Wednesday, January 11, 2012 - 3:03 PM
Wednesday, July 12, 1995, was the crucial day in the harrowing series of events that led to the killing of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys from the United Nations "safe area" of Srebrenica. At his forthcoming trial in The Hague, Ratko Mladic will be confronted with evidence showing that he ordered the executions of his male prisoners after insisting (see video above) that no harm would come to any of the refugees. Shamefully for the international community, Dutch peacekeeping forces cooperated in the expulsion of the Srebrenica Muslims and the separation of the men from the women.
Evidence collected by the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal shows that Mladic put the plan in motion by requisitioning 50 buses for the transportation of refugees who had taken refuge at the Dutch base at Potocari, two miles north of Srebrenica. During a meeting with Dutch officers at the Hotel Fontana in Bratunac at 11:00, he announced for the first time that the men would be separated from the women and children and "screened" for alleged war criminals. You can see video of that meeting here and a Bosnian Serb report on the meeting here. In an intercepted phone call recorded at 12:50, he said he planned to evacuate all the Muslim refugees -- "those who want to go and those who don't want to."
Mladic spent the entire day in the Srebrenica-Potocari-Bratunac area, as you can see from the map below. Following the pattern established the day before, he was trailed by Bosnian Serb television crews, who recorded his activities for propaganda purposes. In addition to the shots above of Mladic saying goodbye to the refugees as they boarded the buses, the video crews filmed his bodyguards distributing candy to Muslim children.
Click on icons for details. View larger map
Troops under Mladic's command directed the male refugees to a nearby two-story house, known as the White House, a few hundred yards from the Dutch compound (identified by the lower red icon). It was here that the first "opportunistic" killings took place within earshot of the Dutch soldiers nearby. Mladic refused a request by a United Nations military observer, Maj. Joseph Kingori, to visit the White House.
According to Srebrenica survivor Hurem Suljic, Mladic promised the men detained in the White House that they would be exchanged for Serb soldiers captured by Muslims. Suljic says that he saw Mladic a second time as he and other men boarded buses in the early evening that took them to a temporary detention center in Bratunac, three miles to the north.
According to the diary of a Bosnian Serb officer, Mladic held a meeting with his commanders in Bratunac at 22:00. He spent much of this meeting procuring fuel and buses for the transportation of Muslim prisoners and refugees. The yellow icon indicates an event for which there is corroborating documentary evidence; events confirmed by video evidence are marked by red icons.
I will describe the events of July 13 in a future post. Click here for other posts in this series.
Sorry but I have to ask again...
Sir what you write about is very serious and important. But your graphic for the blog annoys me to no end. Why are you saluting left handed?
I'm not sure why you are annoyed, all you had to do was read the blog series. As is correctly suggested by Mr. CALVIN JONES, the image is of Mr. Mladic, the primary subject of the series.
In several earlier posts, Mr. Dobbs refers to the three strokes that paralyzed the right side of Mr. Mladic's body, one result of which is the presentation of a left handed salute.
Tex --- good observation. Ever hear of Irony? General Mladic is "saluting" the screamers in the gallery. THEY are the genocidists. They voted for an Islamic Bosnia, though the land is 60% Christian. It was moreso before the Ottoman missionaries arrived 600 years ago... Without resistance from Greeks, Bulgars, and Serbs the Balkans would be like Jeddah today. As empyt of infidels as Arabia and the Maghreb.
Unless it is me who is confused, the top image here General Ratko Mladic. Perhaps the FP editors made some assumptions here is their page design in using his image.
See the author's image at- http://dobbs.foreignpolicy.com/about_dobbs
Why have the Dutch got off scot free?Also the French officers who refused to pass on to the NATO brass the atrocities they were witnessing
the Serbs started this ethnic cleansing in the 1800s being fundamental part of their Serbian identity. Austrian intervention in late 1880s was to stop them doing so. Which made them mad which led to the murder in Sarjevo of the Archduke in August 1914 thence World Wars 1 and 2 and the USSR.
Nice guys
Ethnic cleansing is an identity of other nations of the Former Yugoslavia as well. Don't forget the Ustase's WWII extermination of Serbs as well as Operation Storm in Krajina.
Herr Cheeseman: The Dutch government is corrupt. DutchBat soldiers demand to testify at ICTY in General Mladic's defense. You are meely reciting newpaper screed. Benevolent Austria-Hungary wanted to halt ethnic cleansing? So did Hitler in the Sudetenland and Poland. Get thee to a library. Some reading for you:
When US diplomacy was not an oxymoron:
US Minister Plenipotentiary to Roumania, Bulgaria & Serbia (1913-20), Charles Vopi?ka wrote: "Austria wanted war with Serbia, and ... the death of Archduke Ferdinand was welcomed as a casus belli.” Page 31.-- If you can read German you will find the Vienna press for years debated who set up the Archduke to go to Sarajevo on the Serb national day, 28 June 1928. Meanwhile: Morning Post. London. “If Austria does not want to annex Servian territory, what is the political purpose of her war?"
Last year, when my daughter was just a few months old, I walked past an open-air exhibition at London's South Bank, a photographic project related to the Srebrenica massacre. On the photographs mothers held hand-written testimonies increased fists, stories of their lost sons.
Almost 16 years later some bodies have not been found, only clothing and personal objects scattered across mass graves. The bones had been mixed up, the murdered men jumbled together by bulldozers operated by Ratko Mladic's men to make identification more difficult.
And though I have always appreciated my good fortune in leaving Bosnia alive and healthy -- the death of several family members and friends notwithstanding -- having a child of my own has opened up an understanding of loss that I now realise was previously incomplete
With the overwhelming love of one's own children and the life-long preoccupation with their safety, how do you survive in the wake of such brutality as was experienced by the people of Srebrenica? Can you ever heal if you are not able to hold the body you raised? The news of Mladic's arrest tugged at my gut; this had been a long time coming. But I feel no solace.
I left Bosnia at the end of 1992 when Mladic and his forces were still gearing up for their most flamboyant war efforts, though their disregard for human life was already evident. Mladic's voice was broadcast on the radio as he ordered his subordinates, who, at the time, were positioned around Sarajevo, to pummel only "live flesh", or probably in his ethic "live meat" -- the word meso means both. I later saw him on film, uniformed, hatless and plump, speaking from what he called "Serbian Srebrenica" on July 11 1995.
"It's the day," he said, slightly out of breath, the streets behind him ghostly bare, "when I gift this town to the Serb people as the final revenge on the Turks." That gift was the death of more than 8 000 men and the dispersion of many more.
The war will always be an integral part of my personal and national history; it is one of my people's most potent roots. It is why I am in London and why my daughter was born here. My life has been formed and hers framed by it.
The Bosnian war and, with it, the Srebrenica genocide, is part of my daughter's heritage. And the way I will tell her about it one day -- the way a mother tells her daughter about her history, whether that memory will be stained with bitterness or a vague sense of justice -- depends on the outcome of the trials held at the international Hague tribunal.
In his court appearances Radovan Karadzic is still sticking to his guns, though thankfully not literally. Mladic is likely to do the same, despite his poor health and provided he ever gets to trial. Slobodan Milosevic died in prison, never having been properly convicted, and Franjo Tudjman and Alija Izetbegovic, the other two key players in the Yugoslavian breakdown, both died free men.
good
Ghana news | project server
8-K Big Lie again and remarkably good English. Wer you a professor of professional interpreter-translator. I'll bet "your" letter was composed by a Brit.
General Ratko Mladic delivered a brief speedh on Bosnian Serb television in Srebrenica on 11 July 1995. Glancing at his notes, General Mladic spoke into the microphones of the Bosnian Serb TV service. Anyone with a VCR and a satellite dish could have recorded it at the time. I have some such videotapes of my own.. The revisionists offer a voice-over, with a Yugoslav voice reading a script that was in no way a translation: “The Serbs take revenge on the Muslims." The last four words of the English text cannot even be called a translation:
“Here we are, on 11th June 1995, just before yet another great Serbian holiday commemorating the uprising against the Turks.”
A literal translation by itself without a commentary does not get the story across to an audience that does not intimately know the Balkans. The footage was in effect an image without a context, to be interpreted - or misinterpreted, like a Rorschach blot, by an audience that ranged from the intelligent and unbiased newcomer to Balkan affairs to the most brain-washed Serb-bashers. Most “western” viewers had already been prepared after five years of the PR companies’ smears to hear the worst about the demonic, or demonized, Serbs.
Stripped of the immediate context of the events of 1995 and more remote facts of local history, the “60 Minutes” program was incomplete, yellowest journalism, bombastic, jingoistic, and saturated with untruths and disinformation. General Mladic’s exact words were: “Evo nas, jedanaestog jula, hiljadu-devetsto-devedeset-pete godine u Srpskoj Srebrenici, uoci jos jednog velikog praznika srpskoga. Srpskom narodu poklanjamo ovaj grad napokon dosao je trenutak da se posle bune protiv dahija Turcima osvetimo na ovom prostoru.” Here is a literal translation:
“Here we are, on 11th June 1995, on the eve of yet another great Serbian holiday. To the Serb people we present this city now that the moment has come, after the Rising against the Dahis, to settle our score with the Turks on this territory.”
Context of tradition. The date 11 July is “Petrovdan.” In the Byzantine church this is the eve of the feast of SS. Peter and Paul. To this celebration, Mladic’s winning the battle of Srebrenica adds solemnity for the Serbs of Bosnia. In the period 1801-1804, while under Ottoman sovereignty, the Christians of Serbia and the adjacent Serb land of Bosnia suffered under the horrific misrule of those lords known as the “Dahi.”
Serbia was ruled by four of these Janissaries, the Turks’ equivalent of Hitler’s SS and death squads. Beheadings and impalings were the order of the day. The Serbs rebelled against the Dahis, with in fact the blessing of the Sultan in Istanbul . Not much later the Sultan’s own troops beheaded the Serb leaders at the city of Nish and built a memorial tower of their skulls.
The Serb use of the term “Turk” has repeatedly been misinterpreted by incompetent or mendacious journalists to be a case of Serb racism. How is the term “Serb” used these days?
In any case, when the Ottomans were riding high, Bosnia’s Muslims themselves, flaunted the name Turk”. Even in our time, before this war, you could hear a typical Bosnian Muslim kid say “I like the Turks better than the Serbs.” He meant “I prefer Muslims to Orthodox Christians.
"news ...tugged at my gut... I feel no solace"
"Violence" Any seasoned teacher of English as a foreign language would want to double check the authentici authorship of this letter. A for David Rohde, he never mentioned a massacre of 8k "Muslim men and boys" at Srebrenica. His text has been "enhanced". The Houdini-cum-fakir rope-climber found one boot and one leg bone. Although paleontologists on typological grounds may be able to extrapolate from one molar the whole skeleton of a dinosaur, not so 7000-8000 dinosaurs. The deed for the Brooklyn bridge will be in the next mail for Dobbs-Albright-ICTY if their scenario could be believed. It would have taken a cast of thousands of genocidal Serbs, a lot of time, fuel, vehicles, and budget to disinter and re-bury elsewhere 8000 bodies. Not to speak of thousands of rapes. And who was watching the store, or the front? Add to this the sheer improbability of such an operation going undetected by the CIA's incessant surveillance by U-2s and Predator drones that can loiter for hours and days. Oh yes, I forget: Dobbs says the "analysts" were on extended smoke break. A complaint should be filed on behalf of the bereaved Muslim women in Tuzla who hadn't been notified by the Red Cross or Red Crescent. C & C must have been on smoke break, too.
"Hatless and plump." Off with his head!
Bill Clinton prevent Srebrenica?
Clinton in fact told the Jihadis that the death of 5000 Muslims at Srebrenica could grease the ways for open, as opposed to the ongoing "covert" intervention.
Ratko Mladic has been described as "one of those lethal combinations that history thrusts up occasionally-a charismatic murderer." What drove the Bosnian Serb military commander to order Europe's deadliest massacre since World War II? Could it have been prevented? Michael Dobbs, a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum fellow, investigates.
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