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On July 11, 1995, two NATO warplanes bombed Serbian forces, advancing on Srebrenica. But due to the bad weather and the fact that Serbian forces were holding French and Dutch prisoners of war, NATO called off what was to be a massive bombing campaign. Late in the afternoon, Serbian general Mladic and other commanders entered into Srebrenica. They had won, for the moment. This loss by NATO could not accept and through indirect manipulation and false representation of the facts, US and NATO slandered the Serbs and successfully changed the presentation of a legal military operation. Radio Voice of Russia spoke to Stephen Karganovic on the history of Srebrenica in this special interview on the nineteenth anniversary of those events.
John Robles: Hello sir, how are you this evening?
Stephen Karganovic: I am fine, thank you very much.
We have an anniversary of a very tragic event coming up on July, 11. Some might say it was a part of or the beginning of the rule of international lawlessness and wanton impunity by the architects of Yugoslavia’s and Serbia’s destruction by the US and NATO. Why do you think that is important and give us some of the history, please?
Yes, it is definitely what you have just said and it has become the starting point for a process in international relations. I wouldn’t quite say in international law because, as you correctly put it, the process involves the breakdown of law, lawlessness in fact. What happened was that Srebrenica became a propaganda paradigm that was then used to justify military interventions under the guise of the “right to protect” and as a result it served as the rationale for a couple of very destructive military adventures: Kosovo in 1999, and Iraq, then Libya, and now in Syria, and who knows what is next, and the basic rationale for all these adventures was “We must prevent another Srebrenica”.
Well, the ironic thing is that the death toll in Srebrenica, if you take it at its highest, would be about 8,000. And as you and your listeners, probably, know, the death toll in each of these interventions was far more than that. If you are talking about Syria, you can add another zero to the Srebrenica 8,000 and you probably still would not come close to the carnage that occurred there over the last three years. I just might remind you that it was motivated in large part by the presumed need to “prevent another Srebrenica” as the forces of the current president there supposedly were slaughtering their own people. Much the same thing happened in Libya. According to some estimates, the death toll in Libya was 40,000 or 50,000, a bit more modest, and needless to say in Iraq it was enormous. The figure is still controversial, but nobody puts it at less than 100,000 and some estimates go as far as a million, and so on and so forth.
