The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

Introduction
never large, the mistreatment of prisoners by the Bosnian Muslims and
Croats was certainly no better than in Serb camps, 35 but the Muslims
and Croats had the public relations savvy to keep the media away from
their facilities—and more important, the Western media were only interested
in Serb camps anyway. The famous photo of the Trnopolje resident
Fikret Alic, showing him emaciated and seemingly inside a Serb
concentration camp fence, turned out to be a media fraud. Alic was in
a transit camp, was a sick man and not in any way representative of others
in the camp, and was soon able to move to Scandinavia; and most
important, the fence that appears in television imagery and still photographs
formed an enclosure that surrounded the reporters and photographers,
not the assemblage of Bosnian Muslim individuals whom they
filmed and photographed. 36 But this fraud was a highly successful propaganda
coup for the war-makers and their supportive media. In a later
development of interest, on a visit in 2003 with Alija Izetbegovic in the
hospital where he was dying, Bernard Kouchner, the former head of
Doctors Without Borders and one-time Foreign Minister of France
under Nicholas Sarkozy, recounts that on his death-bed, Izetbegovic acknowledged
to both Kouchner and Richard Holbrooke that he had exaggerated
claims of atrocities by Serbian forces to encourage NATO
intervention against the Serbs. According to Kouchner, Izetbegovic admitted
before both he and Holbrooke that, “There were no extermination
camps whatever the horror of those places,” and added that “[he]
thought that [his] revelations could precipitate bombing [of the Bosnian
Serbs].” 37
A seventh myth, also now institutionalized, is that at the Rambouillet
peace conference in France prior to NATO’s bombing war against
Yugoslavia, it was once again Milosevic and the Serbs who refused to negotiate
on the issues regarding Kosovo, so that NATO was compelled to
bomb. But there is strong evidence that NATO, and notably the Clinton
administration, was anxious to bomb, had made full preparations
to do so, spent great energy getting the KLA to sign on to an agreement
which, among other things, “deliberately set the bar higher than the
Serbs could accept,” according to one senior State Department official,
by requiring Yugoslavia to allow NATO troops to occupy its entire
country. The last tactic was admitted by this official to have been used
to preclude a negotiated settlement, because the “Serbs needed…a lit-
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