The alleged Srebrenica Massacre.
Excerpt from Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting by Peter Brock.
A chaotic chronology raised more questions than answers surrounding the Srebrenica episode in July 1995:
—•July 15—“The Bosnian government deliberately increased the suffering of Muslim refugees fleeing Srebrenica to put pressure on the international community, according to documents made available to ...The Daily Telegraph. The papers include instructions to the United Nations from the government of Alija Izetbegovic in Sarajevo that the refugees must be taken in their thousands to a single location rather than being spread around numerous available centers. The resulting television pictures—including initially preposterous CNN footage showing supposed refugees clad in heavy coats against a winter background with snow (!) —and media reports of chaos among aid workers overwhelmed when the refugees arrived at the U.N. base at Tuzla—were intended to bring about a decisive international response. It is not the first time the Bosnians have manipulated events...” (Italics added)
—•July 16—Thousands of Muslim women and children refugees began arriving at Tuzla from Srebrenica hours after Serb takeover. “They said that most of the men among them had fled into forests in the hope of making their way to Muslim-held territory... U.N. officials in Tuzla said that they knew of no effort yet to interview refugees by investigators from The Hague... ‘It’s going to be a very difficult job to separate the crimes that people heard about or may be imagining from the ones they can really prove,’ said Lars Morkholt, a European Union observer based in Tuzla.” (Italics added)
—•July 24—In the absence of a single retrieved or verified Muslim body from Srebrenica, a report from Tuzla said that “(a)fter five days of interviews the United Nations chief investigator into alleged human rights abuses during the fall of Srebrenica has not found any first-hand witnesses of atrocities.” (Italics added)
—•July 26—U.S. spy satellites and unmanned Predator “drone” aircraft—with around-the-clock, night vision and infrared capabilities—had scanned Srebrenica for days, searching without results for evidence of mass killings and other atrocities since the mid-July fall of the enclave. …Unidentified State Department official, citing reported “eyewitness” accounts of executions at Srebrenica: “There are ways to confirm what eyewitnesses say, he added. If massacres were large enough ‘and if the timing is right, the birds can take a picture,’ he said, referring to spy satellites. But so far, the official said, satellites have produced nothing.” (Italics added)
—•July 27—The stories of mass Muslim atrocities at Srebrenica were inconsistent with accounts from Muslim refugees who arrived from nearby Zepa a few days later: “They brought tales of two weeks of living in caves in the wooded hills during the heavy bombardment of the U.N.-designated ‘safe haven,’ but did not recount atrocities like those people brought out of Srebrenica after the Serbs overran that ‘safe area’ on July 11... ‘We were treated well,’ by the Serbian soldiers,’ said Ms. (Ramiza) Kolovac, a law student in Sarajevo who was visiting her parents in Zepa...” The surprising reports from refugees and aid agencies about “no evidence of systematic abuses of the Zepa civilians” was desperately disputed by Bosnian government officials in Sarajevo who decided to bar journalists from camps holding Zepa refugees. U.N. officials rebutted that it was part of Sarajevo’s “propaganda line.” U.N. chief human rights investigator Tadeusz Mazowiecki resigns in protest that nothing is being done after 2,000 Muslim men were massacred at Srebrenica, reports the Associated Press.
—•August 1—Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights John Shattuck said he interviewed a dozen refugees at Tuzla, including survivors of firing squads, and that 7,000 people are missing from Srebrenica. (Italics added)
—•August 4—A Dutch peacekeeper reports seeing a “‘row of shoes and backpacks belonging to about 100 people on a football field’... The owners presumably had been massacred.” (Italics added)
—•August 9—U.S. spy satellite and U-2 aerial photos, “coupled with interviews with Muslim refugees,” provide “the most compelling circumstantial evidence that Serbian troops executed at least several hundred military-age men and boys as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign (at Srebrenica), Clinton administration officials said.” The International Committee for the Red Cross said “6,000 people are unaccounted for since the fall of Srebrenica... It is unclear how many of the remainder are in hiding, dead or living in refugee camps”... CIA deputy director for intelligence John Gannon, told a senate hearing that “a CIA analysis shows that more than 3,000 settlements, mainly in Serb-controlled areas of Bosnia, have been burned or destroyed in a campaign of ethnic cleansing so that up to 90 percent of non-Serbs will have no homes to return to.” “Serbs had shot Muslims in a soccer stadium in retaliation for Muslim killings of Serbs in past conflicts.” (Italics added)
—•August 10—Madeleine Albright showed spy photos to the U.N. Security Council and claimed 2,000 to 2,700 missing Bosnians from Srebrenica may have been shot by Bosnian Serbs. An unidentified “63-year-old Bosnian refugee told a team led by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State John Shattuck that Gen. Ratko Mladic... had promised safety to a group of refugees being held at a soccer field, a U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. But men and boys were later loaded onto trucks and driven to a site half-mile (sic) from the soccer field, where they were lined up in groups of 20 to 25 and machine-gunned, the official said.” Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s daily intelligence briefings have not disclosed “any intelligence imagery that could confirm massacres.” But within a week after the Croat government unleashed a vicious campaign to cleanse hundreds of thousands of Serbs from the Krajina, Madeleine Albright diverted media attention by waving eight satellite photos of mounds of dirt which, she said, were mass graves containing Muslims at Srebrenica. (Italics added)
—•August 15—The International Committee of the Red Cross reports that 5,000 Muslim soldiers escaped and were secretly assigned to other units. Family members were not even notified about the reassignments by the Bosnian government, said ICRC Report No. 37.
—•October 7—On July 11-12, “Bosnian Serbs marched into Srebrenica and captured it without firing a shot.” ... “As peacekeepers saw the bodies of freshly killed Muslims in Srebrenica, they raised no alarm,” according to Bert Kreemers, Dutch Defense Ministry spokesman... “On July 17, as Dutch peacekeepers were preparing to leave Srebrenica, one of their senior officers, Maj. Robert Franken, signed an agreement with Bosnian Serb authorities certifying that ‘the evacuation was carried out by the Serb side correctly.’ Later that week, as the peacekeepers were arriving in Zagreb, Croatia, the commander of the Dutch ground forces, Lt. Gen. Hans Couzy, who had flown from Amsterdam to meet them, said he knew of no evidence suggesting that the Bosnian Serbs in Srebrenica had committed crimes akin to genocide. At a news conference the next day in Zagreb, Lt. Col. Tom Karremans, who had commanded the Dutch battalion in Srebrenica, asserted that the Bosnian Serbs’ “militarily correct operation” had been carried out “in the right way.” (Italics added)
Excerpt from Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting by Peter Brock.
A chaotic chronology raised more questions than answers surrounding the Srebrenica episode in July 1995:
—•July 15—“The Bosnian government deliberately increased the suffering of Muslim refugees fleeing Srebrenica to put pressure on the international community, according to documents made available to ...The Daily Telegraph. The papers include instructions to the United Nations from the government of Alija Izetbegovic in Sarajevo that the refugees must be taken in their thousands to a single location rather than being spread around numerous available centers. The resulting television pictures—including initially preposterous CNN footage showing supposed refugees clad in heavy coats against a winter background with snow (!) —and media reports of chaos among aid workers overwhelmed when the refugees arrived at the U.N. base at Tuzla—were intended to bring about a decisive international response. It is not the first time the Bosnians have manipulated events...” (Italics added)
—•July 16—Thousands of Muslim women and children refugees began arriving at Tuzla from Srebrenica hours after Serb takeover. “They said that most of the men among them had fled into forests in the hope of making their way to Muslim-held territory... U.N. officials in Tuzla said that they knew of no effort yet to interview refugees by investigators from The Hague... ‘It’s going to be a very difficult job to separate the crimes that people heard about or may be imagining from the ones they can really prove,’ said Lars Morkholt, a European Union observer based in Tuzla.” (Italics added)
—•July 24—In the absence of a single retrieved or verified Muslim body from Srebrenica, a report from Tuzla said that “(a)fter five days of interviews the United Nations chief investigator into alleged human rights abuses during the fall of Srebrenica has not found any first-hand witnesses of atrocities.” (Italics added)
—•July 26—U.S. spy satellites and unmanned Predator “drone” aircraft—with around-the-clock, night vision and infrared capabilities—had scanned Srebrenica for days, searching without results for evidence of mass killings and other atrocities since the mid-July fall of the enclave. …Unidentified State Department official, citing reported “eyewitness” accounts of executions at Srebrenica: “There are ways to confirm what eyewitnesses say, he added. If massacres were large enough ‘and if the timing is right, the birds can take a picture,’ he said, referring to spy satellites. But so far, the official said, satellites have produced nothing.” (Italics added)
—•July 27—The stories of mass Muslim atrocities at Srebrenica were inconsistent with accounts from Muslim refugees who arrived from nearby Zepa a few days later: “They brought tales of two weeks of living in caves in the wooded hills during the heavy bombardment of the U.N.-designated ‘safe haven,’ but did not recount atrocities like those people brought out of Srebrenica after the Serbs overran that ‘safe area’ on July 11... ‘We were treated well,’ by the Serbian soldiers,’ said Ms. (Ramiza) Kolovac, a law student in Sarajevo who was visiting her parents in Zepa...” The surprising reports from refugees and aid agencies about “no evidence of systematic abuses of the Zepa civilians” was desperately disputed by Bosnian government officials in Sarajevo who decided to bar journalists from camps holding Zepa refugees. U.N. officials rebutted that it was part of Sarajevo’s “propaganda line.” U.N. chief human rights investigator Tadeusz Mazowiecki resigns in protest that nothing is being done after 2,000 Muslim men were massacred at Srebrenica, reports the Associated Press.
—•August 1—Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights John Shattuck said he interviewed a dozen refugees at Tuzla, including survivors of firing squads, and that 7,000 people are missing from Srebrenica. (Italics added)
—•August 4—A Dutch peacekeeper reports seeing a “‘row of shoes and backpacks belonging to about 100 people on a football field’... The owners presumably had been massacred.” (Italics added)
—•August 9—U.S. spy satellite and U-2 aerial photos, “coupled with interviews with Muslim refugees,” provide “the most compelling circumstantial evidence that Serbian troops executed at least several hundred military-age men and boys as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign (at Srebrenica), Clinton administration officials said.” The International Committee for the Red Cross said “6,000 people are unaccounted for since the fall of Srebrenica... It is unclear how many of the remainder are in hiding, dead or living in refugee camps”... CIA deputy director for intelligence John Gannon, told a senate hearing that “a CIA analysis shows that more than 3,000 settlements, mainly in Serb-controlled areas of Bosnia, have been burned or destroyed in a campaign of ethnic cleansing so that up to 90 percent of non-Serbs will have no homes to return to.” “Serbs had shot Muslims in a soccer stadium in retaliation for Muslim killings of Serbs in past conflicts.” (Italics added)
—•August 10—Madeleine Albright showed spy photos to the U.N. Security Council and claimed 2,000 to 2,700 missing Bosnians from Srebrenica may have been shot by Bosnian Serbs. An unidentified “63-year-old Bosnian refugee told a team led by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State John Shattuck that Gen. Ratko Mladic... had promised safety to a group of refugees being held at a soccer field, a U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. But men and boys were later loaded onto trucks and driven to a site half-mile (sic) from the soccer field, where they were lined up in groups of 20 to 25 and machine-gunned, the official said.” Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s daily intelligence briefings have not disclosed “any intelligence imagery that could confirm massacres.” But within a week after the Croat government unleashed a vicious campaign to cleanse hundreds of thousands of Serbs from the Krajina, Madeleine Albright diverted media attention by waving eight satellite photos of mounds of dirt which, she said, were mass graves containing Muslims at Srebrenica. (Italics added)
—•August 15—The International Committee of the Red Cross reports that 5,000 Muslim soldiers escaped and were secretly assigned to other units. Family members were not even notified about the reassignments by the Bosnian government, said ICRC Report No. 37.
—•October 7—On July 11-12, “Bosnian Serbs marched into Srebrenica and captured it without firing a shot.” ... “As peacekeepers saw the bodies of freshly killed Muslims in Srebrenica, they raised no alarm,” according to Bert Kreemers, Dutch Defense Ministry spokesman... “On July 17, as Dutch peacekeepers were preparing to leave Srebrenica, one of their senior officers, Maj. Robert Franken, signed an agreement with Bosnian Serb authorities certifying that ‘the evacuation was carried out by the Serb side correctly.’ Later that week, as the peacekeepers were arriving in Zagreb, Croatia, the commander of the Dutch ground forces, Lt. Gen. Hans Couzy, who had flown from Amsterdam to meet them, said he knew of no evidence suggesting that the Bosnian Serbs in Srebrenica had committed crimes akin to genocide. At a news conference the next day in Zagreb, Lt. Col. Tom Karremans, who had commanded the Dutch battalion in Srebrenica, asserted that the Bosnian Serbs’ “militarily correct operation” had been carried out “in the right way.” (Italics added)
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