The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

Prelude to the Capture of Srebrenica
Despite the fact that Srebrenica was not successfully demilitarized,
the Security Council extended the safe area concept to Sarajevo,
Gorazde, Bihac, Zepa, and Tuzla and their surroundings. Of course,
these “safe areas” had never been safe for the Serb residents. As UNHCR
maps reveal, with the exception of Sarajevo, the majority of Serbs had
been cleansed from these areas by the summer of 1992, much as Muslims
were being expelled from towns with Serb and Croat majorities.
Sarajevo-based Serbs, though their neighborhoods had been reduced by
fighting with and the Muslim government, held sections of the city and
survived until they were placed under government control, following
the Dayton agreement.
The militarization of the safe areas—in violation of stated UN policy—would
have been impossible without U.S. assistance. Newsweek’s
military correspondent David Hackworth stated that the illegal supply
of heavy weapons from Iran and other Islamic countries to the Tuzla
airport by C-130 Hercules military transport aircraft had turned into “a
regular shuttle” facilitated by the United States, which scheduled lapses
in surveillance coverage by AWAC radar to coincide with the flights of
illegal arms. 56 This increasing stream of sophisticated weapons, along
with a clear grasp of U.S. policy, gave the Bosnian government confidence
in their ability to prolong the war and prevail militarily with assistance
from both the United States and their Islamic allies.
On February 5, 1994, another bloody staged incident in Sarajevo enabled
the United States to pressure the UN to adopt a tripwire system
in which a Serb attack on a safe zone would trigger a NATO airstrike
against the perceived threat. This shift in policy occurred after a mortar
shell had killed 49 people at the Markale marketplace and injured
two hundred more. The State Department and U.S. Ambassador
Madeleine Albright were quick to blame the Serbs for the mortar and
the Muslim faction tried to break-off talks, but this time General Sir
Michael Rose, then the UNPROFOR Commander in Sarajevo (Jan.
1994 - Jan. 1995), who had forwarded a technical report indicating that
Muslims were responsible for the carnage, went to the office of the
Bosnian President Izetbegovic and threatened to make the report public
if Muslims did not return to negotiations. Lord Owen, who knew
about the report, acknowledged that he helped suppress the report because
“if the slightest hint that the Muslims were thought to be re-
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