Edward S. Herman, "Srebrenica 15 Years After: The Politicization of 'Genocide'" - 0 views
-
The Srebrenica massacre, by contrast, was carried out by a U.S.-NATO target, occurred at a very convenient moment, and has been serviceable ever since.
-
Admittedly, 8,000 is a large number. But 250,000 Serb refugees is a larger number. Recall also Albright's notorious statement in 1996 that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children resulting from the U.S.-sponsored "sanctions of mass destruction" was "worth it," based on U.S. political aims. There is also the internal State Department memo of September 1994, cited in The Politics of Genocide,6 indicating that 10,000 Hutu civilians were being slaughtered per month by the U.S. ally Kagame's forces in Rwanda.
-
In the case of the Kosovo bombing war of March-June 1999, U.S. official claims of Serb killings reached up to 500,000, and Western officials and media pundits were hysterical in their denunciations and indignation. Eventually the official claims fell to 11,000, but the total number of bodies uncovered and missing persons together, including soldiers and non-Kosovo Muslim civilians, was little more than half that official claim (some 6,000).8 But the mainstream media used the word "genocide" 323 times in describing what happened to the Kosovo Muslims, versus 80 times for the Iraq sanctions, which involved 200 times as many civilian deaths, and they used it only 17 times for deaths in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which involved over a thousand times more deaths than in Kosovo
- ...2 more annotations...
-
The fact that a well-armed Bosnian Muslim regiment of several thousand men was located in Srebrenica, and retreated without putting up any defense against a Serb attack force of 200, shows that the charges against the lightly armed Dutch peacekeeping contingent of 69 men are ridiculous and misdirected.
-
Another Srebrenica memorial myth is that the memorial and political actions associated with it are necessary for real peace. In the words of the EU resolution, "there cannot be real peace without justice," which means getting Mladic into court, and this is essential for "reconciliation" so that "civilians of all ethnicities may overcome the tensions of the past." But how about justice for the thousands of Serbs killed from the UN-protected Srebrenica base between 1992 and July 1995, the 250,000 driven out of Krajina in Operation Storm, and the thousands of Serbs and Roma driven out of Kosovo since the NATO takeover and installation of the KLA in power? NATO's bombing war against Yugoslavia in March-June 1999 was in violation of the UN Charter, killed many hundreds of civilians, and involved the use of illegal weapons (cluster bombs, depleted uranium). Don't we need criminal prosecutions in these cases for justice and reconciliation?