Posted By Michael Dobbs
Wednesday, February 29, 2012 - 4:43 PM
Share
In a post last week about the execution of six Srebrenica Muslims near the village of Trnovo, I posed a question about the motivations of the murderers. The Trnovo massacre is unique in one sense alone: it was captured on video, available here, recorded by the killers themselves. Apart from that, it can serve as a microcosm of the atrocities committed in the larger war in Bosnia, which cost the lives of more than a hundred thousand people between 1992 and 1995.
The man you can see above on the balcony is Slobodan Medic, commander of a paramilitary unit known as the Scorpions, who was convicted by a Serbian court in April 2007 of ordering the murders, and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment. The victims, known as "parcels" in the conspiratorial language of the killers, were captured by Bosnian Serb forces while attempting to flee the former United Nations "safe area" of Srebrenica in July 1995.
Although Medic considered himself a Serb "patriot," his true motivations appear to have been much more mundane. Like many leaders of paramilitary gangs, he viewed the war as an opportunity to enrich himself. In the words of a former subordinate, Goran Stoparic, interviewed by the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, Medic was "always a profiteer."
He got the most out of the war, ending up filthy rich. He got rich on those oil wells. When giving testimony here in Belgrade, when the judge asked him about his assets, he said he had five hundred sheep, I don't know how many horses, pigs and whatever, as well as 2.5 million German marks in cash, so and so many cars. He lied, he had much more in cash. Now he has a 500-square meter house in Novi Sad, a huge farm...He's filthy rich and it all came from the war, from State Security turning a blind eye to his clandestine businesses.
Medic did not directly participate in the killing of the six Srebrenica Muslims, who included three minors under the age of eighteen. As the investigation later established, the murders were carried out by his personal bodyguards, led by his cousin, Branislav Medic, who are photographed below:
Some of these men have interesting histories and personal characteristics. It emerged from the trial that Aleksandar Medic was considered "a coward" by his comrades. He was selected for the execution team by his namesake Slobodan as part of a "hardening" process. He sought to prove his toughness to the others by taunting the captives, asking one of the minors whether he had "ever had a fuck." According to one of the others, when the boy answered no, Aleksandar joked, "and now you never will."
In the end, his bravado deserted him. When they returned to base, the killers complained to their commander that the baby-faced Aleksandar was "scared stiff and refused to shoot." The video shows him guarding the prisoners, but not firing his weapon.
Pero Petrasevic emerges from the video as gratuitously cruel, kicking one of the prisoners in the head en route to the execution spot (clearly visible in the recording.) When they were finally arrested, however, Petrasevic was the only member of the killing squad to cooperate with the prosecutors and exhibit remorse for what he had done.
Of the men photographed, only Milorad Momic managed to escape arrest following the release of the video, which shocked Serbian public opinion. In a bizarre postscript to the case, Momic was arrested in January 2011 in a village near the French town of Grenoble. He had changed his name to Guy Monier, married a French woman, and become a French citizen. Known to his neighbors as "Micky," he had a reputation for being "very soft and gentle." He has since been extradited to Croatia for crimes committed at the beginning of the war.
As Goran Stoparic explained, it helped to be a little crazy during the war:
It turned out to be better if you were some kind of psychopath. You could say that being a criminal was good. It meant being braver, more courageous, that you would be a good fighter...It became like some kind of drug, and a man can't get himself unhooked. Even when you decide not to go to a combat zone, a friend calls and you tell him you're not going. Then he calls another five and, willy-nilly, you always go."
The hate between such etnich groups is one thing "I" can never understand.
Thanks for a nice blog anyway!
And what is your explanation of Koran burning and pissing on dead bodies, dear innocent Marcus? White man's burden, no doubt.
I despise it!! And hope some day, that RESPECT is the most valuable value of the human species.
Michael Dobbs has been flirting with ethnically motivated stereotype discourse for a long time and now he had finally crossed the line. Let us first make one thing clear: unlike Dr. Radovan Karadzic, Dobbs is not a psychoanalyst and he is not qualified to “pose questions about the motivations of murderers.” He can speculate about them only as a politically biased layman.
His speculations are third rate propaganda. Like every disinformer, Dobbs is selective in the data he uses or chooses to ignore. Everything that he writes about Medic and his group may well be true, but by failing to mention other miscreants from the same wartime milieu he generates a misleading picture about the distribution of criminal behavior during the Bosnian war.
I do not want to risk in engaging in psychoanalysis myself by suggesting that this precisely is Dobbs' purpose.
Suffice it to point out that according to John Pomfret [Washington Post, February 16, 1994] and Bill Schiller [Toronto Star, July 16, 1995] psychopaths were not to be found in just one camp during the Bosnian war.
Pomfret: “Naser Oric’s war trophies don’t line the wall of his comfortable apartment – one of the few with electricity in this besieged Muslim enclave [Srebrenica] stuck in the forbidding mountains of eastern Bosnia. They are on a videocassette tape: burned Serb houses and headless Serb men, their bodies crumpled in a pathetic heap.”
Schiller: “Ori? is a fearsome man, and proud of it. I met him in January, 1994, in his own home in Serb-surrounded Srebrenica. On a cold and snowy night, I sat in his living room watching a shocking video version of what might have been called Nasir Ori?'s Greatest Hits. There were burning houses, dead bodies, severed heads, and people fleeing. Ori? grinned throughout, admiring his handiwork. ‘We ambushed them,’ he said when a number of dead Serbs appeared on the screen.
“The next sequence of dead bodies had been done in by explosives: ‘We launched those guys to the moon,’ he boasted. When footage of a bullet-marked ghost town appeared without any visible bodies, Ori? hastened to announce: ‘We killed 114 Serbs there.’ Later there were celebrations, with singers with wobbly voices chanting his praises.”
One is hard-pressed to say that Medic and his paramilitary group, so ostentatiously singled out by Dobbs for the role of Balkan villains, did not have worthy competitors in Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina “brigadier” Naser Oric and his brave freedom fighters.
Michael Dobbs has, by his omissions and single-minded insistence on making a political caricature of a tragic ethnic conflict in which he is not called upon to take sides, actually performed a service for his readers. Those who are critical and alert, anyway. He has put his cards on the table and shown himself for the biased and unreliable reporter that he is.
Karganovic denounced my last post on the Trnovo killings as "highly dubious" and insisted that this incident had nothing to do with Srebrenica, even though the victims were all Muslims from Srebrenica last seen alive in the UN "safe area" when it was captured by Bosnian Serb forces. Now he writes that everything I write about Medic and his group "may well be true." That's progress, I guess.
I am now a faithful reader of Michael Dobbs' and I cannot help learning things from him and making progress as I go along. Dobbs, however, continues to use fragments selectively. He notes my approval of the punishment meted out to Medic & Co. but continues to ignore the psychopathic criminality of other participants in the conflict. Dobbs is not making progress.
Dobbs is not interested in justice, but only in finishing off the Serbs. They're so evil that they fought back when Nasir Oric beheaded Serbs and played football with the severed heads. Ask Bill Shiller. Nasir Oric and his mujahedin impaled Serbs, even roasting them on the spit while still live. A greased pole with a rounded head, to prevent heavy bleeding that would shorten the agony, is rammed in past the severed sphincter ani. That grand old Ottoman tradition was re-enacted at Milici, near Srebrenica. Yasunari Mizuguchi showed me his tapes that he shot of the victims in August 1993 after General Mladic's men routed the new Dahis. Yet Oric was "found not guilty" by the ICTY (Meron) of those beastly crimes committed against Serb civilians who were unlucky enough to be reside in the farming villages around the armed camp that the UN designated a protected area. "Findings" of guilty or innocent by the "court" called ICTY have no merit. Just the place for wannabe shrink-cum-witness Effendi Michael Dobbs to play Perry Mason. Horror tapes of Muslim atrocities have been peddled in the New Jeddah known as Sarajevo.
Mr. Dobbs:
Since you referred to some of the victims being "minors under the age of eighteen", I would like to point out that the war presidency in Srebrenica mobilized everybody between the ages of 16 and 60. (See Popovic exhibit 7D00057)
I also remember a protected witness, testifying under the pseudonym B-1619, who testified in the Slobodan Milosevic trial on December 17, 2003. He was a B-H Army soldier who served in Srebrenica and in Zepa and he was drafted while he was a minor. According to his recollection, 10% of the soldiers in his unit were minors (see Milosevic Trial Transcript Pg. 30599) -- and among the Srebrenica victims, less than 10% are under age 18. (See Popovic exhibit P03159)
I think it's terrible that anybody that young was executed, but I also think it's terrible that the Bosnian Army used child soldiers. I think it's terrible to put anybody that young into that position. Wouldn't you agree that it was wrong for the Bosnian Army to draft minors and use them as soldiers, and don't you think that's at least worth mentioning when talking about minors being killed like this?
Now I have a question, why do you think the Skorpions killed these people? Did they do it in order to destroy the Bosnian-Muslim ethnic group? If Medic was the war profiteer, was somebody paying him to do it? Did Medic order his men to carry out this crime in order to test their loyalty? Or were Medic and his men just a bunch of psychopaths, and they did it for the perverse thrill of it -- like a serial killer?
There is no evidence that any of these men were soldiers but that is irrelevant. Killing prisoners without any kind of legal proceeding is a war crime, whether they are soldiers or not. I am surprised you don't get that.
As for the motivation in this particular case, it is difficult to say. It could be a mixture of all the factors you mention. The simplest answer is that they were ordered to kill these people. The bigger question is why such orders were given, and why these particular men carried out an obviously illegal order in such a brutal fashion.
Absolutely, "Killing prisoners without any kind of legal proceeding is a war crime, whether they are soldiers or not." I get that and I agree. But isn't the point of this discussion to determine the reason or reasons why the massacre happened? Aren't we trying to establish a motive here? Isn't that the idea?
Surely you can see how the military status of the victims could be relevant in determining the motivation behind the massacre. I don't think it is a coincidence that that the Bosnian Army drafted males aged 16 to 60 and that 89.2% of the massacre victims identified by the ICMP are males aged 16 to 60, and all six of the victims we see in this video are in the 16 to 60 age group.
Clearly, males aged 16 to 60 were the target. Richard Butler, a military expert, testified for the Prosecution in the Krstic trial and said, "people who didn't qualify as military combatants or potential military combatants were not part of that plan [to execute the prisoners]. One of the unique things that I can use that helps me to support that theory is witness testimony that was brought before the Court earlier where on 13 July in the Sandici meadow, there was an awareness that they were looking to exclude out of the groups of people individuals who were not between the ages of 16 and 60. And that was an awareness by the soldiers at the lowest level." (Krstic transcript Pg. 5511)
The reason why 16 and 17 year old minors were targeted is because the Bosnian Army used them as soldiers. I don't have evidence concerning the military or civilian status of the six individual victims we see here in the video, but we do know that most of the massacre victims were soldiers because Ewa Tabeau (the Tribunal's demographer) compared the OTP's list of Srebrenica missing and dead to the ABiH military records in Tuzla and found that there were military records for over 70% of the victims. (See Popovic exhibit 3D00457) And we know that males who fell within that age group in Srebrencia were drafted.
The motive that the Skorpions had is difficult to determine, but I notice that Slobodan Medic and Milorad Pelemis (commander of the 10th Sabotage Detachment) have something in common. They're both war profiteers. Erdemovic testified in the Karadzic trial just the other day that he heard rumors that Pelemis got several kilograms of gold for the massacre at Branjevo Military Farm.
Andy, Dobbs has no interest in allowing actual facts to get in the way of his bigotry.
Dobbs, I don't know how you stand yourself.
Indeed, Misha may be on to something. In his recent evidence given under cross examination in the Karadzic trial [February 28, 2012] , when asked whether the Srebrenica executioners from his unit, the Tenth Sabotage Detachment, were paid for their services in gold by some outside source, "Star Witness" Drazen Erdemovic replied:
"I don't know exactly whether this, in fact, happened, but there were rumours in Bijeljina according to which Mr. Pelemis had received I don't know how many kilos of gold that had been found in Srebrenica, and that's why he sent us there to shoot these civilians." [Transcript, p. 25395] Pelemis, be it noted was the comander of Erdemovic's unit.
Coming from such an important and trusted prosecution witness, this suggestion cannot be discounted out of hand. So the motive which animated the psychopaths of the Tenth Sabotage Detachment, it now seems, may have been greed and not perhaps the intention to destroy an ethnic or religious group, as such?
No bigger war profiteers can be found than nouveaux riches Bill Clinton (the rot thang) and Tony WMD Blair. In 3 weeks we'll have the 13th anniversary of Clinton's Blitzkrieg that killed 4000 and wounded 10.000, two thirds of whom where civilians including close to 1 hundred children. NATO forces used depleted uranium missiles that resulted in birth defects from cancers previously unseen. Compare the Agent Orange deforestation by the US in Viet Nam. NATO has polluted soil, water and stunted food production in effect for eternity. Economic damage caused by Clinton's war is estimated to be over $100 billion. ALL the deaths, Muslim included, have to be "credited" to the swine who de-recognized Yugoslavia. Dobbs outdoes Josef Goebbels himself...
Are you sick of seeing the same Psychopath posting all over the web when researching Narcissistic Personality Disorder? Did you get sucked into his boards, forums, books, speeches?
Or are you one of the victims who adore Sam Vaknin, Look up to him and hold him up on a pedestal as your life saver?
if so let’s take a closer look at the supposed “Dr Sam Vaknin PhD”
In one of his repetitively & compulsively posted online articles, Vaknin reveals in his own words the reason he really runs the Narcissism ‘Support’ Groups all over the net and so on….
‘There is nothing to be learned from the answers to these questions because each individual has her own threshold. No, I simply enjoy the momentary ability to inflict traumatic pain (emotional pain – I am not the physical type and will never harm a woman physically). It is as close as I can get to omnipotence. It is the perfect gender revenge.’…
‘As a Jew I would have done the same to Nazis. As a victim of a woman, I celebrate with unrestrained glee my ability to degrade women, to humiliate them, to frustrate them, to make them beg for life itself, for they see their (often imagined) relationship with me as life itself. This is why I abstain from sex. This is why I dazzle them with my intellect and charm and wit and knowledge, with unprecedented intrusive interest in their petty, boring, housewivish lives – and then I let go abruptly. At this stage, they are so brittle, so vulnerable that they crash to a million shreds with the crystalline sound of agony.’
Is this really a man you want to give you advice and support on Narcissism, Psychopathy or on your relationships? . Imagine for a moment, you have left your Narcissistic partner/spouse/family and have finally seen the light. You stumble across Sam Vaknin and drink in everything he has written on the subject.
You have just walked out on one Narcissist into the world of another.
Imagine, as an abuse survivor of someone with malignant narcissism or narcissistic personality disorder, giving your life over to a psychopath, and doing it with trust and a firm belief in his authority. What if said psychopathic conman, was advising victims? It seems absurd, that an abuser would advise the abused. It seems even more absurd, that the abused would take the advice to heart.
Thankyou
UMMMM, Obama will still be the one to handle Foreign affairs.....not Biden. Biden can only offer up suggestions, and n the end it is up to Obama to take it, in which he will not, because he will handle it just the way he wants to, and you can believe that those Muslims who are currently working on the Obama campaign....you know, Obama's close friends from College.....Do you really want to see these people in the white house. If you do, then you are a traitor to the US..
"Is rio orange war always forfait mobile" inevitable ?"
MaximB
Whoever the nominal poster, ostensibly relevant articles quoted in full as comments under the Subject header "good" close with "thank you - cleaning services london" or "thank you - cleaning services sydney" and are followed immediately by an irrelevant comment posted by MaximB. Seems suggestive of a semi-sophisticated spamming system.
it's terrible that anybody that young was executed, but I also think it's terrible that the Bosnian Army used child soldiers. I think it's terrible to put anybody that young into that position. Wouldn't you agree that it was wrong for the Bosnian Army to draft minors vrásky and use them as soldiers, and don't you think that's at least worth mentioning when talking about minors being killed like this?Now I have a question, why do you think the Skorpions killed these people? Did they do it in order to destroy the Bosnian-Muslim ethnic group? If Medic was the war profiteer, was somebody paying him to do it?
One of the unique things that I can use that helps me to support that theory is witness testimony that was brought before the Court earlier where on 13 July in the Sandici kasinomeadow, there was an awareness that they were looking to exclude out of the groups of people individuals who were not between the ages of 16 and 60. And that was an awareness by the soldiers at the lowest level." The reason why 16 and 17 year old minors were targeted is because the Bosnian Army used them as soldiers. I don't have evidence concerning the military or civilian kasino status of the six individual victims we see here in the video, but we do know that most of the massacre victims were soldiers because Ewa Tabeau (the Tribunal's demographer) compared theotp's list of Srebrenica missing and dead to the ABiH military records in Tuzla
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.
Read More
Follow us on Twitter | Visit us on Facebook | Follow us on RSS | Subscribe to Foreign Policy
About FP | Meet the Staff | Foreign Editions | Reprint Permissions | Advertising | Writers’ Guidelines | Press Room | Work at FP
Services:Subscription Services | Academic Program | FP Archive | Reprint Permissions | FP Reports and Merchandise | Special Reports | Buy Back Issues
Privacy Policy | Disclaimer | Contact Us
11 DUPONT CIRCLE NW, SUITE 600 | WASHINGTON, DC 20036 | Phone: 202-728-7300 | Fax: 202-728-7342
FOREIGN POLICY is published by the FP Group, a division of The Washington Post Company
All contents ©2013 The Foreign Policy Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
(18)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE