The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

Prelude to the Capture of Srebrenica
tention on the plight of Sarajevo. Owen also stated that UN observers
noted that Bosnian Army forces fired mortar weapons from aside the
Kosevo hospital to provoke retaliatory fire from Serbian forces, events
which credulous reporters invariably described as Serb shelling of the
Kosevo hospital. 26
A pattern of staged incidents to engage world sympathy was revealed
in a classified UN report leaked to the London newspaper, The Independent,
which reported: “United Nations officials and senior Western
military officers believe some of the worst killings in Sarajevo, including
the massacre of at least 16 people in a bread queue, were carried out
by the city’s mainly Muslim defenders—not Serb besiegers—as a propaganda
ploy to win world sympathy and military intervention. . . . Classified
reports to the UN force commander [in Zagreb], General Satish
Nambiar, concluded . . . that Bosnian forces loyal to President Alija
Izetbegovic may have detonated a bomb. ‘We believe it was a commanddetonated
explosion, probably in a can,’ a UN official said then.” 27
The successful attempt by Muslim forces to cast suspicion on Serbs
for a staged atrocity—which came to be known as the “breadline massacre”
of May 27, 1992—seriously affected the development of the conflict,
because it gave strong impetus to the passage three days later of
Security Council Resolution 757, which placed international sanctions
on Serbia, the most important ally of the Bosnian Serbs. 28 The sanctions
were proposed by the U.S. to punish the remainder of Yugoslavia
for the alleged presence of Yugoslav troops in Bosnia.
But in fact a UN report, also dated May 30, confirmed that, based
on the best available evidence, “Most” of the JNA was “believed to have
withdrawn already into Serbia and Montenegro,” as they were required
to do under Security Council Resolution 752. 29 By contrast, the UN report
noted that, “As regards the withdrawal of elements of the Croatian
Army now in Bosnia and Herzegovina, no such withdrawal has occurred.”
30 The Chairman of the Security Council, Austria’s Ambassador
Peter Hohenfellner, received the report two days before the vote on
U.S. sponsored sanctions, but the report was kept from other members
of the Security Council until one hour after the vote for sanctions
against Yugoslavia. 31 Several delegates complained to reporters that they
had been misled, but the U.S. had prevailed in its efforts to target the
Serbs indelibly as the villains and Muslims would be encouraged to con-
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