by EDWARD S. HERMAN and DAVID PETERSON
Map of Bosnia and Hercegovina showing Srebrenica IMAGE / Commons Wikipedia
In their recent article on “How Britain and the US Decided to Abandon Srebrenica to Its Fate” (Observer, July 5, 20151), Ed Vulliamy, a veteran reporter for the Guardian and Observer newspapers, and Florence Hartmann, a reporter and former spokesperson for the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), do a remarkable job of standing history on its head. They do this by the selective use of evidence, including major suppressions of relevant facts; by taking as established truths matters about which there is serious dispute; by a racist underpinning that is clearly hostile to ethnic Serbs; by literal fabrication; and by kitchen-sinking their readers, with quotes from many officials and other sources that fail to prove anything, but that help them to build up the desired atmosphere of an appeased evil.
Vulliamy and Hartmann’s (hereafter V-H) main themes are that the Srebrenica killings of July 1995 were a result of murderous Serb expansionism combined with U.S., British, French, Dutch, and UN appeasement. As regards this appeasement policy, V-H state: “[A] survey of the mass of evidence reveals that the fall of Srebrenica formed part of a policy by the three ‘great powers’ — Britain, France and the U.S. — and by the UN leadership, in pursuit of peace at any price; peace at the terrible expense of Srebrenica, which gathered critical mass from 1994 onwards, and reached its bloody denouement in July 1995.” They go on to add: “Bosnia’s carnage had confounded the world’s most experienced diplomats: ineffective talks and plans had played out and failed for three bloody years.” And along the same line: “diplomats also courted the Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic . . . as they ineffectively sought his cooperation.”2
The authors never mention that there were ongoing civil wars in the former Yugoslavia from 1991 till the Dayton Agreement of November 1995,3 primarily within Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as Croatia, and Srebrenica was one of several Bosnian Muslim enclaves within Bosnian Serb-controlled territory — hardly a sustainable situation in a state of civil war. But this allows V-H to pretend that preserving Srebrenica’s autonomy was urgently important, when in fact it was widely recognized to be unsustainable and exchanging it for Bosnian Serb-held territory in mainly Muslim areas of Bosnia had been actively discussed by all parties, including among Srebrenica and Sarajevo Muslims. But V-H go to great pains to make those discussions involving the great Western powers sound like a straightforward selling out of Srebrenica’s Muslim population. In fact, it was nothing of the kind.
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