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To the Editor Edmonton Journal March 17, 2011 The letters of poet Goran Simic and history professor Srdja Pavlovic in the wake of Canada's deportation of Dr Srdja Trifkovic are rich in rhetoric, but anemic in factual content. Trifkovic is slammed with the pseudo-psychiatric smear "denial".When Hitler announced on 1 September 1939 that Germany had been attacked by Poland, the Poles denied it. That's not "denial". It is a secondary school teacher's job to purvey standard information. However a university professor's role is to train university students to be critical and to develop fresh information. For example, a search of...

Last month was the 18th anniversary of the attack on the Serbian village of Kravica committed by Moslem forces from Srebrenica under the command of Naser Orić on Orthodox Christmas day, January 7, 1993. Several dozen villagers were killed in the attack, the remaining Serbian population was forced to flee to safety, and many homes were pillaged, demolished and torched during the several weeks that Kravica was forcibly occupied by neighbours from nearby Srebrenica. Regardless of arcane debates of who started the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, on a human level the attack on the village of Kravica and the...

In sentencing Milan Gvero, the ICTY for the first time recognised the importance of media propaganda in the mass executions that took place in eastern Bosnia in 1995. On July 11, 1995, a TV presenter in the Bosnian Serb headquarters in Pale announced on prime-time news that the Bosnian Serbian army, VRS, was “liberating Srebrenica in a strong attack”. The news continued: “This took place after the Muslim side attacked the area outside the protected zone of Srebrenica and burned down some villages around the town. “At this moment, the reception of the civilians and UNPROFOR representatives is going on....

BELGRADE/SARAJEVO (Reuters) - Serbia will reopen one of the most painful chapters in its recent past this week when parliament starts debating whether to apologise for the killing of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995. The debate comes after Serbia firmly set its sights on joining the European Union and will highlight Belgrade's efforts to come to terms with the horrors carried out in the name of Serbs during the 1990s wars -- which many in Serbia still deny. "The Srebrenica resolution is necessary to discuss in parliament because with this Serbia wants to demonstrate our desire to...

A former American general blamed "open homosexuality" in the Dutch army for the failure to prevent the Srebrenica massacre in 1995. The Dutch government condemned the comments by Gen John Sheehan, a former Nato commander and senior marine officer, as outrageous. Gen Sheehan made the remarks at a Senate hearing where he argued against plans by President Barack Obama to end a ban on allowing gays to serve openly in the US military. Gen Sheehan said that after the end of the Cold War, European militaries changed and concluded "there was no longer a need for an active combat capability."...

Retired US General: Gay Dutch Troops Contributed to Srebrenica Massacre Michael Bowman | Washington 18 March 2010 A former top U.S. and NATO commander says the Netherlands' inclusion of gays in their military rendered Dutch peacekeeping troops unable to prevent the slaughter of thousands of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995. Retired U.S. Marine General John Sheehan led the U.S. Atlantic Command and served as the top NATO commander in the mid-1990s, the height of ethnic cleansing in former-Yugoslavia. He told the Senate Armed Services Committee that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the U.S. military would breed...

Bosnian police began raiding several locations in eastern Bosnia and questioning a number of people, including the country's security minister, in a case involving incitement to prostitution and sexual abuse of a minor, officials said. The police are conducting searches in thirteen locations near the eastern towns of Serbenica and Bratunac and interviewing several people, including a number of police officers and education workers, police spokesman Dragomir Pajic told Balkan Insight. Bosnia's Security Minister Sadik Ahmetovic told journalists that he had also been invited for questioning about the case, which he said involved a minor Roma girl reportedly raped by...

(The Bleiburg memorial, with the Ustasha and Muslim symbols, dedicated "In memory of the innocent victims of the Bleiburg tragedy, May 1945") At the end of February, Al-Jazeera showed an interview with Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, currently on trial before the ICTY in The Hague. It was done as part of a 40-minute report with Rageh Omaar. The report opened with the rows of green funeral shrouds, wailing Muslim women, and the rows of names on the Potocari monument, near Srebrenica. The images that follow suggest that the Serbs rounded up some eight thousand civilians, and shot them in...

WARNING: THIS BLOG CONTAINS EXTREMELY GRAPHIC ATROCITY PHOTOS. ***** When did commentators first start using the formulation, the catch phrase, “The Srebrenica Massacre [of x-thousands of Muslim men and boys]”? When did the “Srebrenica Massacre” story break? No reports from 10 July 1995 and the immediately ensuing days and weeks ever refer to “the massacre of 8000 (or 7000 etc) Muslim men and boys”. FROM Iran, no mention of a massacre having taken place: “Iranian foreign minister [Velayati], in a message to the UN secretary-general, has asked for immediate action to prevent a massacre of the defenceless people of Srebrenica...

The successful demonization of the Serbs, making them largely responsible for the Yugoslav wars, and as unique and genocidal killers, was one of the great propaganda triumphs of our era. It was done so quickly, with such uniformity and uncritical zeal in the mainstream Western media, that disinformation had (and still has, after almost two decades) a field day.The demonization flowed from the gullibility of Western interests and media (and intellectuals). With Yugoslavia no longer useful as an ally after the fall of the Soviet Union, and actually an obstacle as an independent state with a still social democratic bent,...

Atrocity stories are a classic and effective way to motivate hatred against an enemy you are out to destroy. Poland attacked Germany on 1 September 1939, right? The British press in 1914 had "Huns" raping every maiden in Belgium. The "Ulster Massacre of 1641" was a hoax by London to foment hatred of the Irish; it was intended to "justify" all-out war for centuries on the Irish, citing numbers of victims that were astronomically in excess of the number of Protestants in Ireland. And then there's that big hit 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" which "proved" that Jews...

NewsweekBosnia: Digging Up the Secrets of the Dead By Ginanne Brownell Web Exclusive May 11, 2007 The genocidal massacres of Srebrenica took place more than a decade ago, but Kathryne Bomberger relives them every day. As the director general of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), Bomberger spends a good portion of her days visiting mass graves. Another grim stop: the Podrinje Identification Project (PIP) in Tuzla, Bosnia. Specially built to house recovered remains of Srebrenica victims, it is filled from floor to ceiling with body bags and thousands of bones. There are also poignant personal items like clothing,...

Posted: May 1, 2007 1:00 a.m. Eastern By Aleksandar Pavic For more than 10 years, the term "Srebrenica" has been used to denote the slaughter of "innocent Muslims" at the hands of Christians – more specifically, the Bosnian Serb army, alleged to have slaughtered, according to the version currently accepted by most major media, "between 7,000 and 8,000 Muslims" when it captured that small town in eastern Bosnia in mid-July 1995. As the story goes, the Bosnian Serbs captured this "U.N.-protected zone" and proceeded to take away and execute thousands of men, women and children in the space of several...

THE HAGUE: In the spring of 2003, boxes with hundreds of documents arrived at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague containing hundreds of pages marked "Defense. State secret. Strictly confidential." The cache contained minutes of wartime meetings of Yugoslav political and military leaders, including Slobodan Milosevic, and promised the best inside view yet of Serbia's role in the Bosnian war of 1992-95.

I have been reading the Summary of the Judgement of the ICC on the charge of Genocide. The Court will therefore examine the facts of the case on the basis that genocide may be found to have been committed if an intent to destroy the Bosnian Muslims, as a group, in whole or in part, can be established.The Court further specifies that for the purposes of Article II, first, the intent must be to destroy at least a substantial part of the particular group. That is demanded by the very nature of the crime of genocide: since the object and...

Slobodan Milosevic was posthumously exonerated on Monday when the international court of justice ruled that Serbia was not responsible for the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica. The former president of Serbia had always argued that neither Yugoslavia nor Serbia had command of the Bosnian Serb army, and this has now been upheld by the world court in The Hague. By implication, Serbia cannot be held responsible for any other war crimes attributed to the Bosnian Serbs. The allegations against Milosevic over Bosnia and Croatia were cooked up in 2001, two years after an earlier indictment had been issued against him by...

THE HAGUE, Feb 26 (Reuters) - The top U.N. court ruled 13 to 2, on Monday that Serbia did not commit genocide through the killing that ravaged Bosnia during the 1992-95 war, but said Serbia had failed in its obligation to prevent and punish genocide. This is the first time a state has been on trial for genocide, outlawed in a U.N. convention in 1948 after the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews. Although the killing of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men in Srebrenica did constitute genocide, Serbia was not responsible and was not complicit in the massacre, Judge Higgins said. This...

On Monday, the day the mass murderer Sulejman Talovic gunned down nine unsuspecting shoppers in Trolley Square Mall in Salt Lake City, five of whom died instantly, every report was calling it a “massacre.” Salt Lake City Salt Lake City Police Detective Robin Snyder observed: "We're just trying to figure out where it started and why this happened. There was one shooter. We have no indication that anyone else was involved in this. That shooter is dead." Eyewitnesses described the gunman as “white, in his 20s, about 6 feet tall, with brown hair.” The New York Post headlines screamed “UTAH...

Accused of lying on immigration forms, they are asked about the '90s war. By LANE DEGREGORY Published December 13, 2006 ST. PETERSBURG - The immigration officers came before 5 a.m. Monday, pounding on the doors of 15 St. Petersburg homes. Slavko Krsmanovic, 17, woke to flashlights on his porch, eight agents pointing guns at his house. They wanted his dad. He told them his dad was driving his mom to work. So the agents waited until Strahinja Krsmanovic came home. "As soon as he got out of the car, they handcuffed him behind his back and arrested him," Slavko said....

New York, 18 Dec. (AKI) - Serbs living in the United States are reported to be deeply disturbed and worried by recent arrests of fellow Serbs in connection with the 1990s Balkan wars, community leaders have said. In a six-state swoop, American agents arrested 13 Serb immigrants last week and are looking for another three who are still at large. One of those arrested, Nedjo Ikonic, is being investigated for allegedly having taken part in the massacre of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica when it was overrun by Serb forces in...