The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

Prelude to the Capture of Srebrenica
U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, who writes that he instructed his
Press Secretary, Margaret Tutwiler, to help Bosnian Foreign Minister
Haris Silajdzic utilize Western mass media to build support in Europe
and North America for the Bosnian cause. “I also had her talk to her
contacts at the four television networks, the Washington Post and the
New York Times.” 20 George Kenney, who served on the State Department’s
Yugoslavia desk until his resignation in August 1992, confirms
that he was asked to help “gin up” public opinion favorable to the Bosnian
government and draft material for the spokesman Margaret Tutwiler
who was “always looking for something inflammatory.” 21
These efforts were highly successful and it was often hard to tell where
State Department and Bosnian government press releases on events in
Bosnia left off, and where news reports by major news organizations
began. The misuse of casualty figures by the mainstream media was underway
long before events at Srebrenica in 1995. For example, through
December 1992, the bloodiest year of the conflict, the Bosnian government
stated that there had been 17,000 casualties in the conflict.
Two months later, in the dead of winter, when fighting in this mountainous
terrain had nearly ground to a halt, the Bosnian government
abruptly began using a figure of 200,000 “killed or missing” which was
used by such reporters as John Burns of the New York Times and John
Pomfret of the Washington Post. Shortly thereafter, the phrase “or missing”
was dropped from news accounts. Thus, the number of casualties
claimed by the Bosnian government was brazenly multiplied ten fold in
two months, as an obliging press adopted the new numbers. Incredibly,
the 200,000 fatality figure remained constant over the next two years.
Similarly, Bosnia’s Foreign Minister Silajdzic made headlines around
the world when he visited Britain and then the United States in the
middle of December, 1992. While in the United States, Silajdzic meet
with the U.S. President and appeared on several television news programs,
including CNN and ABC-TV, where he spoke of “death camps”
and “rape camps” and “children beheaded,” with 128,000 people killed
and 30,000 and sometimes as many as 40,000 women raped. “It is my
duty and my job to say this,” he told CNN. Over ABC-TV, Silajdzic
emphasized that the litany of abuses he was citing provided “enough
reason for all to intervene.” 22 In fact, as interested reporters might have
confirmed with the International Committee of the Red Cross, the pris-
43