Oric didn't want to hand over Srebrenica, he was a classic local thug, the kind who thrive in all civil wars. He ruled with an iron fist, had zero strategic vision and was hated and feared by the civilian musilms in the enclave, their leaders were gunned down by Oric's assassination squads.
He only agreed to hand over Srebrenica after he was paid a huge amount of gold by the Bosnian Govt. This is not a secret, the Bosnian Muslim newspapers have been full of reports of this and at Izetbegovich's funeral Oric talked about it.
The Dutch army witnesses admitted that they woke up on the morning of the 11th and found that the 28th division soldiers had vanished in the night. They'd been occupying the frontlines with the Dutch OPs. This speaks of a highly organised decision by the 28th division to let Srebrenica fall.
It's good to see you accept that the 28th division was raiding the Serb villages and killing all they found, largely women, kids and the elderly. The Dutch report had to admit that the 28th never thought that taking prisoners on these raids was even an option.
Yes, there were executions after the fall of Srebrenica.
In the 100's. The low 100's at that.
However, don't forget that the Bosnian Serbs allowed between 1,500 to 3,000 men of fighting age through to Tuzla on the buses that evacuated the women, elderly and kids.
Those executed were reprisals by locals for the slaughter that the 28th carried out over the previous few years.
It was revenge for revenge for revenge for......
True for any civil war.
The rest of the missing?
Well, that 8,000 figure was arrived at by shoddy research by Brunborg. It was torn to shreds by the defence expert witness.
And don't forget that the individual battles that raged along the columns route from Susnjari / Jaglici to Baljkovica / Nezuk accounted ( if you total them up using ABiH figures ) for many 1,000s.
So that's it.
It was a vicious area of a nasty civil war. However, no worse than, say, Mostar, or any more evil than the Lebanese civil war.
Read some books on civil wars over last few decades and the sad aspect is that the Bosnian civil war was small potatoes compared to some of the killing fields in the 3rd world.
The only thing I would quibble about is your numbers of executed by Serb forces when they they took Srebrenica. My sources put the number at around 600. Not a huge difference.
Oops. Some of them were either in the wrong place at the wrong time or they had it comin'. Either way, I ain't cryin' over 'em. God knows the world wasn't cryin' over the Serb women and children slaughtered around Srebrenica while Oric was swinging the baton. Apathy can be a little contagious in a war zone.
I don't disagree with this conclusion. Oric had personally abandoned the city as early as two months before, according to some accounts.
It's good to see you accept that the 28th division was raiding the Serb villages and killing all they found, largely women, kids and the elderly.
It's an undeniable fact which he will not be able to wiggle out of in his trial.
Well, that 8,000 figure was arrived at by shoddy research by Brunborg.
I never asserted the 8,000 number because I don't think it's correct. That's the Bosnian propaganda number, the Serbian propaganda number is a few hundred and the real number is likely in between.
Let's return to the subject of the thread.
The point that I wished to make from the beginning is not that the Serbs living in Bosnia and Kosov did not have legitimate grievances with their Croat and Muslim neighbors. Nor was it that the Serbs had no right to take up arms in self-defense - the Serbs have a right to go to war like any other people. They and the Croats and the Muslims have no right to commit war crimes, however.
My issue is with people praising the anti-American Communist Peter Handke for his apparent support of Serbia, because his apparent support of Serbia is really predicated on his personal admiration for Milosevic as an unreconstructed Marxist leader.
Peter Handke motives are political and not humanitarian.