The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

UN Report on Srebrenica—A Distorted Picture of Events
dered their colleagues in Sarajevo to brief the press and correct
the record. They did, but they claim it failed to correct the imbalance
in reporting…The UN Chief of Staff Brigadier General
Vere Hayes, was interviewed on American TV. “On U.S. television
I explained it, but the State Department did not like
that.” 28
The U.S. State Department resisted attempts to provide the public
with an accurate version of events in Sarajevo, because, as NATO
Deputy Commander Charles Boyd observed, the United States sought
to enable a Muslim military victory, while the UN nominally sought a
negotiated settlement in Bosnia. These clashing goals were something
that the UN report could not acknowledge in its official history of the
war in Bosnia, or in commenting on specific events surrounding the
capture of Srebrenica.
“We must see things in the Balkans as they are, not as we wish them
to be. We must separate reality from image,” General Boyd urged in
Foreign Affairs. 29 Instead, the UN report repeatedly ignores or discounts
facts and credible testimony that undermine or discredit the official version
of events according to the U.S. State Department.
The Fall of Srebrenica does not even mention that the United States
undermined the crucial Lisbon agreement, negotiated before the outbreak
of fighting by David Carrington and Portuguese Foreign Minister
Jose Cutillero, which many well-placed observers believe would have
prevented the war in Bosnia. The Lisbon agreement would have set up
a central government with three self-governing cantons for Serbs, Muslims
and Croats on the model of Switzerland and was signed by all three
parties. The agreement collapsed, however, after Bosnia’s Muslim President
Alija Izetbegovic disavowed his signature following a meeting with
U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmerman. When Izetbegovic
complained to Zimmerman that the European Community negotiators
had pressured him into signing, Zimmerman responded: “If he
didn’t like it [i.e., the agreement], why sign it?” 30 Izetbegovic clearly felt
he had American support to disavow his signature, which he did in late
March of 1992, just before the fighting broke out.
The UN report’s treatment of the now infamous Markale “Marketplace
Massacre” in Sarajevo on February 5, 1994 demolishes any pretense
to objectivity. 31 While noting that the UNPROFOR Commander
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