Thank you for representing everything wrong with Serbia and Serbians. You should be ashamed of what you're doing - minimizing the deaths of so many unarmed prisoners.

taking the males of a community and segregating them out, lining them up closely together and murdering them en masse.

We need to hear the other side of the story. How the Bosnian Muslims all gathered together to urge the Serb forces to shoot them as an expression of mass hysterical assisted suicide.

"Bosnian Muslim nationalists committed atrocities. Many of Bosnia's Croats and Serbs, as well as some Muslims fought against Izetbegovic's forces."

The Hague went after them as well.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3254890.stm

It still doesn't excuse genocide. The piper has to be paid. The act has to be punished for the world to see.

Your argument is like when Holocaust deniers try to divert the discussion by talking about the bombing of Dresden. You engage in the rhetorical fallacy of "Tu quoque" An appeal to hypocrisy doesn't excuse bad actions.

1. You see, that they had a conflict with

a. Slovenia: There was a justifiable reason for that
b. Croatia: There was a justifiable reason for that
c. Bosnia: There was a justifiable reason for that
d. Kosovo: There was a justifiable reason for that

Yes, it is strange that Serbia basically entered into what is now 4 different sovereign countries with an army , a feat that asides from WWI & II NO other country can claim that wasn't considered an invader, but I assure you it is all coincidence.

Yes, it is strange that Serbia was defending its people and interest in other countries and that apparently everyone persecutes Serbian as a hobby, but I assure you, it all truly truly happened, even though no one but we serbs have data to back this up.

Also, we think the Israeli's should start a War with Germany, look at what they did in World War II, and Armenia with Turkey, look at what they did in WWI, as a matter of fact, we support revenge for any insane killings that happened in the past and let's bring it all back into the present, perhaps the Croatians can re-start a war about Bleiburg ( google it) ,this method is sure to break the cycle of violence.

And by the way, though the absolute wrong path without a doubt, why did the Croatians revert to these disgusting ustashe in the first place and align with the germans ? AH yes, it was to release themselves of the strangle the Serbs had put onto the Kingdom of Serbia, something the Jewish Albert Einstein pointed out in an open letter to the New York times, but hey, what does the smartest man on the planet know ?

As for the ENTIRE western world, we condemn you for fabricating lies against us. All of you have chosen to conspire against the mighty serbia, the US, The UK, Germany, Spain and even our Russian brothers chose to show footage that depicted us as criminals. All of you chose to lie but us. Let us forget that our HEAD OF NATIONAL MEDIA AND TV openly admitted to completely fabricating and doctoring.

Simply look at our list of leaders and heroes, how can they not instill confidence in us. One of our dear Heroes, yes he was a bankrobber, smuggler, Mafiosi and genocidal monster, but Arkan himself openly admitted it was all lies.

As for all the maps of a greater Serbia, openly pronounced by many politicians ???? No comment.

And as for Kosovo,

If a territory has historic value, belong to a country, and simply because one ethnic group primarily populated it, why on earth should we give it up ? However, THESE EXACT SAME ARGUMENTS DO NOT APPLY FOR KNIN!!!!!!!!!!

Honsetly, you guys are ridiculous. We Serbs know all, and no one else knows anything, data, eye witness accounts, facts, comparables......bla bla bla, Serbian science and evidence above all.

Vilina Vlas, Misha1?

Misha1, you're getting old and tired with this repetitive looking down your nose at what you pronounce the inaccuracy of Michael Dobbs's journalism. Physician - heal thyself.

You are right it wasn't so much like Nazi Germany as it was like in Yugoslavia during that time. The Cetniks were so brutal in their actions that it gave the SS the willies. Jasenovac in Croatia had one of the highest number of killings for a concentration camp without a gas chamber.

Obviously it made for great propaganda for the Serbs and inspiration for committing atrocities of their own in the same organized brutal fashion. After all it takes sooo much creativity to amass a bunch of people and kill them with firearms.

Your sentence " They actually criticized the UN and United States for interfering in what they considered a local disagreement!" is big giveaway. You have no clue !!
Here is why :
1. Clinton and NATO attacked one sovereign country and full member of UN, without declaration of war, which is equivalent to WAR CRIME. Sole NATO existence is that this alliance is formed to protect members of that pact. Yugoslavia was never treat to any of NATO members countries, including America.
2. NATO bombed civilians and civil targets in Serbia, killing over 10,000 of them. WAR CRIME.
3. NATO dropped cluster bombs over Serbia. This is against Geneva convention. WAR CRIME.
4. NATO dropped uranium plated bombs over Serbia. Against Geneva convention. WAR CRIME !
5. NATO pilots where systematically firing on Serbian pilots parachuted from their downed planes. WAR CRIME.
Maybe now you understand why " They actually criticized the UN and United States for interfering " ???
Secondly, you have to understand that Milosevic never started this. Hitler did.
Bosnian Muslims did.
Thank God, you never married that girl !!

typically full of shit and the fallback position to defend a country whose policies go beyond the pale of defensible behavior.

Serbia was a sovereign nation, SFW! It was committing genocide on its own and supporting people who were doing it on their behalf. There is an unspoken doctrine that countries have a duty to prevent genocide happening on their borders. [The best example is India's intervention in Bangledesh]

There was no way in hell the largest European based military force was going to sit aside and let it happen just over their borders.

Milosevic started the war when he started to bomb breakaway republic Croatia. The statute of limitations on revenge for WWII expired with Tito.

Misha1, I'm sorry to find that it's necessary to explain to you, with your effortlessly superior command of recent history, that the only too simple to understand reason why Bosniaks are prone to tolerate Naser Oric's flaws, even while acknowledging them, is that his recapture of Srebrenica in 1992 and his defence of the town against massive odds from 1992 to 1995 saved many of them from straightforward extermination.

I've just finished my answer to your comment under Mr Dobbs's previous post in which you slid the focus of attention back away from Milan Lukic's conduct onto Naser Oric. To save you the effort of backtracking, I trust my reply there is sufficiently relevant in answer to you here as well for me to be excused repeating it, as follows.

"n order to create a diversionary monster-equivalent to take some of the heat out of the hunt for Mladic, Serb propagandists have elevated Oric to mythical status. Oric was the man whose intelligence and organisational capability at least temporarily saved the lives of many of the Bosniak refugees fleeing the slaughter taking place up and down the rest of the Drina Valley in early summer 1992 when he led the Bosniak recapture of Srebrenica. I don't know the story of what may have happened when the ethnic cleansers were confronted by Oric's forces, though I understand that captured Serbs tended to be exchanged for captured Bosniaks, whose captors were in a position to be considerably more forceful in their negotiating.

Oric was only one of a number of different leaders within the enclave. They operated independently, but seem to have been more successful when they followed his leadership and catastrophically less so when they ignored it, as Emir Suljagic notes in his Postcards from the Grave. (Suljagic found Oric's presence intimidating but nevertheless acknowledged his crucial importance to the survival of the enclave and Suljagic's own personal survival.)

Over the three years of the enclave's gradual extinction Oric was prominently involved in actions first to consolidate its existence and fight back against the ethnic cleansing campaign, and then, as the siege progressed, in break-out raids on the surrounding fortified Serb villages in which large numbers of starving civilians followed Oric's forces and tried to loot desperately needed supplies (in some instances their own produce, in villages from which they had been expelled).

The ICTY trial of Oric found that many of the accusations levied against Oric were wildly exaggerated, for example the number of deaths of civilians in the Serb Orthodox Christmas attack on Kravica (I'm sure I'm not the only person who's been reassured numerous times that Oric slaughtered hundreds and even thousands of civilians in Kravica). It also found that killings of civilians tended to be carried out by the bag people following in the footsteps of Oric's forces rather than by troops under his control. The particular charges that the court investigated concerned his failure to discipline those responsible for the murder and torture of a small number of Serb prisoners (not that the limited number offers any mitigation, it is simply to be borne in mind when reflecting on the scope of the atrocities laid at Oric's door). In the end the evidence found that Oric was not in an appropriate position of responsibility at the time the crimes occurred for the charges to be sustained. (I hope that's not too inaccurate a summary, it's quite a while since I was last obliged to check out the details).

I'm not in a position to know whether Oric acted as toughly, brutally and sometimes criminally as it is claimed and while the circumstances of a desperate fight for survival against an enemy with a plan for genocidal annihilation may explain war crimes and crimes against humanity they don't justify or excuse them. But I've been waiting a long time to see a really substantial case mounted against Oric with the ample evidence that I'm repeatedly told exists. Instead I've been subjected to phony statistics, crudely montaged photographs of heads on pitchforks and at best isolated anecdotes.

I simply haven't seen substantial evidence of brutality on the scale alleged. The Serb "historical record" left in the hands of such notoriously imprecise figures as Milivoje Ivanisevic and Darko Trifunovic is, not unexpectedly, unconvincing. But Stephan Karganovic lays claim to being a serious historical scholar and, given his connections and his sources of funding, his Project has had plenty of time and access within the area of the alleged crime scenes to assemble the relevant information. When he or his associates are ready to release the evidence to the world I'm sure the the world will be ready to judge Oric on the evidence.

In the meanwhile what I'm still seeing is a rather large straw man with a rather small gritty core, a rather impressive small-town boy matched as an equal contender in the heavy-weight reputation stakes against the commander of the entire Bosnian Serb Army, a man with the confidence to express contempt for domestic presidents and the international community and the joint architect of a plan of genocide that he almost succeeded in implementing across Bosnia."

Spood, while it's appropriate to criticise the way Serb nationalists have abused and manipulated the facts of Jasenovac for their own purposes, it's not appropriate to diminish the significance of Jasenovac to them and to the members of all religions and nationalities who were the victims of Nazi and Ustashe barbarism there. It's also worth bearing in mind that Serbs were deliberately deceived by Tito on the subject of the number of deaths at Jasenovac (and elsewhere).

The Jasinovac remark was meant as a dig against the remark that the genocide of the Yugoslav war was different from Nazi Germany.

I was bringing up how Yugoslavs themselves don't need a reference to the Nazis when they had their own version at home.

Spood, it's not an unspoken doctrine, it's a clearly spoken one. The 2007 International Court of Justice judgment, which confirmed the ICTY finding that what happened at Srebrenica was genocide, explicitly condemned Serbia for failure to prevent the genocide at Srebrenica. Unfortunately what it did not do was confirm - as the Court's Vice-President Judge Al-Khasawnei, argued it should have done - that the pattern of systematic population elimination across Bosnia as a whole was also genocide. That's what lies behind this charade of genocide denial.

Set aside the apparently genuine enrage's like William Dorich, the apparently genuine ideologues like Andy Wilcoxson and the occasional nationalist hooligan, and there's no real substance to the exchanges. The aparatchiks like Karganovic, Misha1 and others, aided and abetted by figures in the public sphere who should know a lot better, are working to ensure the persistence for as long as possible of a modicum of doubt that legitimises the Serb/ian refusal to accept culpability.

Because a resolution of the dispute would have consequences, Karganovic, Misha1 and their allies never let a discussion work itself out properly. You can tell the professionals from the amateurs by the way they move on from each position as it becomes untenable, in order not to be pinned down at it.

The consequences of acceptance are of course massive. As long as Milorad Dodik has the capacity to dismiss Republika Srpska's responsibility for genocide and Serbia feels under no constraint to stop meddling in his support, the incompetent and divided government of Bosnia will remain incapacitated by Dodik's destructive manoeuvring for long enough that the ten year time limit for Bosnia to seek a reopening of the ICJ genocide case passes with Serbia still safely out of jail, and able to escape the risk of having to pay war reparations. And in the meanwhile Dodik and Tadic can count on the international community continuing to look on benignly as they proceed with the task of building the Greater Serbia infrastructure system.

So at least let's be grateful to Misha1 for reminding us how it is, and for his virtuoso display of the amoral cynicism with which any argument, however tangential or tenuous, is brought into service and deployed up to the moment at which counter-arguments risk turning it into a liability, at which point it is promptly abandoned.

Hamid's almost inlaws worshipped no new Hitler, but had hoped that some one, anyone, might prevent a re-run of World War II, when Catholic Croats and their Islamic allies murdered well over a half million Orthodox Serbs, plus all the Jews and Roma they could lay hands on. It wasn't the Chetniks that horrified the SS; it was the "Independent" Croatians. Milosevic did not protect the Western Serb lands after all, but he made a useful designated dictator in the interventionists' play. America's script always has a bad guy against whom they must intervene to protect innocent civilian life, then always shedding crocodile tears over collateral damage. Like in Libya in 2011 in the "Arab Spring". The Washington Post is to the US government what Pravda and Izvestia were in the USSR: No pravda (truth) in Izvestia (news); no izvestia in Pravda. The clarion Voice of Foggy Bottom, Mr Dobbs, warms up left-overs from Madeleine Albright's dog's banquet. Mr Dobbs has left out of his scenario the pluralist Muslim Fikret Abdic, whose "renegade Muslims" fought alongside the Christian Serbs against America's man Izetbegovic. He had declared in Islamska Deklaracija (1970, 1990) that there could be "no coexistence of Islam with non-Islamic society; Islam must take over as soon as it is numerically strong enough." Read it. In 1993. a whole year after the purported massacre, women of Srebrenica trashed the Red Cross offices in American-occupied Tuzla, home to the sadist commander at Srebrenica, Naser Oric. He had fled before Mladic got to town, abandoning Muslim women, children and old to the cannibal Serbs. Oric, as a US Intel asset, was so found "not gulity" by ICTY. The Muslim women were desperate to find out where their men were since they went missing in July 1992. Apparently no one had told THEM of designated devil General Mladic's "massacre of 8k Muslim men and boys".

Hamid's almost inlaws worshipped no new Hitler, but had hoped that some one, anyone, might prevent a re-run of World War II, when Catholic Croats and their Islamic allies murdered well over a half million Orthodox Serbs, plus all the Jews and Roma they could lay hands on. It wasn't the Chetniks that horrified the SS; it was the "Independent" Croatians. Milosevic did not protect the Western Serb lands after all, but he made a useful designated dictator in the interventionists' play. America's script always has a bad guy against whom they must intervene to protect innocent civilian life, then always shedding crocodile tears over collateral damage. Like in Libya in 2011 in the "Arab Spring". The Washington Post is to the US government what Pravda and Izvestia were in the USSR: No pravda (truth) in Izvestia (news); no izvestia in Pravda. The clarion Voice of Foggy Bottom, Mr Dobbs, warms up left-overs from Madeleine Albright's dog's banquet. Mr Dobbs has left out of his scenario the pluralist Muslim Fikret Abdic, whose "renegade Muslims" fought alongside the Christian Serbs against America's man Izetbegovic. He had declared in Islamska Deklaracija (1970, 1990) that there could be "no coexistence of Islam with non-Islamic society; Islam must take over as soon as it is numerically strong enough." Read it. In 1993. a whole year after the purported massacre, women of Srebrenica trashed the Red Cross offices in American-occupied Tuzla, home to the sadist commander at Srebrenica, Naser Oric. He had fled before Mladic got to town, abandoning Muslim women, children and old to the cannibal Serbs. Oric, as a US Intel asset, was so found "not gulity" by ICTY. The Muslim women were desperate to find out where their men were since they went missing in July 1992. Apparently no one had told THEM of designated devil General Mladic's "massacre of 8k Muslim men and boys".

You are actually employing a typical ploy Neo-Nazi liars use to minimize or deny the Holocaust. An appeal to incredulity without bothering to support your position.

You imply the stories are untrue, but of course you don't even bother to substantiate your claim is accurate to begin with.

For those interested typical denial ploys try this website
http://www.iranholocaustdenial.com/expressions/how-to-be-a-revisionist-scholar.htm

Fact of the matter is the Serbs are far too proud of their deeds and there is far too much evidence to cover up. All the redirection towards Bosnian misdeeds doesn't act as much of an excuse either.

All we need is David Irving to chime in before this gets really silly.

He was proven a big fat lying bastard, but not a criminal.

The UK does not criminalize defamation (libel/slander) the same way Continental Europe does.

We seem to have our own Irving-lites around here.

Spood, you're right about MCHaun's tricksiness, but it's something only too common in the world of Serb nationalist atrocity denial. What s/he appears to be doing is trying to discredit Mr Dobbs's reference to Srebrenica evidence by muddling it up with evidence about the Kosovo cover-ups, some of which are covered in the IWPR article at http://iwpr.net/report-news/kosovo-atrocity-cover

In the end all s/he does is remind us that irregular body disposal was widely practised by Serb forces in the various conflicts of the wars in the former Yugoslavia as the discoveries in August 2010 when the waters of Lake Perucac disclosed some of their secrets.

"Quite ironic how some bring up David irving, given their own comments."

Like yourself Misha

In fact many of the Genocide deniers here are taking lessons from Irving such as

1. Pretend arguing over exact figures is a legitimate argument to claim genocidal actions didn't happen.

2. Relying on sources whose veracity is dubious on its face. Such as Serbian nationalist political rag sheets

3. Exaggeration of claims to show some form of moral equivalence

4. Appeals to incredulity to unsupported claims

5. Claiming some past event justified genocidal conduct.

It looks like Stephan Karganovic is already the David Irving of Bosnia.
A bigoted lying denier who cloaks himself in the appearance of academia. http://bgdw.wordpress.com/tag/stefan-karganovic/

All I did was describe your posts and that of your confederates. Your tactics are well worn because there is a long history of genocide denial online. I have dealt with Holocaust deniers enough to see the same patterns for a new set of politically motivated liars.

The only person trying to reinvent what happened is you and Stephen Karganovic. Like other historical deniers, there are strong links to far right wing extremists.

Like all denialist liars, they never let actual evidence get in the way of an argument. They like to make wild claims about forensic evidence without any kind of actual qualification to do so. They will make huge leaps in logic, such as any dispute of the official record must be taken as a denial that anything happened.

In case you missed it, here is an article about why Stevie is a big fat liar as well as those who follow him, like yourself
http://bgdw.wordpress.com/tag/stefan-karganovic/

I beg your pardon, Misha1, you seem to be waiting for a reply to something I hadn't thought was waiting for comment.

Yes, initial casualty figures have been revised down since the initial period of chaos and confusion caused by the murderous mass expulsion of the non-Serb civilian population from large areas of Bosnia (and to a lesser extent of Serb communities sacrificed by their political leaders). Over time details have become clearer, as some refugees have been able to overcome opposition and return home and determined forensic investigation has located the whereabouts of the mass graves that concealed the bodies that we were told were still voting in elections and drawing pensions (long circulated meticulous Serb research studies indicated that if someone had the same name as a victim the victims was therefore fortunate enough to be alive - investigated by the ICTY Forensics unit I believe). But I think you're asking me to defend a statement/challenge I didn't think I'd made.

As far as figures for executions are concerned I think the reference point for the most comprehensive is the conclusions at Para 664 of the Popovic et al Trial judgment (available for downloading at the ICTY website http://www.icty.org/action/cases/4). Of course you need to read through the preceding text to follow the details, the caveats entered by the ICTY investigators, the challenges by defence teams and their resolution (including some fairly breathtaking examples of defence incompetence, presumably paid for out of the international purse in the interests of a fair hearing) and the various other elements of thorough discussion that anyone reading the transcripts and conclusions will usually find but which never seem to bother the automatic dismissers of evidence submitted to the ICTY.

"664. The Trial Chamber is satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that at least 5,336 identified
individuals were killed in the executions following the fall of Srebrenica. The Trial Chamber
also notes that the evidence before it is not all encompassing. Graves continue to be discovered and exhumed to this day, and the number identified individuals will rise. The Trial Chamber therefore considers that the number could well be as high as 7,826."

(Of course working out this figure might have been easier had the perpetrators not sought to conceal the crime by concealing the graves and mingling the remains but I guess it's a bit much to expect murderers to conduct operations with a view to the convenience of judicial investigations, and we're only talking about the cases accepted by the Trial Chamber.)

Of course your friend Mr Karganovic has a close familiarity with the case and his associate Mr Simic has made his own "enthusiast's" contribution to the forensic literature, so I'm sure they'll be able to resolve any other in depth questions you might have. Failing that, please feel free to ask me to investigate and report the facts such as I'm able to determine them whenever you need clarification.

So, Misha1, I've done my best to do what you seem to have been expecting of me. Now how about the reciprocation? What do you have to say about Milan Lukic's crimes for a start? Was Vilina Vlas a holiday spa or might there have been grounds for describing it as a rape camp? Do you have any idea how many young women were abducted there and how many were seen alive subsequently? I think the question is relevant to your scepticism about the existence of rape camps.

Misha1, to follow up, since you like to hear from me, Jean-Rene Ruez is currently being questioned by Radovan Karadzic at The Hague on this very subject of the number of executions. Surprisingly from all that's said about it, the ICTY allows defendants not just to give their own evidence but also to question and challenge prosecution witnesses. Interesting things sometimes result from the interchange.

For example Karadzic has suggested to Ruez that the number of 1,200 people killed at Branjevo Farm hasn't been 'scientifically proven' (the investigators had received the information from Drazen Erdemovic, who confessed to his part in the executions and whose testimony and the other sources of evidence supporting it have been criticised by defence teams and relied on as evidence of Tribunal irregularity).

Ruez pointed out to Karadzic that as well as about 1,200 persons killed at Branjevo Farm another 500 were executed in nearby Pilica . 'Scientifically proving' the number of 1,700 dead for Karadzic would require adding the number of bodies remaining in the primary grave at Branjevo to the number of bodies in nine secondary graves discovered along the Cancari road (secondary graves being the sites where mingled backhoe excavated remains were relocated for no obvious reason other than to conceal the whereabouts of bodies buried in mass graves near execution sites). The nine graves have not yet been completely exhumed. (According to the 2009 Popovic et al judgment the Branjevo Farm grave and the first four of the nine secondary graves exhumed yielded remains identified as relating to 960 individuals, and a minimum of 84 individuals were identified from the fifth). At the date of the Popovic et al. judgment all the Trial Chamber could confirm was that between 1000 and 2000 individuals were executed in the Pilica area on 16 July 1995 (Para 550).
It is of course a problem that graves were exhumed and the bodies broken up and reburied but the Tribunal goes into some detail about the evidence of execution that hadn't or couldn't be destroyed and was used in its conclusions.

http://www.sense-agency.com/icty/ruez-only-%E2%80%98victims-of-extermination%E2%80%99-were-buried-in-mass-graves.29.html?news_id=13601&cat_id=1

In America one would say, you were just owned. If you have any rational brain cells left, I would not respond to the above if I were you as there really is no counter to the above that doesn't continue making you look like the self-absorved in denial fools that you are.

Apparently you're unaware of the fact that Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo were all part of Yugoslavia, and that the Slovenes, Croats, Bosnian-Muslims, and Kosovo-Albanians all established illegal paramilitary groups (HOS, ZNG, Patriotic League, Green Berets, KLA, FARK, etc...) in order to forcibly secede from Yugoslavia in violation of the Yugoslav Constitution and against the will of the Serbian minority who lived there. The Serbs may be guilty of some things, but starting those wars isn't one of them -- and to my mind the people who start wars are the people who bear the most responsibility for the consequences.

What the Bosnian-Serbs did in Srebrenica may be an interesting discussion, but at the end of the day what happened to the Muslims happened in the context of a war that they started themselves. Ultimately they've only got themselves to blame, because if there hadn't been a war, there wouldn't have been a Srebrenica massacre. If Izetbegovic had negotiated in good faith with Cutileiro in Lisbon back in 1992 none of this would have ever happened.

This discussion no different from when Holocaust deniers start talking about why the 6 million figure should be disputed and therefore the giant leap to claiming the Holocaust was a hoax.

Claiming some small flaw in the official record is not a legitimate argument in claiming something never happened.

Unlike Holocaust deniers, the Bosnian genocide deniers don't have the luxury of the passage of time to wipe out most of the eyewitnesses.

MARTIAL: "Most likely"? You're skating on thin ice. You never heard of the 8k massacre of "Muslim men and boys" until months after the purported event. IPS-Inter Press Service reported on November 7, 1995, that "more than 5,000 Muslim men and boys remain missing in Srebrenica. " In November 1995, 4 months after the purported "massacre of 7000-8000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica by Serbs", spokesman Nicholas Burns at a press conference in Fogy Bottom, in an official publication of the US State Department said:
"we don't know what happened". Mr Dobbs is writing a novel or a docu-drama

Finally someone has addressed my question!  Thankyou!  And you also provide an answer: "most of them were killed."  I am happy to address the other points you make.

First, I think it is quite legitimate to debate the question of what terminology we should use to describe the war crimes at Srebrenica.  ICTY has decided that they are a genocide, but others can disagree. That is fine.  We are not arguing about the basic underlying facts here.  We are arguing about the definition of a word.  Intent is difficult to prove.

Second, I agree with you that there has been some conflating of Srebrenica men who were "killed in conflict" and the men who were killed as unarmed prisoners, including the men in the photograph at the top of my post.  Having reviewed the evidence, I believe that the vast majority were captured and executed. You can argue about the precise numbers in each group, but it is ridiculous to claim (as people like Karganovic do) that fewer than a thousand were executed.  I will deal with this question in a separate post.

Third, I can agree with you that Serbs were not the only people in this terrible war who committed war crimes. Guilt certainly does not lie on one side only, either in the origins of the war or the way it was conducted.  The Serb minorities in both Croatia and Bosnia had legitimate grievances and reasons for concern as Yugoslavia was falling apart. Having said that, I do think that Srebrenica was a uniquely horrifying crime in its scale, and the attempt to cover it up only makes it worse.

Mr Dobbs, the danger of considering the Srebrenica genocide as a uniquely horrifying single event, which of course it was, is that it obscures the crucial underlying reality that Srebrenica was only the closing fireworks of a programme of events not confined to a brief week and a half in July 1995 or a trajectory of 60 kilometres or so from Zeleni Jadar to Kozluk but enduring over three years and across the whole swathe of territory that the Serb nationalists wanted to secure as their own in perpetuity. Up the Drina Valley through Foca, Visegrad, past Srebrenica, Bratunac and Vlasenica, via Zvornik and Bjeljina through the Posavina and towards the Bosnian Krajina's "heart of darkness" in Banja Luka and Prijedor, not to mention the attempt to stifle the heart of the nation's multicultural life and soul in Sarajevo. However much disgust we feel when the deniers challenge the reality of Srebrenica, it's important not to forgot that what they want most importantly is to ensure that our attention is drawn away from the picture as a whole.

Mr Dobbs, in letting Andy Wilcoxson get away by default with his misrepresentation of the core of the argument about genocide at Srebrenica, you seem to be adrift from the principles at issue, as you were earlier when you seemed to believe you had simply been misunderstood.

To be frank, I'm gobsmacked that you decide that it is quite legitimate to debate the question of what terminology we should use to describe the war crimes at Srebrenica. "ICTY has decided that they are a genocide, but others can disagree." The court which was at the time the relevant judicial forum made the decision and painstakingly explained in Trial and Appeal judgments how the facts were consistent with the legal interpretation. The highest forum of international justice concurred. Your willingness to discuss "the definition of a word" simply offers a let-out to those who want to find a way of avoding acknowledging the genocide. Your indulgence is meaningless. The massacre at Srebrenica was a series of deaths. The genocide was a massacre whose means, motive and perpetrator were established. That's not up for negotiation away by you. There'is scope for legal experts to reflect on the philosophical soundness/consistency of the legal principles applied, but that's beyond your and my paygrade.

Raphael Lemkin did not intend the Genocide Convention he championed to be a mechanism for after-the-event punishment of the successful annihilation of a group. He saw genocide as a process that could and must be interrupted and if possible prevented from reaching completion. That's why Articles II and III are worded in the crucial way that Wilcoxson chooses to ignore, even though he directly quotes the phrase "in whole or in part":

"Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Article III: The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide."

The crime of genocide at Srebenica arose out of the intent to eliminate the Bosnian Muslim population of the Drina Valley using the methods subjected to detailed scrutiny by the ICTY's Krstic Trial and Appeal panels.

There was certainly evidence of intent in the form for basic starters of the Bosnian Serb Assembly's Strategic Goals of the Serb People and more immediately Radovan Karadzic's Directive 7 of March 1995 issuing instructions to the Bosnian Serb army "By planned and well-thought out combat operations, create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival or life for the inhabitants of Srebrenica."

The problem with genocide is not establishing a general intent but in convicting an individual on the basis of intent present in the commission of the acts constituting genocide. That's how Karganovic and the team helped to get Momcilo Krajisnik off the hook when the court found that the acts constituting genocide had been committed but the prosecution failed to bring the evidence that tied Krajisnik, one of the principal architects of the Bosnian Serb murder machine, to the individual perpetrators of the genocidal acts.

You really don't seem to understand that you have essentially issued an invitation to genocide-deniers to reopen the whole debate from scratch.

Ok, so I am coming under fire by both sides here! I guess I am less hung up about  terminology than some people. I think we can waste a lot of energy debating precisely when a terrible war crime becomes a genocide.  I prefer to leave that particular question to the courts, as it involves issues of legal interpretation.  I am more interested in the underlying facts.  I realize this will leave me vulnerable to charges (already made by some) that I myself am a "genocide denier" but I will have to live with that.  Whether Karganovic et al recognize Srebrenica as a "genocide" is of less interest to me than respect for facts that have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.  

Mr Dobbs, Would you agree that exaggerating the severity of a war crime can have serious negative consequences?

I think you'll agree with me that part of what caused the Srebrenica massacre to be as bloody as it was is the fact that the Serbs believed in an exaggerated version of certain events like the killings in Kravica on Orthodox Christmas and quite possibly an exaggerated number of Serbian victims in the Second World War.

Letting the ICTY and the Bosnian-Muslims use a word as emotionally charged as "genocide" without adequate evidence of genocidal intent, and looking the other way when they conflate soldiers killed in combat with unarmed prisoners who were executed is irresponsible because it inflames ethnic tensions that could very well fuel future violence and massacres.

In spite of what East says, I think it is important to scrutinize the ICTY's findings and to call them out when the evidence doesn't adequately support the conclusions reached in their verdicts. I'll agree that there is good evidence that mass killings took place, but the evidence that genocidal intent motivated the killings is not strong at all. I've read the verdicts and when it comes to the issue of genocidal intent, which is required for a genocide finding, the evidence is extremely weak.

@ East -- If the ICTY is infallible then you can't say that Directive 7 constitutes evidence of genocidal intent because para 90 of the Krstic appeal judgment says "Directives 7 and 7.1 are insufficiently clear to establish that there was a genocidal intent on the part of the members of the Main Staff who issued them. Indeed, the Trial Chamber did not even find that those who issued Directive 7 and 7.1 had genocidal intent, concluding instead that the genocidal plan crystallised at a later stage."

Besides wouldn't an "unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival or life" be what motivated ALL of the refugees (Serbs, Croats and Muslims alike) to abandon their homes and all of their possessions during the war?

The fact of the matter is that by the end of the war, 90 percent of the pre-war Bosnian Serb population left the area now called the Federation of BiH and over 95 percent of pre-war Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Muslim inhabitants left what is now Republika Srpska. Everyone involved is guilty of the kind of behavior laid out in Directive 7.

As far as the ICTY is concerned, "The main evidence underlying the Trial Chamber's conclusion that the VRS forces intended to eliminate all the Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica was the massacre by the VRS of all men of military age from that community." Which means that as far as the ICTY's findings relate to article 2 of the genocide convention we're only concerned with whether or not the Bosnian Serbs killed the soldiers and draft eligible men with the intent to destroy their national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.

Andy Wilcoxson, I will agree with you, the emphasis on recognising the classification of Srebrenica legally as genocide - and Rwanda similarly - is propagandistic. It is propagandistic in the sense that it is intended to secure the effective implementation of a legal instrument, the Genocide Convention, inspired by Raphael Lemkin's perception that the experience of one genocide was not enough to prevent another. That's why Lemkin sought the passage of international legislation that would provide a vulnerable group of citizens with external protection from the start against an attempt by their co-citizens to annihilate them.

Of course that has political fall-out, in that it opens the door to external intervention notionally based on humanitarian concern whose motives may be less than pure. But for most of us concerned about the application of anti-genocide measures the key element in principle is the protection of a vulnerable population from extinction and the key lesson in practice is that the world recognised that what was going on at Srebrenica was genocide too late.

The refusal to allow you to deny the truth of what was done is propagandistic - propaganda in favour of timely respect for Lemkin's principles and against abandoning the initiative to geopolitical butchers of the kind you refuse to acknowledge.

Mr Dobbs, it's not a matter of being hung-up over terminology and whether the court is able to attach a specific label or not is secondary to what the label actually means in relation to the underlying crime. What's important is not simply the designation of genocide but our understanding of the wider significance that the label informs us that each relevant individual act has - each murder, each forcible displacement. The term carries the meaning of the crime. Classing murders as underlying acts of genocide recognises that they are not "ancient tribal feuding", they are not "understandable revenge killings", they are not "military pre-emption", they are killings aimed at the extermination of a group, in this case the elimination of the Bosnian Muslim population of North-Eastern Bosnia, whose last local survivors were crammed into Srebrenica.

Your more apparent interest in the phenomenon of what might be described as murder denial rather than genocide denial suggests not that you are a genocide denier but that as your rather ambiguous pronouncements suggest, that what you are seeking to understand is the phenomenon of mass murder on a unique ("genocidal") scale, rather than "genocidal murder"

Your header, with its focus on Mladic's historical freak persona as a "charismatic murderer", again suggests that your primary interest is in the personal chemistry/pathology aspect of your subject - how the man Ratko Mladic was able to commit genocidal murder - rather than his contextual role - how General Mladic proceeded to implement the Bosnian Serb strategy of genocide. That is a legitimate choice but it would have made matters easier for those of us interested in understanding the process of genocide in order to try to prevent it rather than understanding the nature of the genocidal individual if you had made your position clearer. Genocide is more than just a dimension of murder.

Mr Dobbs "believe[s] that the vast majority were captured and executed ... it is ridiculous to claim (as people like Karganovic do) that fewer than a thousand were executed." The basis of the Dobbs "body count" is not revealed. Faith is a mystery. Print Karganovic's work, to wit, the number of femurs found around Srebrenica, adding up -- at 2 per featherless biped to some 900 owners. When I was 17 I wrote for a local newspaper's high school student page. The editor told us sternly: "DO NOT EDITORIALIZE!"... There'd be no desk for him at the Wash. Post.

1. The attacking of mainstream records as being biased and therefore making the illogical insinuation they were lying for a specific agenda.

With Holocaust Deniers its the "Vast Jewish Media Conspiracy", with you its some claim of the State Department's directive (never mind that all of Western Europe was more adamant about getting involved than the US) and that Dobbs is making stuff up for the sake of his "masters"

2. Claiming "victor's justice"

This is done despite not showing any knowledge as to how these kind of trials works. So what about the World Court makes it a kangaroo court? The judges are not from a country which participated in the conflict. The laws applied are those set by UN standards as are the procedures.

Holocaust deniers make the same claim. Just ignorant bitching and moaning. Nuremberg Defendants had the best legal representation available and court procedures/rules of evidence which actually favored them (taking a US/UK approach).

3. They did it too!

Well that's all well and good to discuss Bosnian muslim atrocities but they got prosecuted too for these things. Plus it still doesn't provide an excuse for genocidial behavior of another party. This is rhetorical fallacy.

There is no excuse for genocide. Period

4. Claiming genocide was somehow justifiable.

Holocaust deniers will point to Stalin's purges and mass starvation as somehow the work of the Jews since Nazis also make the connection between Jews and international communism in their screeds.

Bosnian war deniers do the same by references to WWII.

5. Misrepresentation of the victims. Holocaust deniers like to claim that at least 2 million dead civilians in Russia and Poland were the result of "anti-partisan activities" Of course anyone actually associated with the actions admits it was just rampant indiscriminate genocidal and reprisal actions. Genocide deniers claim all the victims of the attacks on "safe zones" were combatants despite the plethora of evidence and eyewitnesses to the
contrary

6. You don't have moral authority because of other massacres which happened in history.

I am amazed how often Holocaust deniers bring up Hiroshima, Dresden or the concentration camps of the Boer War as some kind of moral counterweight to claiming the action of the Nazis was relative in comparison.

Your reference to Rwanda is no different. You employ the same lack of logic and fallacious thinking. How about this as a reaction. They were all bad events and none of it can possibly be excused.

7. It was so long ago, why bother discussing it?
Holocaust deniers try to downplay events as not being relevant so long ago. That Germans should not have to bear the guilt of those actions many generations later.

You claim that it was a part and insignificant event.

Well let me tell you, the world must always take notice of genocide wherever it occurs. When people fail to stop it, they bear the guilt of the events as well as those who perpetrate it.

Thanks to Holocaust denial, the Serbian clique has a ready made template as to how to lie about history.

I see you are stuck to slinging invective and ad hominem in response.

Fact of the matter is, I have seen more than my fair share of Holocaust deniers online. I know their arguments, I know their methods. They are well documented and easy to compare with your POV. You are taking your cues right out of David Irving's texts.

I see the exact same pattern with your discussion. The same illogical mis-steps, the same fallacious arguments, the same agenda, the same types of bald face lies.

The only difference being Holocaust deniers were smart enough to wait at least one generation before coming out with their dishonest crap. Long enough for many of the principle actors/witnesses to die off and evidence to be erased by the passage of time.

You are a liar of the worst kind. One covering up and making excuses for behavior which has no excuse. There is a reason genocide is considered a crime against HUMANITY.

>>One can find a broad range of non-Serb understanding that the nationalist Serb hating crap that you favor isn't in line with reality."

Not all of them are Serbs. Neo-nazis seem to agree with you, Christian fundamentalists too as do various nationalist parties in Eastern Europe.

Lots of people whose word is less than worthless.

>>It's easy to go after a nation/people whose country isn't in NATO, doesn't have nukes or any significant Capitol Hill lobbying clout - points which pertain to the kind of crap getting peddled at some realtively high profile venues."

Its even easier when they engage in the most brutal war Europe has seen since the 1940's and bring back the spectre of genocide.

You still have not answered the question ? Why the Serbs ? because it is easy to go after them ?? That is you argument ?? Really ?? P A T H E T I C .

The world simply decided " Hey, the serbs are easy to go after, let's do it ?? Let's coordinate a mass manipulation of global media and let's have the Serbs have it ??" You cannot honestly believe that ?

Wow, like I said, ignorance is Blyss.

It's like when the bomb in Sarajevo's marketplace exploded and Karadjic claimed on TV Publicly " Most of those "bodies" are in fact dolls to inflate the number of dead", you can youtube that!

Again, the fact that YOUR OWN HEAD OF NATIONAL MEDIA OPENLY ADMITTED TO HAVING MANIPULATED MATERIAL for Serbian TV as he was ordered to and to spin stories.........ah yes, that happened due to Western pressure to, the West managed to get to him and to have him lie.

Always an excuse for everything.
You in denial war mongers should simply ask yourself, why did the entire world decide to turn on us, what possible reason or interests are there ? And why are we the only ones who know the truth ???? And why is that the exact same arguments every radical group has ???

I'll make it simpler, what countries share your view and support you ?
when you see that list, which is as good as no one or virtually no one, than ask yourself why ?

Nelson's style is is to argue by invective. His reference to Bleiburg sounds like what Robert Kaplan has called "Croatianism". Nelson relies on a faulty translation of Karadzic's rebuttal of charges for the first Markale market place massacre in February 1994: "It's like when the bomb in Sarajevo's marketplace exploded and Karadjic claimed on TV Publicly 'Most of those "bodies" are in fact dolls to inflate the number of dead, you can youtube that!' " -- Mr Nelson, if you had watcched ABC-TV that very night, you would have seen a man carrying a mannequin leg. This was shown twice in the program. This footage was screened even at the ICTY "trial" of Karadzic. Some bodies didn't bleed; these could only have come from the morgue. Fresh kills bleed. Bodies had ice in the ears, too. The weather was mild, as evidenced by the "first responders" T-shirts. Potatoes and other produce lay undisturbed on the tables. Sarajevo still life. The fiber glass roofing was in place, though Mark Danner creatively wrote that they were of corrugated steel and that shards decapitated victims... TV cameras were coincidentally up and running, as they were at the Bread Queue massacre of May 1992. The crime scene was destroyed by Muslim officials; they cleaned up the gore in less than half an hour. Only then were UN officials allowed to enter the market. WP SJ & NYT blamed it on yet another "Serb mortar". A 120mm mortar round suposedly from a position out of range of Serb positions, didn't whistle (they all do), and fell in"an impossibly perfect trajectory" (Mark Danner). It fell, like no other artillery projectile out of a tube, vertically and not parabolically. And it did not dismemember the victims, as mortar rounds always do. Turkish surgeon Dr Karaduman reported that the wounded all suffered burns below the belt (his words) while standing. The 68 dead and the many wounded had been felled by a "Bouncing Betty", bounding mine, which had been planted under a market table that was flipped over by the UPWARD blast, n. bene. Detonation was by timer or remote control. The weapon was an antipersonnel mine, known in Balkan military lingo as PROM 2 (protivpesadijska rasprskavajuca odskocna mina). This weapon was never produced for the JNA (Yugoslav Peoples Army), but only at an arms factory in Muslim held Bugojno after the Bosnian secession. It operates in two phases: the first detonation lifts the charge to crotch height, the second triggers a shower of thousands of steel ball bearings that fell any being within its radius. In a word, it was the favored Muslim weapon in asymmetric warfare, the IED (improvised explosive device). As for burns, the PROM was enhanced with a phosphorus charge. The blast left a black smear from burnt plastic on the UNDERSIDE of the overturned table. The shrapnel BBs are encased in a plastic sleeve. There is no plastic in a mortar round.