The Approved Narrative of the Srebrenica Massacre

The Srebrenica massacre has taken on both symbolic and mythical properties, all in the service of political agendas. The symbol is of Serb evil, manifested in an alleged cold-blooded and unprovoked massacre of innocents reminiscent of Nazi behavior during World War II. The myth is that 8000 Bosnian Muslim “men and boys” were executed in the vicinity of Srebrenica in July 1995, and that any executions there were unprovoked and carried out in accord with a genocidal plan. Both facts and language have had to be aggressively massaged to support these claims. The political agendas served by the massacre claims were those of the Bosnian Muslims, striving to get NATO to enter the Bosnian struggle more actively, the Croats, who needed a demonization of Serbs to carry out their own ethnic cleansing plans (most notably, removing 250,000 Serbs from Croatian Krajina in the very next month, August 1995), and the Clinton administration, under attack for a failure to intervene more actively on behalf of the Croats and Muslims and searching for an excuse to do so.This paper is partly drawn from and cites chapters in a forthcoming book on the Srebrenica massacre, Srebrenica: The Politics of War Crimes, written by George Bogdanich, Tim Fenton, Philip Hammond, Edward S. Herman, Michael Mandel, Jonathan Rooper, and George Szamuely. This book is referred to in the notes below as Politics of War Crimes. The author and his colleagues are indebted to Diana Johnstone, David Peterson, Vera Vratusa-Zunjic, Milan Bulajic, Milivoje Ivanisevic, Konstantin Kilibarda, and George Pumphrey for advice. Johnstone’s Fools Crusade is a fine basic statement of an alternative perspective on the Balkan Wars; George Pumphrey’s “Srebrenica: Three Years Later, And Still Searching,” is a classic critique of the establishment Srebrenica massacre narrative and repeatedly hit the target with facts and analyses still not rebutted.