The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

U.K. Media Coverage of Srebrenica
of Muslim men were massacred.” 52 In the Daily Telegraph, Oric was described
as “the Muslim commander of Srebrenica who fought off a
hugely superior Serb army for several years,” and it was noted that “The
survivors of the Srebrenica massacre in 1995 have pledged to protect
Oric, although many Sarajevans accuse him of enriching himself on the
proceeds of the war.” 53 These same accusations were reported when Oric
was arrested by NATO on behalf of the ICTY in April 2003. The Independent
ran an article detailing the crimes of which he was accused,
but also describing him as “widely praised in Bosnia for defending Muslims
from Serb attackers.” 54 Overall, the image of Naser Oric as the
“Muslim Robin Hood” remained intact.
Concluding Note
Coverage of the fall of the Srebrenica safe area by four leading U.K.
newspapers exemplifies a pattern true for the Western media overall,
whereby efforts in early and mid-July 1995 to ascertain the facts and to
provide some relevant context in a difficult wartime situation quickly
surrendered to a more sensationalistic tendency to dramatize a standard
perpetrator-and-victim narrative which, from late July through October
1995, would generate the official version of the Srebrenica Massacre.
Thus by late July 1995, coverage had already descended to the superficial
and the biased. It surely did not clarify issues for the reading
public, but reinforced the party line that villainized the Bosnian Serbs
and treated the Bosnian Muslims as their unique victims. The background
to the events of July 1995 was far from prominent even in early
accounts, and virtually disappeared from later coverage. The scale and
the brutality of killings of Serbs in the 32 months before July 1995 was
ignored, and Naser Oric, the Bosnian Muslim fighter who commanded
these large-scale killings, was portrayed as a noble defender of his comrades,
not as a war criminal. Despite the appearance of varying and contradictory
estimates, the numbers killed at Srebrenica in July 1995 and
the manner of their deaths were never seriously examined in our media
sample, and the role of the West and ICTY was also treated uncritically.
Journalists’ apparently keen sense of Western ‘humiliation’ at Srebrenica
seems to have encouraged them to turn the historical events of July 1995
into an ahistorical morality tale, replete with echoes of World War II,
which could then be mobilised to justify further Western intervention
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