Srebrenica and the Power of Negative Thinking (2024)

Good intentions can proverbially lead to hell. This is even more the case when the good intentions are actually evil intentions pretending to be virtuous.

A prime example is the resolution pushed through the UN General Assembly on May 23 designating July 11 as “International Day of Reflection and Remembrance of the Srebrenica Genocide of 1995.” The stated purpose is, of course, humane and noble: to foster “national reconciliation” and the “maintenance of peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina”, when the actual result, as anyone with any understanding of the situation knows full well, can only be the opposite.

Nothing can so effectively prevent reconciliation between the Serb and Muslim inhabitants of Bosnia Herzegovina than the obligation to declare one party (the Bosnian Serbs) to the three-sided slaughter in the 1990s guilty of “genocide” and the Muslim side as pure victims. Muslim leaders, of course, find this much to their advantage and are strongly encouraged in this claim by NATO, which used it to justify its 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia (by analogy with the Bosnian Serbs). The Bosnian Serbs will never accept this and are likely to move to withdraw their territory (Republika Srpska) from the state patched together at Dayton in 1995 by U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke – with help from Serbia’s president Slobodan Milosevic. The U.S. rewarded Milosevic with continued sanctions, support to murderous Albanian rebels in the Serbian province of Kosovo and finally, the 1999 NATO bombing to detach Kosovo from Serbia.

If there were anything going on in the world today which is not ironic, one could emphasize the irony of this Genocide Resolution being sponsored in the General Assembly by NATO states that not only reject accusations of genocide against Israel in Gaza but are actually supporting and arming Israel – and indeed, the leading sponsor of the Srebrenica Day resolution is none other than Israel’s fiercely committed supporter, the Federal Republic of Germany.

German Revanchism

Does it do a country a lot of good to be made to feel guilty for decades? If Germany is the example, the answer might be “no”. In penance for Nazi crimes in World War II, the Federal Republic has cloaked itself in total devotion to the racist Jewish State in the Middle East, thus thrusting any responsibility for devastation of Russia and other Slavic countries into oblivion.

Back in the 1980s, when West German leaders were hoping to seduce Gorbachev into letting them take over East Germany (called “reunification”), I recall the ardent commitment of German colleagues and acquaintances on the left, members of the SPD and the Greens, to reject all “enemy images” (stereotypes) of historic adversaries. Scarcely had German reunification been achieved in 1991, when Germans began to revive hostile stereotypes of Serbia, its enemy in two world wars, in support of Croatian secession from Yugoslavia. Ever since, Germany has directed its revanchist venom against Serbia, viewed as the “little Russia” in the Balkans. This led up to the all-out Russophobia of today, practiced notably by the former advocates of reconciliation, the SPD and the Greens.

The three-party power distribution between Muslims, Serbs and Croats decided at Dayton resembles the 1992 Lisbon agreement under European sponsorship meant to prevent civil war. It was cancelled by Muslim leader Izetbegovic with U.S. encouragement. The differences were dramatically deepened by all the death, destruction and bitterness caused by a civil war that could have been prevented. The shared government operates under a sort of royal veto from a European High Representative, currently a German conservative politician, Christian Schmidt. The population of Bosnia Herzegovina is in drastic decline, with a majority of educated youth planning to emigrate in search of better prospects.

Divide and Rule

Obviously, designation of one of many brutal acts during the Bosnian war as “Serbian genocide” is a way to keep the region divided and unstable indefinitely. It can also lead to renewed hostilities, which NATO could be expected to settle in its own way. If big Russia is proving hard to beat by Ukrainian proxy, the West can always hope to get away with another illegal bombing of little Serbia or the littler Republika Srpska.

The “Srebrenica Genocide Day” was also a bone of contention thrown deliberately by the West among representatives of the South in the General Assembly. Serbia, as the largest component of Yugoslavia, a leader of the Nonaligned Movement, had excellent relations with the Third World, notably with Arab States. When the U.S. backed the Muslim nationalist party of Izetbegovic in the 1990s, this was a continuation of the Brzezinski policy of support to Islamists in Afghanistan and Central Asia in order to destroy the Soviet Union and weaken Russia.

Major Islamic states that armed and supported the Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s could be expected to support the resolution, despite their differences with each other – such as Saudi Arabia and Iran – or with the West. The resolution thus served to arouse divisions within the Global South, despite its tendency to reject Western hegemony.

Nevertheless, this ploy was obvious to many in the General Assembly. The representative of the United Arab Emirates expressed concern for the Muslim victims, but expressed “severe misgivings about the timing and process” and abstained, noting the destabilizing impact of such a resolution on a tense region. Among those who abstained, Brazil and Mexico complained of the decision to force a vote on a resolution that clearly did not represent a consensus.

The final vote was 84 for, 19 against and 68 abstentions. In addition, many of the 193 member states did not attend the vote, so the resolution was adopted by under half the membership, with the combined negative votes and abstentions outnumbering the affirmative votes. Considering the moral pressure of the term “genocide” in addition to the more material forms of pressure exercised by the U.S. on small states, it was not an overwhelming victory. But it stands, and its Western sponsors will surely use every July 11 to remind the world of “Serb genocide in Srebrenica”.

Factual Uncertainties

Point number 2 of the resolution: “Condemns without reservation any denia l of the Srebrenica Genocide as a historical event, and urges Member States to preserve the established facts, including through their educational systems by developing appropriate programs, also in remembrance, towards preventing denial and distortion…”

This demand for indoctrination seems all the more necessary in that many people who have nothing to do with the matter consider that the term “genocide” has been applied to the Srebrenica massacre for political reasons with no solid basis in established facts.

Admittedly, the definition of genocide is open to interpretation. But putting that label on execution of prisoners, an undoubted war crime, while women and children were spared, broadens the definition of genocide to an extent that makes it arbitrarily applicable.

And that is exactly what the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia did.

Remember that the ICTY was totally run by NATO member states and concentrated its vengeful justice on Serbs. One needs to recall the context of the Bosnian war, which was portrayed by Western media as an attack by Serbs (often blurring the distinction between the Serbs of Serbia and those of Bosnia itself who were fighting for their own land) on the “Bosniaks” (Muslims) whose main strategy was to portray themselves as unarmed victims, in order to justify NATO support. In fact the Muslim side was being illegally armed from outside, notably by many Muslim states and by Islamic jihadists who came to fight on their side. International military monitors have reported that certain much publicized attacks on civilians in Sarajevo (in market places) attributed to Serbs were in reality Muslim false flags aimed at gaining international sympathy and support. Some Muslims believe that the Srebrenica massacre was deliberately provoked for this purpose. In a 1998 interview with the Muslim magazine Dani, Srebrenica police chief and local Social Democratic Party leader, Hakija Meholjic, recalled a September 1993 meeting in Sarajevo where Izetbegovic had claimed that President Clinton had told him NATO would intervene if Serbian forces marched into Srebrenica and massacred 5,000 Muslims.

Bosnian Serbs were known to be angry with the Muslim contingent in Sarajevo because of massacres it had carried out against surrounding Serb villages. Vengeance killings were to be feared. Significantly, the Bosnian commander in Srebrenica, Naser Oric, was absent when the Bosnian Serb army moved to capture the town on July 11, leaving his men without orders. Thousands panicked and fled through dangerous Serb lines toward the safe city of Tuzla. In September, the Red Cross requested information on the whereabouts of 3,000 men from Srebrenica who had been arrested by Serb forces as well as of 5,000 who had fled. It has never been established how many of those who fled reached safety and how many were killed in exchanges with Serb forces on the way. However, a New York Times report put those two figures together as missing, and that was the origin of the “8,000 men and boys” figure constantly repeated ever since as the number of victims of the Srebrenica massacre.

After July 1995, the search was on to find and identify the eight thousand announced victims. A Muslim Commission founded by Izetbegovic was incorporated into the International Commission for Missing Persons created by President Clinton in June 1996, with 93% Muslim staff and an American director. For years afterward, the ICMP searched a wide area for bodies of men who had been hastily buried, collecting their DNA, which did not lead to certain evidence of how or when they had died : whether by execution, as claimed, or as they fled through enemy lines.

This biased commission, operating without independent oversight, was the sole source of the varying body counts submitted to the ICTY.

What is not in doubt is that the ICTY was on the lookout for a Serb massacre that could be designated a genocide, and in a crucial trial they found a devious way to do so.

A Single Direct Perpetrator of a “Genocide”

Oddly enough, only one direct perpetrator has been convicted of what is called “the worst crime since the Holocaust”. A strange Bosnian Croat named Drazen Erdemovic, who had fought on various sides of the war, confessed to belonging to a Bosnian Serb unit of eight men who shot between 1,000 and 1,200 Bosnian Muslims on 16 July 1995 at a farm near the village of Pilica north of Srebrenica. The conviction rested entirely on Erdemovic’s testimony, in the absence of forensic proof or prosecution of his seven colleagues, whose names were known.

For his cooperation, he was in effect awarded a plea bargain.

On the basis of his admission of guilt, Erdemovic was sentenced to five years in prison and was released after three and a half years.

In fact, NATO justice, represented by the ICTY, was never interested in tracking down and punishing individuals who actually committed the war crime of executing prisoners. The whole point was to incriminate Serb leaders, not only the leaders of Republika Srpska but of Serbia as well. Erdemovic was brought in as a Prosecution witness in the ICTY trial of Slobodan Milosevic, who died in his cell in The Hague before he could complete his defense. The crimes of individuals were not politically interesting. The objective was to stigmatize the Serb side of the Yugoslav wars by convicting their leaders of “genocide”.

Erdemovic, who spent less than five years in prison after confessing to actual murders, was used to convict of “genocide” persons who were not near the scene of the alleged crimes at the time. One of them, General Radislav Krstic, was convicted by the ICTY of “genocide” on August 2, 2001 and sentenced to 46 years in prison. On May 7, 2010, he was found near death in his British cell, beaten and with his throat cut by an Albanian murderer serving a life sentence. General Krstic is now in a Polish prison serving a sentence reduced to 35 years.

A Unique Genocide

It is undisputed that General Mladic, who commanded the Bosnian Serb capture of Srebrenica, provided full protection to women and children, provided bus transport to Tuzla to Muslim women, children and elderly men who wished to move to safety in Tuzla. For those who were determined to classify the Srebrenica massacre as “genocide”, this was a challenge. The challenge was met by a sociological argument. It went like this:

The Muslim society of Eastern Bosnia was a patriarchal society in which men supported the women and children of their family. Therefore, eliminating the men amounted to eliminating the society as such. Thus the ICTY redefined genocide to suit the specific case of Srebrenica. It was the genocide of a single town, sparing the women and children (those who in reality determine the future life or death of a people). This unique case of “genocide” was subsequently confirmed without investigation by the International Court of Justice, making it “official”.

And such is the historical event that the world is called upon to commemorate annually, by less than half the members of the UN General Assembly. This is essentially an act of virtue-displaying by the West, containing the moral intimidation: those who don’t go along are “genocide deniers”, perhaps even genocide approvers.

Above all, it is a display of the Western powers’ policy of Divide and Rule.

The Peaceful Virtue of Forgetfulness

In the sixteenth century, France was torn apart by religious war between Protestants and Catholics. The bloody conflict was brought to an end by the accession to the throne of France by the Protestant leader Henri de Navarre, who became King Henri IV in 1594, accepting Catholic rites. This was a ruler who profoundly desired to bring peace to his wounded nation. He did not set up a special tribunal to try the perpetrators of the 1572 Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Huguenots by Catholics. Instead, as the best method to ensure much-desired peace, he issued the Edict of Nantes, which begins:

1. First, that the memory of everything which has occurred between one side and the other since the beginning of the month of March 1585 up to our accession to the crown, and during the other preceding troubles and on account of them, shall remain extinct and dormant as though they had never happened. And it shall not be allowable or permissible to our general prosecutors, or any other person whatever, public or private, at any time, or for whatever occasion there may be, to make mention of them, or institute a suit or prosecution in any courts or jurisdiction whatsoever.

2. We forbid all our subjects, of whatever estate or quality they may be, from renewing the memory of those things, attacking, resenting, injuring, or provoking one another by reproaches for what has occurred, for whatever cause and pretext there may be; from disputing these things, contesting, quarreling, or outraging or offending by word or deed; but they shall restrain themselves and live peaceably together like brothers, friends, and common citizens, under the penalty of being punished as breachers of the peace and disturbers of the public tranquility.

This did not work forever, as indeed no effort at lasting peace has ever worked forever up to now. But it can be seen as a wise intention, which should be contemplated in certain cases as an alternative to the current hypocritical insistence of certain Western powers to keep turning the knife in past wounds, while ignoring the outrages of the day in which they happen to be complicit.

We are constantly told that we must constantly remember the worst things people have ever done as the only way to prevent such things from happening again. There is absolutely no evidence to support such a doctrine.

For the unfortunate citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, nothing could be better than a resolution to admit that when pushed to civil war, to a large extent incited by external powers, people on all sides commit dreadful acts in a cycle of revenge which can end only when it is agreed to forgive and forget.