According to the “facts” alleged by the Hague Tribunal in its numerous judgments, the “genocide” is supposed to have begun only two days later, on 13 July [...]
In early January 2020, Serbian media reported the sensational news that recently declassified British Ministry of Defense files contained important new evidence suggesting that the official account of what happened in Srebrenica was unfounded.
As from time to time has been the case, Western sources have again disclosed some information about Srebrenica in July 1995, which until recently was kept confidential and therefore not available to the public. The source of this particular batch of documents is the UK Department of Defense. The documents that have finally been declassified contains very interesting assessments and reports that take on even greater significance when cross-checked against data which are already known. The document that has attracted the most attention is a letter from a Ministry of Defense official under the date of July 11, 1995, sent to Roderick Lyne, private secretary to the then Prime Minister John Major. The purpose of the letter was to brief Major through his private secretary on developments in the Srebrenica area in order to enable the Prime Minister to handle expected parliamentary questions on that subject.
A definitive judgment on these until quite recently inaccessible documents (they were released by the National Archive of the United Kingdom on December 31, 2019) must await thorough examination. Both the subject matter and everything we know from these and other official sources suggests the conclusion that these are issues too important to be left to very selective and often shallow media interpretations.
But even if we were to confine ourselves to the fragments with which the general public has now been acquainted, some significant and, for the official Srebrenica narrative, rather unfavorable conclusions may even now be drawn.
First and foremost, we see here a report emanating from the British Ministry of Defense, dated July 11, 1995, which matter of factly informs the Prime Minister that at that particular moment British intelligence services lacked knowledge of any intention on the part of the Republika Srpska Army to conquer Srebrenica and place the enclave under its control. (Bosnian Serb army forces did enter Srebrenica on that very day, but that was widely acknowledged to have been an opportunistic move, no resistance having been encountered.) This British assessment is of great importance because of the implications that emanate from it.
According to the “facts” alleged by the Hague Tribunal in its numerous judgments, the “genocide” is supposed to have begun only two days later, on 13 July. Why is this chronology important?
Because for “genocide” to have occurred in the legal sense of the term, even of a relatively small group of 8,000 people (if we compare that to the scope of the extermination of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Jews under the Nazis, or Serbs in the Nazi-aligned Croation state during World War II), presupposes the existence of specific intent, as well as adequate logistical preparation.
To that end, the Hague Tribunal has unpersuasively construed meetings held at the Fontana Hotel in nearby Bratunac on 12 July to bolster its conclusions (see Krstic Trial Judgment, paragraphs 126-134). In its comments, the Tribunal itself accepts that these meetings were held shortly before the alleged genocidal events, in fact only a day before a crime of such serious magnitude was supposed to have begun, but at the same time it acknowledges that there is no “concrete evidence” of the existence of a genocidal plan. Furthermore, the only direct perpetrator of the “genocide” to have been brought before that court, the mildly punished Drazen Erdemovic, who turned Prosecution witness, when cross-examined by defendant Radovan Karadzic admitted freely that neither he nor his colleagues from the 10th Sabotage Detachment execution squad were motivated by the intent to exterminate Muslims when taking part in the execution of war prisoners at Branjevo. As for logistics, since the intent evidently could not have been formed until the eve of the “genocide”, the issue is practically moot. Since no evidence of logistics to carry out such a large-scale killing operation was discovered, there are no specific allegations or details in ICTY judgments on this important issue.
A review of the documents already publicly available for some time makes it crystal clear that the “sensational disclosures” from the British archives must already have been known to anyone with a serious interest in these issues.
The Hague Tribunal’s long-time chief investigator, Jean-Rene Ruez, said much the same thing as the recently declassified British documents when he testified before the French Parliamentary Commission on Srebrenica in 2001. The British Defense Ministry’s assessment subsequently proved to be essentially correct, but since it was drawn up contemporaneously with the events to which it refers, it did not necessarily have to be. However, Ruez’s assessment is retrospective, made five years after the event, with the benefit of insight into the relevant documentation, and it therefore carries more weight. A very precise sequence of events, which virtually rules out the possibility that the official version of the event could be accurate, was presented by ICTY military prosecutor Richard Butler at the “Pelemis and Peric” trial before the Bosnia and Herzegovina War Crimes Court in Sarajevo in 2010. Therefore, far from constituting a sensation, British MoD documents are important pieces of the mosaic that do not disclose anything basically new. They do, however, round out a picture that was already familiar.
Another important detail that the British documents do not reveal, but certainly do confirm, is the refusal of members of the 28th Division of the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina, whose troop strength in July 1995 was about 5,000, to engage in natural and normal conduct in the situation in which they found themselves (also here, footnote 28). The armed outfit in question did virtually nothing to counter “one company and four tanks” (a direct quotation from the British MoD document) of the Bosnian Serb Army that was approaching Srebrenica from the south side of the enclave. To journalists, this may appear as a sensation, but for those who have studied these matters in the context of the Bosnian war — it definitely is not.
Foreign observers who happened to be in the immediate vicinity or who were following the events on the ground in some official capacity have shed light on this mystery. For example, Portuguese General Martins Branco, Deputy Commander of the UN Observation Mission at the time of the events in question, made the following observation in his memoir, “The War in the Balkans,” published in 2017:
“The topography of the Srebrenica region, as well as Eastern Bosnia as a whole, is very hilly. The virgin, densely forested landscapes and deep ditches make it difficult to move combat vehicles and facilitate infantry operations. The numerical ratio of forces, when considered in relation to the terrain properties, which undoubtedly favors the defenders, suggests that the ARBiH forces had more than enough manpower to defend themselves. However, they failed to do so.”
Other observers made similar assertions as Martins Branco (here, pp. 47-48). So once again the British documents did not reveal anything fundamentally new, but the fact that they have been made public is nevertheless helpful because one can never go too far stressing the startling fact that in Srebrenica there was no resistance and that the armed and much more numerous “men and boys” withdrew to the mountains, leaving their womenfolk and elderly unprotected in the face of an “aggressor” who by that time in their eyes had already acquired a genocidal reputation.
Finally, the question must be raised: why did they act that way? Was it to take the opportunity to lure the Serb forces into a strategic trap (remember General Morillon’s testimony at The Hague, where he used precisely such language to describe the situation), hoping the Serbs would slaughter several thousand refugees in Potocari? That certainly would have satisfied the terms of Izetbegovic’s and Clinton’s secret convention, which envisioned exactly such a scenario in order to ensure the political preconditions for a US intervention in the conflict.
It is almost always the case when new files concerning Srebrenica are opened, whether the result is really new data or just a confirmation of already known facts, that not only do these disclosures in no way help the official narrative, but on the contrary they systematically undermine it. It is not surprising therefore for such information to have been kept under lock and key for decades precisely so as not to disturb the prevailing, concocted narrative in the expectation that buying time (and criminalizing “genocide denial”) would assist the narrative in taking hold.
The Karl Rovian way the process of rearranging reality now unfolds was recently explained by Craig Murray, a former British ambassador, in a remarkable article, “The Terrifying Rise of the Zombie State Narrative”. The ruling establishment, Murray claims, has learnt one important lesson from the collapse of the official lies about the non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction: “Never to admit they lied, never to admit they were wrong.”
And the same goes now for all their monumental lies, from the pretext for invading Iraq to Srebrenica, and more recently the political crisis engendered by the cold-blooded assassination at Baghdad airport on January 3. The security services, Murray writes, understand “that in future they just have to brazen it out.” If a hypothetical situation like the mythical Iraqi weapons were to recur today “and the security services decided to brazen it out” by asserting deliberately the false claim that the armaments were in fact found, “there is not a mainstream media outlet that would contradict them.“
The rebuttable or easily refuted claims that are blatantly disseminated and parroted, and believed by millions who blindly take them at face value even though evidence refuting them is close at hand, Murray christens “zombie narratives.” Srebrenica is undoubtedly one of the prominent illustrations of Murray’s thesis.
The “declassification” of the British documents is therefore no evidence of Western transparency or democratic will to keep the public informed. It is proof, rather, of a perfidious damage-control tactic. As we have seen, some of the major “disclosures” in the British documents have long been in the public domain and have gradually been seeping into the public discourse. Extending the embargo would accomplish nothing, but the removal of the secrecy mark should impress the simpleminded who may imagine that this is evidence of regrettably belated, but still highly commendable “transparency” of the Western system.
Those who think this way have already forgotten the farce about finally making public the remaining, most sensitive documents about the assassination of John Kennedy. In the 1990s, Congress explicitly ordered that by 2017 everything must be disclosed, even the last scrap of paper. Yet, under a Presidential directive countermanding Congressional instructions, 2017 has come and gone but the most compromising documents remain locked away for several additional decades, for the reasons of “national security” to which Murray has alluded. Locked away and unpublished documents on Srebrenica surely also abound in the secret files of “all the usual suspects,” as Captain Louis Renault picturesquely put in the movie “Casablanca.”
The availability of these British Srebrenica documents — assuming Ambassador Murray is correct — may in some circles achieve a favorable propaganda effect for the UK, but in relation to Srebrenica, a wall of blatantly imposed lies will not permit them to change or meaningfully challenge anything. Tactical damage control operations should not be confused with permission to touch the core of a protected zombie narrative.
If in 2015 the general public were unaware of these “sensational” documents kept in the British Defense Ministry safe, the British government certainly were. Yet, that did not prevent them from attempting to push through in the UN Security Council a resolution chastising the Serbian nation for genocide in Srebrenica. The resolution failed only thanks to the veto placed by the Russian Federation. And as we now learn, British government sources, in their own contemporaneous and confidential report, had frankly stated that their misleading resolution alleging genocide in Srebrenica was to do with an attack undertaken by a local commander, not by the Bosnian Serb military and political leadership in Pale, and therefore even less probably so by the Serbian leadership in Belgrade.
Originally published on 2020-01-13
About the author: Stephen Karganovic is a President of the Srebrenica Historical Project
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/LegalStatement!
DonatetoSupportUs
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
What is the bigger story? The West Against the Rest or The West Against Itself?The Illiberal Quartet of Xi, Putin, Rouhani and Erdogan is in the line of fire of haughty homilies about Western “values.”Illiberalism is arrogantly and provocatively depicted in the West repeatedly as a Tartar Invasion 2.0. But closer to home Illiberalism is responsible for the social, civil war in the U.S. as Trump’s America has long ago forgotten what the European Enlightenment was all about.The Western view is a maelstrom of a Judaeo-Greco-Roman, pseudo-philosophy steeped in Hegel, Toynbee, Spengler and obscure biblical references decrying an Asian attack ...
Тhe world is at a dangerous crossroads. The United States and its allies have launched a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The US-NATO military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.America’s hegemonic project is to destabilize and destroy countries through acts of war, covert operations in support of terrorist organizations, regime change and economic warfare. The latter includes the imposition of deadly macro-economic reforms ...
GR Editor’s NoteThe following article by professor Eric Waddell was first published twelve years ago by Global Research in December 2003 in the immediate wake of the invasion and occupation of Iraq by US and British forces, with a postscript added in 2007. The article provides an incisive historical perspective on America’s “long war” against humanity, which is being carried out under a fake humanitarian mandate. Let us be under no illusions as to the intent of the US and its allies. We are dealing with World Conquest under the disguise of a “Global War on Terrorism”. Michel Chossudovsky, December 24, ...
IntroductionThe aim of this article is to shed new light on the question of how the configuration of post-war Central and South-East Europe was shaped during WWII by the USSR through its relations with the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (the CPY). Relationships between the CPY and the Soviet Union in 1941−1945 depended on the concrete military situation in Europe, and on the diplomatic relationships between the Soviet Union and the other members of the anti-fascist Alliance. For that reason, the Soviet Union and the CPY were cooperating in two directions during WWII. The concrete military situation in the battleground of ...
Two Kosovo Albanian Muslim muhajedeens (with the passports of Republic of Kosovo) as members of ISIL in Syria in 2015 (Official ISIL’s video material)After the 9/11, a worldwide “War on terror” begun in order to disband and neutralize Islamic terrorist networks across the globe. The main focus of the largest anti-terrorist campaign in history is focused in the Middle East area, as well as in Afghanistan.The Balkan Peninsula is the European area where this campaign has also taken place, with numerous arrests and a continuous effort into riding the fundamentalist out of the area. The question arising though, is how ...
The legal and diplomatic arguments for granting “Kosova” independence, whether “supervised” or unsupervised, are totally spurious and unfounded. There is no basis in international law or international agreements or the UN Charter for dismembering Serbia by allowing a minority population to secede. The only argument is the argument of force, “the spoils of war”, seeing Kosovo as a spoil of war. This is the only “argument”. But since this is an unpalatable and unconvincing argument, it must be buttressed and camouflaged with the discredited and disproved “genocide” construct, which acts as a convenient obfuscating smokescreen. This argument runs as follows: ...
As it appears Lithuania expects major changes in the near future. Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevičius was on an official visit to the United States of America from the 20 to the 24 of February 2017. During a visit he said that Lithuania seeks the permanent presence of United States troops in its territory."We have requested stationing of military forces in our country on a more permanent basis - not only rotational but also more permanent," the minister told BNS in the telephone interview from Washington D.C.Linas Linkevicius' call for the permanent presence of United States troops in Lithuania territory ...
As work nears completion in the first phase of an ambitious project in Montenegro to develop a highway that will connect the Adriatic port of Bar with Serbia, Western officials and mainstream media are ramping up attacks on the endeavor. Western commentators are united in condemnation, ranging from fear-mongering over China’s role to disparaging the plan’s viability. Consistently, they dismiss it as “the highway to nowhere,” implying foolishness on the part of Montenegro and presenting it as a cautionary tale on the dangers of doing business with China. The theme fits neatly within the framework of Washington’s campaign to economically ...
Since Soviet Russia’s 1991 dissolution, successive US administrations governed increasingly lawlessly and recklessly – Bill Clinton worse than his predecessors, Bush worse than him, Obama worst of all, at war with multiple invented enemies throughout his tenure – from inaugural day to the present.A neocon Hillary Clinton presidency succeeding him risks the unthinkable – possible WW III. America’s rage for dominance, its wanting planet earth colonized, and increasing belligerence toward Russia and China points to eventual confrontation.Unknown is to what extent, but when conflicts begin, they take on a life of their own. Starting them is easy, resolving them another ...
Russia and its President, Vladimir Putin, a little more than a year ago, in July 2014 were the focus of attention in Europe and North America, accused, without a shred of forensic evidence, of shooting down an unarmed civilian Malaysian airliner over eastern Ukraine. The Russians were deemed out to restore the Soviet Union with their agreement to the popular referendum of Crimean citizens to annex into the Russian Federation and not Ukraine. Western sanctions were being thrown at Russia by both Washington and the EU. People spoke of a new Cold War. Today the picture is changing, and profoundly. ...
Historical research into the Nazi era rarely throws up many surprises any more. German historian Stefan Ihrig, however, is an exception to this rule. By studying long-published sources, he has uncovered the fascination that Ataturk's modern Turkey held for the German far right, which has been seriously underestimated until now and which set an example for Hitler and the National Socialists.From a right-wing viewpoint, what Ataturk had achieved was an unattainable goal for Weimar-era Germany. Using force of arms, he had managed to reverse the Treaty of Sevres, which had been forced on his country by the Entente in 1920, ...
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has been slammed for mistakenly using a photo taken in Iraq in 2003 to illustrate the Syria 2012 massacre, in which over 100 people, including 32 children, were brutally killed.The picture, taken on March 27, 2003, showed a young Iraqi child jumping over dozens of white body bags containing skeletons found in a desert south of Baghdad.It was posted on the BBC news website under the heading “Syria massacre in Houla condemned as outrage grows”.According to The Telegraph, the caption stated the photograph was provided by an activist and cannot be independently verified, but said ...
For overwhelming Western political analysts, journalists, scientists, etc., the disappearance of the USSR in 1990/91 was symbolized overdramatically by the physical destruction of the Berlin Wall followed by the removal/destruction of status/monuments devoted to the communist leaders and communist ideology. This geopolitical change called for a new world order in international relations (IR) and, in fact, heralded global peace, international democracy, and worldwide security and stability in foreign affairs after the Cold War 1.0 (1949−1989). The period of the Cold War was a historic period lasting from the time of the establishment of the NATO pact in 1949 to the ...
On November 27th, Germany's Spiegel magazine, which is a reliable propaganda organ for America's NATO military alliance against Russia, headlined (in German but autotranslated here) "Explosive reform proposals for NATO: There is life after 'brain death'", and made only passing mention there of NATO's plan ultimately to 'defend Europe against China' (and not only against Russia); but, on December 1st, Russia's Tass News Agency headlined more informatively and honestly, "China to become NATO's second main enemy after Russia in next 10 years, report says". So: NATO's coming second coming, or life after 'brain death' (which was Macron's phrase for NATO), ...
Bosnian Muslim Kasim Blekic was allegedly murdered by Bosnian Serbs but was, in fact, alive outside of Sarajevo.One of the fundamental legal principles or concepts of jurisprudence is that before a person can be charged with a crime, evidence must be shown that a crime has occurred. This is known by the legal principle of “corpus delicti”, the body of a crime, meaning that there must be evidence that a crime has occurred before a defendant can be charged or prosecuted for the crime. The 6th edition of Black’s Law Dictionary (1990) gives the meaning of corpus delicti as “the ...
The interest of European scholars, primarily German and Austrian, in research on Albanian ethnical origin, rose gradually during the second half of the 19th century.[1] Their interest in Albanian and Balkan studies came later in comparison with the study of other ethnic groups and regions in Europe. The reason was that Euro-centrism of the late 19th century and the early 20th century defined the Balkans and its nations as the territory and peoples of obscure identity. In contrast to the “real Europe”, the Balkans was seen as the “Orient”, not part of Europe at all, and above all, it was ...
The US has always been a warfare state. However, the character of US imperialist warfare has changed dramatically. For over two centuries, the US regime’s purpose for war, whether on indigenous peoples, Black people, or nations all over the world, was to expand the productive forces of capitalist exploitation. War preceded the vast profits accumulated from chattel slavery, land grab, and resource extraction in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The foundation of white supremacy and capitalism allowed the US regime to consolidate its expansion despite episodes of periodic crisis. Recent events, alongside a steady fall in the rate of capitalist profit, indicate ...
IntroductionYugoslavia as a state was officially created hundred years ago on December 1st, 1918 as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (renamed on January 6th, 1929 to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia). The country emerged legally from the Corfu Pact of 1917 (signed agreement between Serbia’s government and the South-Slavic representatives from the Habsburg Monarchy) and was an extremely heterogeneous state from ethnic, geographic, historical, confessional, and linguistic points of view.Yugoslavia’s religious and ethnic diversity was expressed in two mutually opposite national-political ideas about the nature and future of the new state. It is true that Slovenia and Croatia had ...
NATO has expanded dramatically after the collapse of its primary rivals, the USSR and the Warsaw Treaty Organization, Canadian Professor Michael Jabara Carley notes, posing the question whether NATO was founded as a defensive or an offensive alliance.The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance aimed against the Soviet Union, was established on April 4, 1949; and only seven years after the formation of NATO the Warsaw Treaty Organization was established bringing together eight nations (versus 15 NATO member-states).So, who was the real “aggressor”? What alliance was an offensive one?“There has been much discussion recently of NATO in the mainstream and alternate media. Why was ...
Contents 1. NATO is born from the Bomb2. In the post-Cold War, NATO is renewed3. NATO demolishes the Yugoslav state4. NATO expands eastward to Russia5. US and NATO attack Afghanistan and Iraq6. NATO demolishes the Libyan state7. The US/NATO War to Demolish Syria8. Israel and the Emirates in NATO9. The US/NATO orchestration of the coup in Ukraine10. US/NATO escalation in Europe11. Italy, the aircraft carrier on the war front12. US and NATO reject the UN treaty and deploy new nuclear weapons in Europe13. US and NATO sink the INF Treaty14. The Western American Empire plays the war card15. The US/NATO planetary war system16. Exiting the war system of NATO1. The operation conducted by the USA and ...
The magazine is covering the research gaps uncovered by global Western hoax mainstream media platforms and academic teaching & research institutions.
This is an alternative information & academic research digest platform with the purpose to offer an alternative “another side of the truth”.
The magazine is independent, private, and free of any influence by any institution, organization, government, or pressure group. URL: www.global-politics.eu
