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JERUSALEM POST REMEMBERS BOSNIAKS & CROATS IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS
PHOTO: Relative of the Omarska concentration camp victims near the Western Bosnian town of Prijedor in Bosnia-Herzegovina holds photos of excavated bodies of her relatives on 06 August, 2006. You can view more concentration camp photos from Bosnian Genocide at this link.
By Tovah Lazaroff, JPost Correspondent in Geneva
Originally published: Apr 26, 2009.
JERUSALEM POST – As an inmate in the Omarska concentration camp in Bosnia, in 1992, Nusreta Sivac began her days by counting the corpses of those who had been killed overnight.
“We would see them on the grass in front of the ‘white house,’ which was a little building where the worst torture was committed,” she told the audience who had gathered on Friday to hear her and other victims of racism, including some from Rwanda. They spoke on the sidelines of the United Nations anti-racism conference that met in Geneva last week.
They sat on a small stage, set off from one of the main corridors in the UN’s European headquarters, at an event titled “Voices: Everyone affected by racism has a story that should be heard.”
Speaking with the help of a translator, Sivac explained how in April 1992 Serbs took over her native city of Prijedor, in the northwest part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and went about “ethnically cleansing” the area of Muslims (Bosniaks) and Catholics (Croats).
First, “freedom of movement was strictly limited. Muslims and Croats had to wear white bands around their arms and to have white flags on the windows of their apartments,” she said.
Sivac was 40 and a judge in the municipal court. Within a few days of the takeover, she was banned from her job.
“I thought that was the worst thing that could ever happen to me, and later I realized that was only the introduction to the worst thing that could ever happen to a human being,” she said.
In June, she was asked to come to the police station, where she was forced onto a bus and driven away by members of the Serb military forces.
“I did not know in what direction I was taken. Only when we arrived I understood that I was taken to the Omarska concentration camp,” she said.
It was an unusual move because mostly it was men who were sent there, while women and children were typically driven to the border with the Bosnian-controlled area, where they sought protection, Sivac said.
She was one of 36 women among 3,500 men detained at the camp.
The women were given rooms above a restaurant. During the day they were forced to serve food or clean while the rooms that they slept in were used to torture prisoners.
“We would hear them screaming every day… When we would come up to the rooms to sleep, we first had to clean because blood was everywhere,” she said.
Every day, people were tortured to death and massacred. Drunken guards jumped on the bodies and sang Serb nationalist songs, she said.
Fathers would see their sons tortured and killed and sons would watch their fathers being murdered, she said.
“Even some of the detained women saw their husbands tortured, and no one was ever allowed to help anyone. They would have risked their lives,” she said.
“Once I saw my cousin running on the grass area covered by the massacred bodies and he was desperately looking for his son. Then I saw them killing him.”
Another time, she saw a Serb soldier take a knife and make a cross on a woman’s face.
Male prisoners were only given one meal a day, a small piece of bread, bean soup and coleslaw, she said.
“When detainees would go to eat, they had to pass a line of Serb guards that would beat them,” she said.
If prisoners did not finish the meal within minutes, they risked being beaten, sometimes to death, Sivac said.
Many people stopped going to meals to avoid the beatings.
For the women, nighttime was the worst, she said.
“The guards would come to the rooms and take us somewhere in the camp and rape us. That happened on a regular basis. We were not allowed to say anything to anyone. I was regularly raped and beaten,” said Sivac.
She was the only judge to survive the camp. All the male Muslim and Croat judges were killed. But Sivac survived until her release in August 1992, right before Western journalists and the Red Cross were brought in to see the camp, which was closed later that month.
Today, she has returned to live in Prijedor, which is now part of the Republic of Srpska. The city is now 99 percent ethnic Serb. Most of the Muslims live in the Federation of Bosnia, where there are some 500,000 Muslim refugees.
No one in the Republic of Srpska talks about what happened in 1992.
“I am surrounded by a society that does not recognize what happened, which I find very difficult,” Sivac said.
In Prijedor, “I see some of the perpetrators and some of those who came already out from The Hague,” she said.
Prejudice still runs so deep in Prijedor that she cannot work there. Instead she travels more than an hour to the Federation of Bosnia to work.
“I have been called to witness in The Hague and I have seen the man [Zeljko Mejakic] that was regularly raping and beating me and other women,” Sivac said.
“He was the worst to the women in the camp. I know that many of the women did not talk about their experiences, because it is extremely difficult to think and to talk about it, even for me today, but I have to be strong and let my voice be heard.”
In 1996, an American documentary, Calling the Ghosts, was made about her story.
Still, she told the audience in Geneva on Friday, very little attention is paid to what happened in Bosnia.
“Unfortunately, the concentration camps in Bosnia is something very rarely spoken about, which is dangerous. We should not close our eyes to what happened. We should condemn it and never allow it to happen again,” she said.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay, who joined the panel, said, “This is why this conference matters. It is because of your experiences.”
Racism, she said, “is a global human tragedy blighting lives and destroying the future of men, women and children in every corner of the world. We must always insure that the voices of the victims are heard and that they resonate.”
REMEMBERING CONCENTRATION CAMPS IN BOSNIA
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH / Bosnia-Herzegovina / The Unindicted: Reaping the Rewards of “Ethnic Cleansing” / January 1997 Vol. 9, No. 1 (D)
Two of the concentration camps, Omarska and Keraterm, were places where killings, torture, and brutal interrogations were carried out. The third, Trnopolje, had another purpose; it functioned as a staging area for massive deportations of mostly women, children, and elderly men, and killings and rapes also occurred there. The fourth, Manjaca, was referred to by the Bosnian Serbs as a ‘prisoner of war camp,’ although most if not all detainees were civilians… The Commission of Experts determined that the systematic destruction of the Bosniak community in the Prijedor area met the definition of genocide.
After the Serbs took power on April 30, 1992, they opened at least four detention camps in the Prijedor opstina. Two of the concentration camps, Omarska and Keraterm, were places where killings, torture, and brutal interrogations were carried out. The third, Trnopolje, had another purpose; it functioned as a staging area for massive deportations of mostly women, children, and elderly men, and killings and rapes (2) also occurred there. The fourth, Manjaca, was referred to by the Bosnian Serbs as a “prisoner of war camp,” although most if not all detainees were civilians.(3)
“Despite the absence of a real non-Serbian threat, the main objective of the concentration camps, especially Omarska but also Keraterm, seems to have been to eliminate the non-Serb leadership,” the U.N. Commission of Experts found. “From the time when the Serbs took power in the district of Prijedor, non-Serbs in reality became outlaws. At times, non-Serbs were instructed to wear white arm bands to identify themselves…According to Serbianregulations, those leaving the district had to sign over their property rights and accept never to return, being told their names would simultaneously be deleted from the census.” (4)
According to Ed Vulliamy (5), the first journalist to report from the Omarska camp, “Omarska was a monstrosity: an inferno of murder, torture and rape. It was a stain upon our century.” (6)
During the period when many persons were interned in the concentration camps, family members sometimes tried to obtain information from the police station in town. “Instead of receiving information concerning the whereabouts of their family members, they were in some cases offered the alternative of paying for an “exit visa” for the family at large.(7) In order to receive an “exit visa,” sums of money had to be paid to various municipal authorities and to the local “Red Cross,” run by the Bosnian Serb authorities, and real property had to be signed over to the municipality.
The Commission of Experts determined that the systematic destruction of the Bosniak community in the Prijedor area met the definition of genocide. (8)
The persecution of non-Serbs in Prijedor did not ease after international pressure succeeded in forcing the Bosnian Serbs to close the concentration camps in 1992, as evidenced by the ICRC’s attempt to evacuate all remaining non-Serbs from Opstina Prijedor in March 1994. (9)
As documented by Human Rights Watch/Helsinki, a final wave of mass expulsions of non-Serbs from Prijedor and many other towns in Serb-controlled territory occurred in September and October 1995, when the infamous Zeljko “Arkan” Raznatovic joined local forces to conduct “ethnic cleansing” operations. (10) Forced expulsions in Prijedor began on October 5 during which those expelled were again forced to finance their own “ethnic cleansing” by paying transportation fees to the local “Red Cross” and were harassed, robbed, and threatened while waiting for the buses which would later dump them at the confrontation line. (11)
One woman told Human Rights Watch/Helsinki during a 1995 investigation of the expulsions, “All the Muslims from the city [Prijedor] were expelled. We went to the [local] Red Cross, gave them seventy DM for each family member and got on the buses. . .There were thirteen buses in the convoy leaving from Prijedor for Teslic. Men were taken off my bus. . . My husband was taken off the bus in Blatnica, a Serbian village in the woods.” She had not seen her husband since. (12)
Many draft-age males were separated from their families during round-ups in other Bosnian Serb-controlled areas, and transferred to Prijedor, where they were interned at the “Autoprevoz” facility or other local detention centers. Following the official closing of the camps in 1992, and until the present, rumors have abounded about the reopening of the Omarska, Manjaca and Keraterm camps, but Human Rights Watch/Helsinki has been unable to confirm them. Prisoners released from “Autoprevoz” in an exchange told Human Rights Watch/Helsinki that when the International Committee of the Red Cross tried to visit them, they were moved by bus onto the Kozara mountain and hidden until the visitors had gone away. (13)
Oppression of the now-minority Bosniak and Bosnian Croat populations throughout Republika Srpska continues today through restrictions on freedom of movement; evictions and expulsions; arbitrary arrest and detention; ethnically motivated harassment and direct physical attack; denial of employment, humanitarian assistance, medical care, and social insurance; discrimination in access to education; and restrictions on religious freedom.
(3) As of June 23, 1993, according to the United Nations Commission of Experts, which conducted an extensive review of war crimes committed in Prijedor municipality, the total number of killed and deported persons was 52,811 (including limited numbers of refugees and people missing). Camps located in or around Prijedor included Omarska, Manjaca, Keraterm, and Trnopolje. See Final Report of the United Nations Commission of Experts, for a detailed description of events around Prijedor in 1992 and throughout the war.
REASON WHY KRAJISNIK GOT AWAY WITH GENOCIDE
As Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic pointed out:
‘People are not little stones, or keys in someone’s pocket, that can be moved from one place to another just like that… Therefore, we cannot precisely arrange for only Serbs to stay in one part of the country while removing others painlessly. I do not know how Mr Krajisnik and Mr Karadzic will explain that to the world. That is genocide.’
Author: Edina Becirevic
The acquittal of Krajisnik on genocide charges challenges the very definition of this gravest of all crimes, according to a leading Sarajevo criminal justice authority writing for IWPR’s Tribunal Update 470
On 27 September 2006 Momcilo Krajisnik, a Bosnian Serb leader accused of being one of the architects of ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian 1992-95 war, was found guilty of most of the charges against him and sentenced to 27 years in prison. The tribunal judges said it had been proved beyond reasonable doubt that he was responsible for the extermination, murder, persecution and deportation of non-Serbs during the war, adding that his role in the commission of these crimes was crucial. However, rather surprisingly, Krajisnik was acquitted of the most serious charges – genocide or complicity in genocide.
On first reading, this finding sends a somewhat confusing message. According to the summary of the judgement, read by Presiding Judge Alphons Orie on 27 September, genocide did take place in Bosnia – however, it was not possible to prove the intent of the perpetrators. ‘The Chamber finds that in spite of evidence of acts perpetrated in the municipalities which constituted the actus reus of genocide, the chamber has not received sufficient evidence to establish whether the perpetrators had genocidal intent, that is the intent to destroy, the Bosnian-Muslim or Bosnian-Croat ethnic group, as such,’ says the summary. The only reasonable conclusion that could be taken from this formulation is that genocide took place in Bosnia merely by accident.
The term genocide carries a heavy political burden, and scholars of genocide quite often disagree on the interpretation of the 1951 genocide convention. However, theorists from Raphael Lemkin – the Jewish lawyer who coined the term genocide – to any other contemporary scholar in this field, would agree that it simply does not happen by accident and requires organised action. In his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in 1944, Lemkin specifically says that genocide could – but does not necessarily – mean destruction of a whole nation. However, he says that genocide requires organised planning aimed at destroying the basic foundations of the life of the national groups. That kind of plan would target ‘political and social institutions, culture, language, economic existence, as well as the personal security, freedom health, dignity, even lives of individuals that belong to those groups’.
Another recognised expert on the subject, Helen Fein, considers that the process of proving genocide involves establishing continuity in attacks aimed at destroying members of a group in an organised manner. Fein also says that two of the preconditions for genocide are the absence of sanctions for the perpetrators and the existence of ideologies that promote the idea of genocide.
Irvin Louis Horowitz, meanwhile, suggests that genocide is the structural and systematic destruction of innocent people.
None of the leading scholars in the field mentions ‘accidental genocide’.
The judgement against Krajisnik says, ‘The common objective of the joint criminal enterprise was to ethnically re-compose the territories targeted by the Bosnian-Serb leadership, by drastically reducing the proportion of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats through expulsion.’ It is important to note that this conclusion relies on the ‘six strategic aims of the Serb people’, which were adopted by the Bosnian Serb parliament at a session held on 12 May 1992. The first of these goals – to ‘separate Serb people from another two national communities’ – was announced by Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader also indicted for genocide by the tribunal. As parliamentary speaker, Momcilo Krajisnik presided over this session, and he emphasised the importance of the first strategic goal, which he said should be supported by ethnic division on the ground.
It is noteworthy that at this meeting, both Karadzic and Krajisnik were warned by Bosnian Serb military commander General Ratko Mladic, also indicted on genocide charges, that their plans could not be committed without committed genocide. ‘People are not little stones, or keys in someone’s pocket, that can be moved from one place to another just like that… Therefore, we cannot precisely arrange for only Serbs to stay in one part of the country while removing others painlessly. I do not know how Mr Krajisnik and Mr Karadzic will explain that to the world. That is genocide,’ said Mladic. It was obvious to Mladic that the plan envisaged by the Serb politicial leadership could not be put into practice without a genocide. Even though the general had no qualms about executing this genocidal plan, this quote from the parliamentary transcript shows that Serb military and political leaders were aware of the likely consequences of their actions.In short, Krajisnik’s judgement seems to go against established definitions of genocide, as well as what General Mladic believed the crime to be. The judges in the Krajisnik case said they had established that genocide took place, but were not convinced the Serb leadership intended to commit it. They appear to lean toward a school of thought which sets extremely high standards of proof for genocide. To them, the Srebrenica massacre was one ‘genocidal incident’ in the broader ethnic cleansing of Bosnia. In his book States of Denial, Stanley Cohen says that avoiding the use of the word genocide in situations of armed conflict gives other countries an excuse not to intervene. This may help explain why the term was so studiously avoided during the Bosnian war.
Edina Becirevic is senior lecturer at the Faculty of Criminal Justice Sciences in Sarajevo. This comment appeared in IWPR’S Tribunal Update No. 470, 29September 2006, see
http://www.iwpr.net/Bosnia’s Accidental Genocide – republished from Bosnian Institute.
MOMCILO KRAJISNIK SENTENCED TO 27 YEARS
Bosniak woman Munira Subasic watches on TV the verdict on Momcilio Krajisnik, a former high-ranking Bosnian Serb politician accused of genocide over the brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia, at the Union of Srebrenica woman in Sarajevo on Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2006. The U.N. tribunal sentenced Bosnian Serb politician Momcilo Krajisnik on Wednesday to 27 years in prison for crimes against humanity committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
Bosniak women survivors of the Srebrenica massacre gesture as they watch on TV the verdict on Momcilo Krajisnik, a former high-ranking Bosnian Serb politician accused of genocide over the brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia, at the Union of Srebrenica women in Sarajevo on Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2006. The U.N. tribunal sentenced Bosnian Serb politician Momcilo Krajisnik on Wednesday to 27 years in prison for crimes against humanity committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
Bosniak woman Munira Subasic survivor of the Srebrenica massacre reacts as she watches on TV the verdict on Momcilo Krajisnik, a former high-ranking Bosnian Serb politician accused of genocide over the brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia, at the Union of Srebrenica woman in Sarajevo on Wednesday, Sep. 27, 2006. The U.N. tribunal sentenced Bosnian Serb politician Momcilo Krajisnik on Wednesday to 27 years in prison for crimes against humanity committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
Sabra Kolenovic, a Bosnian Muslim survivor of 1995 Srebrenica massacre of over 8,000 Muslims reacts, during the live TV coverage from the U.N. war crimes tribunal in the Hague, from her office in Sarajevo September 27, 2006. Relatives of victims of the Srebrenica massacre blasted the U.N. war crimes tribunal’s verdict on Bosnian Serb politician Momcilo Krajisnik on Wednesday as too lenient, despite his sentence of 27 years’ jail.”
INTERNATIONAL WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL JAILS FORMER BOSNIAN SERB POLITICIAN FOR 27 YEARS
“It’s a minimal punishment for what he has done,” said Zumra Sehomerovic, of the “Mothers of Srebrenica” association.“It doesn’t matter that he may not live long enough to walk out. What matters is that his acts are properly punished,” she said. “This Hague tribunal has also become a circus. God, is there justice anywhere in this world?”
The UN Yugoslav tribunal today jailed the former speaker of the Bosnian Serb parliament for 27 years for war crimes, but acquitted him of Bosnian genocide.
Momcilo Krajisnik, 61, one of the highest ranking politicians in wartime Bosnia, was convicted of five counts of war crimes, including persecution, extermination, and the murder of Bosniaks and Croats in the early stages of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, which left more than 100,000 dead on all sides, mostly Bosniaks.
Reading a litany of killings, plundering and forced transfers in a summary of the judgment, presiding judge Alphons Orie said Krajisnik’s “role in the commission of the crimes was crucial.”
The judgment said Krajisnik “knew about, and intended, the mass detention and expulsion of civilians. He had the power to intervene, but he was not concerned with the predicament of detained and expelled persons.”
Orie said the judges were unconvinced by the evidence that the Bosnian Serb leadership had deliberately intended to destroy the non-Serb population in whole or in part – a key element in winning a conviction for Bosnian genocide.
The court has ruled in other cases that genocide occurred at Srebrenica, Bosnia, in July 1995, when Bosnian Serb troops killed at least 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in the worst civilian massacre in Europe since the Second World War II (see preliminary list of dead and missing).
“Krajisnik wanted the Muslim [Bosniak] and Croat populations moved out of Bosnian-Serb territories in large numbers, and accepted that a heavy price of suffering, death, and destruction was necessary to achieve Serb domination and a viable statehood,” the judgment said.
Krajisnik listened to the reading of the verdict gravely, with downcast eyes, then stood as the sentence was read. His lawyers had asked for acquittal, and said they would appeal the ruling. Prosecutors had asked for a life sentence.
Several family members were in the gallery to hear the verdict. “I know my brother is certainly not guilty, at least not to such an extent.” said Mirko Krajisnik.
Victims of the Bosnian Serbs decried the sentence as too lenient.
“It’s a minimal punishment for what he has done,” said Zumra Sehomerovic, of the “Mothers of Srebrenica” association.
“It doesn’t matter that he may not live long enough to walk out. What matters is that his acts are properly punished,” she said. “This Hague tribunal has also become a circus. God, is there justice anywhere in this world?”
Krajisnik’s case was of the most important remaining for the tribunal, which is due to begin its last trial in 2008, and may be the last chance to apportion blame among the leadership of the breakaway Bosnian Serb leadership for atrocities carried out by troops on the ground.
The two remaining key suspects, former Bosnian Serb Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic, both indicted for genocide, are fugitives.
The ruling did not mention former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who prosecutors claimed had pulled the strings from neighbouring Serbia during the war. Milosevic died of heart attack in his cell in March, before a verdict could be rendered in his case.
A third figure in the Bosnian Serb leadership, Biljana Plavsic, confessed and is serving an 11-year sentence. She testified unwillingly against Krajisnik, saying he wielded almost as much power as Karadzic.
Krajisnik’s indictment covered events July 1991-December 2002, including the period when ethnic Serbs seized two-thirds of the territory in Bosnia and evicted non-Serbs. The judgment described what happened to Bosniak detainees at Zvornik, just one of the dozens of towns listed in the indictment.
“One man had his ear cut off, others had their fingers cut off, and at least two men were sexually mutilated,” it said. “About 160 detainees were later removed in small groups and executed by the Serb guards.”
Taken together, what was done to Bosniaks and Croats in Bosnia would be enough to constitute the act of genocide, but “the chamber has not received sufficient evidence to establish whether the perpetrators had genocidal intent,” Orie said.
The judges rejected the argument by Krajisnik’s lawyers had argued he was only a small player in the Bosnian Serb government, They said he was part of its executive authority and bore responsibility.
GENERAL LEWIS MACKENZIE IS CONCENTRATION CAMP RAPIST
GENERAL LEWIS MACKENZIE – PAID SERBIAN LOBBYIST AND OUTSPOKEN SREBRENICA GENOCIDE DENIER
Gen. Lewis MacKenzie, the former commander of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in Bosnia is an outspoken Srebrenica genocide denier. He portrays himself as an expert on Srebrenica who can rule on genocide issues, even though he has no legal background and he has never visited Srebrenica in his life. On July 14, 2005 edition of Canada’s The Globe and Mail, under “The Real Story Behind Srebrenica“, this is what he stated (quote):
Quote: “Evidence given at The Hague war crimes tribunal casts serious doubt on the figure of ‘up to’ 8,000 Bosnian Muslims massacred. That figure includes ‘up to’ 5,000 who have been classified as missing. More than 2,000 bodies have been recovered in and around Srebrenica, and they include victims of the three years of intense fighting in the area. The math just doesn’t support the scale of 8,000 killed…. It’s a distasteful point, but it has to be said that, if you’re committing genocide, you don’t let the women go since they are key to perpetuating the very group you are trying to eliminate. Many of the men and boys were executed and burried in mass graves.” End Quote
As an alternative to Lewis Mackenzie’s make-believe denials, read Facts: 8,106 killed in Srebrenica Genocide.
While it is difficult to ascertain exactly how much has been directed towards payment for speakers and journalists, the SUC [Serbian Unity Congress] and Serbnet have set up a special fund for this purpose. Based on former UN General Lewis MacKenzie’s own admission which was later corroborated by Serbnet — that he was receiving over $15,000 per speaking engagement — the amount spent on MacKenzie represents more than what the SUC is paying to PR firms such as Manatos and Manatos, Inc. (
source).The Serbian propaganda campaign employs methods similar to Holocaust denial and revisionism. Their first line of action is to create an atmosphere of relativism. The second line of action is then to deny the totality of the destruction in order to downplay the purpose and systematic nature of the aggression. The third line of action is then to create their own ‘facts’ and ‘references’ and it is here where they have been most successful. The SUC [Serbian Unity Congress] has used public relations firms (Manatos and Manatos, McDermott O’Neill and Associates, David Keene and Associates), in order to grant their leaders and paid representatives access to television and radio interviews, congressional sub-committee hearings and U.N. sponsored commissions. These congressional hearings, interviews and official reports are then used as references, which lend legitimacy to their position. For example, the Serbnet speeches made by former UN General Lewis MacKenzie on his speaker-tour are frequently advertised, as are the articles of Sir Alfred Sherman which appeared in the British press.
But just, who is Gen. Lewis MacKenzie? To answer that question, one must go back to 1992. In December – same year – the chief Bosnian military prosecutor in Sarajevo, Mustafa Bisic, formally charged Gen. Lewis MacKenzie with sexual misconduct against civilians while on duty in Bosnia, and requested that the UN revoke his displomatic immunity. MacKenzie was accused of raping several Bosnian women being held captive in a Serbian prison camp, as a “gift” from Serbian officials. The victims were later executed by Serbian soldiers, allegedly to ‘erase evidence’.
Here is an archived version of investigative article published on June 4th, 1993 by Pacific News Services.
450 Mission Street, Room 506
San Francisco, CA 94105
415-243-4364 ANSWERS NEEDED TO CHARGES OF UN MISCONDUCT IN BOSNIA
By: Dennis Bernstein, Pacific News Service
Date: 06/04/1993
Last November the chief Bosnian military prosecutor in Sarajevo charged a high UN official with sexual misconduct against civilians while on duty in Bosnia. The prosecutor publicly demanded that the Bosnian president press the United Nations to remove the official’s diplomatic immunity.
Although reports of the alleged war crimes have appeared in the Arab, European and Canadian press, have been circulating in UN circles and even surfaced in a briefing for U.S. Congressional aides by a human rights group, there has as yet been no formal response from the UN. While the official has denied the charges, those attempting to investigate them — journalists, human rights advocates, foreign policyanalysts, and at least one U.S. legislator, not to mention Bosnian officials and Sarajevans themselves — believe they raise troubling questions about the overall accountability of the UN: just who is policing the peacekeepers?
Some months after he unexpectedly stepped down from his assignment last August, General Lewis MacKenzie, Canadian head of the UN peacekeeping force in Bosnia Herzegovina, was charged in a bill of indictment by chief military prosecutor Mustafa Bisic with sexually molesting four Bosnian Muslim [Bosniak] women held by Serbian forces in a prison camp in a Sarajevo suburb.
In a letter to the Bosnian president dated Dec. 3, 1992, Bisic cited the eyewitness testimony of a Serbian guard who had worked at the camp, known as Kod Sonje. The guard claimed he saw MacKenzie and several escorts arrive in a military transport vehicle with the UN insignia. The eyewitness claimed guards were then ordered to release four Bosnian Muslim women prisoners to MacKenzie. According to the prosecutor’s complaint, the women were later murdered by camp guards under orders to “erase evidence” of this “unusual gift.”
The prosecutor’s charges, aired over Sarajevo television, were denounced by MacKenzie in several interviews with European and Canadian media as a propaganda tactic by one side in the three-sidedcivil war to gain international sympathy. “I can understand why they (Bosnian officials) would do something like that,” the former UN peacekeeper told the Vancouver Sun in an interview published Feb. 13.
“If I had been in their position and found that the peace-keeping force was not what I wanted, I can envision my devious mind working out a story to discredit them.”
Nevertheless, in February new information about the possible existence of a videotape placing MacKenzie at the Kod Sonje camp helped refocus attention to the charges. In an interview with Pacific News Service, U.S. Congresswoman Louise M. Slaughter (D-NY) says she is “very concerned” about the charges and has informed U.S. ambassador to the UN Madeline Albright that her office “is trying to ferret them out as best we can.”
Slaughter learned about the videotape from Safeta Ovcina, a Bosnian nurse who testified at a special briefing conducted by Helsinki Watch for Congressional staffers. The briefing was held February 23 amid growing concern in the West over media accounts of mass rapes of Bosnian Muslim women by Serbian soldiers.
Ovcina, who spent ten months tending war victims at a frontline hospital before fleeing Sarajevo for the United States, testified she had been shown the videotape by her neighbors whom she described as members of the Bosnian military.
“I looked at the tape and saw General MacKenzie, whom we always saw on TV news, with Serb chetniks. There were three or four girls on both sides of him…MacKenzie was hugging them.”
In a telephone interview with Pacific News Service at her home in St. Louis, Ovcina says she recognized some of the young women as formerly involved in a hair cutting business.
“They didn’t laugh, theydidn’t cry, they just sat there…The feeling I had is that they were surrounded by a bunch of drunken people, and they were very unhappy,” she recalled.
Ovcina says her neighbors told her the women were later killed and buried in a grave on the outskirts of Sarajevo. In her testimony at the Helsinki Watch briefing, she also described witnessing other abuses and indiscretions by UN personnel, including the selling of protection, food, cigarettes.
Bosnian officials in the United States interviewed by Pacific News Service say they do not know the whereabouts of the videotape nor do they have any verification that it exists. Although the allegations are now widely accepted as truth in Sarajevo, according to Bosnian Ambassador to the UN Muhamed Sacirbey, at this point “there is no proof to justify them.” Interviewed by phone from New York, Sacirbeysaid his government had not formally challenged General MacKenzie’s diplomatic immunity at the UN.
Another eyewitness to the alleged Kod Sonje incident is Borislav Herak, a Serbian soldier captured by Bosnian forces in early November and now awaiting execution for war crimes. Herak was interviewed on film by award winning Bosnian film maker and TV producer Ademir Kenovic several days after his arrest.
According to a transcript of the interview provided by Kenovic, Herak said he was at the camp when MacKenzie arrived in a white UN vehicle and met with the camp warden Miro Vukovic. He was then taken to a room “for big shots” where he was served whiskey and food.
Later, Herak said he saw MacKenzie and several other UN soldiers “taking four or five girls in this vehicle to have fun.” Asked if he were certain it was General MacKenzie, Herak replied, “Yes, I am sure. I saw him on television.”
To date, General MacKenzie has not been questioned by U.S. media about the charges and repeated phone calls to him by Pacific News Service in Washington DC were not returned.
Congresswoman Slaughter says while she doesn’t want to spread “what could be a smear campaign,” she considers the allegations serious enough to warrant investigation. If proven true, they couldundermine the UN’s entire peacekeeping mandate.
“But I don’t know who is authorized to handle such an investigation,” she added.
Slaughter was especially troubled to learn that twice when he visited Washington last May, General MacKenzie was represented by the public relations firm of Craig Shirley and Associates which is closely identified with the Serbian government. The firm also represents Serb-Net Inc., a Chicago-based association of Serbian American organizations which a spokesperson says “works to counter the negative press images about Serbia.”
(06/04/1993)
COPYRIGHT PNS
SREBRENICA MASSACRE REVISIONISM CRIPPLES PROSPECT OF RECONCILIATION
Comment: Revisionism Will Cripple Bosnia’s Future
“Thank you for making me realise that I have to deal with my past if I want to have a future,” Satko Mujagic told me on a hot, Bosnian August afternoon.We were standing on the site of the infamous Omarska concentration camp.
It is no exaggeration to say that this family unit is together thanks to the journalist Ed Vulliamy, a man I am privileged to call my friend, and who is viewed as a saviour by hundreds of other Bosnians.
For the memories are still fresh and true reconciliation impossible until the past is properly addressed – by all. The victims. The perpetrators. The observers.
[ Daniel’s note: Note that The Living Marxism magazine was launched in 1988 as an outlet for the Revolutionary Communist Party, a bizarre controversialist sect which split from the “International Socialists” in the 1970s. Soon the Revolutionary Communist Party was collapsed into Living Marxism, which, hovering between three different parent companies, later changed its name to LM. ]
[ Daniel’s note: For Srebrenica Massacre 101, click here ]
[ Daniel’s note: Facts: 8,106 Bosniaks Killed during Srebrenica Massacre ]
In a response to Ali’s denial, Quentin Hoare sent a letter to Slobodna Bosna supporting Vulliamy and denouncing Ali’s claims.
FEAR OF OBLIVION IS GREATER THAN THE HORRORS SUFFERED
Masovic actually reported the words of a former Jewish detainee of Nazi concentration camp Auswitz, who long after the liberation felt the constant need to talk about what he had been through. Although he was often told to stop “harassing” his interlocutors, the former detainee always responded with – fear from oblivion.
“Let this also be the motto for Bosniaks after genocide in the past war”, stressed Masovic.
Prior to the execution of Srebrenica men near Trnovo, which was screened with all horrific details that happened before the actual execution, the Commission for Missing Persons also presented the video footage on all mass graves discovered to date.
“The number of ‘white bags” in which the remains were stored after the exhumation is not equal to the number of victims, because some of the bags contain clothes and personal items of the victims, as well as numerous incomplete skeleton remains”, said Masovic.
The remains of another 250 victims from Srebrenica should be buried at the Memorial complex Potocari in July, he said.
Presentation of the said video footage was organized at the roundtable, which was organized on Wednesday by the veterans’ associations on subject “Support to BiH lawsuit against Serbia and Montenegro for aggression and genocide”. Organizers are the Alliance of recipients of the greatest war medals in FBiH, the BiH Patriotic League and the Association for protection of heritage of the battle for BiH.
Opening remarks at the roundtable were made by Director of the Institute for Researching War Crimes Smail Cekic.
“Numerous information and documents, including the top secrets of the former military top of Serbia and Montenegro, indubitably indicate that aggression and genocide were committed in BiH”, said Cekic.
One of the numerous records is the secret order of the former Yugoslav military top from 1990 on disarming the territorial defense of the former Republic of BiH.
“The value of the seized properties from her territorial defense exceeds US$ 633 million”, said Cekic.
CHOMSKY’S SREBRENICA GENOCIDE DENIAL
Chomsky’s Genocidal Denial
By Marko Attila Hoare
November 23, 2005
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2
In the realm of politics, there are those of us who wear our hearts on our sleeves: proud of what we stand for, we are not afraid to state our positions as clearly as possible, so there is no danger of misunderstanding; we call a spade a spade, and are ready to face the music. On the other hand, there are those who are embarrassed by their own position: they dissemble; muddying the waters so that what they really think is vague and hidden; when confronted by those who recognise them for what they are, they lash out in fear and shame, denying what everyone knows to be the truth.
Two very interesting parallel cases were highlighted in the Guardian newspaper on 17 November. It was reported that David Irving was arrested in Austria for the crime of Holocaust denial. Irving is well known as a Holocaust denier and Hitler apologist, yet when accused of this by the historian Deborah Lipstadt, he attempted to sue her for libel, resulting in his crushing courtroom defeat. Yet he apparently remains ashamed to accept the label that he has inevitably earned. According to the Guardian: ‘Mr Irving has said he does not deny Jews were killed by the Nazis, but challenges the number and manner of Jewish concentration camp deaths. He has questioned the use of large-scale gas chambers to exterminate the Jews, and has claimed that the numbers of those who perished are far lower than those generally accepted. He also contends that most Jews who died at Auschwitz did so from diseases such as typhus, not gas poisoning.’ In other words, lacking the moral courage to say proudly ‘Yes, I deny the Holocaust !’, Irving seeks refuge in the claim that he is merely concerned with the accuracy of details and interpretation. Thus, the Holocaust denier does not merely deny the Holocaust; he denies his own denial. Of course, no rational person would accept such a plea at face value.
On the same day (17 November), a new twist emerged in another saga of genocide-denial: the Guardian printed a grovelling apology to Noam Chomsky for a none-too-flattering interview with him carried out by the award-winning journalist Emma Brockes, published by the Guardian on 31 October, in which Brockes cites Chomsky as having said that the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 was ‘probably overstated’ and was not even an actual massacre. Chomsky prides himself on being a resolute champion of freedom of speech; on this ground, he has defended the right of Holocaust-deniers to publish what they want; and condemned Britain’s libel laws. Yet faced with Brockes’s exposure of his position, he and his circle of fans retreated from their pro-free-speech position, and organised a campaign of denunciation of Brockes, bombarding the Guardian with letters of complaint, and eventually bullying this spineless newspaper into issuing an unequivocal apology and retraction.
In his letter of complaint to the Guardian, published on 2 November, Chomsky writes: ‘As for her [Brockes’s] personal opinions, interpretations and distortions, she is of course free to publish them, and I would, of course, support her right to do so, on grounds that she makes clear she does not understand.’ Yet as a result of the Chomskyite campaign against Brockes, the Guardian readers’ editor reported on 17 November: ‘The Guardian has now withdrawn the interview from the website.’ Just fancy that ! More shamefully still, the Guardian also apologised for having published a letter by Kemal Pervanic, a survivor of the Serb concentration-camp Omarska, alongside Chomsky’s on 2 November. Pervanic said he was ‘shocked by some of the views of Noam Chomsky in the article by Emma Brockes’s.’ Yet in the words of the Guardian readers’ editor’s grovelling piece of self-criticism: ‘While he has every sympathy with the writer [Pervanic], Prof Chomsky believes that its publication was designed to undermine his position, and addressed a part of the interview which was false… With hindsight it is acknowledged that the juxtaposition has exacerbated Prof Chomsky’s complaint, and that is regretted.’ So much for respecting the right of a concentration-camp survivor to state his opinion.
The irony is all the greater, as the Brockes interview revolved around Chomsky’s defence of the writer Diana Johnstone, allegedly on the grounds of supporting freedom of speech. In 2003, the left-wing Swedish magazine Ordfront published an interview with Johnstone, which repeated her revisionist, genocide-denying views of the Bosnian war. This provoked massive outrage on the part of members of Ordfront’s editorial board and readers, leading to resignation of the editor and a public apology by the magazine for the pain it had caused to Bosnian genocide survivors. Johnstone’s Swedish publisher apparently withdrew its agreement to publish her book. This, in the eyes of Chomsky, consisted of a violation of Johnstone’s ‘freedom of speech’, though nobody had prevented her from disseminating her views through other magazines or publishers; indeed, her book has been published in the UK by Pluto Press, and her articles are available all over the internet, should anyone wish to read them. Nor, it should be said, was Johnstone murdered, tortured or driven out of her home, like hundreds of thousands of Bosnian citizens in the 1990s, whose rights Chomsky has never got round to championing. But assuming the right of a Western author not to have her writings rejected by publishers on political grounds is a more worthy cause than the right of Balkan untermenschen to life and limb, it remains to be seen whether Chomsky’s fellow left-wing libertarians will engage themselves in defence of Brockes as forthrightly as they did in defence of Johnstone.
What was it about Brockes’s interview that so rattled Chomsky ? Chomskyite ire focussed on the question-and-answer headline that introduced the interview:
Q. [Brockes]: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated ?
A. [Chomsky]: My only regret is that I didn’t do it strongly enough.
This was a paraphrase, rather than a literal quotation, and one that was written by the newspaper rather than by Brockes herself, and for which she therefore cannot be held responsible. Nevertheless, it accurately summed up the essence of the matter: Chomsky had supported Johnstone, who claimed that the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated. In his open letter to the Guardian of 13 November, Chomsky claimed it was simply a matter of defending freedom of speech: ‘The truthful part is that I said, and explained at length, that I regret not having strongly enough opposed the Swedish publisher’s decision to withdraw a book by Diana (not ‘Diane,’ as the Guardian would have it) Johnstone after it was bitterly attacked in the Swedish press… In the interview, whatever Johnstone may have said about Srebrenica never came up, and is entirely irrelevant in any event, at least to anyone with a minimal appreciation of freedom of speech.’
Chomsky therefore claimed his defence of Johnstone’s freedom of speech had been misrepresented as denial of the Srebrenica massacre. Indeed, Brockes’s portrayal of Chomsky’s alleged denial of Srebrenica was at the heart of Chomsky’s complaint. According to Brockes, Chomsky claimed ‘that during the Bosnian war the ‘massacre’ at Srebrenica was probably overstated.’ Brockes elaborated thus on Chomsky’s style: ‘Chomsky uses quotations marks to undermine things that he disagrees with and, in print at least, it can come across less as academic than as witheringly teenage; like, Srebrenica was so not a massacre.’ Chomsky’s outraged response was that ‘with five minutes research on the internet, any journalist could find many places where I described the massacre as a massacre, never with quotes. That alone ends the story.’ The Guardian readers’ editor accepted the validity of Chomsky’s complaint, and threw in an apology to Johnstone for good measure: ‘Ms Brockes’s misrepresentation of Prof Chomsky’s views on Srebrenica stemmed from her misunderstanding of his support for Ms Johnstone. Neither Prof Chomsky nor Ms Johnstone have [sic] ever denied the fact of the massacre.’
The big question is, of course, does Chomsky really deny the Srebrenica massacre ? Or, if he does not deny it outright, does he put such a spin on it that he denies it to all intents and purposes ?
Johnstone, for her part, denies it to all intents and purposes. Her book, Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (London: Pluto Press, 2002) puts the words ‘Srebrenica massacre’ in quotes (p. 106). She then goes on to argue: ‘In trying to understand what happened at Srebrenica, a number of factors should be taken into account.’ These are, she argues, that Srebrenica and other ‘safe areas’ had ‘served as Muslim military bases under UN protection’; that the ‘Muslim military force stationed in Srebrenica – some 5,000 men under the command of Naser Oric, had carried out murderous raids against nearby Serb villages’; that ‘[Bosnian President] Izetbegovic pulled Naser Oric out of Srebrenica prior to the anticipated Serb offensive, deliberately leaving the enclave undefended’; and that ‘Insofar as Muslims were actually executed following the fall of Srebrenica, such crimes bear all the signs of spontaneous acts of revenge rather than a project of ‘genocide’’. Furthermore: ‘Six years after the summer of 1995, ICTY forensic teams had exhumed 2,631 bodies in the region, and identified fewer than 50. In an area where fighting had raged for years, some of the bodies were certainly of Serbs as well as of Muslims. Of these bodies, 199 were found to have been bound or blindfolded, and must reasonably be presumed on the basis of the material evidence to have been executed.’ She concludes: ‘War crimes ? The Serbs themselves do not deny that crimes were committed. Part of a plan of genocide ? For this there is no evidence whatsoever.’ (pp. 109-118).
To sum up Johnstone’s position on Srebrenica: she blames everything that happened there on the Muslims; claims they provoked the Serb offensive in the first place; then deliberately engineered their own killing; and then exaggerated their own death-toll. She denies that thousands of Muslims were massacred; suggesting there is no evidence for a number higher than 199 – less than 2.5% of the accepted figure of eight thousand. And she eschews the word ‘massacre’ in favour of ‘execution’ – as if it were a question of criminals on Death Row, not of innocent civilians. It is as if she were to claim that less than 150,000 Jews, rather than six million, had died in the Holocaust; that the Jews had provoked and engineered the Nazi killings; that these killings had been ‘executions’; and that the Jews had then exaggerated their death toll. She is ready to excuse the Srebrenica killings as retaliation for Oric’s earlier killings of Serb civilians – but does not mention that Oric’s crimes took place long after the war had already begun and Serb forces had begun slaughtering Muslims all over Bosnia. She does not mention how Srebrenica became an ‘enclave’ in the first place: through Serb aggression against, and conquest of, East Bosnia in 1992, and the killing and expulsion of the Muslim population that this involved – against which the Srebrenica Muslims were temporarily able to hold out as an ‘enclave’. All in all, this can reasonably be called denial; insofar as it is not complete denial – she recognises less than 2.5% of the massacre – it is an apologia for the Serb forces. The Guardian readers’ editor’s claim that ‘Neither Prof Chomsky nor Ms Johnstone have [sic] ever denied the fact of the massacre’ is, therefore, at least half untrue.
But what about the other half, i.e. Chomsky ? An open letter to Ordfront, signed by Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy and others, stated: ‘We regard Johnstone’s Fools’ Crusade as an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition.’ In his personal letter to Ordfront in defence of Johnstone, Chomsky wrote: ‘I have known her for many years, have read the book, and feel that it is quite serious and important.’ Chomsky makes no criticism here of Johnstone’s massacre denial, or indeed anywhere else – except in the Brockes interview, which he has repudiated. Indeed, he endorses her revisionism: in response to Mikael van Reis’s claim that ‘She [Johnstone] insists that Serb atrocities – ethnic cleansing, torture camps, mass executions – are western propaganda’, Chomsky replies that ‘Johnstone argues – and, in fact, clearly demonstrates – that a good deal of what has been charged has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication.’
In the same letter, Chomsky makes much of an allegedly positive review of Johnstone’s book in a British foreign-affairs journal: ‘I also know that it has been very favourably reviewed, e.g., by the British scholarly journal International Affairs, journal of the Royal Academy.’ He then continues, with his own idiosyncratic logic: ‘I don’t read Swedish journals of course, but it would be interesting to learn how the Swedish press explains the fact that their interpretation of Johnstone’s book differs so radically from that of Britain’s leading scholarly foreign affairs journal, International Affairs. I mentioned the very respectful review by Robert Caplan, of the University of Reading and Oxford [sic]. It is obligatory, surely, for those who condemn Johnstone’s book in the terms just reviewed to issue still harsher condemnation of International Affairs, as well as of the universities of Reading and Oxford, for allowing such a review to appear, and for allowing the author to escape censure.’ The essence of what Chomsky is saying, is that Johnstone received a positive review in a respectable scholarly journal, therefore her book must be good.
There are, first of all, a number of distortions in Chomsky’s claim: International Affairs is the journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, not of the ‘Royal Academy’; the RIIA is a para-governmental think tank, not a scholarly institution, therefore it makes no sense to describe International Affairs as ‘Britain’s leading scholarly foreign affairs journal’; the reviewer was Richard, not Robert Caplan; and his review of Johnstone’s book was far from being as positive as Chomsky suggests. Caplan wrote: ‘Diana Johnstone has written a revisionist and highly contentious account of Western policy and the dissolution of Yugoslavia… Yet for all of the book’s constructive correctives, it is often difficult to recognize the world that Johnstone describes…The book also contains numerous errors of fact, on which Johnstone however relies to strengthen her case… Johnstone herself is very selective.’
Indeed, Caplan was overly polite in his criticisms of what is, in reality, an extremely poor book, one that is little more than a polemic in defence of the Serb-nationalist record during the wars of the 1990s – and an ill-informed one at that. Johnstone is not an investigative journalist who spent time in the former Yugoslavia doing fieldwork on the front-lines, like Ed Vulliamy, David Rohde or Roy Gutman. Nor is she a qualified academic who has done extensive research with Serbo-Croat primary sources, like Noel Malcolm or Norman Cigar. Indeed, she appears not to read Serbo-Croat, and her sources are mostly English-language, with a smattering of French and German. In short, she is an armchair Balkan amateur-enthusiast, and her book is of the sort that could be written from any office in Western Europe with access to the internet.
The quality of Johnstone’s ‘scholarship’ may be gauged from some of the Serb-nationalist falsehoods she repeats uncritically, such as the claim that the Serb Nazi-collaborationist leader Draza Mihailovic formed ‘the first armed guerrilla resistance to Nazi occupation in all of Europe’ (p. 291) – a myth long since exploded by serious historians (see for example Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: The Chetniks, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1975, pp. 124, 137). Or Johnstone’s claim that Croatia in 1990 ‘rapidly restored the symbols of the dread 1941 [Nazi-puppet] state – notably the red and white checkerboard flag, which to Serbs was the equivalent of the Nazi swastika’ (p. 23) – a falsehood that can be refuted by a glance at any complete version of the Yugoslav constitution, which clearly shows that the Croatian chequerboard – far from being a fascist symbol equivalent to the swastika – was an official symbol of state in Titoist Yugoslavia (see, for example the 1950 edition of the Yugoslav constitution, published by Sluzbeni list, Belgrade, which shows the Croatian chequerboard as a Yugoslav symbol of state on p. 115; or the 1974 edition published by Prosveta, Belgrade, which shows the Croatian chequerboard – in full colour – at the start of the text). It would require an entire article to list and refute all the numerous errors and falsehoods in Johnstone’s book; Chomsky praises it because he sympathises with her political views, not because it has any scholarly merit.
Perhaps it would be unfair to label Chomsky a Srebrenica massacre-denier simply because he praises uncritically Johnstone’s massacre-denying book and endorses its conclusions. A fuller picture of Chomsky’s views on Srebrenica, however, can be gleaned from his interview with M. Junaid Alam of Left Hook on 17 December 2004, where he states that ‘Srebrenica was an enclave, lightly protected by UN forces, which was being used as a base for attacking nearby Serb villages. It was known that there’s going to be retaliation. When there was a retaliation, it was vicious. They trucked out all the women and children, they kept the men inside, and apparently slaughtered them. The estimates are thousands of people slaughtered.’ The key words here are ‘retaliation’, ‘apparently’ and ‘estimates’; the slaughter ‘apparently’ took place; the thousands killed were mere ‘estimates’; they were, in any case, simply ‘retaliation’ for earlier Serb crimes. Note that while Chomsky raises doubts about the fact and scale of the killings, he is absolutely categorical that they were retribution for earlier Muslim crimes – the slaughter apparently took place, but if it did, then it was definitely retaliation. Read carefully, nothing that Chomsky says actually contradicts Johnstone’s massacre-denying claims cited above.
Chomsky then goes on to compare the Serb behaviour favourably with that of the Americans in Fallujah: ‘Well, with Fallujah, the US didn’t truck out the women and children, it bombed them out.’ Chomsky does not mention the thousands of Bosnian women and children raped and murdered by Serb forces in other parts of Bosnia; nor those blown to bits by the Serb shelling of Sarajevo and other Bosnian towns, choosing instead to focus on the sparing of the women and children of Srebrenica. Johnstone, too, makes much of this: ‘one thing should be obvious: one does not commit ‘genocide’ by sparing women and children’. In fact, the Nazis began the systematic extermination of Jewish adult males in the USSR in 1941 before they began the systematic extermination of Jewish women and children, and the Nazis, unlike the Serb forces a half century later, were not being restrained by the democratic Western media.
Chomsky again compared Serb behaviour at Srebrenica favourably with American behaviour at Fallujah in his article ‘Imperial Presidency’ (Canadian Dimension, January/February 2005, vol. 39, no. 1), where he wrote of ‘Srebrenica, almost universally described as ‘genocide’ in the West. In that case, as we know in detail from the Dutch government report and other sources, the Muslim enclave in Serb territory, inadequately protected, was used as a base for attacks against Serb villages, and when the anticipated reaction took place, it was horrendous. The Serbs drove out all but military age men, and then moved in to kill them. There are differences with Falluja. Women and children were not bombed out of Srebrenica, but trucked out, and there will be no extensive efforts to exhume the last corpse of the packrats in their warrens in Falluja. There are other differences, arguably unfair to the Serbs.’ Not quite massacre denial, it is true; more of a massacre minimisation – since Chomsky nowhere recognises the figure of eight-thousand Muslim dead, it is entirely possible that he reduces the massacre to the fraction suggested by Johnstone, and therefore denies it to all intents and purposes. And he is certainly at pains to contrast ‘the Serbs’ favourably with the Americans.
One might criticise Brockes for not giving a more nuanced portrayal of Chomsky’s vague yet complex view of the Srebrenica massacre – were it not for the fact that Chomsky is notorious for the deliberate use of obscure and confusing language, designed to muddy the waters as to his real views, and the use of verbal trickery aimed at confusing his opponents. Take his 2001 exchange with Christopher Hitchens over the question of whether the US bombing of Sudan’s pharmaceutical factory in 1998 was a crime equivalent to 11 September:
Chomsky stated: ‘That Hitchens cannot mean what he writes is clear, in the first place, from his reference to the bombing of Sudan. He must be unaware that he is expressing such racist contempt for African victims of a terrorist crime, and cannot intend what his words imply.’
Hitchens replied: ‘Since his [Chomsky’s] remarks are directed at me, I’ll instance a less-than-half-truth as he applies it to myself. I ‘must be unaware’, he writes, that I ‘express such racist contempt for African victims of a terrorist crime.’ With his pitying tone of condescension, and his insertion of a deniable but particularly objectionable innuendo, I regret to say that Chomsky displays what have lately become his hallmarks.’
Chomsky then pulled his sleight-of-hand: ‘Hitchens claims that I accused him of a ‘propensity for racist contempt.’ I explicitly and unambiguously said the opposite.’
Given such word games and obfuscation, Chomsky should hardly complain when an earnest interviewer fails to interpret his well-camouflaged position as he would have it. Had he so wished, he could have avoided the entire imbroglio with Brockes by telling her unambiguously: ‘I recognise that several thousand Muslim civilians were massacred by Serb forces at Srebrenica in 1995′. Yet one rather suspects he wanted to have his cake and eat it: to put forward a ‘position’ that was compatible with those of the outright deniers, like Johnstone, but that nevertheless allows him formally to deny being a denier himself.
Instead of taking responsibility for his own insincerity and double-talk, he chose to punish the messenger – Brockes. He has then failed on two occasions – his letter published in the Guardian on 2 November and his open letter to the Guardian of 13 November – to state categorically that the massacre occurred in the way that it is understood to have done: as a massacre of several thousand innocent Muslim civilians by Serb forces. Nor is it true what Chomsky claims, that ‘with five minutes research on the internet, any journalist could find many places where I described the massacre as a massacre, never with quotes.’ I have not yet discovered a single text on the internet in which Chomsky describes Srebrenica as a ‘massacre’; if such a text exists, it is not as easy to find as Chomsky claims. Chomsky’s actual position on Srebrenica must remain an open question until he can actually bring himself to speak and write in plain English – for which nobody should hold their breath. Under these circumstances, the Guardian readers’ editor had no need to issue its apology, and had no right to impugn the journalistic professionalism of Brockes. It is to Brockes, not to Chomsky, that the Guardian should be apologising.
The outrage of Chomsky and his fellow-travellers over his portrayal as a Srebrenica massacre-denier is particularly ironic, given that several of these fellow-travellers are themselves overt Srebrenica deniers. Chomsky is notorious for having gone on record in 1977, in an article co-written with a certain Ed Herman, as claiming that Khmer Rouge atrocities were being exaggerated by the Western media (‘Distortions at Fourth Hand’, The Nation, 25 June 1977). Recently, the same Ed Herman founded a ‘Srebrenica Research Group’ to propagate the view that the Srebrenica massacre never happened. In his essay ‘The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre’, Herman writes that ‘the evidence for a massacre, certainly of one in which 8,000 men and boys were executed, has always been problematic, to say the least’. Herman concludes: ‘The ‘Srebrenica massacre’ [note the quote marks] is the greatest triumph of propaganda to emerge from the Balkan wars… But the link of this propaganda triumph to truth and justice is non-existent. The disconnection with truth is epitomised by the fact that the original estimate of 8,000, including 5,000 ‘missing’ – who had left Srebrenica for Bosnian Muslim lines – was maintained even after it had been quickly established that several thousand had reached those lines and that several thousand more had perished in battle. This nice round number lives on today in the face of a failure to find the executed bodies and despite the absence of a single satellite photo showing executions, bodies, digging, or trucks transporting bodies for reburial.’
In this way, Chomsky’s close collaborator Herman unashamedly holds a view that Chomsky is outraged to have attributed to himself. Both Chomsky and Herman are regular contributors to the website ‘ZNet’ – a haven for neo-Stalinist die-hards, several of whom are outright Srebrenica deniers. The publication of Herman’s above-cited article was greeted with uncritical approval by ZNet blogger David Petersen, who praised its ‘powerful analysis’. The same Petersen then reacted with outrage when Brockes attributed the same Srebrenica-denying view that he himself endorses to his comrade Chomsky, describing her interview as ‘lies, smears and more lies’. Just fancy that ! If to deny the Srebrenica massacre is shameful – which it is – why do Johnstone, Petersen and Herman do so ? But if they really think that the Srebrenica massacre did not happen, or was vastly smaller and more justifiable than is usually claimed, why should they be so outraged at Chomsky being described as a denier ? The answer brings us back to where we began: the Chomskyites and ZNet people are, at heart, embarrassed by their own position. In this, too, they resemble the controversial British historian recently arrested in Austria.
In this debate over whether or not Chomsky denied a massacre, it is important not to lose sight of something more damning and much less controversial: that Chomsky quite openly denies that genocide took place, either in Srebrenica or in Bosnia as a whole, and makes no bones about putting the word ‘genocide’ in quotes – this despite the fact that an international tribunal, established by the UN, has convicted a Bosnian Serb general of aiding and abetting genocide in Srebrenica. Indeed, the genocide-denial of Johnstone, Chomsky and their circle goes far beyond questioning the Srebrenica massacre. Chomsky was among those who supported the campaign in defence of Living Marxism (LM), the lunatic-fringe magazine that accused the news agency ITN of fabricating the existence of Serb concentration camps in Bosnia, on the basis of the writings of Thomas Deichmann, an amateur journalist and supporter of the Serb-nationalist cause. Deichmann claimed the camps in question were merely ‘detention centres’, and – although he had never visited them himself – presumed to know them well enough to claim that the pictures ITN had taken of them were deliberately intended to ‘mislead’ the Western public as to their true nature. ITN sued LM for libel, and the magazine was unable to produce a single witness who had actually seen the camps at first hand, whereas eye-witnesses such as Vulliamy testified as to their true, horrific character. LM‘s resounding defeat in the libel trial has not stopped Johnstone, in a recent commentary on the Chomsky-Brockes affair in the left-wing American magazine Counterpunch, from repeating LM‘s already discredited lies: “The issue raised by LM had to do with the way photographs taken at Trnopolje camp, by focusing on a thin man on the other side of a wire fence which in reality did not surround the Muslim inmates, but rather the ITN crew itself, was used to create the impression that what was happening in Bosnia was a repetition of a Nazi-style Holocaust.” The campaign against Brockes has therefore simultaneously become a campaign to rewrite the history of the Bosnian war to deny that genocide took place.
Chomsky’s denial that genocide took place in Bosnia, even after it has been established in international law that it did, and even after LM‘s lies about Serb camps were exposed as such in a British court, marks him down as a revisionist in the mould of Irving; the general thrust of Brockes’s exposure of him was therefore bang on target. In pandering to him, the Guardian has besmirched its own reputation and insulted the survivors of the genocide. Ironically, it was Guardian journalists such as Vulliamy and Maggie O’Kane who were in the forefront of bringing the genocide to light in 1992. That the Guardian – with this proud record – should have chosen to betray Brockes, its own journalist, by apologising on her behalf to an unabashed genocide-denier, means that this newspaper is now collaborating in the revisionist re-writing of the history of the Bosnian war.
Srebrenica Massacre 