The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

Preface
event and symbol demonstrating Serb evil, the justice of the Western
intervention in the Balkans, including its wars and criminal trials, and
showing that “humanitarian intervention”—and the bypassing of supposedly
obsolete rules against military attacks on sovereign nations—
is sometimes necessary and good. Not a single major discussion that
advocates “humanitarian” war, with its related notions of the “responsibility
to protect” and the “right to intervene,” has been produced since
the events of July 1995 that has not also cited an alleged failure to prevent
either the “Srebrenica Massacre” or the Bosnian “genocide” to buttress
its pro-interventionary argument. 10 If, however, the regnant claims
about the Srebrenica massacre are untrue or seriously inflated—like that
of the alleged threat posed by Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” in
2002-2003—one of the moral and intellectual bedrocks of Western interventionism
in this post-Soviet era of rapid U.S. and NATO-bloc expansion
is seriously weakened.
We know that our work will be assailed as “historical revisionism”
and, worse, as “genocide denial,” but charges such as these are fundamentally
political in nature, and we regard them as no more than cheapshots
and evasions, whose real purpose is to preempt challenges to a
firmly established party-line. The regnant account is regularly protected
by aggressive personal attacks on the challengers in lieu of the more arduous
task of answering with evidence. 11 Those who guard the gates of
recent Balkans History—especially those who guard it zealously, with no
other calling but to keep this History all to themselves, and to keep others
out—have sharpened several weapons with which to defend those
gates, and to repel their adversaries. Many of them believe that the best
way to control The Truth is to portray anyone who would breach the
gates as a kind of barbarian—and nothing more. In January 2009, the
European Parliament proclaimed every July 11 a “day of commemoration
of the Srebrenica genocide,” when “more than 8,000 Muslim men
and boys…were summarily executed by Bosnian Serb forces…making
this event the biggest war crime to take place in Europe since the end
of the Second World War.” 12 In the face of such certitude, who in his
right mind would “deny” the “Srebrenica massacre”?
We will not be cowed by these rhetorical questions designed to enforce
a politically preferred but eminently challengeable truth. We do
not think we have given the final word here. But we have based our ar-
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