "Dnevni avaz".

Ekskluzivno za naš list Stajner, koji je bio stacioniran na položajima oko Srebrenice, gdje je počinjen genocid, ispričao je ovu skandaloznu priču nakon što je prvi put nakon agresije došao u Sarajevo i BiH. Stajner je odao i počast žrtvama Srebrenice u Potočarima.

Striktne naredbe

Tokom razgovora Stajner je priložio i mnoštvo dokumenata koji, osim na četnička zlodjela, nedvojbeno ukazuju i na šokantan odnos njegovih kolega vojnika prema srebreničkom stanovništvu koje je bilo zatvoreno u "zaštićenoj zoni UN-a".

- Od komande UNPROFOR-a 22. maja 1993. godini dobili smo striktnu naredbu da u Srebrenici ne možemo spasiti niti pružiti bilo kakav medicinski tretman "ranjenom muslimanu starijem od 15 i mlađem od 60 godina". Budući da sam u to vrijeme bio drugi u lancu komandne odgovornosti jedne od UN-ovih osmatračnica, otvoreno sam protestirao zbog ovakve odluke - kaže Stajner.

Demilitarizaciju cijele enklave Stajner je 1993. nazvao neetičkom, kao što se pobunio i protiv pogrdnih imena kojima su kanadski vojnici nazivali lokalno muslimansko stanovništvo.

- Muslimane su zvali "džigabu" (jigaboo), što je riječ s veoma ružnim značenjem. Nešto poput termina "crnjo" ili čak "smeće" - govori Stajner.

Srpske linije

On objašnjava da je među kanadskim kolegama bilo i onih koji su činili sve ne bi li olakšali život civilima, ali da je među njima, ipak, bilo više onih koji su okretali glavu i nisu željeli pomoći.

- Samo zato što nisam bio kao oni i što sam se družio i razgovarao s muslimanima željeli su me strpati u zatvor. Protiv mene su pisali i prijave. U jednoj navode da sam jednog "džigabua" pustio u osmatračnicu da posmatra srpske linije. Najgore od svega je što je kanadska vojska sve njihove prijave uzela kao službeni dokument - govori veteran kanadske vojske.

Stajner, koji uz kanadsko posjeduje i švicarsko državljanstvo, naglašava da je 14 godina neuspješno pokušavao potisnuti i zaboraviti užas kojem je u Srebrenici svjedočio i da su ovo samo neki od razloga zbog kojih će ličnu, ali i pravdu za BiH tražiti u Ženevi.

Pravili su mi probleme kada sam krenuo u Bosnu

Stajner kaže da će Vijeću za ljudska prava u Ženevi podnijeti tužbu i zbog diskriminacije koju je u Kanadi doživio uoči nedavnog polaska u našu zemlju.

- Kada sam u vladi Kanade objasnio da, nakon rata, ove godine idem prvi put u BiH kako bih izrazio poštovanje prema bosanskom narodu, jedan od službenika pitao me jesam li ja musliman!? Protiv ovakvog postupka već sam se žalio u Kanadi, a pravnu borbu nastavit ću u Ženevi. Nije uredu da jedan vladin službenik razgovara na ovakav način - govori Stajner.

BEFORE KRAVICA, BOSNIAKS WERE MASSACRED

2011-10-31T01:20:00.000-07:00

CREDIT: The 1992 Suha Massacre. / Region: Srebrenica-Bratunac./ Let us not forget./ Edited by: Daniel Toljaga (originally published via YouTube).

"On 10 May 1992 -- more than three years before the July 1995 Srebrenica genocide, eight months before Naser Oric's counter-attack on the Serb village of Kravica and in the first days of the Bosnian war -- Serbs from the village of Kravice, with the help of the Yugoslav Peoples Army (JNA) and other Serb forces in the region, participated in the massacre of Bosniak civilians in the Bosnian Muslim village of Suha in the municipality of Bratunac, adjacent to Srebrenica. They sexually tortured young women and girls and then killed 38 unarmed Bosniak residents. They dumped their bodies in a local mass grave. Among the 38 exhumed remains were those of nine children ranging in age from 3 months to 11 years, several women and mostly elderly men. One of the victims was the 9-months pregnant Zekira Begić-Hrustanbašić.." - Daniel Toljaga

PRIJE KRAVICE, POKOLJ NAD BOŠNJACIMA

2011-10-31T01:18:00.000-07:00

CREDIT: Masakr u Suhoj 1992. godine / Regija: Srebrenica-Bratunac / Da se ne zaboravi / Priredio: Daniel Toljaga (Preneseno sa YouTube kanala)

"Dana 10. maja 1992 -- više od tri godine prije julskog genocida u Srebrenici, osam mjeseci prije Naser Orićevog kontra-napada na srpsko selo Kravica i u prvim danima rata na ovim prostorima -- Srbi iz sela Kravice su uz pomoć Jugoslovenske narodne armije (JNA ) i lokalnih srpskih snaga učestvovali u masakru nad bošnjačkim civilima (ženama, djeci i starcima) u bošnjačkom selu Suha u obližnjoj opštini Bratunac, odmah do Srebrenice. Mlade žene i djevojke su seksualno zlostavljali, a potom su ubili 38 nenaoružanih bošnjačkih stanovnika. Njihova tijela su bacili u lokalnu masovnu grobnicu. Među 38 ekshumirana leša, bilo je devetoro djece u dobi od 3 mjeseca do 11 godina starosti, nekoliko žena, te stariji muškarci. Jedna od žrtava, Zekira Begić-Hrustanbašić, je bila u devetom mjesecu trudnoće.." - Daniel Toljaga

$1.3 MILLIONA ZA PROPALU SRPSKU PROPAGANDU U AMERICI I GENOCIDNOG 'PESNIKA NJEGOŠA'

2011-10-30T19:13:00.000-07:00

Prelijepa Bošnjakinja Ajla Karajko o propalom Dodikovom govoru na Columbia University u New York-u. Ovaj članak prenosimo sa Bosnjaci.net i drago nam je da se Bošnjaci u Americi napokon bude i staju u odbranu svoje države i svog naroda.

New York: Dodik donirao oko 1,300,000 KM za zadužbinu srpsko-crnogorskog genocidnog pjesnika Njegoša

VILA IZ DODIKOĐIJE

Ajla Karajko

Autor: Ajla Karajko

Svijet je pun ljudi koje možete slušati bez prestanka, ljudi koji prostoriju u koju uđu ispune vedrinom i koji najsivije zidove okreče u nevjerovatne boje svojim riječima. Milorad Dodik nije jedan od takvih.

Predsjednik Republike nam Srpske je na svoj sopstveni govor zakasnio ni manje ni više nego 10 minuta. Ko zna, možda je to njegov način da pošalje poruku podrške onim 10 000 majki Srebrenice. Sumnjam. Ušao je u prostoriju bez pozdrava i sjeo na rezervisano mjesto u prvom redu. Tik ispred mene. U trenutku sam se zapitala kakva sredstva je morao koristiti da bi se dočepao mjesta govornika na jednom od najboljih univerziteta svijeta. Smiješno je, znate. Jedna od glavnih odgovornih osoba zbog koje su i Dejton i integracija u EU ugroženi je pozvan da govori o pomenutima.

Misao mi je prekinuo njegov pogled. Zvirljajući po prostoriji, Dodikove su se oči zaustavile na meni. Pogledi su nam se sreli. Nasmiješio se baš onako kako se nasmiješi nepoznatom gostu na stubištu. Znate ono, nije vam komšija i pozdrav bi bio previše, a opet ne želite biti toliki debil i samo proći pored žive osobe. Baš tako. Moram priznati da mi se u tom trenutku učinio kao čovjek. Čovjek sa tijelom i glavom pričvršćenom na to tijelo, doduše ne baš proporcionalno ali plastična hirurgija je van moje domene. Nešto kasnije sam potvrdila da moja pretpostavka i nije bila pogrešna. Dodik jeste neko ljudsko biće. Ali definitivno nije čovjek. I nema karakternih osobina da bi bio!

Nakon što je dr. Timothy Frye, direktor Harriman Instituta na Kolumbiji završio predstavljanje predsjednika rečenicom čija je jasna poruka bila genocid nije pod znakom upitnika, Dodik je uzeo mikrofon sa podignutim dlakama na glavi. Dodik ne priznaje genocid. On čak i nema pojma šta je to genocid. Ili bar tako priča dok se vozika okolo po razrušenoj Bosni i Hercegovini u svojoj limuzini. Napokon je progovorio. I vjerujte mi, drago vam je što to niste čuli. Nisam lingvista, ali znam razliku između govora koji priliči jednom predsjedniku i govora koji koriste zidari kada se dovikuju sa krovova.

Kako bih izbjegla nepotrebnu frustraciju odlučila sam slušati njegovog prevodioca. Ni on nije puno bolji imajući u vidu da je par puta zatražio pomoć publike, ali eto, razumijem da je teško govoriti strani jezik. Međutim, ne razumijem i ne želim razumjeti da predsjednik jednog dijela naše drage ne govori ne samo bosanski, već ni srpski jezik. Toliko o edukaciji ovoga čovjeka i o njegovom srpstvu.

Neću se previše fokusirati na njegov unaprijed smišljeni govor, isproban bar tri puta u tri države. Podvući ću samo da Milorad Dodik želi jedinstvenu Bosnu i Hercegovinu, koja je trenutno IMAGINARNA zemlja poput svih onih koje su nekada činile veliku Jugoslaviju. Podvući ću, također, da je Republika Srpska jedina REALNA zemlja, čije su institucije i ekonomija SAVRŠENE. Jedini problemi, prema mišljenju Dodika, su sadašnji visoki predstavnik koji krši ustave Dejtona, i bivši visoki predstavnik koji je, eto, napisao memoare. Ne da je to zanimalo ikoga u publici.

U govoru Dodika sam primijetila dosta konflikta, međutim skidam mu kapu za kriticizam međunarodne zajednice i njihovih intervenecija. Predsjednik Republike Srpske je svoj govor završio izjavom da Bosnu i Hercegovinu niko ne voli. Bošnjaci je ne vole jer ne znaju kako napraviti samo muslimansku državu. Hrvati je ne vole jer su već godinama potčinjeni. Srbi je ne vole jer škodi ekonomiji Republike Srpske, inače svjetske velesile. Međutim, nekako Srbi su jedini koje žele jedinstvenu Bosnu i Hercegovinu. Izvinite na izrazu, ali jebo Hollywood i španske serije, kad ovaj čovjek režisira čitavu jednu državu u kojoj on kao glavni lik igra pravi monopol sa živim ljudima.

Tako sam ja sjedila tu i šutjela onako kako majke obično šute kad ih njihova petogodišnjakinja pita šta je sex. Zaprepašteno, nespremno na bilo kakav odgovor, postiđeno također. Šutjela sam jer su se riječi ovoga čovjeka zabile u moje snove o budućnosti Bosne i Hercegovine i ostavile me sa zaprepaštenim izrazom lica. Šutjela sam jer nisam bila spremna da čujem od predsjednika jednog dijela svoje zemlje da je čitav motiv rata iz devedesetih bilo etničko čišćenje onih 30% Srba iz Sarajeva. Šutjela sam jer me je bilo stid onih nekoliko studenata i profesora koji su tu došli da nauče nešto više, da čuju istinu.

Taj moj momenat ni-na-nebu-ni-na-zemlji je prekinut blicem aparata Dodikovog novinara, inače jedinog prisutnog novinara. Zašto mi se čini da je neko i ovdje uvukao svoje krvave prste?

Ubrzo su počela stizati pitanja iz publike. Kažu da ne postoji glupo pitanje, ali ostavljam svakom na lični izbor da prosudi prvih par. “Gospodine predsjedniče, možete li reći odakle vam cifra da je 10 000 Srba izgubilo život tog i tog dana?” – pitao je izborani, ćelavi čovo sa ciničim osmjehom na licu, misleći kako će petocifrenim ciframa zamagliti oči publici. Ne moram napominjati kako je Dodik iskoristio priliku da obavijesti publiku kako su brojke o žrtvama Srebrenice netačne, godinama manipulirane i nepotrebne. Situacija se malo zagrijala kada je mladić pitao zašto predsjednik odbija koristiti riječ genocid. Dodik je okrivio politiku i međunarodnu zajednicu za pogrešno korišten termin, jer Srebrenica je ništa više od samo strašnog zločina. U meni je već vrilo. Podigla sam ruku bez imalo oklijevanja. I znala sam. Znala sam da će od svih podignutih ruku gospodin – moderator izabrati baš ruku mlade plavuše u pink košulji predpostavljajući da neću biti u mogućnosti da se suočim sa gospon. Strašnim i prolongiram već postojeću napetost u prostoriji. Izgleda da mu treba par lekcija o “izgled-vara”. Tako sam ja, iako sa predpostavkom da sam mlada razmazana babina djevojčica, dobila tu čast da postavim posljednje pitanje. Najveći problem mi je bio kako da ga oslovim. “Predsjedniče” sadrži previše poštovanja. “Hej, ti” je ispod mog nivoa. Nisam ga ni oslovila. Bolje je tako. Riječi su samo krenule iz mene: “Prije par minuta ste spomenuli da ne želite biti povezani sa ratnim zločincima Karadžićem, Mladićem, Miloševićem i njihovom politikom. To poštujem. Međutim, ako je tako, zanima me kako to da ste poslali privatni avion po Biljanu Plavšić, te je lično dočekali na aerodromu u Beogradu? Ipak, Plavšićka je osuđeni ratni zločinac. To je činjenica. Međunarodno priznata činjenica.”

Nakon par minuta privatnog razgovora sa prevodiocem, svjestan da nema izbora jer je publika jasno čula i jako dobro razumjela moje pitanje postavljeno na engleskom jeziku, bez intervencije prevodioca koji je konstantno nastojao ublažiti sva pitanja postavljenja na jednom od jezika bivše Jugoslavije, Dodik mi je odgovorio: “Poslao sam avion zato što posjedujem avion. Plavšić je moja prijateljica koja je odslužila svoju kaznu. Opet bih uradio isto.”

Ja imam dvadeset godina. Još uvijek sam student. Dodik je pedesetdvogodišnji predsjednik. Je li suludo što sam očekivala inteligentniji ili ako ništa opširniji odgovor?

U tom svemu, posebno me je začudilo Dodikovo iznenadno razumijevanje ljudskih prava. Također me je začudilo što šerif nije znao koliko je tačno vremena njegova najbolja prijateljica Plavšić provela u zatvoru. Učinila sam posljednje napore i dala mu tačnu cifru. Za dobro vaše jetre, poštedit ću vas detalja o suvišnim komentarima iz publike.

Uslijedio je aplauz onih nekoliko saradnika koji su iskoristili priliku da na račun države obave shopping u njujorškoj petoj aveniji, i Dodik se bez pozdrava zagubio iza zatvorenih vrata. Ja sam otišla po svoju zastavu Bosne i Hercegovine koju mi nije bilo dopušteno unijeti u prostoriju. Pozdravila sam se sa par dragih prijatelja i izašla na glavna vrata. Dočekali su me ljuti, smrznuti ljudi sa plakatima. Protestvovali su. Ne zato što je Dodik održao govor, već zato što im nije bilo dopušteno da čuju taj govor iako su se zvanično registrovali. Neki od tih ljudi su bili predstavnici bosanskohercegovačke misije pri UN-u. Zapitajte se zašto oficijalnim predstavnicima naše drage BiH u Sjedinjenim Američkim Državama nije bio dozvoljen ulaz.

Dodik se nije više pojavio. Otišao je na zvančini prijem na kojem je donirao $1,000,000 za zadužbinu Njegoša, programa koji promoviše studij srpske politike.

Znači da ponovim, Dodik je donirao oko 1,300,000 KM. Pogodite od kud mu te pare. Nije da riječ “korupcija” odzvanja. A sada pogodite koga će to najviše pogoditi? Pomislite samo na gladne, nezaposlene Bosance. Pomislite na pare ukradene iz VAŠEG novčanika.

Eto, tako je u ovom performansu trećerazrednog cirkusa, vila iz Dodikođije doletjela privatnim avionom i iza sebe ostavila 1,300,000KM kao nagradu Amerikancima. Za šta, to je tek da vidimo. Sumnjam da će nas šerif Dodik razočarati. Lično, očekujem sustavnu i legalnu pljačku hiljada građana Bosne i Hercegovine, koja će nas odvesti ni manje ni više nego u totalni finansijski, socijalni i ljudski kolaps.

A svima vama nezadovoljnim građanima poručujem da se obavezno nastavite žaliti na nacionalizam, ali da i dalje birate iste nacionalističke stranke predvođene sebičnim autokratima i kroničnim destabilizatorima bolje budućnosti koji, evo sada i javno, uzimaju iz VAŠIH džepova i daju nekom tamo Njegošu.

PROTESTI BOŠNJAKA U NJUJORKU PROTIV MILORADA DODIKA

2011-10-28T19:41:00.000-07:00

Foto: Bošnjaci protestvuju pojavljivanje Milorada Dodika na Columbia University u Njujorku. Plakat "8,372 NIJE SAMO BROJ" simbolizira broj žrtava Srebreničkog Genocida.

***
***

Video zapis, I Dio: Protest Protiv Dodika i Verbalni Napad na Trifunovića.

Grupa Bošnjaka se verbalno sukobila sa beogradskim profesorom Darkom Trifunovićem, kojeg su nazvali “ekspretom za izazivanje terorizma.”

Ispred poznatog njujorškog ˝University Columbia˝ dogodio se incident, kada je znatan broj Bošnjaka onemogućen prilikom ulaska u prostor gdje je Milorad Dodik, predsjednik Republike Srpske održao govor.

Organizatori skupa pozvali su novinara Erola Avdovića da prati događaj, ali su mu zabranili da postavlja pitanja. On je odbio ući u salu i biti ˝Dodikova nijema publika˝.

Iako su bili unaprijed uredno registrirani, građanima nije bilo dozvoljeno da prisustvuju predavanju. Okupljeni su poručili da se Bošnjaci ne puštaju unutra samo zbog imena.

-U tom će predavanju sigurno blatiti Bosnu i Bošnjake i negirati genocid – poručio je ef. Mehdija Demirović, imam u bh. islamskom centru u Njujorku za BATV productions.

Grupa bh. građana ispred Univerziteta verbalno se sukobila sa beogradskim profesorom Darkom Trifunovićem, kojeg su nazvali ˝ekspertom za izazivanje terorizma˝.

Video zapis, II Dio: Negacija Genocida u Bosni i Negacija Postojanja Bošnjaka.

TURKEY REMAINS CLOSE ALLY OF THE BOSNIAK PEOPLE

2011-10-19T22:20:00.000-07:00

Anniversary of death of Bosnia-Herzegovina's first president, Alija Izetbegovic, is being commemorated in his country 8 years after his passing.

Alija Izetbegovic, ethnic Bosniak, who managed to establish a free Bosnian state despite all difficulties, is considered a ''Father'' by his people.

The late president, who witnessed the most challenging times during years of war between 1992-1995, had been known by Turkish readers earlier with his liberal books ''Islamic Declaration'' and ''Islam Between East and West'' published in 1970s and 80s.

Note: More than any other text, the Islamic Declaration is cited by Serbian nationalist propaganda as evidence of dangerous 'Islamic fundamentalism' in Europe which must be suppressed... or else. Often cited to justify persecution of the Bosnian Muslim civilian population during the former war, the Declaration and its author, Mr. Alija Izetbegovic, former president of Bosnia, have been demonized and frequently blamed for the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. One might explain these accusations as viscous political propaganda brought on by war. However, as early as 1983, Izetbegovic and his writings were the target of a virulent campaign against Islam in Communist Yugoslavia. This campaign had its contemporary roots in the early 1970's when Bosniaks were allowed for the first time to declare themselves as a national group, but its deeper roots may lie in what Serbian scholar Bogdan Denitch calls "the pathological suspicion and hatred of Muslim Slavs."

Serbian propagandists (and other left-apologists) took out of context President Izetbegovic's words from Islamic Declaration (Izetbegovic's book criticising Islamic governments): "There can be no peace or co-existence between the Islamic Faith and non Islamic institutions". Part II of the Declaration, "The Islamic Order," explains how Muslim society should be reorganized based on Islamic principles. Parts of this section are often quoted out of context to prove that the Declaration advocates violence. It is crucial to note that Izetbegovic was speaking here of Islamic countries in which false modernist or conservative Islamic doctrines have been institutionalized in the political and social system. He was simply criticising Islamic governments and in many instances praised Western achievements. He was not speaking of Western countries or his native Bosnia-Herzegovina (Bosnia is not even mentioned in the book). A close reading of the Declaration reveals that Izetbegovic was advocating a cultural, not a political revolution, especially in countries (like Yugoslavia) where Muslims were a minority. As Noel Malcolm pointed out, Bosnia was not even mentioned in Izetbegovic's book and he even praised Christian governments and Christian achievements in arts and science.

In an exclusive interview with Alija Izetbegovic's son and successor, Bakir Izetbegovic said Turkey had always been a close ally of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

''My father, in his deathbed, consigned his country to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan whom he considered a son. Turks have always helped Bosnia, during the terms of office of former Turkish leaders Turgut Ozal and Suleyman Demirel as well. But, there has never been such a group of statesmen (like Mr. Abdullah Gul, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Ahmet Davutoglu) who help Bosnia in the wisest way,'' Bakir Izetbegovic said.

Commenting on the ''Dayton Agreement'', the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bakir Izetbegovic said his father had thought at the time that ''the agreement did not provide fair peace, but any agreement would be better than war''.

''During those days, Dayton just saved the life of a sick person. The person survived, but his body did not function. A state organized according to this agreement cannot be functional. We still need surgeries,'' Izetbegovic said.

''Politicians who provoke Serbians and Croatians against the union of the state is one of the major problems Bosnia-Herzegovina faces nowadays,'' he added.

Turkey, which sees Bosnia-Herzegovina as a heritage of Alija Izetbegovic, keeps extending major political and economic assistance to this country. Turkey displays intense efforts to help Bosnia heal the wounds of war, integrate with the international community and get over its problems.

Within this framework, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has paid 4 visits to Bosnia in a year, moreover, Turkish deputy premiers and ministers travel to this country almost every month.

Tripartite talks between Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia, initiated upon Davutoglu's efforts, have so far yielded to a series of positive results and had repercussions all across the Balkans.

Commenting on the cooperation between Turkey and Bosnia-Herzegovina, Turkish ambassador in Sarajevo Emre Zeki Karagol said the Republic of Turkey had been displaying utmost efforts for the well-being and survival of the Bosnian state.

''Bosnia's welfare is as important as our own well-being to us. Turkey extends efforts particularly for Bosnia's integration with Euro-Atlantic institutions,'' he said.

Karagol also noted that Turkey's help continued in social and cultural matters, moreover, projects implemented by Turkish International Cooperation and Development Agency (TIKA) added momentum to the country's status in foreign politics.

Expressing the importance of economic ties as well, Karagol said Turkey and Bosnia were eager to improve their bilateral economic relations. He said Turkey kept on encouraging its businessmen to invest in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a unique an untouched market for foreign investors.

According to TIKA's Coordinator for Bosnia-Herzegovina, Zulkuf Oruc, his agency had allocated the largest budget for Bosnia after Afghanistan, adding such move proved the importance Turkey attached to this country.

Oruc also said TIKA currently supported a wide range of projects in Bosnia including investments related to infrastructure, renovation of historical artifacts, education and health.

SREBRENICA WAS PRELUDE TO OPERATION STORM

2011-10-18T23:20:00.000-07:00

Peter Galbraith, first US ambassador to Croatia (1993-96)
Interviewed by BH Dani (Sarajevo), 3 August 2001.
Translated by The Bosnian Institute, UK.

In a letter sent by Peter Galbraith to the State Department on 25 July 1995, two weeks after the fall of Srebrenica, he wrote: ‘In view of the wealth of evidence for atrocities in Srebrenica and the likelihood that a mass crime was committed there, I should like once again to request consideration of the possibility of air strikes to help Zepa.’ He went on to report in detail the testimony of an unnamed refugee who had survived Srebrenica, and who that very day had given a UN official in Tuzla a ‘very credible’ account of how after his arrest he had been taken to a ‘small building’ already full of prisoners, from which he was transferred to the stadium at Bratunac. In the stadium General Mladic had assured the prisoners, whose hands were tied behind their backs, that nothing was going to happen to them, after which all the males were taken to Konjevic Polje and shot; he had escaped only by a miracle. Galbraith concluded his letter with a last historic warning to his superior: ‘It is still not too late for us to prevent a tragedy at Zepa. The defenders of Zepa are resisting bravely under attack. There is no doubt whatsoever that they know what awaits them. We must not let them down.’ Dani came into possession of a copy of the letter prior to this interview.

This gives me a strange feeling… I sent that letter marked ‘No distribution’, which is a category used only for the most sensitive material, so that I could be sure it would reach the Secretary of State. And Holbrooke did indeed get it, take it to Warren Christopher, hand it to him and say: ‘Chris, you have to read this, this is the human face of what is going on!’ I was worried that after the fall of Srebrenica we would write off Zepa too, and I went off to meet Christopher a few days after Srebrenica had fallen to discuss this. The UN official mentioned was my wife Tone Bringa – though she was not my wife at the time – who had been at Tuzla airport with two aid workers interviewing refugees. If you recall, at the time the press was writing much less about the missing menfolk, the main stress was on the women and children deported from Srebrenica on buses. Among the others at the airport she met this one man who kept repeating stubbornly: ‘I have to talk, I have to talk!’ Women went up to him, probably to ask about their relatives or husbands, but he answered: ‘Later, I have to speak to someone!’ Tone speaks Bosnian well and realized that he was being very serious, and he explained in great detail what had happened to him. But the two UN aid workers were probably very tired, it was their hundredth interview, so that they did not at all realize the significance of his story. Tone told me about it when she came to Zagreb and we at once understood the importance of what he was saying. I believed that those men and boys had been killed from the moment they disappeared. Five thousand, and now it’s reckoned seven thousand, people cannot just disappear and nobody know what has happened to them.

What led you to that conclusion?

The Bosnian Serb army, its modus operandi. Although I’m no expert on the area, I was here before being appointed ambassador to Croatia, I spoke to refugees who had come in from Prijedor and Kozarac; I was in Banja Luka in October 1992, in Manjaca, which probably wasn’t the worst but it was still dreadful. I simply knew that’s how it was. At all events, this guy gave the first tangible evidence.

Can you remember how things were in Banja Luka in October 1992?

Banja Luka in October 1992 was the most evil-filled place I’ve ever been in. Evil things were so obviously in progress, yet life in the city was superficially normal. The roads were blocked so the Muslim [Bosniak] population couldn’t leave or enter the city. Armed men with shaggy beards and hair and hard faces cruised the streets – nowadays we’d call them chetniks. Planes were taking off from the military aerodrome near Banja Luka and flying over the city in spite of the flight ban. And just outside town ethnic cleansing was in progress. I met with Serb officials, as well as with the Catholic bishop and the leader of the Bosniak community Muharem Krzic, who is an incredibly brave man. We were sitting in the Hotel Bosna when he said, in front of the Serb officials: ‘You should know that while we’re sitting here, only 30 kilometres away in Kotor-Varos mass killing is going on…’

He said it in front of them?

Yes, right in front of them. I was tired, because I’d arrived that day from the States; he thought I wasn’t giving him my full attention, so he asked if we could meet again next day. We met again in the morning.

How did the local Serbs you talked to behave?

We had a normal conversation, to the extent that you can have a normal conversation in such circumstances. I don’t recall exactly what they said to me, but I’m sure they told me about the last five hundred years of Serb history, two genocides in this century… I don’t have to remember the details, I can leave that to the tape. But since I’d brought along a camera, I wanted to have a picture of myself with them, and one of them said: ‘Why do you need that, for the war crimes tribunal, ha-ha!’ I thought that wasn’t such a bad idea either, and now we can see who had the last laugh. This was just before the US presidential elections of 1992. I was worried about Krzic so I rang him from the American embassy in Belgrade and told him – because I knew they’d be listening to us – that if Clinton won he’d intercede personally on his behalf. Then I told a colleague from the embassy that next time he went to Banja Luka he should explain to Krzic that it had been just for the telephone, and that although I’d do everything I could myself, I couldn’t commit the future president of the United States. Unfortunately it took my colleague too long to make the journey and Krzic had already told the press that he had guarantees from Clinton’s personal envoy – which I wasn’t in any case. But I was just trying to save his life, because I admired his courage. Later he was imprisoned and beaten, and I really did intervene as best I could, and eventually he was released and came to Zagreb. Later on, which was really ironic, when the republicans were investigating my role in arms sales, they asked: ‘Who was that guy from Banja Luka and what was that secret meeting all about?’

You have mentioned that anecdote about the war crimes tribunal. During your ambassadorship in Croatia, did you ever believe that the tribunal would issue an indictment against such high-ranking officers?

I always believed that.

Why?

If you read the transcripts of my press conferences, which I can show you because they have been published, you’ll see that. A group of American journalists were attacking the tribunal in 1994, saying that it was ‘a farce’, we were doing it to ‘salve our conscience’, only ‘small fry’ would end up in court – and perhaps not even they. I told them: ‘No, it’s no small matter to be a suspected war criminal: first, the whole world considers you to be a war criminal; secondly, you have to worry about whether anyone’s going to abduct you, whether anyone from your own side is going to betray you, you can’t sleep two nights running in the same bed.’ Mr Karadzic, where are you sleeping now? I doubt whether you ever spend two nights in the same bed. Can you imagine life in constant fear for five or six years, especially if you’re a coward like Karadzic? The second thing I said at that time was: ‘One day your side won’t be in power any longer!’ One day a government will come to power which will conclude that it’s far easier to send you to The Hague than to keep you in the country.

What do you make of the comments coming from the right in Croatia and Serbia, and from Moscow too for instance, that the Hague tribunal is a destabilizing factor in the former Yugoslav republics?

When I was ambassador in Croatia, the first complaint was that the tribunal was proceeding only against Croats, instead of against all the Serb crimes and their perpetrators who should have been at The Hague. Now the Serb perpetrators too are at The Hague, starting with the absolute number one, Slobodan Milosevic, through top-ranking officers to the political leadership, Biljana Plavsic and Momcilo Krajisnik – apart from Karadzic and Mladic, who if they survive long enough will end up at The Hague, I’m sure. So I think the tribunal is an essential factor of stability, for two reasons: because of the arrest of the criminals, but also as a precondition for a durable peace. People have to confront the crimes they have committed and be brought to justice. In Croatia I realized that part of the cause of the recent conflict was the fact that justice was bypassed after the 1941-5 war. Tito came to power, killed as many ustashe as he wanted to, the door was closed and everyone got on with their lives; but a line was not drawn beneath the crimes that had been committed, which allowed the Serbs, instead of saying that Ante Pavelic was responsible, to say: ‘The Croats are responsible!’ Now it’s clear that neither the Serbs nor the Croats are responsible, but individuals: Milosevic is responsible, Karadzic, Mladic, Kordic, Blaskic.

Carla Del Ponte told Dani that the prosecutor was investigating Franjo Tudjman and that if he had lived he too would have been indicted. Did you know about this investigation while you were serving as ambassador in Croatia?

I talked to the prosecutors who were collecting evidence against Tudjman before he died, but the Tribunal had waited too long to investigate matters connected with the case. By that time he was already at death’s door.

How great in your view was Tudjman’s personal responsibility for the crimes committed by units of the Croatian army?

It would probably be wiser to leave that judgement to the historians, or in the case of his subordinates to the courts. There are two separate questions. The first is the involvement of the Croatian government and regime in what we then called the Bosniak-Croat war and the ethnic cleansing carried out at the time. There is no question but that Croatia had a determining influence on the HVO and the HDZBiH. In fact, Tudjman’s influence on the Bosnian Croats was far greater than Milosevic’s influence on Karadzic. That influence was very useful, because Tudjman and Susak brought the war to an end: the moment they signed the Washington Agreement they implemented it. The second question is that of Operation Storm. I have read the indictment against Gotovina, and it’s obvious that the same things apply to the top of the chain of command, i.e. Tudjman. Namely, after it had established control over the territory of the Krajina Serbs, the Croatian Army either participated in or permitted systematic looting and burning, and notably the murder of at least 150 Serb civilians who had remained in their houses. These were not individual acts, they were events that occurred on territory under the control of the Croatian authorities and that could not have occurred unless those authorities had given their approval. This is command responsibility – and a very serious instance of it.

Explain to us the circumstances that led to your famous tractor drive with the Serb refugees leaving Croatia. The Croatian citizens lining the route along which you passed were far from well-disposed towards the columns of Serb refugees.

We have to understand first of all that the Serb population left their homes before the Croatian Army took over, so it is very difficult to defend the view that the Croatian Army drove out the Serbs. This was very different from Prijedor, Visegrad and other places that are synonyms for the Bosnian genocide. But I am quite sure that crimes against humanity were committed after the Croatian Army took control of the Krajina. I’ll explain my tractor drive. Some 40,000 Serb refugees were trapped near Topusko and the Croatian Army had them surrounded. A ceasefire was signed and the refugees were allowed to pass through the Croatian positions near Sisak and on to the motorway leading towards eastern Slavonia. On the first day of the evacuation there was stoning in Sisak, a mob attacked the column and a number of elderly women were killed, while the Croatian police stood by and watched what was going on. I learnt about this only the next morning: it turned out that an Associated Press reporter had been there and he wrote a very good text describing a woman removing splinters of glass from the shawl in which her baby was wrapped. I asked for an interview with Tudjman, which was fixed for midday, and protested against the treatment of the Serb civilians. I told him that in a normal democratic country the minister of the interior would have resigned, or he would have fired him. He lost his temper with me, which often happened…[laughs]… and said I was wrong. I lost my temper too and told him I’d protect the refugees myself if he wouldn’t.

He didn’t believe you’d actually do it.

I didn’t believe it either, but I’d said it so now I had to. We collected all the reporters we could find and went off to join the convoy. My intention was to drive in a bullet-proof car with a prominent US flag, but it was a fine day and I mingled with the refugees and talked to them. I met some guy from Karlovac, his wife and two small children, but in the middle of our conversation the convoy set off and he invited me to join him. I sat on the tractor in Petrinje, and when we got to Sisak the mob was lining the road and things looked very ugly. The people were really out for revenge, the hatred was tangible.

Tudjman never forgave you.

But this time there was a policeman every fifteen metres, very determined to protect the refugees. And in the middle of all this, people recognized me – ‘Oh, look, there’s Peter Galbraith!’ – and began to wave at me, so I waved back. And yes, Tudjman never forgave me. Up to then we’d had very good relations.

What did he say to you?

He never said anything explicitly, but we had far less contact.

He called you a ‘tractor diplomat’

That was later. I was in London at the time of a HDZ congress and he made a speech about red-green witches and tractor diplomats. But that was in the Croatian version of the speech, in the English translation it wasn’t even mentioned.

In an interview with Croatian radio and TV you said that your government had known about Operation Storm before it began. Can you give us a few more details about this?

We have to go back to that time, remember how we were thinking then. Srebrenica had already fallen, it was becoming more and more clear that the missing menfolk had been killed. Zepa was about to fall, and then the assault on Bihac followed, in which not just Bosnian but also Krajina Serbs took part. In the London Declaration it was written merely that we would ‘protect Gorazde’, but there wasn’t a word about Bihac, or Zepa. I sincerely believed that if Bihac fell, there’d be another Srebrenica but four times bigger. The Croats had some perfectly legitimate interests too, since if Bihac fell the strategic encirclement would alter to Croatia’s disadvantage, since a compact western-Serb state would have been created. They’d always planned to attack the Krajina, but initially intended to do so in November, since the weather would still be good enough then to launch the assault from the coast, but it would be harder for Serbia to support the Krajina logistically through Bosnian territory. However, they realized that after the fall of Srebrenica and in the middle of a Serb offensive against Bihac, the sanctions and international pressure they were so afraid of would be far milder. This was a cunning move. I knew about the decision only around 21 July. Susak hosted a party in honour of our military attaché, at which he informed us of the Croatian authorities’ decision to launch the operation on 1 August.

It’s still not entirely clear how it came about that the Croat forces halted their advance before Banja Luka. Your testimony could throw additional light on the circumstances under which the operation was called off.

That was one of the absolutely key moments in the war. Even now I can’t tell you whether we did the right thing. Perhaps we did, perhaps we didn’t…

What was your problem?

I’ll tell you what my problem was at the time, and how I look at things today. It was September and Holbrooke had arrived with his team. Ordinarily we two would first have gone directly to Tudjman and talked with him for an hour, an hour and a half, before joining his ministers. We were waiting outside Tudjman’s office, Holbrooke had come in from Belgrade, with instructions from the Secretary of State to tell Tudjman not to take Banja Luka, and he asked me what I thought about it.

Was he in two minds too?

It was my impression that Holbrooke didn’t think he had to obey his instructions, since on previous occasions he hadn’t obeyed them either. And he asked me. People on the inside will tell you that I was a hawk, that I called for military intervention and favoured a military solution. But at that moment I too had certain doubts. My doubts related to two things: one was the refugee population from western Bosnia and the Krajina which was in the area, as well as the local population, since I had already seen the Croats in action. It’s true that the city was in the hands of people whom I consider fascists, but there were normal people there too, women and children, innocent people. I was worried about the potential consequences of the 400,000-strong wave of refugees that would have passed through the Posavina corridor and Brcko, and the humanitarian catastrophe it would have produced. On the other hand, I was afraid we might replace one problem by another. In other words, if Tudjman took Banja Luka would he give it up? I’d often heard him talking about how Banja Luka had traditionally been oriented towards Zagreb, and I know what that meant: when we divide up Bosnia, Banja Luka will be in Croatia. I think Holbrooke was influenced by the fact that Milosevic had told him that in Banja Luka there were Serbs representing an alternative leadership to Pale. We discussed this and both came to the conclusion that we should tell Tudjman to halt. Holbrooke told him that. It was a very hard decision, and if we’d felt only slightly differently it would have been different. Sometimes history is made not by big, carefully pondered strategic decisions, but precisely like this.

How does it strike you from today’s perspective?

The reason for allowing Croatia to take Banja Luka was that it would have meant the total collapse of the Bosnian Serbs and the fascist principles they espoused. It would have been far easier to reconstruct the country in the conditions of a total Serb defeat than it is at present. And we did think about this at the time. But even today I don’t know the right answer. The peace would have been far more stable if the Croatian Army had taken Banja Luka.

In other words, you regret your decision?

Not necessarily. The other side of the coin is the question of how many more people would have died. I don’t know what the price is. I only know these are hard decisions that cannot be avoided. We had the responsibility for taking that decision and I think we took it on the basis of the best possible assessment we could make at the time. During the past six years I’ve thought about it every day.

Moving on to something else, given Tudjman’s views on Bosnia we see him as the ideal type of politician Samuel Huntington had in mind when he wrote Clash of Civilizations. By the end of your period of service Tudjman certainly wasn’t fond of you, but you always had very frequent contact with him. Tell us something about your conversations in the context of his views on Bosnia, Muslims and civilizational differences.

Tudjman was very different from Milosevic, although people are only too ready to say they are just the same. They were completely different personalities. Milosevic was the biggest opportunist I’ve ever seen, whereas Tudjman was very rigid, knew what he wanted and what he believed. His only problem was that he lived in the wrong century, since he belonged more to the nineteenth century than to the twentieth.

Which was our misfortune.

And Croatia’s too. His view of the world was historically determined, and as you perhaps know his favourite writer was Huntington. Clash of Civilizations was his favourite book. He always used to explain to me and the visitors I brought to see him that the Balkans were the site of a clash of civilizations, in which Croatia was the eastern frontier of Western civilization, Serbia embodied the unknown and mysterious Orthodox world, while the third participant in the conflict was Islam penetrating into Europe and represented by the Bosnian Muslims. I tried to persuade him not to use this line of argument, especially in front of visitors, because it didn’t convince anybody; everyone simply left him thinking the guy was the most incredible racist. All the congressmen who came solidarized with Bosnia. I wanted to arouse some sympathy in them for Croatia too, but Tudjman constantly prevented it! I’d tell him: ‘Don’t do that! Tell them how you want to help the Bosnians and oppose the Serbs.’ And I developed a whole line of argument to use whenever I discussed with him. I’d tell him: ‘That’s very interesting, Mr President. I’m not a great historian like you, but I understand my country and I’d like to explain to you how the Americans see things.’

He knew you were a Harvard historian. Did he understand the irony in your words?

No, he was incapable of irony… [laughs] … But let me finish. So I’d say to him: ‘They watch on TV the Bosnian Serbs shelling Sarajevo and squeezing the besieged city and they say: “Christ, what barbarians!” And then, to be frank with you, they watch Mate Boban and the destruction of Mostar and the demolition of the Old Bridge and they say: “Those Croats are barbarians too!” When they see the citizens of Sarajevo, women in high heels, men in suits, trying to get to work or queuing for bread or water while the shelling continues, they say: “Those people look like us, they’re Westerners, they’re ordinary people just like us!” But those people, Mr President, are Muslims!’ At that time our relations were still friendly, he wouldn’t say anything, we’d move on to something else. Two days later I’d arrive for another meeting and he’d begin to develop his theory all over again.

How do you assess the current position of the Bosniaks? Do they have real reasons to fear for their survival, squeezed as they are between two obviously very powerful nationalisms that have unconcealed designs upon parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina?

I’m an optimist concerning the future of both Bosnia and the Bosniaks. Many people saw the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina as the path to the future: the cold war was over, and we were entering a period of chaos, the stability of a bi-polar world had vanished, and B-H was an introduction to this future. On the contrary, I think it was an echo of the past. The nation-state on the threshold of the twenty-first century does not have the importance it had at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is no longer the defining institution of human life; local institutions like the village, town or region are growing in importance. Supra-national institutions like the EU, or for that matter the UN, WTO, OSCE or Council of Europe, are important too. People today travel far more, there are no barriers to interpersonal communication via the Internet, more and more we have a common language available to us in the form of English. I presume that Croatia and Serbia – I say Serbia, because in the long run I have my doubts about the future of Yugoslavia – will join the European community and be interested in supra-national problems, while the importance of the national question will diminish. Can you imagine the Croatian Kuna existing in twenty years time? Probably not, Probably Croatia will be using the Euro. Perhaps in twenty years the danger threatening Bosnia from Croatia will be no greater than the danger threatening Switzerland from Germany, Italy or France.

Has the fact that the Bosniaks are also Muslims been seen in some international circles as posing a fundamentalist threat? Has their adherence to Islam aroused suspicion and made their position more difficult in international circles?

That’s true. There was no basis for it in reality, but that fact did make things more difficult. In my country too there were people looking for a new enemy. But I think the justice of the Bosniak cause eventually prevailed, which can best be seen in the reaction of the Jewish diaspora, which identified with the Bosnian Muslims. By contrast, real hostility prevailed among them towards the Croatian government, even though Tudjman tried to help the Jewish community in Croatia; but that was to no avail, because people would constantly return to his links with the ustashe. Not personal links since he was a partisan, but his attempts to rehabilitate the ustasha movement.

He was booed at the opening of the Holocaust Museum in Washington.

Right. That was a bit unfair, because the Jewish community was fully protected by the Tudjman regime; but no one could get over that obscene idea of reburying ustashe at Jasenovac.

What was your impression of Milosevic? Were you too one of the many international victims of his ‘charm’?

Generally speaking, I think I’m immune to charm, and his charm too completely escaped my notice. I met him in 1992, in Serbia, while I was working for the foreign affairs committee; I was impressed by the fact that he was very articulate in English, but thought: ‘That guy’s lying!’ I went away from that meeting dissatisfied. We had long conversations at Dayton, but frankly he was drunk. At our first meeting at Dayton we were discussing eastern Slavonia, it was his first meeting with Tudjman after several years, also present were Christopher, Susak, Milan Milutinovic, Holbrooke and I. He was 35 minutes late! What can you do on the military airport at Dayton, Ohio?! He was in the officers’ club and after lunch he got drunk. Christopher and Tudjman drank white wine, and in the course of an hour and a half they drank a glass each, while Milosevic ordered a bottle of white wine and my only job during the meeting was to see how many times he filled his glass. At the end they all went off and left us two, and the high point of the meeting was when he told me – because I was supposed to go to eastern Slavonia to continue mediation – that this was a waste of time. At the end of the supper I asked the waiter how much wine Milosevic had drunk: a bottle and a half!

Did you get the impression he really had no problem with dropping the Krajina Serbs and returning the occupied parts of Sarajevo?

At the meeting on eastern Slavonia Milosevic insisted that its future should be decided by a referendum, while Tudjman would accept nothing except unconditional reintegration. And after a long wrangle Milosevic said: ‘OK, there won’t be a referendum!’ Just like that! He was never concerned about the human rights of the Serbs in Croatia. Christopher told me to prepare a briefing on the agreement for eastern Slavonia, and of the fourteen points in the agreement I drafted seven. They all had to do with the human rights of the Serbs in Croatia. Although I tried to get Milosevic fired up about this, he never showed the least interest. It was completely unimportant to him. That guy doesn’t believe in anything, his feeling for Serb rights is non-existent.

Croatia became a member of the Council of Europe during Tudjman’s regime, while Bosnia has to go through a very long and complicated procedure before entering this European institution. Can you comment on this?

This is a very interesting example of the European modus operandi. In the case of Croatia, the Council of Europe drew up a list of forty conditions it had to fulfil before becoming a member. Three months went by, Croatia didn’t fulfil a single one of those forty conditions, yet it became a member. Our policy was different: we demanded fulfilment of the conditions we’d set for entry to the Partnership for Peace and we never relaxed them. It seems to me that if Croatia became a member of the Council of Europe, then so should B-H. The conditions they set were good conditions, but it’s not clear to me how the conditions for Croatia can be different from the conditions for B-H.

Let us return once more to Srebrenica. Are you disappointed at the failure to act, in view of the fact that the information you sent in remained hidden during the following months? If these facts had been revealed in time, at least Zepa might have been saved.

I was disappointed that we didn’t do anything to save Zepa. I think that my letter and the fall of Srebrenica changed a lot. They changed American policy, the US no longer had any objection to Operation Storm, the military operation which changed the regional dynamics and led to the defeat of the Bosnian Serbs. I think my letter and the information it contained had some influence, and helped to save Bihac.

DR. ANN ROSS: EPIDEMIOLOGY OF THE SREBRENICA GENOCIDE

2011-10-18T21:49:00.000-07:00

Starvation was widespread in the besieged Srebrenica. Bosniak children and elderly regularly died of hunger. Others were hunted down by Serbs and slaughtered. Footage shows the aftermath of the Srebrenica Children Massacre, April 1993. Video screenshot courtesy of CNN.

..............................................................

Photo of starving Bosnian Muslim children in Srebrenica under Siege (1993). Footage from ABC , Tony Birtley reporting from Srebrenica (1993).

........................................................................

Forensic Science Policy & Management: An International Journal (Volume 2, Issue 2, 2011); “Epidemiology of Genocide: An Example from the Former Yugoslavia,” pages 94-102; DOI:10.1080/19409044.2011.604378; Ashley Maxwell & Ann H. Ross.

Researchers from North Carolina State University are proposing a health-based approach to identifying groups at high risk of genocide, in a first-of-its-kind attempt to target international efforts to stop these mass killings before they start.

Genocide, or the willful attempt to exterminate a specific population, is a violation of international law. In recent years, international discussion of genocide has focused in part on finding ways to identify populations at risk in order to prevent a problem before it starts.

Some risk factors have already been identified, such as severe state oppression of a group or a regional history of genocide. Now researchers are offering a new risk factor for consideration: a population’s health and its track record of prenatal care.

“This is a data-driven approach that we developed by analyzing the remains of genocide victims. There can be no confusion or claims of inaccurate reporting from third parties. The bodies of the victims speak for themselves,” says Dr. Ann Ross, professor of anthropology at NC State and co-author of a paper on the research and proposed risk factor. This effort marks the first time researchers have used skeletal analysis to assess the overarching health of genocide victims before their murder.

Ross and her co-author, former NC State graduate student Ashley Maxwell, began by analyzing remains of Bosnian Muslims from the Srebrenica massacre – where 8,000 men and boys were killed in 1995. Ross is a forensic anthropologist and worked extensively in the Balkans during the late 1990s to help identify the remains of genocide victims.

There are multiple factors for the advent of war, and in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda nationalistic goals and political control were used to justify the genocide of thousands of individuals, mainly males of battle age, between sixteen to sixty years of age. War and genocide have detrimental effects on population health due to population displacement, food shortages, and the decline of health services.

The skeletal remains of victims from Srebrenica, Bosnia, were analyzed for pathological conditions to assess general health and were compared with other countries that have experienced genocide to evaluate health issues in various parts of the world. Approximately 35% of the skeletal sample shows evidence of congenital and pathological conditions that may be population specific, which indicates that declining health was prevalent before the war, especially prenatal requirements for expectant mothers. In addition, data on general health from Rwandan and former Yugoslavian refugees showed a prevalence of acquired pathologies, mainly AIDS, while Bosnian and Herzegovinian refugees showed an increase in tuberculosis and heart diseases after the war.

The skeletal and clinical research details the health problems that existed before and after the wars/genocide, and shed light on the current health problems that still need to be addressed. Marginalized and vulnerable groups, such as victims of genocide, need immediate action to prevent morbidity and mortality in the future. This study may be the first to outline the health status of victims of genocide and identify group marginalization as a path to genocide.

Available: Download Full Text!

VIDEO: NASER ORIC & RIGHTEOUS DEFENDERS OF SREBRENICA

2011-10-15T13:47:00.000-07:00

You're about to watch a rare war footage of Naser Oric and a group of his heroic comrades who defended Srebrenica from Serbian fascists. Oric's Srebrenica defenders could be compared to groups of Jewish Partisans who fought Nazis in World War II. According to Jerusalem-based Yad Vashem, Serbian Chetniks were killing Jews during the Holocaust.

In the first three months of the Bosnian war (April to June 1992) Serb fascists, stationed in villages around Srebrenica, torched to the ground almost 300 Bosniak settlements and villages around Srebrenica.

Naser Oric counter-attacked Serb villages because they were -- in the words of the International Criminal Tribunal -- legitimate military targets; they were heavily armed villages, used as launch-pads for deadly attacks on Srebrenica and Bosnian Muslim villages in the besieged enclave. Serbian villages around Srebrenica could be compared to Nazi villages during Second World War -- they were used as convenient terrorist bases from which Serbian fascists launched attacks against emaciated refugee population of the besieged Srebrenica.

Serb soldiers and civilians participated in torture, rapes, and mass killings of Bosniaks in the besieged enclave of Srebrenica between April 1992 and July 1995. In July 1995, as confirmed by the judgments of the International Criminal Tribunal, Serb soldiers and civilians also participated in the Srebrenica massacre.

Thank God Srebrenica had Oric. Watch this video ↓

ICTY BARS 2 SEPARATE GENOCIDE TRIALS FOR RATKO MLADIC

2011-10-13T10:51:00.000-07:00

Correction made: AFP inaccurately reported that Serbs killed 30 Bosniaks during the Bisina massacre. In fact, the correct number is 39 killed. See Tolimir's indictment.

Exterior view of Bronovo hospital where
Ratko Mladic is being treated in The Hague.

THE HAGUE (AFP) — Judges trying Bosnian Serb ex-army chief Ratko Mladic on war crimes charges turned down Thursday a prosecution bid to hold two separate trials, the first focusing on the Srebrenica massacre.

"The Trial Chamber today denied the prosecution's request to sever the indictment against Ratko Mladic," a statement said, upholding a challenge filed by Mladic's lawyer Branko Lukic against the prosecution bid.

Splitting the proceedings in two "could prejudice the accused, render the trial less manageable and less efficient, and risk unduly burdening witnesses," the judges said.

"Participating in the pre-trial preparations of one case while simultaneously participating in the judgement or appeal stage of the first trial could unfairly overburden the accused and limit his ability to participate effectively in either."

Mladic, also named "the Butcher of Bosnia", faces 11 counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in Bosnia's 1992-95 war.

Among other charges, the 69-year-old former general is accused of masterminding the murder of some 8,000 Bosniak men and boys over a six-day period in Srebrenica in July 1995, in Europe's bloodiest episode since World War II.

Prosecutor Serge Brammertz asked the court in August for the trial to be split in two.

One trial would deal solely with the Srebrenica massacre, and the second with the rest of the charge sheet: the 44-month siege of Sarajevo which claimed some 10,000 lives, crimes committed in other Bosnian municipalities, and the kidnapping of UN personnel.

Brammertz had argued that "two short trials instead of a long trial is the most efficient, the best way to manage this case", with the Srebrenica trial to be heard first.

Families of Srebrenica victims of the Srebrenica hailed the bid, saying they feared Mladic would die before being judged, as happened with his erstwhile mentor, former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic.

But the judges found that two trials could be "considerably less efficient", and would mean that witnesses would have to testify twice.

They also rejected as "speculative and unsubstantiated" the prosecution's arguments that split trials would be easier to manage should Mladic's health deteriorate.

In Sarajevo, Munira Subasic of the Association "Srebrenica mothers," said she was "surprised and hurt" by the court's decision.

"We have demanded from the prosecutor and the court to split the charges as all will depend on Mladic's state. We are very afraid that he might die and his enormous crime to die with him," Subasic told AFP.

"There are already enough evidence on Srebrenica massacre which have been established by the Tribunal and a verdict could be brought very quickly, the process could be very fast and efficient," she said.

Mladic was arrested in northeast Serbia on May 26 after 16 years on the run. He was transferred to the UN's detention unit a few days later and made his first appearance before the court on June 3, where he told judges he was "gravely ill".

On Tuesday, his lawyer said Mladic had been hospitalised with pneumonia.

The judges granted a prosecution request to add the alleged murders of 39 Bosniaks in the municipality of Bisina in southwest Bosnia in July 1995 to the charges against Mladic, and ordered that a third amended version of the indictment be filed within seven days.

Mladic would be given an opportunity to plead to the new charge on November 10.

IS RATKO MLADIC DYING?

2011-10-12T14:14:00.000-07:00

Ratko Mladic in court. He is indicted for the Bosnian Genocide in connection with genocide in municipalities of Kotor Varos, Prijedor, Srebrenica and several other districts (his indictment was shortened several times).

Ratko Mladic is suffering from pneumonia, he is dehydrated, can't drink any water, refuses to (or can't) eat anything, and his weight has dropped to only 56kg (123 pounds), according to Banja Luka daily Nezavisne, citing information given by Mladic's lawyer Branko Lukic.

Survivors of the Srebrenica Genocide -- mothers and sisters of 8,100 systematically murdered boys and men -- held a peaceful monthly meeting to commemorate Srebrenica in Tuzla yesterday (11th of each month). They stated they wish Ratko Mladic to stay in good health so he could live to see his conviction for genocide.

This blog also wishes Ratko Mladic to get well soon. We need you Ratko to stay alive so we can convict you. Please stay strong, we will pray for you. You will be convicted. The justice will be served.

To the ICTY: If Mladic continues to refuse food and water, he should be forcibly fed so his life can be saved. It is important to keep him alive until he becomes officially convicted for the Bosnian Genocide. His indictment includes charges for the Bosnian Genocide (including genocide in Kotor Varos, Prijedor, Srebrenica, and several other municipalities).

YASUSHI AKASHI: ARCHITECT OF DISASTER IN BOSNIA

2011-10-12T00:08:00.000-07:00

By Georgie Anne Geyer

Victoria Advocate, p.10A

11 July 1995.

TOKYO — On Saturday, I wrote about how one man — Japanese U.N. diplomat Yasushi Akashi — had almost singlehandedly formed the disaster that is closing in upon us in Bosnia.

After talking with important diplomatic and journalistic friends of his here, I have come to the inescapable conclusion that this man is not at all the pacifist many believe him to be – nor is he a classic U.N. “neutralist at all costs,” as he described himself to me.

Instead, after my research here and elsewhere, Akashi, a man of considerable charm and intelligence, turns out to be a classic Japanese nationalist, trying to gain Japan a place in the world politically and militarily (above all, he has wanted Japanese soldiers prominently under U.N. banners).

His is also a contorted pseudo-U.N. neutralist ideology that has (as his good friends admiringly admit) frankly played up to the Serbs and flattered them to get them to throw down their arms and say,” Here’s to peace in the world!”

What, you may ask, is the matter with that? Well, since we are now at the moment of truth in Bosnia — the U.N. troops have to be withdrawn or Akashi’s bloodless and masochistic United Nations has to be really oppose the Serbs — let us start with the most important answer to that question.

Akashi’s now clear and sick policy of humbling himself (and, thus, the entire U.N.) to the Serbs will not work because it cannot. These thugs and criminals are “mountain” Serbs who fight dirty unless contained, when they rather easily give in to superior force.

Instead of assuaging fears these Serbs have about the outside world, gestures of “understanding,” a la Akashi, are simply taken contemptuously as the obeisances that weakness rightly pays to strength. And so, the more U.N. troops come, as with the new European “reaction force,” and the more Akashi assures the Serbs that even that force is only there to back up his policies of “reconciliation,” the more the Serbs revel in their military superiority and conquest.

So Akashi’s nearly unilateral policy of flattering and supinely agreeing with every depredation of the Serbs has merely encouraged them to keep fighting for more. Akashi, because of his own strange compulsions and the complications cowardice of the West, has constantly expanded the war.

This one man has been allowed to make such world-shaking decisions by, first, the weak willingness of the Security Council members (most definitely including the United States) to pass hapless resolutions over Bosnia, and, then, to give them to Akashi to carry through as special representative.

Because of the chaotic lack of structure of the United Nations — it has no army, no generals, no legal system, no real accounting, nothing of what constitutes a real, tested military — one man like Akashi, who is left to coordinate everything with no real controls on his work and personal intentions, can have unparalleled power.

And so, it has been he who has decided, time after time, that the U.N. soldiers should not be protected from the Serbs (that would “unnerve” the Serbs) and that no humiliation was too great for him to force the U.N. to stomach — all, of course, in the wondrous name of peace.

Finally, we come to Akashi’s intentions, and based upon what I have seen in Bosnia and heard from people close to him here and in the United States, I believe he is almost consumed by hatred of the West in general and of the United States in particular. In this, too, he identifies with the Serbs.

His mentality has been formed by a lifetime spent as a U.N. bureaucrat (a job that Japanese have historically disdained). It is formed by a Third Worldism that reinforces hatred of the South against the North. It is also formed by his experience of seeing America occupy Japan when he was only a boy and by his subsequent education in America.

Whatever the details of his motivation and psyche, the contours of what they have led to are now clear. Bosnia has become the paradigm for the overwhelming failure of the responsible countries and alliances of the world, destroying the hope of the post-Cold War world. The younger generation of the world has seen its leaders side with the Serbs, some of the bloodiest killers since the Nazis. NATO, which Akashi wantonly brought in, never to use except as a “bluff” to the Serbs, is seriously threatened.

And the leaders of Europe and the United States — who somehow were not paying attention as all these depredations occurred in their names — are now faced with either trying to bring the U.N. soldiers out as still another winter approaches, or sliding deeper into the Bosnian abyss.

And you know the oddest part? Most of them wouldn’t even know Akashi’s name.

SERB REFUSES TO TESTIFY AT GENOCIDE TRIAL

2011-10-11T22:15:00.000-07:00

Update: Dragomir Pecanac was the third most responsible person for the Srebrenica Genocide, after Ratko Mladic and Ljubisa Beara.

Photo: Dragomir Pećanac. Courtesy: ICTY.

A former security and intelligence officer in the Bosnian Serb army refused on October 10 2011 to testify in the genocide trial of his commander at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Dragomir Pecanac faces contempt of court charges after failing to comply with a subpoena ordering him to give evidence in the trial of Zdravko Tolimir, who was an assistant commander in the Bosnian Serb army and reported directly to its leader, Ratko Mladic, the UN News Centre said.

The ICTY issued a warrant for the arrest of Pecanac late in September 2011 and he was subsequently transferred to the custody of the UN Detention Unit in The Hague, where the tribunal is based.

Making an initial appearance on October 10 in his own contempt of court case, Pecanac did not enter a plea. All accused in contempt cases must enter a plea within 10 days of their initial appearance.

Later today, during the ongoing trial of Tolimir, Pecanac refused to testify as a witness, the ICTY said in a media statement.

The trial of Tolimir – who is charged with genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, extermination, murder, persecutions, forcible transfers and deportations – continues. The charges relate to a series of events during the Balkan wars, including the notorious massacre of thousands of Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995.

BOSNIAN MUSLIMS CONVERTING TO CHRISTIANITY?

2011-10-11T14:29:00.000-07:00

After a brutal persecution, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, it has recently been reported that a small number of Bosnian Muslims have voluntarily converted to Christianity. It is distasteful that some people would resort to such measures, because the survival of Bosnia-Herzegovina is tightly knitt on our ethnic identity, and our ethnic identity is defined by our faith. We wonder: How can people simply flush their roots down the toilet and change their identity? It's part of us, our parents, our grandparents...

Bosniaks are Muslims, while Serbs and Croats are Christians. Both Serbs and Croats would be more than happy to secede from Bosnia-Herzegovina (if they could) and join Great Serbia and Great Croatia, while Bosniaks oppose any secession moves. Without Bosnian Muslims, there would be no Bosniaks, and without Bosniaks, there would be no Bosnia-Herzegovina! Is that really what you want?

According to the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), Croatian woman Vanya Bule "runs Emek Beraka, a ministry that helps organize the summer outreach programs." With the help of this ministry, some former Bosnian Muslims -- like Meri Hukura, Albin Hadzic, David Hadzic, Selma Mujakovic, Dina Hukic, Eldina Husarkic, Arnesa Besic, to name a few -- have already abandoned their Bosniak roots and actively participate in inviting others to do the same.

In the name of hundreds of thousands of Bosnian Muslim victims of ethnic cleansing,

In the name of all the suffering we went through,

In the name of Srebrenica,

Shame on you all.

WHAT DOES REPUBLIKA SRPSKA WANT?

2011-10-11T00:38:00.000-07:00

Bosnia: What Does Republika Srpska Want?

International Crisis Group

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Republika Srpska’s flirtation in June 2011 with a referendum is a reminder that Bosnia’s smaller entity still threatens the stability of the country and the Western Balkans. It is highly unlikely that the RS will secede or that the Bosniaks will attempt to eliminate it, but if its Serb leaders continue driving every conflict with Sarajevo to the brink, as they have done repeatedly to date, they risk disaster. The agility of leaders and the population’s patience need only fail once to ignite serious violence. Over the longer term, RS’s determination to limit Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) to little more than a coordinator between powerful entities may so shrivel the state that it sinks, taking RS with it. RS also suffers from its own internal problems, notably a culture of impunity for political and economic elites and a lingering odour of wartime atrocities. Its leadership, especially its president, Milorad Dodik, needs to compromise with Sarajevo on state building and implement urgent entity-level reforms.

The RS threatened a referendum early in 2011 that could have provided support for a Serb walkout of Bosnian institutions and brought BiH back to the brink of war. The situation was defused in June, when the European Union (EU) offered a dialogue process on the judiciary, whose reform the RS was demanding. State and entity officials sat down and began to review the county’s complex judicial system with an eye to harmonising it with the EU body of law (acquis communautaire). The process will be long and painstaking, but RS can achieve effective change only by working through the BiH Parliamentary Assembly and Constitutional Court.

The international community has wrestled with RS for years. Given a free choice, many in the entity would prefer independence, but this is unacceptable to the rest of Bosnia and the international community. The RS is too weak to fight its way to independence and would not achieve international recognition as a state. Its leaders reject much of the internationally-led state-building project that has given Bosnia its current administrative structure. Some Bosniak and international observers believe international will has flagged, giving Serbs room to sabotage the state, while other international and Serb observers argue international interventions keep Serbs in a bunker mentality. The EU’s response, aided by the U.S. and others, to the political and legal challenge the RS posed in June offers a non-coercive alternative from which it will be difficult for any party to walk away.

Bosniaks, Croats and the international community have little choice but to engage with RS elites, especially President Dodik. He is the most populist and difficult leader the RS has had for years, but he and his party have strong support. The opposition did better than expected in the October 2010 elections, especially in the contest for the Serb position in the BiH presidency, but Dodik’s Alliance of Independent Social Democrats party (Savez nezavisnih socijaldemokrata, SNSD) controls the RS government and presidency, as well as the Republika Srpska National Assembly (RSNA). Nationalism and protection of the RS remain the entity’s unifying idée fixe.

The RS is divided into east-west halves. The SNSD appears invincible in the politically and economically more influential western portion, controlling every municipality either directly or in coalition with a smaller party, and is encroaching on the traditional eastern stronghold of the Serb Democratic Party (Srpska demokratska stranka, SDS). Dodik’s government decides all budgetary issues, as well as much of the investment that goes to the east. Many eastern municipalities, especially those run by the opposition, feel deprived and are slowly beginning to seek greater economic and political decentralisation, but this takes a back seat to concerns about protecting RS as a whole.

Corruption and weak rule of law undermine economic growth. The RS, like the rest of Bosnia, is only slowly emerging from the recession that resulted from the global financial crisis. Privatisation of RS Telecom and an oil refinery gave the RS a cash bonanza in 2006-2008, creating a false glow of prosperity. But these funds have done little to further growth, and recent tax increases and expected cuts in social services may breed social dissatisfaction.

Many Serbs believe that they are asked to shoulder all blame for the 1992-1995 war, accused of being occupiers and aggressors. An overwhelming number of the war’s victims were Bosniak civilians, who suffered vicious ethnic cleansing and, most horrifically and prominently, mass murder in Srebrenica. Serbs worry that the RS will be taken away from them if they admit they carried out a genocide at Srebrenica. But this is an empty fear. Rather, RS elites should acknowledge the responsibility of their wartime leaders and support reconciliation efforts so as to become more respected and trusted authorities throughout Bosnia.

RECOMMENDATIONS

To the Government of Republika Srpska:

1. Cease challenging the emergency powers of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) and the legitimacy of state institutions by calling for referendums; work instead to mend contested state institutions, including by:

a) using all available procedures in the Parliamentary Assembly of BiH; and
b) challenging impugned aspects of the institutions in question in the Constitutional Court of BiH.

2. Improve government-to-government relations with BiH and the (Bosniak-dominated) Federation of BiH, by holding regular and frequent joint sessions.

3. Cease support and funding for divisive commemorations of wartime events.

4. Support and fund actions to establish the historical truth about the war and to reconcile BiH citizens, such as by:

a) presenting awards to persons and institutions responsible for saving the lives of members of persecuted communities; and
b) publicising options for returnees to maintain links to the Federation, including health and social services.

To the President of Republika Srpska:

5. Promote reforms to:

a) strengthen the rule of law and root out corruption;
b) increase decentralisation; and
c) multiply investment in less developed regions, especially those to which displaced persons have returned and in the eastern RS.

6. Deliver speeches to the Parliamentary Assembly of BiH and at the annual commemoration at Potočari acknowledging fully the responsibility of the wartime RS leadership, including past presidents of RS, for genocide in Srebrenica and crimes against humanity elsewhere in BiH.

To the National Assembly of Republika Srpska:

7. Amend the RS constitution to limit the Vital National Interest veto to matters of genuine national interest and to remove the ambiguity that allows the Constitutional Court to circumvent the veto.

To the European Union:

8. Declare that neither partition nor greater centralisation is compatible with Bosnia’s early progress toward EU membership.

9. Continue the high level dialogue on the judiciary and expand its format to address other disputed issues, while keeping international partners fully informed of progress.

To the Government of the United States:

10. Support EU efforts on judicial reform and other issues.

Sarajevo/Istanbul/Brussels, 6 October 2011

BYEN SOM KUNNE OFRES (SERBISK PROPAGANDA DOKUMENTARER)

2011-10-10T00:01:00.000-07:00

Serbisk Propaganda: Srebrenica - Byen som kunne ofres

Den norske Helsingforskomité, Kirkegata 5, 0153 Oslo
Tel: (+ 47) 22 47 92 02 – Fax: (+ 47) 22 41 60 76 – Bankgiro: 5001 06 26061
Org.nr.: 959 196 451 – Hjemmeside: www.nhc.no
Kringkastingsrådet
NRK
E-post: postmottak@nrk.no

Oslo, 3. mai 2011

Kopi: Kringkastingssjef Hans-Tore Bjerkaas

Re: Klage på Brennpunkt-dokumentaren Byen som kunne ofres, vist av NRK tirsdag 26. april 2011

Den norske Helsingforskomité ønsker med dette brevet å klage inn Brennpunkt-dokumentaren Byen som kunne ofres.

 Vi mener at programmet bidrar til historieforfalskning og ikke lever opp til den journalistiske standard man må forvente av NRK. Vi viser til NRK-plakaten, særlig til punktene 1b, 1c, 1d og 4f.
 Helsingforskomiteen vil i tillegg til denne klagen til Kringkastingsrådet, også klage programmet inn for Pressens Faglige Utvalg (PFU) for brudd på Vær Varsom Plakaten (særlig punktene 3.2, 4,1 og 4.14)

Personer med begrenset kunnskap om krigen i Bosnia-Herzegovina og folkemordet i Srebrenica vil sitte igjen med et feilaktig bilde etter å ha sett denne dokumentaren av hva som skjedde og hva de ulike aktørene foretok seg.

Overordnete spørsmål

1. Dokumentaren stiller spørsmål ved om det skjedde et folkemord i Srebrenica og går langt i å plassere ansvaret for overgrepene på bosniske og amerikanske myndigheter.

Det springende punktet i en folkemordsdom er om en kan bevise “en hensikt” om å ødelegge en etnisk, nasjonal eller religiøs gruppe som sådan.1 Derfor finner vi i noen av dommene fra Den internasjonale domstolen for det tidligere Jugoslavia (ICTY) en inngående vurdering av om ledelsen i de bosnisk-serbiske styrkene hadde en slik hensikt i forhold til Srebrenica-massakrene, som fant sted i perioden fra de bosnisk-serbiske styrkene angrep enklaven 6. juli 1995 og frem til 16. juli i områder rundt Srebrenica.2 Dommene bekrefter at en slik hensikt fantes, og setter dem i sammenheng med den overordnede hensikten for angrepet på Bosnia-Herzegovina som startet krigen 1992-95, nemlig å skape etnisk rene serbiske områder.

Mye av innholdet i programmet er ikke nytt, slik det påstås i filmen, men velkjente påstander som mange ganger er imøtegått av seriøse kilder. Programmet er etter vårt syn ubalansert og grunnleggende misvisende om de historiske realitetene det søker å beskrive. Å benekte eller underslå folkemord er et alvorlig forhold, straffbart i en rekke land, og dette programmet går langt i den retning. I et intervju med Dagsavisen, beskriver regissør Ola Flyum filmens holdning på denne måten:

“Mange tenker på Srebrenica som et nytt Holocaust i Europa, der 8.000 ble henrettet. I realiteten var dette en del av omfattende krigshandlinger. Vi viser hvordan Mladic handler som general som skal ta kontroll over et område. Byen er forlatt, omkring 15.000 menn er stukket av, på vei gjennom serbisk område til muslimske linjer. Ingen vet hvor mange av dem som er bevæpnet. For oss framstår dette som en ekstremt kaotisk situasjon, ikke som en planlagt etnisk rensing, forteller Flyum.”3

Denne oppsummeringen synes å bekrefte at inntrykket filmen gir av at Srebrenica ikke var noe folkemord er i tråd med filmskapernes intensjon. Filmen er rammet inn av en åpningssekvens som påstår at det var en avtale mellom den bosniske presidenten, Alija

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

1 Ifølge konvensjonen av 9. desember 1948 om forhindring og avstraffelse av forbrytelsen folkemord betyr folkemord nærmere angitte “handlinger som er begått i den hensikt å ødelegge helt, eller delvis, en nasjonal, etnisk, rasemessig eller religiøs gruppe som sådan”, deriblant “å drepe medlemmer av gruppen”; …(artikkel II).

2 Se for eksempel dommen mot Radislav Krstic i appellkammeret i ICTY fra 2004, http://www.icty.org/x/cases/krstic/acjug/en/krs-aj040419e.pdf. Alle rettsdokumentene i Kristic-saken ved ICTY er tilgjengelig på http://www.icty.org/case/krstic/4.

3 http://www.dagsavisen.no/utenriks/article515488.ece
------------------------------------------------------

Izetbegovic (1925-2003) og USAs president Bill Clinton om å ofre Srebrenica og 5000 mennesker for å kunne legitimere amerikansk militær intervensjon, og en avslutningssekvens som gir Izetbegovic ansvaret for Srebrenica.

Dokumentaren har selvsagt rett i at det var en væpnet konflikt (borgerkrig) i Bosnia-Herzegovina, hvor alle parter begikk krigsforbrytelser. Men den tar fatalt feil når den unngår å sette konflikten i sammenheng med ”the joint criminal enterprise” (terminologi kjent fra ICTY-dommene) som hadde som mål å fjerne alle ikke-serbere fra landområder hvor det bodde serbere i blant annet Bosnia-Herzegovina slik at man kunne skape et sammenhengende Stor-Serbia, og ved å unnlate å vektlegge at befolkningen i Srebrenica (som hovedsakelig var flyktninger) var offer for et planlagt folkemord.

Rettslig sett kan bare de som planla og utførte folkemordet ansvarliggjøres. I tillegg peker en dom fra Den internasjonale domstolen (ICJ) fra 2007 på at Serbia som stat kunne ha forhindret det, og således bærer et ansvar.

Det reiser meget krevende moralske spørsmål å påstå at bosniske myndigheter (1) kunne ha gjort mer for å forsvare Srebrenica; og videre slutte at (2) de er dermed ansvarlige for overgrepene som motparten utførte.

Dokumentaren går enda lenger: den påstår at Izetbegovic inngikk forbund med USA om å la Srebrenica falle. Men selv om dette skulle stemme (som vi betviler og som reiser et sterkt krav om dokumentasjon) er det fortsatt feil å legge skylden på den bosniske regjering og eventuelt USAs ledelse for det folkemordet som ble utført av bosnisk-serbiske styrker.

 Det kan se ut som om dokumentarens ønske om å nyansere det ”svart-hvite bildet” og knuse etablerte myter, fører til en gjengivelse av en versjon av Srebrenica og Bosnia-krigen som er nær sammenfallende med propagandaen til de som var ansvarlige for folkemordet i Srebrenica og med det synet som deres forsvarere forfekter, ved å benekte eller relativisere folkemordet. Ifølge denne propagandaen ble det begått krigsforbrytelser, men de ble begått av begge parter i konflikten og gjerne av udisiplinerte soldater som handlet uten hjemmel i ordrer ovenfra.

2. Hvorfor ble Srebrenica angrepet av bosnisk-serbiske styrker? Programmets utgangspunkt er å ta et oppgjør med at bosniske myndigheter ikke gjorde noe for å forhindre folkemordet i Srebrenica sommeren 1995. Helsingforskomiteen ønsker å understreke at det er både legitimt og viktig å undersøke de bosniske myndighetenes rolle i forbindelse med Srebrenicas fall, og at det er journalisters rolle å stille seg kritisk til det som kan oppfattes som vedtatte sannheter. Men dette må gjøres på en måte som gjengir de grunnleggende forholdene rundt folkemordet i Srebrenica korrekt. Dette er blant de best dokumenterte folkemordene i historien, ikke minst på grunn av at flere av sakene ved ICTY er rettet mot personer som på ulike nivåer deltok i henrettelsene. Noen av de involverte har også tilstått.4

 En film som indikerer at de bosnisk-serbiske styrkenes angrep på Srebrenica først og fremst var motivert ut fra å gjengjelde angrepene på landsbyer i nærheten av Srebrenica fra bosnjakiske, regjeringstro styrker basert i Srebrenica overser den overordnete konteksten. Bosnia-Herzegovina var fra april 1992 offer for ”a joint criminal enterprise” for etnisk rensing.

Srebrenica hadde stor strategisk betydning siden det lå mellom to serbiske områder, vest for og øst for Srebrenica, og dermed kunne forpurre denne planen. Ifølge en av de viktige dommene knyttet til Srebrenica, mot Radislav Krstic, var ”Srebrenica (and the surrounding Central Podrinje Region) … of immense strategic importance to the Bosnian Serb leadership. Without Srebrenica, the ethnically Serb state of Republica Srpska they sought to create would remain divided into two disconnected parts, and its access to Serbia proper would be disrupted.”5

Derfor ble Srebrenica angrepet og dette er også konteksten for beslutningen om å drepe de bosnjakiske mennene i Srebrenica.

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

4 Se dokumentene i saken mot Drazen Erdemovic ved ICTY, http://www.icty.org/case/erdemovic/4

5 Appellkammerets dom i saken mot Krstic, paragraf 15.

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

3. Intern uenighet i det bosniske lederskapet. Det er godt kjent at det var sterk intern uenighet i den bosniske regjeringen og militære ledelse under krigen 1992-95. Denne uenigheten kom også til uttrykk i forhold til Srebrenica. Et hovedpunkt i uenigheten var om en skulle holde fast på Bosnia-Herzegovina som en fleretnisk-stat hvor de ulike gruppene bodde om hverandre, eller om en skulle etablere kompakte territorier hvor de ulike gruppene bodde hver for seg.

At daværende president Alija Izetbegovic var kontroversiell som politiker og leder for den bosnisk-herzegovinske staten under krigen er heller ikke noe nytt. Heller ikke påstanden om at sentralregjeringen i Sarajevo sviktet Srebrenica, eller kritikk av at ledelsen inviterte radikale islamske mujahedin-krigere til å delta i den bosniske hæren.

Det nye er påstanden om at Izetbegovic og Clinton inngikk en avtale om å ofre Srebrenica. Å fremme en slik påstand uten å undersøke den grundig og å gi begge motparter mulighet for å kommentere den er uansvarlig.

4. Srebrenica som ”sikker sone”. Fra januar 1993, etter at bosniske styrker fra Srebrenica sommeren og høsten 1992 hadde søkt å utvide sitt territorium, blant annet med angrepet på landsbyen Kravica, strømmet flyktninger på nytt til Srebrenica samtidig som bosnisk-serbiske styrker intensiverte beleiringen av byen.

Kommandøren av FNs styrke i Bosnia-Herzegovina (UNPROFOR) den franske general Philippe Morillon besøkte Srebrenica i mars 1993. Da var byen overbefolket, det var nesten ikke drikkevann igjen siden de serbiske styrkene hadde ødelagt byens vannforsyninger. Befolkningen fikk strøm fra midlertidige aggregater. Tilgangen på mat, medisiner og andre livsnødigheter var ekstremt knapp. Før kommandør Philippe Morillon dro, annonserte han til den panikkslagne befolkningen at byen var trygg, under beskyttelse av FN og at han aldri ville forlate dem.

Mellom mars og april 1993 ble 8 000 til 9 000 bosnjaker evakuert fra Srebrenica etter initiativ fra FNs høykommissær for flyktninger (UNHCR). Den sentrale bosniske regjeringen i Sarajevo motsatte seg på dette tidspunktet evakueringen fordi de mente det bidro til den etniske rensingen.

De bosnisk-serbiske myndighetene fortsatte forsøkene på å erobre Srebrenica. Dette var en viktig del av bakgrunnen for at FNs sikkerhetsråd erklærte Srebrenica (sammen med noen andre områder) som ”sikker sone” 16. april 1993, og det innebar en forpliktelse for alle parter til å avstå fra væpnede angrep Srebrenica og området rundt.

Med andre ord, det å gjøre Srebrenicas fall utelukkende til en del av konflikten mellom den bosniske sentralregjeringen og de bosnisk-serbiske styrkene etter april 1993 er ikke riktig. FNs sikkerhetsråd og det internasjonale samfunnet hadde påtatt seg å garantere for sikkerheten i Srebrenica. Disse forholdene blir kraftig underbetont i dokumentaren, som dermed tegner et sterkt fortegnet bilde av situasjonen.

Kritikk av enkeltheter

I det følgende ønsker vi å liste opp noen eksempler på fire typer problemer som bidrar til at programmet etter vårt syn ikke er god og etterrettelig journalistikk: faktafeil, selektiv kildebruk, tendensiøse fremstillinger og bruk av perifere eksperter.

Kardinalfeilen er etter vårt syn at programmet ikke forholder seg til dommene fra Den internasjonale domstolen for det tidligere Jugoslavia (ICTY), som representerer den grundigste juridiske og faktiske undersøkelsen av krigsforbrytelser, forbrytelser mot menneskeheten og folkemord i Bosnia-Herzegovina, inkludert omstendighetene rundt Srebrenicas beleiring og fall. Et seriøst forsøk på å diskutere krigen i Bosnia-Herzegovina generelt, og forbrytelser spesielt, må forholde seg til ICTY-dommene, selv om man selvsagt også kan kritisere dem. Heller ikke FNs rapport fra 1999 om Srebrenica blir tillagt vekt.

Programmet refererer bare overfladisk til ICTY. Domstolens dommer blir ikke referert til (med unntak av Oric-dommen) selv når man i dokumentaren kommer til stikk motsatte konklusjoner.

Vi har merket eksemplene under med tidspunktet der de opptrer i den timeslange filmen.

Filmen åpner med at Hakija Meholjovic, en tidligere politimann og offiser fra Srebrenica, hevder at den bosniske presidenten Alija Izetbegovic fortalte ham følgende: President Clinton har sagt at hvis 5000 (underforstått 5000 bosnjaker i Srebrenica) slaktes, vil NATO angripe serbiske mål over hele Bosnia. Denne påstanden gjentas i filmen, ukritisk, og fremstår som fakta. Dette er svært alvorlige påstander mot Clinton og Izetbegovic som fremsettes uten ytterligere belegg.

 Det anføres i filmen at Bakir Izetbegovic, sønnen til Alija Izetbegovic, ikke svarte på forespørsel om intervju hvor han kunne kommentere påstanden.
 Det anføres ikke om Bill Clinton har blitt spurt om å kommentere påstanden.

Vi har ingen grunn til å tro at påstanden stemmer, men den slår an tonen i filmen: amerikanerne og muslimene konspirerte sammen for å organisere Srebrenicas fall, mens serberne, som i hovedsak gjennomførte en konvensjonell militær operasjon (som det sies senere i filmen) forsøkte å unngå at uskyldige sivile ble berørt.

Flere dommer fra ICTY og Den internasjonale Domstolen i Haag (ICJ) slår fast – etter svært grundige høringer og bevisførsel – at den bosnisk-serbiske siden planla og begikk folkemord i Srebrenica, at det var nøye organisert og representerte kulminasjonen på det som var planen fra starten av: å skapet et etnisk rent serbisk land.

Det faktum at mange av ofrene ble gravlagt flere ganger, det vil si at massegraver ble gravet opp, og lik begravet annet steds, tyder også på at serbiske militære og/eller politiske ledere har ønsket å skjule forbrytelsen.

4:10. Programmet sier at bosniske myndigheter ”benytter anledningen” (de årlige massebegravelsene i Potocari) i propagandaøyemed. Det er kanskje noe i det, men er samtidig bare en del av sannheten rundt de årlige begravelsene (nye begravelser skjer etter hvert som ofrene fra massegravene blir DNA-identifisert). Bosniske myndigheter blir omtalt som om de utnytter tragedien det også hevdes at de er ansvarlige for.

Filmen sier at Bosnias muslimske flertall erklærte selvstendighet (våren 1992) og borgerkrigen brøt ut som følge av dette. Dette er misvisende. Det ble arrangert folkeavstemning 1. mars 1992 om uavhengighet, der bosnjaker, kroatere og noen serbere stemte for uavhengighet. Et stort flertall av serberne stemte imot eller boikottet folkeavstemningen. Ingen av folkegruppene hadde absolutt flertall i befolkningen, men bosnjakene utgjorde den største folkegruppen. Det som så hendte var at bosnisk-serbiske styrker sammen med serbiske styrker (både regulære og paramilitære) gikk til angrep i april 1992 på den bosnjakiske sivilbefolkningen og representanter for de bosniske myndighetene.6 Det var dermed også en konflikt mellom to stater, med Serbia som den aggressive part. Senere forsøkte Serbia å distansere seg fra krigshandlingene, men serbiske myndigheter støttet fortsatt de bosnisk-serbiske styrkene og kunne kontrollere dem. Også dette er prøvet og slått fast av ICTY og ICJ.

6:32 Filmen sier, ”to år senere (i 1992) er det borgerkrig” i Øst-Bosnia. Filmen forteller ikke hvordan ”borgerkrigen” i dette området artet seg. Under den etniske rensingen av Øst-Bosnia ble tusenvis av sivile drept og de overlevende bosnjakene fordrevet til bosnisk-kontrollert territorium eller trengt sammen i enklavene Gorazde, Zepa og Srebrenica, der de ble beleiret og beskutt med artilleri. Disse områdene var erklært som såkalte ”sikre soner” av FNs sikkerhetsråd i en resolusjon av 16. april 1993. Et hovedproblem med denne politikken fra Sikkerhetsrådets side var at FNs medlemsland ikke var villige til å sende tilstrekkelig med soldater for å forsvare de sikre sonene.

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

6 Bosnjakene er en sørslavisk etnisk gruppe. Majoriteten bor i Bosnia-Herzegovina, men det finnes mindre grupper i de andre landene på Vest-Balkan og, etter krigen, i en rekke vestlige land. De omtales ofte som bosniske muslimer, men dette er misvisende siden ikke alle bosnjaker er muslimer. Bosnisk er betegnelse på enhver innbygger i Bosnia-Herzegovina, mens de største etniske gruppene i landet er bosnjaker, serbere og kroater. Byen som kunne ofres er ikke på høyde med denne terminologien, og skaper et misvisende inntrykk av at bosnjakene er mer religiøst aktive enn de andre gruppene og bare i forhold til islam.

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

5
7:59 Filmen sier at den bosnjakiske kommandanten Naser “Oric angrep serbiske landsbyer omkring Srebrenica ... omtrent 50 serbiske landsbyer ble ødelagt … kvinner, barn og eldre også drept”. Naser Oric ble stilt for ICTY i forbindelse med krigsforbrytelser i landsbyene han angrep og i forbindelse med overgrep mot serbere som var fanger i Srebrenica. Det er hevet over tvil at serbiske sivile ble drept i landsbyene de bosnjakiske styrkene fra Srebrenica angrep. Men domstolen frikjente Oric for straffbare handlinger i forbindelse med disse angrepene. Det dreide seg i stor grad om militære mål. En rekke av landsbyene var i utgangspunktet heller ikke serbiske, men hadde hatt blandet eller bosnjakisk befolkning før den etniske rensingen. Dette er fakta som ikke nevnes.

Bosnjakene i Srebrenica var i realiteten for en stor del flyktninger fra etnisk rensing, som i flere år levde under beleiring, sult og artilleriangrep fra den serbiske siden. Med hensyn til drap på sivile serbere i fangenskap i Srebrenica, slo ICTY fast at krigsforbrytelser, inklusive drap, hadde funnet sted. Men Oric ble likevel frikjent ettersom retten ikke fant det bevist at han hadde et personlig straffeansvar (det vil si at det fantes en etablert kommandokjede) for disse overgrepene. Frikjennelsen er kontroversiell, ikke bare på serbisk side. Mange jurister mener at ICTYs anklagere gjorde en dårlig jobb med saken.

Filmen bruker lang tid på angrepet på den serbiske landsbyen Kravica i januar 1993. En person som ble tatt til fange der intervjues om mishandlingen han ble utsatt for. En serbisk rettsmedisiner og fotograf intervjues og forteller om gruoppvekkende detaljer: Folk som er blitt korsfestet, halshugging, kastrasjon, omskåret og kvinner som har fått fostrene revet ut av magen med mer. Det fremstilles som om dette er i forlengelsen av Orics angrep på blant annet Kravica, og med en påstand om at drapene har et religiøst preg.

Selvsagt er det viktig med ny dokumentasjon om overgrep mot serbere, men påstandene er diffuse i forhold til når, hvor og med hvem dette skal ha skjedd. De etterlater et inntrykk av at den serbiske befolkningen har blitt utsatt for massakrer og ekstremt grove overgrep uten det gis ytterligere belegg. Slike alvorlige påstander må man kunne belegge. Helsingforskomiteen tviler på at det er hold i dem ettersom dommene i ICTY og undersøkelsene til The International Research and Documentation Center i Sarajevo, samt andre uavhengige og troverdige kilder, ikke refererer til dem.

I FNs rapport om Srebrenica fra 1999 skriver generalsekretær Kofi Annan at serberne overdrev betydningen av de bosnjakiske angrepene som påskudd for deres egentlige mål: et etnisk rent serbisk land. Dette målet førte til at serbiske styrker drepte tusenvis av sivile i etnisk rensing og dermed gjorde seg skyldig i den store majoriteten av forbrytelser som ble begått i Bosnia-Herzegovina.

15:53 Filmen sier at ”i mars 1993 innleder serberne en offensiv for å gjenerobre tapt territorium.” Det er riktig at serberne gikk til angrep da, men det de tok tilbake var territorium de tidligere hadde etnisk renset og deretter mistet til bosnjakene som var i Srebrenica. Filmen presenterer den serbiske siden som den militært underlegne part som bare reagerer (gjenerobrer tapt territorium). Angivelsen av de bosnisk-serbiske styrkenes ressurser og kapasitet senere i filmen (43.03 osv.) er etter vårt syn klart misvisende. Det samme er å regne de nederlandske FN-styrkene som hadde mandat til å beskytte Srebrenica som en sikker sone for sivile, som en del av bosnjakenes militære kapasitet.

25:20 Filmen sier at muslimene lovet at de ikke skulle angripe landsbyer fra Srebrenica og ikke trakassere serbere som befant seg i Sarajevo i forbindelse med opprettelsen av Srebrenica og noen andre byer som sikre soner. Det er riktig at begge parter brøt avtalen om demilitarisering, men filmen unnlater å peke på at situasjonen var asymmetrisk, med flyktningene i Srebrenica som den svake part. Den serbiske siden trakk ikke tilbake artilleriet rundt de sikre sonene, men angrep dem. I tillegg til at de stanset nødhjelpssendinger og tidvis tok FN-personell som gisler.

En delegasjon fra Sikkerhetsrådet ledet av Diego Arria kom til Srebrenica 25. april 1993, og i sin rapport fra besøket til FN fordømmes de serbiske styrker for å gjennomføre “ a slow-motion process of genocide.” Rapporten konkluderte med at “Serb forces must withdraw to points from which they cannot attack, harass or terrorise the town.”7

Til slutt erobret de bosnisk-serbiske styrkene to av de sikre sonene, Zepa og Srebrenica.

Filmen sier at Izetbegovic trakk seg fra fredsavtalen i 1993 ut fra ambisjoner om å skaffe seg mer territorium. Bosniske myndigheter portretteres som krigsorienterte og aggressive, mens realiteten var at de lovlig valgte bosniske myndighetene var den angrepne part, og at den foreslåtte fredsavtalen i 1993 dermed var kontroversiell siden den i realiteten ville anerkjenne serbiske erobringer og undergrave eksistensen av Bosnia-Herzegovina som stat. Izetbegovic kan kritiseres, men i denne filmen blir ikke hans side av saken presentert.

34:00 Det sies at Oric undergravet avtalen rundt de sikre sonene ved ikke å legge ned våpnene. Igjen portretteres bosnjakene som aggressive løftebrytere, mens det ikke sies noe om serbiske angrep, løftebrudd og etniske rensing som gjorde sivilbefolkningen til et direkte mål.

34:20 Filmens nevner ulovlige våpenslipp til Srebrenica-enklaven, og antyder større våpensmuglingsoperasjoner utført av amerikanerne. At noen våpen ble smuglet inn, vil mange kilder bekrefte, men at amerikanerne drev på denne måten er tvilsomt. Igjen: Slike påstander må belegges. I dette tilfelle bygger de opp under forestillingen om en amerikansk-muslimsk konspirasjon. Brennpunkts ekspert John R. Schindler, som gjennom programmet kommer med en rekke misvisende og feilaktige påstander, sier at våpensmuglingen var årsaken til angrepet på Srebrenica. Dette står i kontrast til FNs rapport om Srebrenica, ICTY-dommer og ICJ-dommen som alle slår fast at årsaken til angrepet og folkemordet var målsetningen om å skape et etnisk rent serbisk land, som innebar at muslimene måtte fordrives eller utslettes.

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

7 The United Nations' Report on The Fall of Srebrenica (1999) [A/54/549]

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

Filmen problematiserer den bosniske statens tilgang til våpen, men hvorfra og hvordan de bosnisk-serbiske styrkene fikk sine våpen diskuteres ikke. I en dokumentar om ansvaret for folkemordet i Srebrenica er det underlig, og uttrykk for programmets ubalanserte og fordreiende tilnærming, at man overhodet ikke ser på de materielle og organisatoriske forutsetningene for den faktiske og logistiske gjennomføringen av folkemordet: mannskap, våpen, forvaringsbygninger, gravemaskiner og busser.

36:20 Filmen sier at muslimene brøt fredsavtalen med general Mladic. Igjen, avtalebrudd fantes på begge sider. Igjen portretteres muslimene som svikefulle og aggressive, mens den serbiske siden og Mladic implisitt fremstår som opptatt av fred, avtaler, lover og regler. Dette er å stille saken på hodet.

37:10 I filmen hevder at FNs tidligere fredsmegler Throvald Stoltenberg at problemet med de sikre sonene var at muslimene skjøt ut av dem, og at når serberne besvarte angrepene, ble de sivile rammet. Dette er en kontroversiell gjengivelse av faktum fra en kontroversiell kilde (fredsmeglerinnsatsen til blant annet Stoltenberg ble betegnet som ”appeasement” av Kofi Annan i Srebrenica-rapporten til FN). Igjen bygger filmen opp om et bilde av at det er muslimene som er den aggressive part og som truer sivilbefolkningen, noe som altså er å snu saken på hodet.

40:50 I filmen uttaler Schindler at Izetbegovic skal ha sagt at ”selv om sivilbefolkningen blir slaktet, var det ikke vi som gjorde det.” Dette er påstander som ikke belegges. Izetbegovic er kritisert for mye, men vi har ikke sett dokumentasjon på at han skal ha sagt eller ment noe slikt som dette.

41:21 I filmen hevdes det at Izetbegovic beordret angrep på landsbyen Visnjica – og at dette angrepet var marsjordren for serberne. Ifølge ICTYs dom i saken mot den serbiske generalen Radislav Krstic, var angrepet, som resulterte i drap på fire serbiske sivile, ledd i skyggekrigen mellom de beleirete bosnjakene og de bosniske serberne rundt grensen av det FN hadde erklært som en ”sikker sone”. Som tidligere nevnt: I FNs rapport om Srebrenica fra 1999 skriver generalsekretær Kofi Annan at serberne overdrev betydningen av de bosnjakiske angrepene som påskudd for deres egentlige mål, et etnisk rent serbisk land. En annen omstendighet som ikke nevnes er at folk døde av sult i Srebrenica på den tiden som følge av den ulovlige serbiske nødhjelpsblokaden.

42:45 Schindler hevder at mer enn 1300 sivile serbere ble drept av muslimske styrker ledet av Oric. Dette tallet ser ut til å stamme fra kontroversielle serbiske kilder. Et norsk støttet statistisk prosjekt fant at av 480 drepte serbere i Srebrenica-området var 151 sivile. Det er mange, men ikke i nærheten av Brennpunkts tall. Oric var også aktiv utenfor Srebrenica-området, men like fullt er det vanskelig å tro på tallene til Schindler. Igjen virker det som om hensikten er å understreke at serberne ble provosert til handling av den blodtørstige røverbanden til Oric i Srebrenica.

45:09 Det sies at Mladic var militært underlegen og at han ikke stolte på sine lokale tropper, ettersom han var redd for at de skulle begå overgrep. Dette er feil. Rent militært konkluderer FN-rapporten om Srebrenica med at: ”There was no contest.” Serberne var militært sett knusende overlegne. Filmen regner opp FN-styrkene som en del av motstanden serberne måtte regne med, men nevner ikke at serberne på den tiden truet med å drepe tilfangetatte gisler fra FN, hvis FN intervenerte militært, og at de i tillegg over lang tid hadde hindret forsterkninger i å ankomme Dutchbat, FN-kontingenten i Srebrenica som dermed var underbemannet.

Det tegnes et bilde av underlegne serbiske styrker som tvinges til aksjon av muslimske angrep og avtalebrudd, noe som er i total kontrast til ICTY-dommenes og FNs versjon. Å fremstille Mladic som bekymret for overgrep, er også i total kontrast til ICTY-dommene og ICTY-tiltalen mot Mladic der han er sentral i planleggingen og gjennomføringen av et omfattende folkemord som krevde betydelig logistikk.

Dokumentaren portretterer Mladic som en hederlig soldat med respekt for humanitære verdier og lover, noe som er i strid med alle kjente og juridisk etablerte fakta om krigen i Bosnia-Herzegovina.

49:25 I denne sekvensen portretteres Mladic som en hederlig soldat, som sto overfor en uklar og vanskelig situasjon etter erobringen av Srebrenica (49.55), at han ba om hjelp av bosnjakene i Srebrenica, at han ikke ønsket å skade den bosnjakiske sivilbefolkningen, men at Izetbegovic og den bosniske ledelsen ikke ”brydde seg med å svare på Srebrenicas bønn om hjelp”, og dermed implisitt var ansvarlige. Det er i strid med alle fakta kjent fra ICTY-dommene, ICJ-dommen og FN-rapporten. Mens Mladic forhandlet med FN og sivilbefolkningen i Srebrenica, skilte mennene hans de tilfangetatte bosnjakiske mennene fra kvinner og barn. De ble alle sammen henrettet i dagene som fulgte, mens kvinnene og barna ble busset til Tuzla i en stor operasjon som inkluderte rekvirerte kjøretøy fra Serbia. At Mladic sa at han ønsket å skåne den uskyldige sivilbefolkningen står i kontrast til det han gjorde.

50:30 Møte mellom Mladic, Nesib Mandic og UNPROFORs nederlandske kommandanter. På møtet framstår partene som likeverdige, men faktum er at Mladic’ styrker hadde vunnet en fullstendig militær seier. Redaksjonen problematiserer ikke at Mladic sier: ”Nesib, ditt folks skjebne ligger i dine hender”. Tvert i mot følger man opp med følgende kommentar: ”Men Nesib Mandic kunne ikke gjøre noe. Verken Izetbegovic eller noen andre fra det politiske eller militære lederskapet brydde seg med å svare på Srebrenicas bønn om hjelp”. Dette er å sette ting på hodet. Det var serbiske styrker som hadde militær kontroll og som utførte folkemordet. Det er også høyt uklart hva redaksjonen mener at lederne i Sarajevo skulle kunne gjøre i situasjonen, men med dette som eneste kommentar gis et åpenbart villedende inntrykk av ansvarsforholdene for folkemordet.

51:53 Filmen sier at de fleste muslimske mennene nektet å overgi seg fordi de fryktet hevn etter landsbymassakrene de hadde begått. Dette er igjen misvisende. De ville ikke overgi seg fordi de fryktet at de ville bli drept, noe mange av dem ble. Igjen brukes hevnmotivet etter angrep fra bosnjakenes side frem på en tendensiøs måte.

Når Mladic snakker om hevn, refererer han til at tyrkerne brutalt slo ned et opprør mot ottomansk styre i 1804.8

52:08 I filmen hevder eksperten Schindler at deler av den bosnisk-serbiske hæren under kontroll av kontraterror-tjenesten henrettet om lag 2000 mannlige muslimske krigsfanger etter Srebrenicas fall. Dette er feil. Langt flere ble henrettet. I juli 2010 hadde internasjonale rettsmedisinere identifisert 6481 individuelle ofre fra Srebrenica som var funnet i massegraver, og anslår at om lag 8100 bosnjaker, ikke 2000, ble henrettet. Det var heller ikke en operasjon begått av ”udisiplinerte elementer”, slik filmen antyder.

ICTYs dommer slår fast at folkemordet var planlagt og ledet av den bosnisk-serbiske politiske og militære ledelsen, og at gjennomføringen involverte deltagelsen av store deler av den regulære bosnisk-serbiske armeen samt paramilitære avdelinger fra Serbia. Når Schindler påstår at rundt 5000 av muslimene ble drept i regulære kamphandlinger som artilleriangrep, har dette ingen basis i fakta.

Schindler sier:

“I løpet av 24-48 timer den 11. juli 1995 henrettet den bosnisk-serbiske hæren 2000 muslimske menn. De fleste var ubevæpnede krigsfanger. De 5000 andre muslimene ble drept i løpet av de fem neste dagene. Små og store grupper prøvde å flykte – sammen med sivile – tilbake til Tuzla. De ble drept i hopetall av artilleriild. Serberne klarte å finne dem. Men for serberne (to be fair) var dette mer som en vanlig militær operasjon.”

Denne fremstillingen står i skarp protest til ICTY-dommene, som viser til en rekke massehenrettelser i perioden frem til 16. juli.

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

8 Mladic’ uttalelse er gjengitt på YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=US&feature=related&hl=iw&v=DzdtFBcn4-A

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

53:00 Filmen sier at serberne aldri vil innrømme folkemord. Alt i alt synes filmen også å ha denne oppfatningen, at Srebrenica ikke var et folkemord. Dette er i strid med dommene fra ICTY, ICJ og en rekke andre kilder.

55:40: Mladic får uimotsagt uttale: “Målet for de serbiske styrkene var ikke den sivile befolkningen eller UNPROFOR, men fundamentalister eller terroristorganisasjoner.”

Dette er en autentisk gjengivelse av den offisielle bosnisk-serbiske krigspropagandaen. Under dekke av den ble det begått folkemord og etnisk rensning. Vi er svært kritiske til det etterlatte inntrykket av dette sitatet, særlig sett i sammenheng med programmet for øvrig og at påstanden ikke problematiseres og ikke holdes sammen med ICTY-dommene knyttet til Srebrenica.

Filmen avsluttes med at journalisten Mirsad Fazlic sier at “Izetbegovic har ansvaret for det som skjedde i Srebrenica.” Oversettelsen er unøyaktig, men filmen slutter altså med en slags dom over Izetbegovic og en implisitt frikjennelse av Mladic og de bosnisk-serbiske styrkene. Igjen: Dette er å stille ting på hodet.

Brennpunkts Håkon Haugsbø omtaler begivenhetene i Srebrenica som en ”massakre”, ikke et folkemord, og gjennomgående synes Brennpunkt å gå god for og støtte filmens revisjonistiske tendens. Som vi har anført ovenfor er folkemord en definert og hevdvunnen forbrytelseskategori i internasjonal strafferett som indikerer at det fantes en hensikt om å ødelegge en gruppe eller en del av en gruppe som sådan. Massakre som ledd i et folkemord er noe annet enn massakre utført ut fra andre hensikter eller motiver.

Kilder. Filmens hovedekspert, som setter alle begivenhetene i ramme, er den amerikanske forfatteren John R. Schindler. I løpet av filmen kommer han med en rekke misvisende og feilaktige påstander. Noen av dem er allerede nevnt. Han beskriver også krigen i Øst-Bosnia i 1992 – 1994 som ”settling of scores” mellom to nasjonalistiske grupper. Denne beskrivelsen dekker over at det var den serbiske siden som gikk til angrep på den bosnjakiske befolkningen og bosniske myndigheter, støttet av den serbiske (eks-jugoslaviske) hæren og paramilitære grupper fra Serbia. Han kaller også Srebrenica for en konvensjonell militær operasjon, noe som vanskelig kan tolkes som annet enn benektelse av folkemord. Å basere programmet på en akademiker med så vidt avvikende oppfatninger om det som skjedde i forhold til majoriteten av ledende akademikere med kunnskap om dette feltet, er uprofesjonelt og uforsvarlig av en redelig journalist. Særlig siden uttalelsene hans også er i strid med ICTY-dommene.

Når det gjelder andre kilder som Stoltenberg, den tidligere bosniske hærsjef Sefer Halilovic og et par andre fra den bosniske siden, er de alle relevante kilder, men samtlige er også kontroversielle på grunn av sine egne roller i historien som utspilte seg i Srebrenica. Programmet synes ikke å ta høyde for dette, men bruker dem ukritisk etter behov.

Misvisende religiøs tendens. Religion er også et element som gjør fremstillingen tendensiøs. Å kalle folkegruppen bosnjaker for muslimer – gjør at de oppfattes som en religiøs gruppe. Skillet mellom muslim som etnisk og religiøs betegnelse er det ikke mulig å se hvis man ikke kjenner til det fra før (”muslim” ble etablert som en etnisk gruppe i Jugoslavia i 1979). Den bosniske hæren fremstår dermed som en religiøs hær, noe som ikke var tilfellet – slik den bosnisk-serbiske hæren ikke var en ortodoks kristen hær, eller den kroatiske hæren en katolsk kristen hær.

Heller ikke var den bosniske hæren og bosniske myndigheter mono-etniske: mange bosniske serbere og kroater tok stilling på regjeringssiden. Fremstillingen i filmen kan i noen grad betraktes som en lefling med muslimskepsis. Krigen var ikke en religiøs krig, slik det antydes når det gjelder deltakelsen av Mujahedin, og ovennevnte inntrykk av hæren som en muslimsk hær. Det zoomes inn på religiøse slagord rablet på vegger (det finnes ikke belegg for at de ble skrevet under krigen), og klippes lydspor i overgangen fra en serbisk begravelse over i aftenbønn i dagens Sarajevo osv.

For Den norske Helsingforskomité

Bjørn Engesland Gunnar M. Ekeløve-Slydal

Generalsekretær Assisterende generalsekretær

BORIS MALAGURSKI & "THE WEIGHT OF CHAINS" REVIEW

2011-10-09T18:57:00.000-07:00

PHOTO 1/2: Boris Malagurski, unemployed Vancouver-based amateur "film director", apologist for Serbian Nazi-collaborating Chetniks and a racist genocide denier.

The Weight of War Crimes

By Zijad Burgic

The film “The Weight of Chains”, by Serbian-Canadian filmmaker Boris Malagurski, is yet another of a series of films that seeks to hide Serbian responsibility for the bloody Balkan wars of the last century’s final decade. Besides this film, others that fall into this category include documentaries by the Norwegian authors (far-right revisionists) Ola Flyum and David Hebditch. The films “A Town Betrayed” – about Srebrenica, and “Sarajevo Ricochet” – about the so called Al-Qaeda in Sarajevo, were aired recently on Norwegian national television. Also worth mentioning is the documentary “An agreed-upon war”, recently aired on Serbian television. Although “The Weight of Chains” actually premiered last year in Subotica, these days it ‟s being aggressively promoted on the internet. This is most likely in response to the media highlighting the July 11th commemoration of the Srebrenica Genocide.

Other are to blame!

One website that propagandized the content of the film – the film was displayed without any indication of who the author was – stated that the film had been recently aired on Russian television, without any mention of which channel it was on, leaving one to assume that it was aired on state television. The film‟s title is described as “inspirational”, and it‟s mentioned that it received support from the Canadian organization “Global Research Centre.” Also mentioned is the support of the so called “Peaceful Humanitarian Action” organization in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Emphasis is also placed on how the film deals with “the complex theme of western involvement in the internal affairs of the former Yugoslav republics, then and now”. The film reportedly offers a different answer as to “why Yugoslavia fell apart in a bloody war.” All that‟s needed is to watch the film and listen to the people that are interviewed. You‟ll come to the same conclusion – others are to blame! An air of mystery (wow!) and exclusivity is added with the mention that the film features American administrative documents from the 1980‟s – shown for the first time ever. These documents are, in fact, decisions and actions of the U.S. administration connected to the protection of U.S. economic interests from 1984 to 1990; the film‟s director presents these as being key to the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Particularly prominent in the film is the mention of the establishment of the National Endowment for Democracy and the involvement of the CIA.

PHOTO 2/2: Boris Malagurski, unemployed Vancouver-based amateur "film director", apologist for Serbian Nazi-collaborating Chetniks and a racist genocide denier.

I saw Boris Malagurski (born in 1988 in Subotica, Vojvodina, in northern Serbia) for the first time at the beginning of this year on the “National News”, the main news program of the Canadian national television station CBC. At the time, he was being interviewed at Vancouver airport. He lamented and preached of the error of Canadian and American authorities, after Canadian customs officials refused to allow Dr. Srdja Trifkovic to enter Canada. Dr. Trifkovic, as a guest of a Serbian students‟ organization, was supposed to lecture to students at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. The ban was preceded by enormous activism on the part of Bosniak organizations in the USA and Canada who opposed this guest‟s appearance, because they claimed that this individual was a denier of the Bosnian genocide. Circumstances were such that Dr. Srdja Trifkovic was denied entry into Canada, and students were deprived of a lecture by this right-wing individual – or one that can simply be described as a Chetnik.

Kosovo mythology

The beginning of the film is marked by scenes which describe the Yugoslav community in an easy-going, even pleasant, manner. This film, made up of carefully-chosen words, mentions the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which, as the director nonchalantly concludes, “was broken up by the war.” Of course, it’s never mentioned that this state, almost from its inception, had functioned as a dictatorship and Greater Serbian hegemony. And there’s no need to mention the intense political debate in the Kingdom of SHS in which they occurred, and murder in the Assembly…

The author, the narrator in the film, does not forget to include a few sentences about the alleged anti-fascist struggle of the Chetniks and Draža Mihailović, described as “anti-fascists” and “the first guerrillas” of Europe.

A better-informed scholar of Balkan history will, after several minutes of watching this film, understand clearly that “The Weight of Chains“ is based on the complex matrix of the “Kosovo myth”. The director (of course, subconsciously) remarks that the end of the medieval Serbian state came after the Battle of Kosovo in the year 1389. It’s a historical fact, however, that the fall of Smederevo (which happened seven decades later) ended the Serbian empire of the middle ages and from that moment began life in Serbia under the Ottoman Empire.

Following this are some vague terms intended to appeal to an ultra-nationalist Serbian audience, regarding the Turkish ways of ruling, along with some epic notions regarding the reasons for the spread of
Islam in the Balkans.

Director Boris Malagurski has gathered the cream of the crop of the right-wing milieu, lobbyists for the alleged “Serbian interest” in the U.S. and Canada. Thus, in the film there are an already internationally-known selection of individuals: Gregory Elich, Barry Lituchy, John Bosnich, Canadian General Lewis MacKenzie (UN commander in the Balkans during the past war and a man of highly questionable moral values), James Byron Bissett (former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1990-1992), Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, a known genocide denier who lives in America… These people are all in fact promoters, lobbyists, and bloodsuckers, textbook Chetniks and right-wing extremists who’ve profited on the misfortunes of Serbs and other people in the Balkans.

Using skillful techniques and a sophisticated story line in order to win the trust of potential movie-goers, the director continues with his attempts to prove that the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia was caused by U.S. interests and the interests of large corporations, along with the consequences of the process of globalization on a global scale. When examining the local, Balkan-level causes of the break-up of Yugoslavia, the film leaves one believing that the emergence or awakening of the Ustasha movement in Croatia and radical Islam in Bosnia are the sole factors at play. These and similar views are propagated by other organizations such as: “The Lord Byron Foundation for Balkan Studies” – headed by James Byron Bissett and “Global Research Centre” – led by Michel Chossudovsky, professor at the University of Ottawa. In the Bosnian Serb Republic, these individuals are aided in their work by the organization “Peaceful
Humanitarian Action”.

Skilful manipulation

In order to make this documentary material as compelling as possible, the film repeatedly uses dialogue from other films; this film‟s author, however, does not warn viewers about this. Hence, in this film we see a number of famous film stars of the era. Also interviewed for the film are individuals whose good faith and honesty cannot be doubted.

Rade Aleksic from Trebinje is interviewed; he’s the father of Srdjan Aleksic, a young man known for his courageous actions in protecting fellow citizens of other nationalities and ended up killed by drunken Serbian soldiers. Also featured are the stories of two rappers from the Balkans: Vedran Mujagić, a member of the popular Sarajevo band “Dubioza kolektiv” and Bosko Ćirković from the famous Belgrade band “Beogradski sindikati”. There‟s also Vlade Divac, the former Yugoslav basketball national team representative and NBA star. It’s apparent that these people were not aware of how their participation in the film would be utilized.The director uses extreme forms of propaganda in order to portray Croatia as a criminal state, skilfully using an interview with the widow of the belated Josip Kir, the police chief of Osijek before the war, to this end. Kir was assassinated by Croatian nationalists (there‟s speculation that the command for his death came from the Croatian state leadership); in a rather distasteful manner, the director uses the story of Kir’s heroism to cast blame for the war (in Croatia) on the Croats. The story of the murder of Milan Levar, a Croat who was also assassinated by Croatian nationalists, is used in the same context. During the war, their were crimes committed against Serbs in Gospic, and it appears that Levar knew too much about this. However, while Kir was killed just before the war in Croatia started, Levar was killed in 2000.

By claiming that the blame for the break-up of Yugoslavia lies with “new leaders”, namely local leaders, the filmmaker dismisses the responsibility of the Serb leadership; after all, Slobodan Milosevic, is an old leader! In this context, the narrator calls Alija Izetbegovic a “Nazi collaborator”, a claim that distorts facts for viewers. As a matter of fact, Izetbegovic was born in 1928; the attribute of a World War II “Nazi” can hardly be assigned to a 13 year-old! A similar method of manipulating images and various events and documents is used by the filmmaker to describe pre-war Yugoslav society and conditions. Of course, the utmost care is taken never to mention the Serbian oligarchy of that period in any sort of negative context.

What’s not in the film never even happened!

According to that old saying of Bašeskija, that which is not documented never even happened!

The greatest propaganda trickery of the film consists precisely in what’s not found in it – on the issues not discussed. In the film you will not find any mention of the following: the activism of SANA and the well-known Memorandum from the second half of the 1980′s; there’s not a word regarding the military plans of the already well-reformed JNA (Yugoslav National Army) and the strong influence that Greater Serbian nationalists had on these – the military plans of RAM1 and RAM2; there’s no mention of the plans and boundaries of Greater Serbia (even though some players are still in the Hague and on trial precisely because of this); the film does not include a word regarding the aggression of the JNA in Croatia, and especially not on combat operations in Bosnia. In this film you’ll neither see nor hear a single thing regarding the fact that the wars that took place in the 1990‟s were a result, above everything else, of a desire to create a so-called Greater Serbia! Or that the main perpetrators were the Serbian political clique headed by Slobodan Milosevic and his political supporters and compatriots in the republics of the former Yugoslavia.

In the film, the rebellion of Serbs in Croatia is treated as a legitimate demand for cultural autonomy; the actual truth of the nature of this armed rebellion and secession is bypassed. In the film you will not find anything regarding the horrific destruction of Vukovar or the bombing of Dubrovnik, except in isolated instances. Or the arming of Serb civilians in Bosnia and Herzegovina by the JNA… or the concentration camps… or Ravno, Zvornik or Bijeljina…. Or of Prijedor, Kozarac or Brcko…. Of the siege of Sarajevo and its suffering… of the genocide in Srebrenica and the murder of over 8,000 people….. Yes, in this film you will hear a “different truth”, of Clinton’s speech and his agreement with Izetbegovic of the need for 5,000 murdered Srebrenica residents in order for the U.S. to intervene?!?

When war crimes and war criminals are discussed in this film, you’ll see nothing regarding Milosevic, Karadzic, Mladic and the recently arrested Goran Hadzic. You’ll learn only about the alleged war crimes of others.

A distortion of the presented themes is one of the main characteristics of this film. The tragedy of Bosnian Muslims (known as Bosniaks), the genocide against the Bosniaks of Srebrenica and the crimes against these people during the four-year war are not subjects that are covered in this film. Nor is there any acknowledgement and recognition of other crimes committed by Serbian nationalists. This film and all of the actors in it are used, and some even misused, simply to cover up the historic responsibility of Serbs for the wars.

One rather interesting statement is made in the film regarding the work of journalists from top news agencies, who are described as being nothing more than agents of their respective states; their reporting is described as being non-objective, and they’re accused of laying all the blame of the wars on the Serbs. One witness in the film claims that all of these individuals have received money and publicity for their dishonourable work.

A good portion of the film deals with the secession of Kosovo and the role of the United States and NATO in this regard. However, this part of the story is less relevant when it comes to evaluating the work of Boris Malagurski and his team.

Joint criminal enterprise of the media

In a review by Azer Pehilj titled “Denial of genocide in Norway – the night when they massacred the truth”, on the Bosnian-Herzegovinian website “tačno.net” the documentaries by Norwegians Ole Flyum and David Hebditch, “A Town Betrayed” and “Sarajevo Ricochet” are characterized as a “joint criminal enterprise of the media involving one small film company”. The same evaluation can be given to the creator of the film “The Weight of Chains”.

Under the headline “Cinematic trickery and historical revisionism” by Sanjin Pejković on the website “media.ba”, you‟ll find an interesting and readable review of the documentary film, “An agreed-upon war” by Sladjana Zaric and directed by Philip Čolović. The film was aired recently on Serbian national television. Judging from the above-mentioned review, the film is really nothing more than propaganda. “An agreed upon war” will surely continue to be, in the future, a convenient modus operandi and model for a documentary that reconstructs recent history, writes S. Pejkovic. The hard-core, ruthless nationalist propaganda of the ‟90s is already being replaced by a pro-European oriented revisionist brew, one in which Draza Mihajlovic and a yearning towards European values are mentioned in the same breathe. By presenting rumours as truth and assigning equal blame for the war to all sides, facts are being tailored to suit the objectives of the film. Cinematic trickery is being used to justify a policy that is present in Serbia even today, twenty years after the war, says Pejković. He rightfully points out that these films “instead of clarifying an image, do nothing more than to blur it and create a historical revision – sometimes barely noticeable and other times very explicit.”

It’s worth noting, however, that this assessment was made before Friday, July 22nd, 2011 – before Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik carried out a bombing and shooting spree in Oslo and on the island of Utoya, killing 76 and injuring 96 people. Before this rampage, the mass murderer left behind over 1,500 pages of written text in which he discusses the reasons and objectives for his crimes. The mere fact that Breivik was inspired by Serbian atrocities and the leaders who carried them out in the ‟90s, and that he is not the sole author of the material left behind (he mentions that he used the writing of other right-wing individuals) puts all of these socalled documentary films, their authors and collaborators, in a very sensitive context. Of course, the same can be said of all those academics who sell themselves out for a fistful of dollars and an easy life, often remunerated by the blood of innocent people, like those children in Norway. All fascist ideas are an equal danger to world peace, whether they carry Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or any other demarcation, in addition to the one that‟s adorned by the swastika.

Hence, instead of promoting “a mythical vision” of their own past, Serbian intelligentsia ought to reconsider its own role and responsibility in the recent crises and wars. This kind of film, instead of being called “The Weight of Chains”, could be more appropriately titled “The Weight of War Crimes”!

(Translated into English: Suzana Vukic, journalist)

SO CALLED CRIMES AGAINST SERBS, FORCED STATEMENTS

2011-10-02T20:47:00.000-07:00

COURT: Bosniak prisoners were forced to sign false confessions about rapes of Serbian women and other lies doctored by Serbian ultranationalist propagandists.
.
To claim that Serbs were victims of 'Bosnian Muslim' aggression in the Bosnian war is an incitement to violence and an exercise of moral relativism. As the International Criminal Tribunal confirmed, on numerous occasions, the Serbs were systematically killing, systematically terrorizing, systematically raping and systematically persecuting Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims). To make things worse: In concentration camps like Manjaca, Omarska, Keraterm, and Trnopolje, and elsewhere, Serbs were forcing Bosniak prisoners to sign false confessions about the so called "crimes against the Serbs." Serbs needed these doctored confessions so they could falsify history and feed future generations of young Serbs with their dangerous victimhood mythology.

But, it did not work.

For example, in Tadic's judgement (and many other judgement and testimonies) the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at the Hague concluded that Bosniak and Croat prisoners were tortured and forced to sign coerced confessions during 'interrogations',

"Some [Bosniak and Croat] prisoners were very severely beaten during interrogation, a guard standing behind the prisoner, hitting and kicking him, often knocking him off the chair in which he sat; there were instances where prisoners knocked to the floor would be trodden and jumped on by guards and severely injured; all of this while the interrogator looked on. Treatment varied from prisoner to prisoner and seemed to depend rather more on the brutality of the individual interrogator and guards than on the behaviour of the particular prisoner. Prisoners, after their interrogation, were often made to sign false statements regarding their involvement in acts against Serbs. The calling-out of prisoners was not only for the purposes of interrogation. In the evening, groups from outside the camp would appear, would call out particular prisoners from their rooms and attack them with a variety of sticks, iron bars or lengths of heavy electric cable. Sometimes these weapons would have nails embedded in them so as to pierce the skin. On occasions knives would be used to slash a prisoner’s bod"

Asim Basic, survivor of genocide in Kotor Varos, testified that Serbs were beating him ruthlessly because he refused to sign statements that he had committed the so called "crimes against the Serbs" by raping Serb women, and other lies, read at SENSE Tribunal (use Google Translate).

By terrorizing, sniping and shelling besieged multi-ethnic Bosnian towns like Sarajevo and Tuzla, Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Bosniaks, Serbs, and other residents who were opposing the ideology of "racial purity" by defending democratic and multi-ethnic values of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Bosniak side -- or rather, the outgunned government of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was operating on about 25% of unoccupied B&H territory -- did not persecute Serbs; instead, it fought for the survival of Bosnia-Herzegovina and all of its citizens. While the government of Bosnia-Herzegovina lacked heavy artillery and ammunition for basic weaponry, the Serb side was handsomely armed by the Yugoslav Peoples Army. No wonder Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing was such a huge success. In several months of 1992, Serbs succeeded in ethnically cleansing 70 per cent of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

ZAHVALA BOŠNJACIMA ZA SPAŠAVANJE PILOTA NICK RICHARDSON-A

2011-10-02T13:41:00.000-07:00

Uz ovaj članak: Treba se sjetiti i britanskog specijalca Wayne Mills-a, koji je poginuo 29. aprila 1994 kod Goraždu kada je sa svojim vojnicima naišao na grupu srpskih vojnika u šumi. Iako su britanci uspjeli ubiti dvojicu četnika, Mills je nažalost izgubio svoj život. Pilot Nick Richardson je spašen od Bošnjaka kada su Srbi srušili njegov avion.

U Beriču kod Goražda otvoren je internet centar koji će koristiti demobilisani borci Armije BiH i mladi ljudi iz ovoga dijela Općine Goražde.

Projekat je finansirala britanska Vlada želeći i na ovaj način zahvaliti stanovnicima Beriča koji su 1994. godine spasili britanskog pilota čiji je avion oboren iznad Goražda u akciji bombardovanja položaja Vojske Republike Srpske. U Beriču je uz prisustvo građana otkrivena i spomen ploča na kojoj je zapisano da su 16. 04. 1992. godine pripadnici Prve drinske brigade spasili engleskog pilota Nika Ričardsona [Nick Richardson], neposredno nakon obaranja njegovog aviona iznad lokaliteta Jabučko sedlo. A događaja iz tog perioda prisjeća se i Šaban Tabaković iz Beriča koji je vidio kad je avion pilota Ričardsona pogođen.

-Dan ranije sam bio u ispomoći Rogatičkoj brigadi, kad sam se vratio kući, kažu mi da je ‘pala’ Jabuka. Ja sam otišao ujutro u Vlahoviće, da vidim šta se dešava, kad sam došao sa dvojicom momaka vidio sam da nadiru četničke trupe sa Ćurevske kose a dva aviona nadlijeću, neće da ih bombarduju, ja u sebi psujem, kažem tucite ih, gađajte ih…

Nisam ni izgovorio kad je jedan avion pogođen lansirnim uređajem. Katapult ga je izbacio i pao je jedan kilometar ispred mene u rejonu Vlahovića, a avion je pao iznad sela Mrkova u šumi Međed. Ja sam sa dvojicom momaka trčao da nađemo pilota, kada smo ga pronašli on sjedio uz drvo i digao ruke kao znak da se predaje. Ja sam mu pružio ruku i potapšao ga po ramenu, i rekao momcima da ga niko ne dira. Doveo sam ga u Berič, komandantu bataljona Dževadu Adžemu-Oskaru. Potom smo sišli u jedan potok, starim putem kod vode, ja sam pio vode, on je također bio žedan ali nije smio da se napije, i kad je vidio mene i on je počeo da pije, priča Šaban, pojašanjavajući da je pilot, tek kasnije shvatio da je u rukama Armije BiH.

-Tek kad sam ga doveo u bataljon komandantu koji je znao engleski, Dževadu Adžemu – Oskaru on mu je objasnio sve i odveo ga u Goražde i poslije su ga evakuisali, bio je lijep momak, plav, baš kao oficiri iz filmova, prisjetio se Šaban.

Tako je ovaj događaj iz 1994. godine u Berič doveo i britanskog vojnog atašea u BIH, pukovnika Stivena Krofta te umirovljenog brigadnog generala Dejvida Santa Olala koji je tokom rata bio zapovjednik mirovnih snaga u Goraždu. Oni su u prisustvu brojnih domaćih zvaničnika prisustvovali otvaranju centra i spomen ploče koja će podsjećati na ovaj gest ljudi iz Beriča. Njihovi utisci su impresivni.

-Kada sam došao ovdje činilo mi se da je sve u crno bijelom a sada je sve u koloru, najmodernije. I zaista je divno biti ovdje i vidjeti sve pozitivne promjene koje su se desile ovdje, kazao je general Dejvid Santa Olala.

-Drago nam je da smo ovdje sa vrlo važnim ciljem da uz pomoć britanskog vojnog atašea i britanske ambasade i Vlade Velike Britanije, danas možemo koristiti jedan informatički centar koji će poslužiti lokalnom stanovništvu ali prvenstveno demobilisanim borcima za sticanje novih znanja i vještina, mogućnost prekvalifikacije, lakšeg iznalaženja novih radnih mjesta. Ono što smo uradili u ratu spašavanjem britanskog pilota i njegovom sigurnom evakuacijom, danas nam se konkretno vratilo ovim činom. Mladim ljudima smo poručili da je izlaz iz ove situacije isključivo obrazovanje, tolerancija, suživot i stvaranje ambijenta da se kroz taj proces unaprijedi život na našim prostorima, izjavio je ovom prilikom Dževad Adžem, ministar za boračka pitanja BPK-Goražde.

-Građani Goražda duguju veliku zahvalnost brigadnom generalu Dejvidu Olali koji je dao veliki doprinos opstanku Goražda. On je pomagao stanovništvo na različite načine, ta pomoć je mnogo značila potpuno blokiranom Goraždu, kazao je ovom prilikom Muhamed Ramović, načelnik općine Goražde i pritom uputio posebnu zahvalnost generalu Santa Olalli. Naglasio je njgovu ulogu i značaj koji je on dao u zaštiti civilnog stanovništva za vrijeme rata u BiH. Inače o ovom događaju Nick Richardson napisao je i knjigu „No escape zone“ koja je doživjela veliki uspjeh u svijetu, a u Engleskoj je već doživjela treće izdanje. Spomen ploču otkrili su ministar za boračka pitanja Dževad Adžem i umirovljeni brigadni general David Santa Olalla.

SRAMOTA: GENOCID U GORAŽDU BEZ OSUMNJIČENIH

2011-10-02T12:34:00.000-07:00

Ukrajinski vojnik UNPROFOR-a pomaze ranjenoj bosnjackoj starici evakuiranoj iz opsjednutog Gorazda u opsjednuto Sarajevo. Srbi su 1994 godini pobili najmanje 1500 bosnjackih zena, djece i staraca u opkoljenom Gorazdu (Genocid nad Bosnjacima) Photo: Mark H. Milstein/ Northfoto.

Ines Ribić danas živi u Sjedinjenim Američkim Državama – i od potrage za istinom ne namjerava odustati.

Autor: Alen Bajramović

Sporost pravosudnih institucija u BiH u procesuiranju ratnih zločina najočitija je na primjeru ratne enklave Goražde. Ovaj grad je od 4. maja 1992. godine pa sve do kraja rata bio u potpunom okruženju, izložen granatiranju, izgladnjivanju i bjesomučnim napadima u kojima nije pravljena razlika između civilnih i vojnih ciljeva.

U okupiranim naseljima počinjeni su užasni zločini, a svjedoci bezuspješno traže tijela najmilijih i pravdu za zločince. Ipak, do danas niko za zločine počinjene nad stanovnicima Goražda nije ni osumnjičen.

Ines Ribić imala je 17 godina kada je politika odlučila da razori njen grad, dom i porodicu. U naselju u blizini preduzeća Pobjeda u zatočeništvo je najprije odveden njen otac Ibrahim, čije tijelo ni do danas nije pronašla, a onda je ispred porodične kuće ubijena i njena majka Slavica.

Ines i njene mlađe sestre, sa dedom Ilijom i nanom Esmom morale su promijeniti imena kako bi spasile gole živote:

„Uzele smo srpska imena i navodno promijenili vjeru da bi oni nas pustili da izađemo i tako smo izašli. Propusnice su potpisane od Radenka Jovičića i Stanka Stojanovića koji su bili tada u komandi. Ja sam ostala Ines pošto je ono kao miješano ime, jedna sestra zvala Anisa, sad se zvala Ana, i najmlađa se zove Emina, dali smo joj ime Mira, pa je nana bila Mara.“

Opkoljeno Goražde u Ratu (Genocid u Bosni). Photo: Peter DePree

.
Izgladnjivanje i ranjeni

Emir Čengić imao je 12 godina kada je počeo napad srpskih snaga na Podlozje u kojem je živio sa porodicom. Ubijeno je više od 40 civila, a za tijelima većine njih i dalje se traga:

„Opkolili su kuću, bacili su bombe, onda su zvali da se predamo. Vojno sposobne muškarce su odvojili i odatle se svaki trag gubi braći i ocu. Bili su komšije većinom.“

Doktorica Sabina Gušo početak rata dočekala je u improviziranoj ambulanti u Mujković Polju, a nekoliko mjeseci kasnije radila je i u Ratnoj bolnici, stvorenoj preko noći u objektu prijeratnog Doma zdravlja. Tokom prvi pet ratnih mjeseci nije bilo anestezije, instrumenata, niti operacionih sala.

Snimci amputacija tokom kojih su korišteni partizanska anestezija i kućni alat već su obišli svijet. Tokom cijelog rata bolnica i terenske ambulante granatirane su istom žestinom kao i vojni, ali i ostali civilni ciljevi:

„Ono što se ne može zaboraviti to je, recimo, april 1994. kada je u tom jednom granatiranju poginulo naših četvoro uposlenika. Ili granatiranje ovih improvizovanih objekata stacionarnog tipa, gdje se zbog malog kapaciteta nije moglo smjestiti sav onaj broj provrijeđenih. Tada su ciljano gađali taj objekat, gdje je jedna medicinska sestra poginula,i četvero je bilo poginulih i ranjenih od onih koji su tu bili smješteni. Znači, faktički nije bilo selekcije od strane ljudi koji su željeli uništiti ovaj grad.“

Izgladnjivanje civilnog stanovništva zaustavljanjem konvoja sa hranom i lijekovima, pored artiljerije i pješadije, bilo je najjače oružje u rukama napadača na grad. Krajem 1992. i 1993. godine između linija fronta, pod okriljem noći, gladne i loše odjevene kolone Podrinjaca pješačile su do magacina na planini Grebak. Odatle su na leđima nosile hranu, ali i municiju za odbranu grada.

Zasjede, minska polja, hladnoća, umor i glad odnijeli su na stotine života. Rabija Adilović iz sela Zorovići ispraćala je i dočekivala kolone ljudi, žena i djece. Krijepila je iscrpljene i liječila ranjene:

„Sjećam se jednog čovjeka kojemu su obadva oka bila izbijena i vilica prebijena, kojega sam pitala – samo na jedan dio usta sam mu trpala hranu. Pa sam smrznute ljude spašavala. Jedne prilike kad je pošla kolona za Grebak, kad je bilo granatiranje, 13 ranjenika odmah u kući smo imali. Te smo ranjenike cijelu noć previjali.“

Razruseno Gorazde (Bosanski Genocid). Photo Peter DePree.

.
Naša i njihova istina

Opsada Goražda Neziru Čeliku vraćala je sjećanja na Drugi svjetski rat, kada je njegov otac poginuo prilikom prevrtanja skele kojom je preko Drine prevozio izbjeglice iz Čajniča. U posljednjem je ratu obavljao dženaze. Prisustvovao je ukopu više od 1.400 sugrađana:

„20. aprila 1994. 12 je dženaza u gasulhani. Ruke su mi bile krvave do lakata. Ja sam samo saprao te ruke, i ja više ništa ne znam. Nije bilo šta nije prema meni išlo – od crijepa, cigle. Ona navodeća pala – sa pet je kuća odmah krov skinut, kao da nikad nije bilo krova.“

Tužilaštvo u Goraždu procesuiralo je nekoliko slučajeva ratnih zločina nad civilima srpske nacionalnosti u ovom gradu, obavljajući istrage pod stalnom prijetnjom od artiljerije i snajpera. S druge strane, zbog ratnih zločina počinjenih nad stanovnicima grada pod opsadom do sada niko nije ni osumnjičen.

Ovu činjenicu glavni tužitelj Mirsad Bjelajac pokušava opravdati izmjenama zakonskih propisa po kojima je je sve izjave od strane svjedoka, koje je ranije prikupio AID, trebalo ponovo dobiti. Problem predstavljaju i odlazak, umiranje svjedoka ili njihova odluka da ratnu prošlost pokušaju zaboraviti. Ipak, osnovni problem je što su entitetske crte podijelile istinu i pravdu na „našu“ i „njihovu“:

„Da su se tri naroda borila protiv nekog izvana, brže bi se radilo. Ako su ratni zločin počinili Srbi, da bi se ubrzalo, onda bi trebalo njihovi tužioci profesionalno da obave to. A vi sad znate kakvi su problemi. Ko će da svjedoči? I boje li se? I prijeti li se? I ono što se zna neće se reći, odnosno ne smije se reći, ili može da škodi politici nekih entiteta.“

I pored činjenice što je sve vidjela i doživjela, upoznala tamničare svoga oca i ubice majke, zločin počinjen nad njenim roditeljima nikada nije procesuiran. Ines Ribić danas živi u Sjedinjenim Američkim Državama – i od potrage za istinom ne namjerava odustati:

„Tu je bila masa zločina. Za mnoge zločine oni više nemaju ni svjedoke – jer godine prolaze, narod umire. Za ovaj zločin imaju svjedoke. Oni nikad ništa nisu bili u stanju da urade. Ja sam se čula sa Tužilaštvom 2009. godine, sa Vesnom Budiumir, čule smo se putem telefona, poslala sam joj i e-mail. Sa SIPOM sam se prvi put sastala 2010. godine i dala sam im svoju kompletnu izjavu. Tužilaštvo pokušavam da kontaktiram, da čujem šta se radi na tom slučaju, zovem telefonom, šaljem e-mailove, ali niko nije u stanju da odgovori. Iako imam namjeru da se vratim u, to mi je životna želja, ali kad dođe do ovakvih situacija, drago mi je što nisam u Bosni. Jer tolike godine rata smo trpjeli, koještošta prošli od Srba, a sada trpimo od našeg naroda. Pravda treba da dođe. Što se tiče traganja, ja ću naravno nastaviti tragati – ja neći nikad stati.“

Izvor: Slobodna Evropa

BONES TELL TALE OF SUFFERING BEFORE BOSNIAN GENOCIDE

2011-09-25T20:39:00.000-07:00

In this April 15, 1993 file photo, a nurse tends to 12-year-old Sead Bekric in a hospital in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina, after Serb attack on the elementary school in the besieged Srebrenica blinded him and killed (Photo/Karsten Thielker)

****

In Winter of 1992/93, five thousands (5,000) Bosniak women, children and elderly died of starvation in the besieged Bosnian Muslim enclaves, including Srebrenica. Their suffering is part of Serb terror inflicted on the Bosniak refugees between April 1992 and July 1995 in pursuit of ethnically pure Greater Serbia. For example, see Daniel Toljaga's War Hospital, Starvation in Pre-Genocide Srebrenica, Desperation and Resistance in Pre-Genocide Srebrenica, and Scenes of Hell in Pre-Genocide Srebrenica.
.
On Sept 20, distinguished Live Science editor, Stephanie Pappas, published an article focusing on the suffering of Bosniak people long before the 1995 Srebrenica genocide. She discussed latest research findings conducted by Ann Ross, an anthropologist at North Carolina State University.

The victims of the mid-1990s genocide in Bosnia were allowed to suffer long before Bosnian Serb forces began their massacres, according to a new study of bones from mass graves in the region.

The bones of the victims are scarred with telltale signs of chronic disease and birth defects, suggesting that this population of Bosnian Muslims endured a lack of health care long before the Bosnian conflict turned violent.

"They had been marginalized for a long time," study researcher Ann Ross, an anthropologist at North Carolina State University, told LiveScience. "They had very poor health care. For example, there were a couple of individuals that had significant ear infections that had produced even the breakdown of bone. … Obviously, that was telling me they didn't even have access to antibiotics that could have dealt with that issue."

Please continue reading by visiting
original article published by Live Science >>>

Extra: United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., features a short clip of the 1993 Srebrenica Children Massacre: