Articles on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre:

Srebrenica: Anatomy of a Massacre Ten years after the Srebrenica atrocity, tribunal investigators have been able to piece together a detailed picture of the planning and execution of the worst massacre on European soil since World War Two. By Michael Farquhar, IWPR, July 9, 2005 (Republished August 3, 2006)

Dead and Missing from Srebrenica War-crimes deniers try to cast doubt on the 8,000 killed at Srebrenica. This article documents the validity of the official lists. By András Riedlmayer, July 19, 2005

Srebrenica: ten years on The Bosnian Serb massacre of around 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in July 1995 has left deep wounds. Ed Vulliamy revisits the scenes of a terrible crime, meets families and survivors, and reports on the search for human remains and justice. July 6, 2005

Belgrade: war crimes in daily life A day’s walk in Serbia’s capital brings Dusan Velickovic closer to the emotional heart of a country still struggling to face the truth of its past. June 28, 2005

There was genocide in Srebrenica. And it continues to win… Michael Thieren expected a health emergency and found himself in a genocide zone. A decade on, the memory and the anger burn. July 11, 2005

The Village of the Widows The bereaved of Srebrenica are trying to rebuild their lives. But the massacre of their men and boys has doomed them demographically, economically, and socially. Newsweek, July 12, 2005

IWPR coverage, July 6, 2005:

A Survivor’s Story Former prisoner tells how he escaped death at the hands of a Serb execution squad.

Most Victims Still Nameless Local forensic investigation teams attempt to return victims’ bodies to grieving relatives.

The Wall of Denial Despite mountains of evidence, many Serbs refuse to accept that a massacre took place.

A Painful Return A few thousand have courageously gone back to the Srebrenica area to rebuild their shattered lives. By Ed Vulliamy

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Books on Bosnia: From Srebrenica to the Middle Ages
A small British publisher teams up with the London-based Bosnian Institute to produce four valuable books on Bosnia.

Srebrenica: War-crimes deniers

A question for genocide deniers The cold-blooded murder of 7,000-8,000 Muslim men following the fall of the United Nations "safe area" in July 1995 is probably the most documented war crime in history -- but there are still those who insist it never happened. By Michael Dobbs, Foreign Policy, February 1, 2012

Edward Herman: The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, Herman insults the survivors with denial of Serbian atrocities and apologetics for Serbian aggression. Several readers responded. July 2005
   More on Edward Herman here.

Antiwar.com: While the perpetrators of the Bosnian Serb massacre of over 7,000 Muslims at Srebrenica are starting to confess (see Bosnian Serbs finally admit truth of Srebrenica deaths), Serb nationalist apologists are still denying that the massacre happened. Antiwar.com is among the prominent deniers. For a good antidote, see The Independent, November 5, 2003. The article notes, "The Bosnian Serb government has admitted for the first time that Bosnian Serb forces were responsible for the mass slaughter of Muslims in Srebrenica in July, 1995, Europe's worst atrocity since the end of the Second World War." See also Remains of dozens found in Bosnia's largest grave. (The Independent, July 29, 2003)

Noam Chomsky:

See a listing of various Chomsky statements denying or minimizing Serbian crimes against the peoples of Bosnia and Kosovo.

Srebrenica and Honesty The writer criticizes Chomsky for soft-peddling the Serbian massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. "I cannot believe you are ignorant of the facts about Srebrenica and the Yugoslavian wars. You've devoted your life to uncovering hypocrisy and dispelling ignorance. So how am I to understand your bias in this matter?"  By Julie Wornan, member of Americans Against the War, France, January 4, 2005

Chomsky bamboozles on the Balkans II In an interview with Radio-TV Serbia, Chomsky endorses the lies of LM Magazine (see below). Oliver Kamm rebuts and rebukes Chomsky. June 2006

Chomsky misrepresents the Dutch investigation of Srebrenica. June 2006

Chomsky, The Guardian, and Bosnia The authors critique Chomsky's endorsement of Diana Johnstone's Srebrenica genocide denial. By David Aaronovitch, Oliver Kamm, and Francis Wheen, March 20, 2006

   More on Noam Chomsky here.
 

General Lewis MacKenzie: Paid Serbian lobbyist and outspoken Srebrenica genocide denier

James Bissett: Former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia denies Srebrenica genocide

"Missing civilians" from Srebrenica that are supposedly on the OSCE voting lists. This claim was presented to the OSCE and European Union by Dr. Dragan Kalinic, at that time president of the RS Parliament.
This is propaganda that has been spread at regular intervals by the deniers of the massacre ever since the late 1990s. It's easy to make up a list of names. Kalinic was a collaborator with Karadzic and his direct political heir after the war. Eventually he was removed from office - click here.

Some of those names on the list may have been people who were thought to have been missing but indeed turned up surviving. Others were simply the same names as people who did go missing. In any case, that list doesn't disprove that there was a massacre. We know that at least some body parts of around 6,500 victims have been DNA-identified, as of 2010.

Noam Chomsky invited to give the annual Amnesty International Lecture in Belfast
October 30, 2009

Amnesty appears oblivious to the controversies that surround some of Chomsky’s views on human rights, and in particular the support that he has offered and continues to offer to polemicists who deny the substance, scope and authorship of the worst atrocities perpetrated during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war. Without explanation, Chomsky characterises Ed Vulliamy’s description of Omarska and Trnopolje as “probably” wrong while at the same time he endorses the claim by Thomas Deichmann and LM magazine that Vulliamy, Penny Marshall, and Ian Williams gave a false account of the situation in the Prijedor camps as “probably” correct.

Open Letter to Amnesty International - The horror of what happened at Omarska and Trnopolje has been borne out by painful history, innumerable trials at the Hague, and - most importantly by far - searing testimony from the survivors and the bereaved. These were places of extermination, torture, killing, rape and, literally “concentration” prior to enforced deportation, of people purely on grounds of ethnicity. While Prof. Chomsky was not among those who first proposed the idea that these camps were a fake, he said many things, from his ivory tower at MIT, to spur them on and give them the credibility and energy they required to spread their poisonous perversion and denials of these sufferings. Chomsky comes with academic pretensions, doing it all from a distance, and giving the revisionists his blessing. And the revisionists have revelled in his endorsement. By Ed Vulliamy, October 2009

Open letter to Noam Chomsky and Amnesty International - The focus of our human rights organisation's work is the support that we give to minority groups who have been the victims of genocide and dispossession. You call genocide when it suits your ideological purposes.  Who could condone the murkier aspects of American foreign policy or fail to condemn the way that policy has supported and encouraged crimes against humanity? But you express your criticism of the crimes of the recent past in a perverse way, that makes genocide the almost exclusive prerogative of organisations with close links to the US. It is only then that you consider it to be genocide.  And it is only your political/ideological friends who are apparently incapable of committing genocide. By Tilman Zülch, President of the Society for Threatened Peoples, October 30, 2009

Discussion of Edward Herman and David Peterson's open letter to Amnesty International. December 1, 2009

Related Publications of Amnesty International:

Bosnia-Herzegovina: How can they sleep at night? Arrest now! Can they sleep at night? The surviving victims or their relatives, who know that those who are responsible for the violations they endured remain at large? The international troops serving in Bosnia-Herzegovina, who know that every day they patrol areas where individuals suspected of committing genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of humanitarian law are at liberty? The international community, who demanded the establishment of the Tribunal after being horrified and outraged by these crimes, and who know that it will itself be judged by history if justice is not done? Ironically, those who are most likely to be able to sleep at night are those who perpetrated the crimes, knowing that their leaders will protect them and that the international community does not dare to arrest them for fear of the perceived difficulties which would result. By Amnesty International, September 30, 1997

Report on the ongoing search for justice by the victims of rape in Bosnia. Published on the heels of its announcement of the Chomsky lecture, by Amnesty International, September 30, 2009

Srebrenica Documentary Background

DNA Results Reveal the Identity of 6,186 Srebrenica Victims Through the use of DNA identity testing, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) has revealed the identity of 6,186 persons missing from the July 1995 fall of Srebrenica, by analyzing DNA profiles extracted from bone samples of exhumed mortal remains and matching them to the DNA profiles obtained from blood samples donated by relatives of the missing. The overall high matching rate between DNA extracted from these bone and blood samples leads ICMP to support an estimate of close to 8,100 individuals missing from the fall of Srebrenica.

Dutch Reports:
Srebrenica: Reconstruction, background, consequences, and analyses of the fall of a 'safe' area An extensive survey of the massacre, carried out by Dutch experts. Long, wandering, rambling, unwieldy, coming to contradictory conclusions. Often misrepresented, by Noam Chomsky, David Gibbs, and others. -- Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD), April 2002 (PDF)
   Srebrenica: Questions for the future -- Medecins Sans Frontieres, Holland, April 4, 2002
   Summary of the conclusions from the Epilogue of the NIOD report April 10, 2002
   Owning Up to Srebrenica by Tim Judah, IWPR, April 12, 2002
   Dutch government resigns in wake of NIOD report April 16, 2002
   Responsibility and Guilt of the Dutch Troops and Officials By Hasan Nuhanovic, chair of the Association of Srebrenica Victims, April 26, 2002
   Secret - the true story behind the Srebrenica report This article provides great detail about the flawed process of the NIOD investigation and report. By Alain van der Horst, December 12, 2003
   Dutch report is so broad that both prosecution and defence witnesses are using it IWPR, February 6, 2004 (Republished November 9, 2005)
   "FORGET ABOUT IT": "PARALLEL PROCESSING" IN THE SREBRENICA REPORT This article gives an idea of how evasive the NIOD report was. Dominick LaCapra has remarked that "when you study something, you always have a tendency to repeat the problems you are studying." In psychoanalytic supervision this phenomenon is called "parallel processing." Parallel processes are subconscious re-enactments of past events: when you are caught up in a parallel process, your behavior repeats key aspects of what there is to know about what you're studying - in a way, however, that you yourself don't understand. The article analyzes the extent to which the "NIOD Report," the official Dutch report on the massacre in Srebrenica (1995), "parallels" the events it describes. It introduces the phenomenon, examines the way the NIOD researchers unwittingly replicated several key aspects of the events they studied, and discusses some instances in which paralleling highlights precisely those features of the events under consideration that are hard to come to terms with. By Eelco Runia, History and Theory, volume 43, pages 295-320, October 2004 (PDF)

Dutch Parliamentary Report Blasts UN Actions in Srebrenica January 27, 2003
Dutch Parliamentary Inquiry Fails to Answer Key Questions into Srebrenica Massacre January 31, 2003
The Netherlands failed at Srebrenica - but so did NATO, Dutch ministers tell parliamentary inquiry IWPR, November 27, 2002 (Republished April 29, 2005)

Two Srebrenica Survivors Lawsuits

1. A group of some 6,000 surviving relatives of the victims of the fall of the enclave of Srebrenica, has formed the group Mothers of Srebrenica. This group holds the State of the Netherlands and the United Nations jointly responsible for the fall of the enclave at Srebrenica and therefore liable for the death of their family members and the consequent loss suffered. The group has commenced legal proceedings in the Netherlands against the State of the Netherlands and the United Nations.

Click here for information on the lawsuit. (Follow links on sidebar for details of the proceedings.)

2. Hasan Nuhanovic researched and documented the terrible events at Srebrenica in meticulous detail over more than 500 pages before taking his case to law, alongside a similar action brought by the family of the murdered electrician Rizo Mustafic.

A few days after the enclave fell to the Serb forces on 11 July 1995 the Dutch Blue Helmets were ordered by their government to leave Srebrenica, abandoning the defenseless Bosnians entrusted to their protection. The names of 8373 former inhabitants of the UN safe area who were murdered by the triumphant Serb forces and buried in mass graves are known. One of them, Hasan Nuhanovic's father, was recently identified from remains discovered in one of those mass graves. The fate of Hasan's mother and his brother remains unknown. Many of the mass graves were subsequently destroyed by Serb troops using bulldozers to conceal all evidence of the crime. The victims' remains were taken away and reburied elsewhere.

The Tragedy of the Nuhanovic Family:
Hasan Nuhanovic spent the night of 12-13 July 1995 with his parents and brother in an improvised office in the UNPROFOR support base at Potocari, on the outskirts of Srebrenica, taking orders from the Dutch officer Andre de Haan. De Haan, who was in the same room along with a doctor and a nurse, had been a guest of the family on a number of occasions and was fond of his mother's cooking. Even so, when news was received that nine men had been killed outside the UNPROFOR base no-one came forward to help the family about to be separated from one another, Nuhanovic remembers in the account he gives in his book "Under the UN Flag". The next morning, between 5 and 6 AM, de Haan said to him, "Hasan, tell your mother, your brother and your father that they must leave the base, now."
See 15 years after the Srebrenica massacre, a survivor buries his family, by Hasan Nuhanovic, The Washington Post, July 11, 2010

Court Rebuffs Srebrenica Survivors' Claim BIRN, September 10, 2008

Dutch Supreme Court rules in favor of Srebrenica survivors SENSE-TRIBUNAL, September 6, 2013

More information:

Interview with attorney Liesbeth Zegveld discussing the case and in particular the reason the Nuhanovic/Mustafic cases are brought against the Dutch government and not against the UN (the Mothers of Srebrenica case is against both).
The interview with Zegveld is followed by another with Ramesh Thakur, one of the people at the UN responsible for formulating the "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine and discussing the implications of the case for its implementation. CBC Radio, June 17, 2008

Radio Student Slovenia's audio broadcast (in English) of Hasan Nuhanovic's presentation describing the fall of Srebrenica.  This is based on the research in "Under the UN Flag" and formed the basis of the presentation he gave the court. (Six audio segments; the first starts with an introduction in Slovenian and then shifts to English. Scroll down for the rest, which are in English)

Visual reminders of what the cases are all about:
Tarik Samarah's project "Srebrenica - genocide at the heart of Europe", displayed at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC
A poignant photomontage of Potocari

Read Under the UN Flag, by Hasan Nuhanovic - how the Dutch state and the United Nations abandoned the people of Srebrenica to genocide in July 1995.

Srebrenica: the search for a terrible truth goes on Hasan Nuhanovic has the eyes of a man who has seen too much. His day job is helping to pursue international sex traffickers. In the evenings and at weekends, he hunts for the remains of his murdered family. "There is no closure – closure only comes when we die," he says. "But I need to bury them." The Guardian, October 13, 2009

See also:

Bosnia       Post-War Bosnia       Srebrenica Debate
 

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