Posted on 12/12/2005 11:32:23 AM PST by kronos77
Below we have posted an analysis of what happened in Srebrenica, written by Carlos Martins Branco, a Portuguese military officer who served in Bosnia as a UNMO (UN Military Observers) Deputy Chief Operations Officer in the UNPF (UN Peace Forces) at theatre level. Meaning he knew a whole lot about what was happening on the ground.
Branco argues that the extremist Bosnian Muslim leadership made it easy for Serbian forces to re-take Srebrenica in 1995, setting the stage to sell the world a false massacre story, with the purpose of isolating the Bosnian Serbs, internationally. He argues that it was a big mistake for the Serbs to go in, but it was not an act of genocide. That, he says, is a fabrication, and he adds that he debriefed UN Military Observers who were involved, and has read UN reports that were never shown to the public.
A few points.
(Excerpt) Read more at emperors-clothes.com ...
Then don't post stupid.
Problem solved.
I don't think you understand. In war the agressor sets the rules. The Islamic Swine go after infidels. Every non-believer is a combatant according to them.
Perhaps you will read this article from The New York Times from November 1, 1987. This is before all the propagandists had a chance to circle the wagons.
By DAVID BINDER, Special to the New York TimesML/NJBELGRADE, Yugoslavia
Portions of southern Yugoslavia have reached such a state of ethnic friction that Yugoslavs have begun to talk of the horrifying possibility of ''civil war'' in a land that lost one-tenth of its population, or 1.7 million people, in World War II.
The current hostilities pit separatist-minded ethnic Albanians against the various Slavic populations of Yugoslavia and occur at all levels of society, from the highest officials to the humblest peasants.
A young Army conscript of ethnic Albanian origin shot up his barracks, killing four sleeping Slavic bunkmates and wounding six others.
The army says it has uncovered hundreds of subversive ethnic Albanian cells in its ranks. Some arsenals have been raided.
Vicious InsultsEthnic Albanians in the Government have manipulated public funds and regulations to take over land belonging to Serbs. And politicians have exchanged vicious insults.
Slavic Orthodox churches have been attacked, and flags have been torn down. Wells have been poisoned and crops burned. Slavic boys have been knifed, and some young ethnic Albanians have been told by their elders to rape Serbian girls.
Ethnic Albanians comprise the fastest growing nationality in Yugoslavia and are expected soon to become its third largest, after the Serbs and Croats.
Radicals' GoalsThe goal of the radical nationalists among them, one said in an interview, is an ''ethnic Albania that includes western Macedonia, southern Montenegro, part of southern Serbia, Kosovo and Albania itself.'' That includes large chunks of the republics that make up the southern half of Yugoslavia.
Other ethnic Albanian separatists admit to a vision of a greater Albania governed from Pristina in southern Yugoslavia rather than Tirana, the capital of neighboring Albania.
There is no evidence that the hard-line Communist Government in Tirana is giving them material assistance.
The principal battleground is the region called Kosovo, a high plateau ringed by mountains that is somewhat smaller than New Jersey. Ethnic Albanians there make up 85 percent of the population of 1.7 million. The rest are Serbians and Montenegrins.
Worst Strife in YearsAs Slavs flee the protracted violence, Kosovo is becoming what ethnic Albanian nationalists have been demanding for years, and especially strongly since the bloody rioting by ethnic Albanians in Pristina in 1981 - an ''ethnically pure'' Albanian region, a ''Republic of Kosovo'' in all but name.
The violence, a journalist in Kosovo said, is escalating to ''the worst in the last seven years.''
Many Yugoslavs blame the troubles on the ethnic Albanians, but the matter is more complex in a country with as many nationalities and religions as Yugoslavia's and involves economic development, law, politics, families and flags. As recently as 20 years ago, the Slavic majority treated ethnic Albanians as inferiors to be employed as hewers of wood and carriers of heating coal. The ethnic Albanians, who now number 2 million, were officially deemed a minority, not a constituent nationality, as they are today.
Were the ethnic tensions restricted to Kosovo, Yugoslavia's problems with its Albanian nationals might be more manageable. But some Yugoslavs and some ethnic Albanians believe the struggle has spread far beyond Kosovo. Macedonia, a republic to the south with a population of 1.8 million, has a restive ethnic Albanian minority of 350,000.
''We've already lost western Macedonia to the Albanians,'' said a member of the Yugoslav party presidium, explaining that the ethnic minority had driven the Slavic Macedonians out of the region.
Attacks on SlavsLast summer, the authorities in Kosovo said they documented 40 ethnic Albanian attacks on Slavs in two months. In the last two years, 320 ethnic Albanians have been sentenced for political crimes, nearly half of them characterized as severe.
In one incident, Fadil Hoxha, once the leading politician of ethnic Albanian origin in Yugoslavia, joked at an official dinner in Prizren last year that Serbian women should be used to satisfy potential ethnic Albanian rapists. After his quip was reported this October, Serbian women in Kosovo protested, and Mr. Hoxha was dismissed from the Communist Party.
As a precaution, the central authorities dispatched 380 riot police officers to the Kosovo region for the first time in four years.
Officials in Belgrade view the ethnic Albanian challenge as imperiling the foundations of the multinational experiment called federal Yugoslavia, which consists of six republics and two provinces.
'Lebanonizing' of YugoslaviaHigh-ranking officials have spoken of the ''Lebanonizing'' of their country and have compared its troubles to the strife in Northern Ireland.
Borislav Jovic, a member of the Serbian party's presidency, spoke in an interview of the prospect of ''two Albanias, one north and one south, like divided Germany or Korea,'' and of ''practically the breakup of Yugoslavia.'' He added: ''Time is working against us.''
The federal Secretary for National Defense, Fleet Adm. Branko Mamula, told the army's party organization in September of efforts by ethnic Albanians to subvert the armed forces. ''Between 1981 and 1987 a total of 216 illegal organizations with 1,435 members of Albanian nationality were discovered in the Yugoslav People's Army,'' he said. Admiral Mamula said ethnic Albanian subversives had been preparing for ''killing officers and soldiers, poisoning food and water, sabotage, breaking into weapons arsenals and stealing arms and ammunition, desertion and causing flagrant nationalist incidents in army units.''
Concerns Over MilitaryComing three weeks after the ethnic Albanian draftee, Aziz Kelmendi, had slaughtered his Slavic comrades in the barracks at Paracin, the speech struck fear in thousands of families whose sons were about to start their mandatory year of military service.
Because the Albanians have had a relatively high birth rate, one-quarter of the army's 200,000 conscripts this year are ethnic Albanians. Admiral Mamula suggested that 3,792 were potential human timebombs.
He said the army had ''not been provided with details relevant for assessing their behavior.'' But a number of Belgrade politicians said they doubted the Yugoslav armed forces would be used to intervene in Kosovo as they were to quell violent rioting in 1981 in Pristina. They reason that the army leadership is extremely reluctant to become involved in what is, in the first place, a political issue.
Ethnic Albanians already control almost every phase of life in the autonomous province of Kosovo, including the police, judiciary, civil service, schools and factories. Non-Albanian visitors almost immediately feel the independence - and suspicion - of the ethnic Albanian authorities.
Region's Slavs Lack Strength While 200,000 Serbs and Montenegrins still live in the province, they are scattered and lack cohesion. In the last seven years, 20,000 of them have fled the province, often leaving behind farmsteads and houses, for the safety of the Slavic north.Until September, the majority of the Serbian Communist Party leadership pursued a policy of seeking compromise with the Kosovo party hierarchy under its ethnic Albanian leader, Azem Vlasi.
But during a 30-hour session of the Serbian central committee in late September, the Serbian party secretary, Slobodan Milosevic, deposed Dragisa Pavlovic, as head of Belgrade's party organization, the country's largest. Mr. Milosevic accused Mr. Pavlovic of being an appeaser who was soft on Albanian radicals. Mr. Milosevic had courted the Serbian backlash vote with speeches in Kosovo itself calling for ''the policy of the hard hand.''
''We will go up against anti-Socialist forces, even if they call us Stalinists,'' Mr. Milosevic declared recently. That a Yugoslav politician would invite someone to call him a Stalinist even four decades after Tito's epochal break with Stalin, is a measure of the state into which Serbian politics have fallen. For the moment, Mr. Milosevic and his supporters appear to be staking their careers on a strategy of confrontation with the Kosovo ethnic Albanians.
Other Yugoslav politicians have expressed alarm. ''There is no doubt Kosovo is a problem of the whole country, a powder keg on which we all sit,'' said Milan Kucan, head of the Slovenian Communist Party.
Remzi Koljgeci, of the Kosovo party leadership, said in an interview in Pristina that ''relations are cold'' between the ethnic Albanians and Serbs of the province, that there were too many ''people without hope.''
But many of those interviewed agreed it was also a rare opportunity for Yugoslavia to take radical political and economic steps, as Tito did when he broke with the Soviet bloc in 1948.
Efforts are under way to strengthen central authority through amendments to the constitution. The League of Communists is planning an extraordinary party congress before March to address the country's grave problems.
The hope is that something will be done then to exert the rule of law in Kosovo while drawing ethnic Albanians back into Yugoslavia's mainstream.
Maybe you'll read the old NYT aricle I posted just above and stop with your ad hominems. This isn't DU, you know.
ML/NJ
Disabuse yourself of that misconception immediately.
Furthermore, posting an article on Kosovo while attempting to defend your continuing ignorance of events in Bosnia isn't really going in the right direction.
Feh. You lack the minimum level of knowledge required to discuss the issue in an informed manner, and you aren't going to gain it anytime soon. We're wasting each other's time.
ML/NJ
Good take. Serbs have confessed to participating in the massacre and been convicted in courts, the Serb Republic government has issued a report admitting their culpability, and expressed its "sincere regret and apologies" for the murders. There is even a video of Serb forces machinegunning Bosnian prisoners. This propaganda about Srebrenica being a hoax works only because the propagandists rely on how little most people know about the Balkans; witness the poster above who backed up his belief in the Srebrenica hoax story by citing an article about Kosovo.
Still in 4ID?
600 men were executed by Serb forces in Srebrenica by a paramilitary group that wasn't under Mladic. The lies and the exagerations about Srebrenica really need to stop already.
Shhhh! Don't insult Hoplite like that, he's a big war hero don't you know? He defended a Popeye's restaurant during the LA riots, bravery worthy of a free bucket of $9.99 cajun chicken fingers, so you back off pal!
Talk about snore...
If moslem then we don't need to worry about it.
Islam is the enemy
From what I read here on Srebrenica there were 7000 bodies of mixed ethnicity in the grave. That's not genocide. Mass murder possibly but not genocide.
In Srebrenica Muslims killed 3,000 Christian Serbs, most favourabila in 1992, 1993 and 1994 Easter hollidays, and Some 1,000 Muslims killed when Serbs got bored with Muslim atrocities.
Srebrenica Muslim commander Naser Orlic is arrested and awaiting trial in Hague.
Define Bosniak.
It is an indisputable fact that, ten years ago, Serb forces under the command of Ratko Mladic massacred almost 8000 Bosnians in the enclave of Srebrenica. This atrocity has been documented through thousands of testimonials by witnesses and relatives, through the discovery of numerous mass graves, and even through last year's admission by the government of the Republika Srpska that Serb forces conducted the killings. More recently, the appearance of the now famous videotape should remove the doubts from the mind of any reasonable person about the scope and brutality of this massacre.
Unfortunately, a sense of denial has prevailed among large segments of the population about war crimes committed by Serbs. In public remarks I made on May 12, I noted that polls showed that just over one-third of Serbs believed that war crimes were committed at Srebrenica, despite the acknowledgement of the RS Government itself that these crimes occurred.
I noted that less than one-third of Serbs believed that the bodies of over 800 Kosovar Albanians, most of them brutally executed, were located in mass graves in Serbia -- despite the fact that your own government acknowledges this fact. Indeed, these graves contained the bodies of three young American citizens -- the Bytyqi brothers -- who were summarily executed after being illegally detained at the Petrovo Selo MUP facility.
The massacre of 8000 Bosnian Muslims in the enclave of Srebrenica never happened.
Pssst, don't disturb them when their do the "duties" for Mr. Soros, if you get my drift!
BTW- when did the UN get a military??
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