A good question.
If I understand it properly you mean,sort of , what is the common understanding, by an average person in West, of the event.
In plain: a mass murder of 8000 civilians/POWs done by Serb forces in the UN Safe Haven.
Definitely FALSE.
Having said that, there was an organized murder, just on a much smaller scale.
West had to close the “Balkan’s case”. Dragged too much.
The only way to do it was to push certain parties in a certain way using certain means.
The only way to create a public support for that and, sort of, legal cover, was to have a proper story.
The best story was “preventing genocide”.
Srebrenica was that case.
Muslims played that very well and Serbs walked into it.
Not that local Muslims liked it and the Serbs had any problem with that at the time, of course.
Puppet masters played Balkans tribes, Serbs in particular, well.
Muslim leadership knew that the attack was coming. They intentionally weakened the defense by pulling out the core military leadership from the enclave a couple of weeks before Serb attack.
They knew that the defense, in a case of Serb push, would collapse fast.
Now….to be honest, they didn’t actually want enclave to collapse altogether; they wanted it weak enough to start collapsing and then force West/UN to engage with airstrikes.
In essence get West on their side on the ground.
I’d call that plan A.
Should plan A fail plan B.
They knew that as soon as people there realize that no West support was coming the defense and enclave would collapse and people would flee.
Knowing Serbs too, they knew that a certain level of mass murder would happen.
Fleeing mass of civilians with murder/execution of a group here and there……perfect to construct the story. Especially when fleeing would be done by unfit mass of noncombatants over difficult mountainous terrain pursued by motorized Serb forces.
What people fail (or refuse) to acknowledge today is that total disdain for West by Serbs at the time.
That level of killings was, essentially a message to West: “I know you don’t like this, so what? You do not make rules here.”
Serb leadership on the ground (Mladic) could’ve prevented a lot of that; not all of course.
In Srebrenica proper it could’ve been less than, say, 50 murders (you can’t prevent all local Serbs of shooting a person here and there).
In pursuing the fleeing mass, probably a couple of hundreds tops.
The thing is, Mladic and the rest didn’t care.
That’s why numbers, IMHO, got to around, most likely, several hundreds. Definitely not several thousands.
But, then, you can’t make a story with several hundreds. You need thousands. A nice number. That made 7000/8000.
BTW, when Germans pulled a mass execution of Serb civilians in WW2 once, the number of shot Serb civilians was 7000. Some people tried to dispute that. Makes you think, eh?
Funny thing those numbers and their use in practical politics.
Not...........quite............
There is no doubt that the chaotic events in the Balkans in the 1990s involved some ad-hoc, extrajudicial, noncombat killings by probably all parties.
In your view, is the Srebrenica narrative essentially true or false?
There is no doubt that the chaotic events in the Balkans in the 1990s involved some ad-hoc, extrajudicial, noncombat killings by probably all parties.
Not………..quite…………
1. There was plenty of deep ideological groundwork before all that.
2. There was quite a lot of careful planning, preparation and organizational/logistical effort in all that. Including training of paramilitaries and (re)deployment of regular military.
3. There was a lot of chaos, too….BUT…underneath all that chaos was that 1. and 2. Chaos was in execution on the ground on a low level, NOT in the high places of power.
Say, chaos was from a battalion militia down, NEVER up.
Ethnic cleansing was planned well, and well done on a large scale. Including concentration camps.
Ad-hoc, extrajudicial, noncombat killings were part of all that setup. Part, mind you. Integral part.
“We want your people to leave this region”->they don’t; shell them, push with regular forces, break their local militia type defense->do some “ad-hoc extrajudicial, noncombat killings” to encourage all civilians to flee->consolidate->rinse and repeat.
Serebrenica was done by the same principle.
Additional element was a long history of hatred there reinforced by tit for tat killings since ’92.
Perfect storm of ethic warfare.
That the storm was carefully and skillfully used by the puppet masters then and there is a different story.
Oh, BTW, Oric and his main henchmen were pulled out of Srebenica a couple of weeks before the Serb attack for a…..training….exercise in Sarajevo. Pure coincidence, of course…………
And all that above definitely done by all parties all over that region, just different in scale.
Thanks for reposting these important reconsiderations of Srebrenica.
The Srebrenica Narrative is now pushing towards the 25-year mark. It is strong and has an ‘official state religion’ aspect to it.
What is the Srebrenica Narrative? It is this: “In the 1990s, White-Christian fascistic Bosnian Serbs, with the backing of Serbia’s White-Christian fascist regime, carried out a crazed racist genocide campaign, executed 8,000 innocent Muslims, for no objective but race-hatred; thankfully, the USA and NATO saved the Muslims from genocide.”
The Balkan interventions, it has turned out, were a blueprint for the past twenty years of U.S. and NATO or quasi-NATO interventions. So far no sign of any Trump moves towards any kind of humanitarian bombing campaign against racists or Islamophobes (Serbs) or anyone else except the inherited campaign against ISIS.
So was Srebrenica a hoax? The long answer: There is no doubt that the chaotic events in the Balkans in the 1990s involved some ad-hoc, extrajudicial, noncombat killings by probably all parties. This tends to happen with insurgents and paramilitaries fighting ethnic civil wars, but the Srebrenica Narrative as I’ve tried to sketch it out above is mainly false, with the central claims definitely false, but all lucrative politically for each the Bosniaks, the Clinton Machine, NATO, and the EU. (Short answer: Yes, hoax or something near to it.)
Not...........quite............
There is no doubt that the chaotic events in the Balkans in the 1990s involved some ad-hoc, extrajudicial, noncombat killings by probably all parties.
Most of what the West has been fed about the Bosnian conflict is crap. Muslim political leader Alija Izetbegović and his hardliners controlled the narrative and fed Western journos a very one sided version of the war while concealing their own atrocities against innocent Serbs. The numbers of Muslims killed at Srebenica was always hyped for propaganda effect and almost all were male combatants and not helpless women and children as reported.
Slobodan Milosevic, maligned by the (((Western))) press corps as “another Hitler”, was exonerated for the war crimes he was charged with:
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/354362-slobodan-milosevic-exonerated-us-nato/
This isn’t to say the Serbs were necessarily angels, but there were two sides to the story and their side was never told.
What’s this nonsense of trying to bridge muslim and Christian communities together? Don’t these people understand the more you try to bring people together the more they’ll realize that they are all better off living separately.
http://www.ebritic.com/?p=213256 This article is quite interesting. Bob Baer, a CIA agent, said he is sorry what the CIA did to Yugoslavia. He wrote a book about it. He says the CIA stirred up the ethnic conflicts to destroy Yugoslavia. It worked sadly.
Every muslim’s sacred.
Every muslim’s great.
If a muslim’s wasted,
UN gets quite irate.
h/t to Eric Idle and Monty Python
wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Sperm_Is_Sacred
Related to Srebenica, article on Bosnian Croat General Slobodan Praljak who just sacrificed his life, to show that the corrupt ‘war crimes’ trials in the Hague were a fraud to hide the crimes of Western governments … Hague ‘courts’ where no less than 15 defendants have wound up dead (!) during proceedings … A court where crimes by Nato and Muslim militias were overlooked, whilst Balkan Christian leaders were convicted for ‘conspiring’ & ‘allowing’ atrocities … So why aren’t many Western leaders in the dock on these grounds?
https://www.henrymakow.com/2017/12/War-Crimes-Tribunal.html
Praljak had already served most of his prison term and would have been released soon, underscoring the brave intentions of his dramatic public suicide, Praljak drinking a dram of poison on live video in the Hague ‘Yugoslavia war crimes’ courtroom … as it says in the photo caption, whatever his past crimes, General Praljak died a brave warrior, sacrificing his existence to try to let the world know there are other sides to this story