The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

Prelude to the Capture of Srebrenica
Writing in the London-based South Slav Journal, Joan Phillips reported
that she visited the eastern Bosnian town of Fakovici a year after
it had been attacked by Oric’s Muslim forces for the first time on July
12, 1992. The same town had been razed to the ground in World War
II and its inhabitants slaughtered by the Croatian-led Ustasha. “In this
war, Fakovici was once again the scene of a terrible massacre, on October
5, 1992, in which a quarter of its inhabitants were killed…There
used to be 115 people living in Fakovici before the war. By the time of
the massacre, the number had dwindled. And then 25 or 26 were killed
on the same day.” 40
One survivor of the attack interviewed by Phillips was Andrija
Markovic, whose grandfather had led the Partisan resistance to the Fascists
from the hills around Fakovici in World War II. On the day of the
attack, the Markovic family lost 57-yer old Olga Markovic, 61 year old
Slavka Markovic and 51 year old Radoje Markovic, 53 year old Radomir
Markovic and several cousins. Having lost 16 members in the previous
war, the Markovic family had now lost 10 more to the soldiers of the
28th Division of the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
“Naser Oric’s reign implied a thorough knowledge of the area held by
his forces,” Morillon testified. “It appeared to me that he was respecting
political instructions coming from the Presidency” in Sarajevo. 41
Oric and his Deputy Tursunovic were installed by the Izetbegovic government
despite the wishes of Srebrenica’s moderate Muslim leader
Township Assembly President Besim Ibisevic, who was trying to reassure
Serbs. Oric himself acknowledged to Olslobodjenje that he had to hide
in forests together with his allies and obtain food secretly because most
Muslim residents did not share the views of the extremists who would
take over. Since the end of 1991, however, the Muslim National Council
had been preparing armed insurgents with rifles and uniforms and
began to deploy hardened criminals to serve as paramilitaries, a tactic
later used by some Serb and Croat leaders.
Born in nearby Potocari, Oric had worked as a Belgrade policeman,
and for two years as a bodyguard for Serbian President Milosevic, but
had been fired for theft at the end of 1991 and returned to Bosnia. Tursunovic
was in jail in Zenica, part way through a 15 year sentence for
murdering three Muslims in 1986, when he was released from prison at
the end of 1991 by President Izetbegovic and assigned to be Deputy
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