Institute for Research on Suffering of the Serbs in XX c.

by George Pumphrey

06.02.2010

The debate around President Boris Tadic's resolution on Srebrenica has again focused the spotlight on this Bosnian town in the Drina Valley. Inspired by the ad hoc tribunal set up in The Hague to punish (Serb) war crimes during the Bosnian Civil War, the resolution is causing dissention about whether Serbia should plead mea culpa and beg forgiveness for the crime supposedly committed nearly fifteen years ago.

There are many aspects to this debate. Whereas Rasim Ljajic, Serbia's Labor Minister and President of the National Council for Cooperation with the Hague Tribunal, says that he believes it is "important that the resolution on Srebrenica is adopted for moral and political reason(s), " other parties insist that there be a resolution condemning also the war crimes committed against Serbs.

 

 

An appeal to Serbian President Boris Tadic, signed by Serbian and foreign intellectuals, soon to be published, demands that the president reconsider his efforts to put through a parliamentary resolution that "would treat the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995 as a paradigmatic event of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and doing so with language that could be interpreted as Serbia's acceptance of responsibility for ‘genocide’.”

The resolution of the Serbian government would have wide-ranging negative effects, not only on Serbia. But the appeal of the intellectuals currently in circulation inadvertently also makes a historical mistake.

It has been nearly fifteen years since Srebrenica was handed over to Bosnian Serb forces to make way for a ceasefire accord.   Those were 15 years of heavy propaganda about an alleged execution of 7,000 to 8,000 Muslims.

Though the appeal strongly confronts – with very good arguments – the Tadic kowtow, it makes the mistake of opening the backdoor for a similar kowtow later. To date, all those who have claimed that a mass execution had taken place, have been unable to prove it. Yet the appeal gratuitously admits that the alleged mass execution had happened, even seeking – if not to justify – at least to relativize the importance of what they assume to have taken place. The second paragraph of the appeal reads in part:

"The execution of Moslem prisoners in July of 1995, after Bosnian Serb forces took over Srebrenica, was a war crime, but it is by no means a paradigmatic event. The informed public in Western countries knows that, at that time, Serbian forces executed in three days approximately as many Moslems as Moslem forces, raiding surrounding Serbian villages out of Srebrenica, had murdered during the preceding three years."

Fifteen years ago, there was such a deluge of propaganda that only very few attempted to go back upstream to examine the evidence of a mass execution at the story's source.

If one looks back into the history of the legend of Srebrenica, one will find that a "Srebrenica Massacre" has at least six sources of origin.

Hakija Meholjic, former president of the (Muslim) Social Democratic Party in Srebrenica, who served as police chief, was one of Srebrenica's delegates in September 1993 to his party's congress in Sarajevo. After the war, in an interview to the journal Dani, he recounted what Alia Itzetbegovic had told his delegation before the congress began: "You know, I [Izetbegovic] was offered by [US President Bill] Clinton in April 1993 (...) that [if] the Chetnik forces enter Srebrenica, carry out a slaughter of 5,000 Muslims, (...) there will be a [NATO-US] military intervention."