The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

Prelude to the Capture of Srebrenica
taped some of his butchery, including severed Serbian heads, and
showed these videotapes to John Pomfret of the Washington Post and
Bill Schiller of the Toronto Star. Schiller writes that Oric was “as bloodthirsty
a warrior as ever crossed a battlefield,” and then recounts a visit
to the warlord’s home in January 1994:
On a cold and snowy night, I sat in his room, watching a shocking
video version of what might have been called Naser Oric’s
Greatest Hits. There were burning houses, dead bodies, severed
heads and people fleeing. . Oric grinned throughout, admiring
his handiwork. “We ambushed them,” he said. The next sequence
of dead bodies had been done in by explosives: “We
launched those guys to the moon,” he boasted. When footage
of a bulletmarked ghost town appeared without any visible bodies,
Oric hastened to announce. “We killed 114 Serbs there.”
Later, there were celebrations, with singers with wobbly voices
chanting his praises. 44
It speaks volumes that, despite massive and detailed evidence about
the crimes of Naser Oric, Zulfo Tursunovic and other commanders of
the 28th Division, the ICTY did not indict Naser Oric until 2003, and
then only on 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. 45 That
the systematic slaughter of the Serbian civilian population in the area
west of the Drina by Oric’s forces did not qualify as a crime against humanity
reflects the political agenda of the sponsors of the ICTY, most
notably then U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright, who arranged the
appointment of top prosecutors and other key figures linked to the Tribunal.
M. Cherif Bassiouni, the head of the UN Commission of Experts,
an Egyptian expert on Islamic law who taught at DePaul Law
School in Chicago, did not even mention Oric’s murderous attacks on
the surrounding population in the Final Report of the Commission of
Experts which he chaired, though he had been provided the forensic
evidence from Dr. Stankovic’s extensive files on crimes. 46
By contrast, the decision to charge the Bosnian Serbian leader
Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic with genocide (among
other counts) for events in Bosnia that dated back to 1992 was taken less
than two weeks after the Bosnian Serbs captured Srebrenica, 47 and
50