The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

U.K. Media Coverage of Srebrenica
Bosnian Serb drive against the ‘safe area’. ‘It was simply a terrorist
stronghold and we couldn’t tolerate it any longer’, Radovan Karadzic,
the Bosnian Serb leader, said yesterday.”
While the Serbs are presented as having been engaged in “ethnic
cleansing,” Oric’s activities are presented as less serious, with no killings
mentioned: “During the bloody autumn of 1992, when Bosnian Serb
soldiers and their paramilitary allies were ‘cleansing’ eastern Bosnia of
Muslims, Naser Oric and his men were striking up and down the Drina
river valley, stealing livestock, burning villages, and inflicting stinging
humiliations on the Bosnian Serb army flanks.” The final raid, on the
village of Visnjica, is mentioned as the Serbs’ reason for taking Srebrenica,
and Lieutenant-Colonel Milovan Milutinovic is quoted as saying
that “Since January, 50 Serbs have been killed in terrorist actions.
We can no longer tolerate Unprofor failure and inaction. We will go in
and do Unprofor’s job for them. We will demilitarise Srebrenica.” However,
it is made clear that this is simply an excuse, and that the raid on
Visnjica was merely an attempt to obtain food since the Serbs were
blocking aid convoys: “Following months when the Serbs had been restricting
aid convoys into the enclave, a Muslim raiding party from Srebrenica
attacked Visnjica, a nearby Serb village. They were probably
after livestock, but the Muslims also burnt six houses, killed one Serb
soldier and badly wounded an old woman. The authorities immediately
took a small group of foreign journalists to Visnjica to prepare world
public opinion for an attempt to overrun the enclave.”
A few days after this article in The Independent, The Guardian mentioned
Oric as “the Bosnian commander of Srebrenica” who had “capitulated”
as “a deal was cut”: “The Bosnian soldiers agreed to surrender
their weapons to the UN and, in return, the Serbs agreed to stop the attack.”
47 Oric is presented here as “a superb guerrilla commander, the
best in the Balkans,” according to UN sources. It is therefore a mystery
why “Oric and his 250 crack troops hardly tried to fight.” The “UN
sources” cited in the article suggest that “as a good military commander,
Oric could see that defending Srebrenica was hopeless and withdrew
his men to the hills to wreak havoc on the Serbs from there—’which’,
says the UN, ‘they are well able to do’.” The article notes, however, that
“Conspiracy theories abound that some deal was done—that he and his
men withdrew 24 hours before the town fell and that the Bosnian gov-
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