The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

Summary and Conclusions
a genocide indictment for these carefully planned ethnic cleansing operations
and massacres.
15. The UN is less thoroughly integrated into NATO-power demands
than the ICTY, but it is highly responsive, and in the Srebrenica
case, it came through just as the United States and its main allies desired.
Under pressure from the U.S., the UN employed a double standard for
reporting alleged abuses by Serb forces as compared with comparable
abuses by Croat and Muslim forces. Between May of 1992 and April
of 1993, scarcely a week went by without massacres and scorched-earth
attacks by Muslim warlord Naser Oric on towns and villages such as
Sikirici, Konjevic Polje, Glogova, Zalazje, Fakovici, Kaludra, Loznica,
Fakovici, Brezani, Krnica, Zagoni, Orlice, Jezhtica, Bijlaca, Crni Vhr,
Milici, Kamenica, Bjelovac, Kravica, Skelani and Zabokvica.
“Naser Oric was a warlord who reigned by terror in this area and over
the population itself,” General Phillippe Morillon testified at the Hague
Tribunal. “He could not allow himself to take prisoners. According to
my recollection, he didn’t even look for an excuse.” 34 Oric’s forces were
responsible for an estimated 1,200 Serb deaths in the Srebrenica area
through March 1993, according to a report submitted to the United
Nations by the Yugoslav State Commission on War Crimes in June
1993; 35 the Serb historian Milivoje Ivanisevic estimates a total of 3,287
Serb deaths in the same area through the end of the war in late 1995. 36
Yet, despite extensive evidence of Oric’s direct participation in such
atrocities, the U.S. State Department, the UN, and major news organizations
were largely silent on these crimes. UN Security Council resolutions
to condemn abuses by Muslim forces or Croatian forces were
routinely thwarted by threatened veto from Madeleine Albright. The
report on Oric was submitted to the UN Commission of Experts on
War Crimes, whose chairman M. Cherif Bassiouni had been appointed
by Ambassador Albright, but Oric was not even mentioned in the final
report of the Commission. 37 When the ICTY finally got around to indicting
Naser Oric on March 28, 2003, very possibly to create the image
of judicial balance, he was only charged with relatively minor counts
related to a few deaths, the mistreatment of prisoners, the destruction
of physical property, and, above all, his failure to restrain the soldiers
serving under his command. 38 Although Oric bragged to Western reporters
of slaughtering Serb civilians, 39 then ICTY spokesperson Flo-
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