The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

CHAPTER 7
UN Report on Srebrenica—
A Distorted Picture of Events
By George Bogdanich
In November 1999, the United Nations issued a report titled The
Fall of Srebrenica. 1 Commissioned by the UN General Assembly 12
months before, The Fall of Srebrenica purports to explain “why the
United Nations failed to deter the Serb attack on Srebrenica and the
appalling events that followed” (para. 3). As UN Secretary-General Kofi
Annan announced with some pride in its Introduction, “having failed
to act decisively during all of these events, the international community
found a new will after the fall of Srebrenica,” as a “concerted military
operation was launched to ensure that no such attacks would take
place again” (para. 4).
Despite the fact that this UN report was widely received as a serious,
fact-based assessment of the “appalling events” conveyed by its title, it
is deeply flawed—in its allegations, its research, its analysis, and its conclusions.
This follows from the fact that The Fall of Srebrenica is first
and last a political document rather than an unbiased search for truth.
As with the work of the eminently political International Criminal Tribunal
for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the real purpose of The Fall of
Srebrenica was to place the decade-long (and still ongoing) dismantling
of Yugoslavia in a doctrinally acceptable light. 2
The Fall of Srebrenica enshrines the famous “lesson of Srebrenica,” 3
another iteration of the “responsibility to protect”—allegedly, the principle
that any “deliberate and systematic attempt to terrorize, expel or
murder an entire people must be met decisively with all necessary
means, and with the political will to carry the policy through to its logical
conclusion” (para. 502). The “concerted military operation” to
which Kofi Annan refers was known as Operation Deliberate Force, a
UN-approved but NATO-executed bombing campaign against Bosnian
Serb targets that began on August 30, 1995, and lasted until September
14. 4 But, contrary to Annan’s tracing of Operation Deliberate Force
back to Srebrenica, the incident that triggered NATO’s bombing campaign
was the August 28 shelling of a crowded public marketplace in
Sarajevo, killing 37, later shown to have been carried out by Bosnian
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