Talk about “malign influence” in the Balkans! A distinguished Serbian academic, historian Dr. Miloš Ković, is fighting for his professional life with few seeming to notice. A NATO controlled cabal entrenched in the Department of History at the University of Belgrade is pulling strings to prevent his appointment to full professor, although Dr. Ković amply satisfies all requirements, and it is working assiduously to ultimately oust him altogether from the faculty. It had earlier managed to dismiss three of Dr. Ković’s academically promising like-minded colleagues.

Dr. Ković’s “sins” are from the point of view of his detractors manifold and on the face of it they fully justify his persecutors’ vengeance. He is publicly on record as an opponent of the fabricated history of Serbia and the Balkans that was generated by the Hague Tribunal through its contrived verdicts. He is also boldly swimming against the current by  rejecting the de rigueur characterisation of Srebrenica as “genocide.” And he has infuriated the dominant establishment as well as colleagues on NATO and Western “NGO” payrolls by insisting that occupied Kosovo is an inalienable part of Serbia. Impudently, he teaches that Kosovo is Serbia’s religious and cultural heartland, and he frequently takes his history students there to observe the evidence for themselves, in the form of innumerable Serbian monuments which dot it.

With such odd views, it is no wonder that Dr. Ković’s professional agony has not been noticed by the „New York Times“ nor been the subject of indignant denunciations by the usual gaggle of organizations that unfailingly react to the slightest violation of „human rights“ or infringement of „academic freedom“ in even the remotest corner of the globe.

Quite the contrary, Ković’s ideas qualify, without exception, as unpardonable thought offences that thoroughly enrage the paladins of “diversity” and “open society.” True to form, the chairman of the history department where Ković has been teaching, Prof. Slobodan Samardžić, appointed a commission, riddled with conflicts of interest, assigning it the suspected task of glossing over Dr. Ković’s sterling qualifications and blocking his appointment to full professor. Incidentally, Prof. Samardžić has been virtue signalling his allegiances for some time by referring to the Serbian people  (from whose governmental budget he is salaried) as unwashed „scum“ which had coming to it the mass extermination in satellite Croatia’s World War II Jasenovac concentration camp that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

While understandably painful for the targeted individual, the broader context of this intellectual suppression campaign is equally important. It is the effort to fully dominate discourse and thinking in the politically and economically conquered territories, and amongst the younger generation in particular. It is a multilevel project starting with the interdiction of information that challenges coloniser-approved narratives. The youth are, naturally, a prime target in this no quarter war for the control of purposefully zombified human minds, preferably emptied of knowledge and certainly deprived of the faculty of critical analysis. Such is the profile of the ideal helots of the order that is being constructed. Non-party line teachers such as Dr. Ković are simply not allowed to interfere with the dumbing-down process.

So the Ković affair, as shameful an example as it is of ruthless trampling by Western – and why not say it openly? – NATO minions in Serbia of every known principle of academic integrity, including the sacrosanct canon of diversity that Transatlantic hypocrites relentlessly preach to others, is about much more than just a single individual. If these principles were sincerely held, instead of serving rather as mere weapons in the arsenal of political warfare, the undeserved torments of this outstanding, Oxford-educated Serbian academic, opposing almost single-handedly the tidal wave of NATO-sponsored garbage education in his country, would be front-page news in the farthest reaches of the “free world.”

Instead, it is an ignored scenario that nevertheless keeps repeating itself in one institution of higher learning after another throughout the still captive nations of Eastern Europe.

As Ković correctly puts it, at stake is not just his own future as an educator, but an issue that should be of transcendent importance for society in general: who will shape our children’s perception of their own past? Obviously, and without even having to refer to Orwell explicitly, whoever seizes the power to do that will also largely determine the future that those suggestible young souls will be allowed to have.

So far, a respectable number of colleagues from various university departments have rallied to Dr. Ković’s cause and expressed support, many at some cost to their own position in a fragile land dominated by the not so soft but certifiably malign influence of its Western ill-wishers. Among the most hopeful signs that in the end the Belgrade History Department cabal’s plans may be thwarted is a rally in support of the beleaguered Dr. Ković, organised the other day by several hundred students who admire his academic excellence and unflinching integrity.

The news may not have made “The New York Times,” London “Guardian,” “Le Monde,” or CNN (regrettably not even RT as far as it is known) but it is sure to be noted with some chagrin by both the instigators and their foreign puppeteers.

They have made some strides but still have a very long way to go before finally congratulating themselves on successfully flushing the brains and emptying the minds of Serbia’s intellectual youth.

July 11 this year will mark the 26^th anniversary of the tragic events that took place in 1995 in the east Bosnian district of Srebrenica. With each passing year the ceremony loses some of its luster and pomp, as genocide fatigue sets in. The inquirer into these matters will get radically different answers and interpretations, mainly depending on the ethnicity of the local informant. As Diana Johnstone accurately observed, in the Balkans truth generally lacks a transcendent or ontological dimension, it tends to be purely tribal.

That axiom of Balkan epistemology being out of the way, the question still remains whether there are any solid facts, or “hard data points,” to – as my contracts professor in law school used to say – “hang your hat on.” Regrettably, again, it really depends on who you talk to.

For the Muslim population of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Srebrenica has been successfully shaped into an identitarian founding myth, a rallying cry and a device potently used by their self-perpetuating governing class in Sarajevo to drive them into a sheep corral of which they, the elite, would be self-appointed gatekeepers. For the NATO crowd, Srebrenica has been a rich political bonanza, a gift that literally keeps on giving. By driving what at present appears as an eternal cleavage between the two largest Bosnian communities, the Serbs and the Muslims, Srebrenica has provided the Western alliance with a seemingly unassailable pretext to keep strategic Bosnia under its interminable protectorate lest, so their narrative goes, the hostile ethnicities quickly go for each other’s throats, causing another ugly carnage that the decent and civilised folks in Washington, London, and Brussels simply could not abide. But more realistically, the bonanza that Srebrenica has given to those decent folks is just the right rationale that they had been looking for. After Srebrenica, they may wage their “right to protect” [R2P] interventions wherever a poor and defenceless nation catches their eye for sitting on a pot of gold, oil, strategic minerals, or anything else they may want to help themselves to, or its ruler become disobedient and turns into a “dictator who is killing his own people.” SCF readers are too sophisticated to require specific illustrations, but just for the record Kosovo, Iraq, Syria, and Libya come to mind.

What is supposed to distinguish Srebrenica from other ugly episodes of the civil wars that engulfed the former Yugoslavia is its unique status as the “first genocide in Europe since the end of World War II”. (What Professor Lemkin might have to say about it, for obvious reasons, we shall never know.) That status was first conferred on Srebrenica by the Western media, reporting in lockstep on the conflict in Bosnia. Right on cue, it was later duly confirmed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), an ad hoc court which, many suspect, was specifically set up for that very purpose. Contemporary media charges of “genocide” in which 8,000 Muslim POW “men and boys” were slaughtered by Serb forces after marching into Srebrenica received miraculous retroactive judicial confirmation once ICTY got seized of the matter and began delivering its boiler plate verdicts.

In the event, ICTY verdicts became an effective substitute for hard facts which they supposedly were based on, much as gold paper certificates, in the perception of simpleminded investors, became more solid than physical gold itself. The advocates of parliamentary “Srebrenica genocide resolutions” and “Srebrenica genocide denial laws” in various countries have been quite insouciant about providing hard facts to sustain their claims; after all, the last time we checked, it was still the rule that the burden of proof was on whoever was asserting something. But if it ever existed in the normative universe of the decent folks of the Western world, that rule was notably suspended in the case of Srebrenica. According to the Srebrenica lex specialis, an ICTY verdict is all the evidence needed to prove the commission of the horrendous crime of genocide, and Srebrenica genocide denial laws which are already on the books in numerous countries are conveniently applied to shut up anyone who undertakes to question such a course of reasoning. Never mind that the Hague Tribunal itself is an institution of questionable legitimacy, the authorisation to set up a court not being found anywhere in the UN Charter. Even to raise that issue is itself a violation of the genocide denial rules.

Issues such as whether or not genocide occurred in Srebrenica in July of 1995, and whether or not the Hague Tribunal is a legitimate forum entitled to pronounce on the subject, have been discussed and analysed from every angle ad nauseam (here, here, and here). In fact, hard data points challenging the Srebrenica genocide narrative do abound. There are strong indications that autopsy reports which supposedly document the execution of the “8,000 men and boys” are not all that they are cracked up to be. The DNA evidence subsequently summoned to fill that gap and prove the massive scope of prisoner executions, on closer examination, also raises more questions than it answers. Inconvenient evidence has also emerged of huge combat casualties that have been stealthily incorporated into the execution statistics in order to bolster the genocide death toll (also here). Though much of the scepticism regarding the established Srebrenica story in fact does rest on impressively objective foundations, we shall not insist on it in order not to ruffle any tribal feathers.

Instead of “disputing” or “denying”, we choose to mark this year’s anniversary by affirming. The atrocious destruction of the Serbian community in Srebrenica between 1992 and July of 1995 has scarcely ever been noted or acknowledged by the Srebrenica moralists de jour, so we will briefly perform their neglected task.

According the Bosnia-Herzegovina census of 1991, on the eve of the war, a quarter of Srebrenica’s population, or 8,315, were Serbs. When Serbian forces retook Srebrenica in July 1995, not a single one was left. A thousand, or more according to some estimates, were murdered, their villages attacked and razed to the ground; the remainder were expelled to Serbian-controlled territory surrounding the enclave.

The remains of Serbian villages attacked from inside the Srebrenica enclave

The beastly methodology used by armed gangs from the enclave to intimidate and expel their Serbian neighbours is depicted in the fate of little Mirjana, a Serbian girl raped and murdered by soon to be, in 1995, Srebrenica genocide victims, mourned by much of the free world.

Question: Did Serbs expelled by their neighbours have the right in 1995 to return to their homes and at least bury their dead?

Few would venture to say “no” to a question so starkly put. So sweeping the appalling pogrom of the unmourned Serbian community of Srebrenica under the rug, to avoid provoking such an embarrassing question, makes perfect, albeit somewhat twisted, sense.

We will soon be lucky enough to learn the answer to one of the few remaining mysteries of the Yugoslav Tribunal at the Hague. At this point it is entirely irrelevant how you choose to call it, ICTY or The Mechanism (the latter being the official, sinister-sounding name of its final incarnation). The issue concerns the appellate judgement in the case of General Ratko Mladic, commander of Serbian forces in the 1992 – 1995 Bosnian war. He stands accused, and in the trial verdict was found guilty, of the long list of usual heinous offences, topped by genocide and Srebrenica, that a person of his stature and ethnicity would normally have to face at the Hague Tribunal. On June 8, at the end of the appellate phase of the proceedings, we shall find out what the appeals chamber think about it.

The interesting thing about Mladic’s appellate chamber is that, in contrast to past practice, it is not composed of “good ole boys” drawn mostly from NATO countries. It is a chamber whose complexion, at least since the surprisingly successful recusal in 2016 of good ole boys Meron, Agius and Pocar, after a defence complaint of bias, BLM would probably approve (though the unsuspected presence of Uncle Toms can never be entirely discounted). Still, the new set of Mladic appellate chamber judges have solid Third World credentials. How that will impact their ruling, we shall soon find out.

But by far the most interesting member of this group is its presiding judge, Zambian jurist Prisca Matimba. In 2012 she sat on the trial chamber of General Mladic’s right-hand man, General Zdravko Tolimir, whom the majority found guilty and packed off to life imprisonment. Mrs. Matimba, however, sent shock waves by composing a fascinating dissenting opinion in which she compellingly argued that there was no evidence of Gen. Tolimir’s guilt on any of the charges laid against him (see chapter XIII of Judgment) and that instead of being sent to prison the defendant should be sent home. In the best British legal tradition, Zambian judge Matimba turned the tables. She supported her conclusion with a brilliant legal analysis reinforced by a panoply of lethally formulated First World arguments. But her singlehanded bravado performance failed to make even the slightest dent in her majority colleagues’ determination to reach a diametrically opposite result. Nevertheless, she in effect demolished not just her fellow-judges’ legal findings in the Tolimir trial but implicitly thrashed her institutional employer, the Hague Tribunal, as well.

Theoretically, on June 8 judge Matimba could tweak the Tribunal’s tail again by repeating her memorable 2012 performance. There is no ostensible reason for her to now take a different position in the Mladic case. Not only are all the basic charges the same as against Tolimir but, more importantly, so is the evidence, for whatever it is worth. Major witnesses are much the same and the crime base, as alleged by the prosecution, is also virtually identical, certainly in the key segments of genocide and Srebrenica. But before getting one’s expectations too high, worth pondering is the career of another ICTY judge, Christoph Flügge, who also briefly got out of line and then had to fight hard for “rehabilitation” (meaning job, salary and benefits).

Following the apprehension of Radovan Karadzic, Flügge was appointed a pre-trial judge in that case. But in 2009, in an inexplicable outburst of nonconformism, he told Der Spiegel that the term “genocide” in his view was no longer judicially viable: “Which is why I believe that we should consider devising a new definition of the crime. Perhaps the term mass murder would eliminate some of the difficulties we face in arriving at legal definitions. It would also work in Cambodia, where Cambodians killed large numbers of Cambodians. What do you call that? Suicidal genocide? Sociocide?” Still, as a properly repentant German, he concluded his academic musings on this delicate subject by maintaining that “strictly speaking, the term genocide only fits the Holocaust”.

But it turned out that the Tribunal would have none of Flügge’s new definitions and Massenmoerder nonsense because it understands all too well the nature of its overriding political task. It is to aim straight for the jugular, which in plain terms is genocide. After this incautious interview, Flügge promptly vanished from the Karadzic pre-trial panel. It is a matter of speculation in which political re-education camp judge Flügge spent the next year or so of his life (the ones in Xinjiang had not yet been officially opened) but after some time he emerged as a totally new and right-thinking man. He even apparently managed to regain a modicum of his employers’ trust, which included the privilege of serving on the Mladic trial chamber. And after his remarkable genocide epiphany he was happy to sign the verdict, in which the “genocide” charge evidently no longer bothered his delicate conscience.

The Flügge precedent is therefore something well to keep in mind when calibrating expectations from judge Prisca Matimba, without derogating in the least from the significance of her extraordinary dissenting opinion in the Tolimir case. No matter what, that will remain a unique and inspiring expression of professional integrity and can still be inhaled as a rare breath of fresh air in the miasmic swamp of the Hague Tribunal.

On June 8, General Ratko Mladic’s appointed judgment day, we will find out if there are any limits to the power of the Hague Tribunal to reengineer recalcitrant human souls. Should it succeed in whipping into line even the brave Zambian lady and superb legal professional Prisca Matimba, that will come as a sad disappointment indeed but also as another ringing confirmation of the inherent fallenness of human nature.

Whether we choose to view Srebrenica as a criminal investigation to sort out who and at whose direction executed prisoners of war, or as a political provocation to lay the groundwork for chronic instability in the Balkans and furnish a plausible rationale for Western interventionism under the guise of the Right to Protect doctrine, or both, a quarter of a century later we still do not have answers to even the most fundamental questions about it.

We cannot draw any settled, factual conclusions about who ordered prisoner executions (never mind the real number of victims, which even at a more realistic eighth of the inflated and now politically correct figure is appalling enough), or why, even though the prisoners would have been vastly more useful to the Serbian side if exchanged for Serb POWs instead of being uselessly shot, nor do we even know who the actual executioners might have been. Oddly, for what under the aegis of the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) should have been a proper criminal investigation, very little solid data has emerged. With the glaring exception of a murky individual by the name of Dražen Erdemović, a single, self-confessed executioner who conveniently turned prosecution witness in return for a ridiculously light sentence, twenty-five years later we are still in the dark about both the intellectual authorship of the crime and who actually committed it.

The unanswered, and one suspects deliberately obfuscated, questions about Srebrenica are not mere trifles. They go to the very core of what happened and why.

That Srebrenica is still an issue so many years later is mainly to the “credit” of the aforementioned International Tribunal in the Hague, set up in in 1993 in contravention of the UN Charter and specifically to juridically validate the “international community’s” preconceived view, articulated by U.S. intelligence agencies and purveyed to the public by no less than the New York Times, that Serbs were responsible for “90% of the crimes” committed during the war in Bosnia. Coming in March 1995, barely a few months before Srebrenica, this guesstimate was a remarkable example of predictive conditioning.

The Tribunal, or as one of its more notable prisoners General Ratko Mladić has called it – “the NATO commission,” pursued its vindictive task with relentless efficacy. Its dubious judgments largely confirmed the aforementioned predictive estimate. Roughly 80% of its designated war criminals just happened to be Serbs.

Soon after the Hague Tribunal opened for business in the late 1990s manipulation of the evidence became the hallmark of its “investigative” practices. If evidence sought to be acquired by one method failed to yield the desired results, that method was simply jettisoned in favour of a more promising approach. Beginning in 1996, the Prosecution of the Hague Tribunal organized forensic teams to exhume victims of the Srebrenica massacre, which were determined to number around 8,000 before a single mass grave was even opened. When ultimately the body count proved disappointing, in 2001 the forensic teams were inexplicably withdrawn and a new approach involving DNA identification was launched. It was now claimed that mass grave body parts could be matched with alleged relatives who had given their DNA samples, in order to push the tally within reach of the target 8,000 victim figure. When defence teams demanded physical delivery of biological samples in order to have them tested in an independent laboratory, their reasonable request hit a huge snag. The ICTY chamber flatly refused to enforce Article 66 [B] of ICTY’s Rules of Procedure and Evidence to enable “the defence to inspect any documents [and] tangible objects in the Prosecutor’s custody or control” if that meant that the Prosecution’s shoddy DNA evidence could be undermined.

Equally questionable is the evidence that anything resembling genocide had occurred in Srebrenica. In fact, the Tribunal as much as admitted that such evidence was lacking when counterintuitively it found (a) that evidence of a genocidal plan was unnecessary to make a finding of genocide and, as if that were not odd enough, that (b) it was also unable to determine when the decision to commit genocide in Srebrenica was made, or by whom. Instead, in the Krstić case the ICTY chamber conjured up the “mosaic theory” of evidence involving the cobbling together of a judicial narrative by assembling disparate and indirect data in a Rorschach Test image it alone was self-authorized to interpret. Relying on that user-friendly doctrine, a multiplicity of ICTY chambers predictably concluded that a ghastly massacre in July of 1995 of up to a thousand POWs (officially still 8,000, of course) at the conclusion of a bitterly fought ethnic conflict in a remote part of Bosnia was an event on a par with the Holocaust and the extermination of Armenians during World War I. Of course, distinguished legal scholars, not just Prof. William Schabas, but also Prof. Michael Mandel and Prof. George Szamuely would respectfully disagree, but so far not to much avail against the judicial concoctions of the Tribunal’s hack judges.

But while Srebrenica – as it was meant to – has certainly played a hugely disruptive role on the local stage, cementing the enmity always bubbling beneath the surface in relations between Bosnia’s constituent religions and ethnicities, it has played an arguably even more sinister role in geopolitical terms. The slogan fashioned by Western NATO interventionists soon after the Srebrenica narrative officially crystallized, “Never again Srebrenica,” actually became the cynical rationale for many more Srebrenicas under the guise of humanitarian interventions supposedly to save beleaguered nations from disobedient dictators who were all, as if on cue, “killing their own people.” The ruins of Libya and Syria are striking illustrations of the devastation wrought by the application of that pseudo humanitarian slogan. It is something that only rapacious imperialists or luciferian misanthropes could manufacture and call it a rescue mission.

The virus epidemic is a tool for achieving a new level of regimentation for mankind and for elitist restructuring of the neo-liberal financial and economic system, while its victims cower helplessly under curfew, in fear of contagion. The ambitious Srebrenica operation was conceived, under cover of sanctimonious cant, also as a tool to achieve several strategically important objectives. The main one, as it turned out, was to furnish a rationale for the cynically misnamed Right to Protect doctrine, enabling Western imperialist powers to arrogate to themselves the sole right of intervening to “rescue” endangered nations. In the process, several million innocent Muslim lives, many times the number of alleged Srebrenica victims, were pitilessly sacrificed for the plunder of their countries´ coveted natural resources and geopolitical advantage.

Neither narrative would have succeeded without the unconditional support of the corrupt globalist media, drowning out critical voices which recommended a careful study of the facts and a cautious approach to drawing momentous conclusions without solid evidence. Through alternative news sources, we are now learning extremely interesting things about the dreaded Covid-19. It seems that this type of virus is quite common, at least in its laboratory-unmodified form, that it is not necessarily lethal unless certain very stringent conditions are met, and that it is not even as easily communicable as the induced hysteria has claimed. Over a much longer period of time, since Srebrenica in 1995, we have learned that there is no forensic evidence to support nearly 8,000 executions and that a considerable quantity of remains of men killed in combat was callously misrepresented as belonging to execution victims. All the exhumed bodies around Srebrenica were automatically adjudged to belong to execution victims who were subjected to genocide. Similarly, anybody dying today with even a trace of Corona virus in their system is automatically listed as a victim of the pandemic, so publicly cited statistics could be made to look more intimidating.

Oddly, or perhaps not, when speaking of statistics, in both cases they utterly fail to buttress the official story. A careful comparison of mortality data for the United Kingdom over the last several years and this year, since the officially proclaimed pandemic began, shows no significant increase in recorded deaths. Would the situation be found to be different in other countries if their data were studied as meticulously? Similarly, after the “genocide,” in Srebrenica the Muslim population continued to be in the majority and for many years controlled the local administration. A Serb mayor finally was elected quite recently, supported by many disgruntled Muslim voters mainly because his predecessor was seen as incompetent and corrupt.

Another notable parallel is that making waves about either narrative, Covid-19 or Srebrenica, is not a good idea and can result in social and professional ostracism. Both narratives serve as the norm of political correctness in their respective spheres. Denial, or even insistence on a nuanced alternative explanation, is without examination equally scorned as a “conspiracy theory.” Wikipedia features a meticulous listing of “Srebrenica genocide deniers” so that they may be exposed to deserved public calumny for their heretical views. A similar hit list of “coronavirus deniers” has also emerged recently. Strategies for getting “coronavirus sceptics” into the right-thinking fold are being actively developed. When persuasion is no longer enough, what will come next?

The officially sacralized narratives, both Srebrenica and now Coronavirus, have tested human credulity to the limit. May we ever be allowed to question protected tales, even when under the onslaught of facts they make less and less sense? As Peter Hitchens has cogently argued, the demise of critical thinking (as well as common sense) in the fabled West has taken an alarming turn:

“We demonstrated, in fact, that we don’t really have a civil society any longer. What shocked me having spent such a long time in the Soviet Union is that under the Soviet Union’s rule most people regarded it with a certain amount of contempt, made jokes about it, realized they were being mocked and fooled. In this case the population accept what they’re being told without any question. It’s extraordinary. The old USSR would have loved to have a population like the current western world which actually genuinely believe the propaganda and does what it’s told.”

Only Oswald Spengler may have put it better, in the very title of his masterwork, Der Untergang des Abendlandes.

As from time to time has been the case, Western sources have again disclosed some information about Srebrenica in July 1995, which until recently was kept confidential and therefore not available to the public. The source of this particular batch of documents is the UK Department of Defense. The documents that have finally been declassified contains very interesting assessments and reports that take on even greater significance when cross-checked against data which are already known. The document that has attracted the most attention is a letter from a Ministry of Defense official under the date of July 11, 1995, sent to Roderick Lyne, private secretary to the then Prime Minister John Major. The purpose of the letter was to brief Major through his private secretary on developments in the Srebrenica area in order to enable the Prime Minister to handle expected parliamentary questions on that subject.

A definitive judgment on these until quite recently inaccessible documents (they were released by the National Archive of the United Kingdom on December 31, 2019) must await thorough examination. Both the subject matter and everything we know from these and other official sources suggests the conclusion that these are issues too important to be left to very selective and often shallow media interpretations.

But even if we were to confine ourselves to the fragments with which the general public has now been acquainted, some significant and, for the official Srebrenica narrative, rather unfavorable conclusions may even now be drawn.

First and foremost, we see here a report emanating from the British Ministry of Defense, dated July 11, 1995, which matter of factly informs the Prime Minister that at that particular moment British intelligence services lacked knowledge of any intention on the part of the Republika Srpska Army to conquer Srebrenica and place the enclave under its control. (Bosnian Serb army forces did enter Srebrenica on that very day, but that was widely acknowledged to have been an opportunistic move, no resistance having been encountered.) This British assessment is of great importance because of the implications that emanate from it.

According to the “facts” alleged by the Hague Tribunal in its numerous judgments, the “genocide” is supposed to have begun only two days later, on 13 July. Why is this chronology important?

Because for “genocide” to have occurred in the legal sense of the term, even of a relatively small group of 8,000 people (if we compare that to the scope of the extermination of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Jews under the Nazis, or Serbs in the Nazi-aligned Croation state during World War II), presupposes the existence of specific intent, as well as adequate logistical preparation.

To that end, the Hague Tribunal has unpersuasively construed meetings held at the Fontana Hotel in nearby Bratunac on 12 July to bolster its conclusions (see Krstic Trial Judgment, paragraphs 126-134). In its comments, the Tribunal itself accepts that these meetings were held shortly before the alleged genocidal events, in fact only a day before a crime of such serious magnitude was supposed to have begun, but at the same time it acknowledges that there is no “concrete evidence” of the existence of a genocidal plan. Furthermore, the only direct perpetrator of the “genocide” to have been brought before that court, the mildly punished Drazen Erdemovic, who turned Prosecution witness, when cross-examined by defendant Radovan Karadzic admitted freely that neither he nor his colleagues from the 10th Sabotage Detachment execution squad were motivated by the intent to exterminate Muslims when taking part in the execution of war prisoners at Branjevo. As for logistics, since the intent evidently could not have been formed until the eve of the “genocide”, the issue is practically moot. Since no evidence of logistics to carry out such a large-scale killing operation was discovered, there are no specific allegations or details in ICTY judgments on this important issue.

A review of the documents already publicly available for some time makes it crystal clear that the “sensational disclosures” from the British archives must already have been known to anyone with a serious interest in these issues.

The Hague Tribunal’s long-time chief investigator, Jean-Rene Ruez, said much the same thing as the recently declassified British documents when he testified before the French Parliamentary Commission on Srebrenica in 2001. The British Defense Ministry’s assessment subsequently proved to be essentially correct, but since it was drawn up contemporaneously with the events to which it refers, it did not necessarily have to be. However, Ruez’s assessment is retrospective, made five years after the event, with the benefit of insight into the relevant documentation, and it therefore carries more weight. A very precise sequence of events, which virtually rules out the possibility that the official version of the event could be accurate, was presented by ICTY military prosecutor Richard Butler at the “Pelemis and Peric” trial before the Bosnia and Herzegovina War Crimes Court in Sarajevo in 2010. Therefore, far from constituting a sensation, British MoD documents are important pieces of the mosaic that do not disclose anything basically new. They do, however, round out a picture that was already familiar.

Another important detail that the British documents do not reveal, but certainly do confirm, is the refusal of members of the 28th Division of the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina, whose troop strength in July 1995 was about 5,000, to engage in natural and normal conduct in the situation in which they found themselves (also here, footnote 28). The armed outfit in question did virtually nothing to counter “one company and four tanks” (a direct quotation from the British MoD document) of the Bosnian Serb Army that was approaching Srebrenica from the south side of the enclave. To journalists, this may appear as a sensation, but for those who have studied these matters in the context of the Bosnian war — it definitely is not.

Foreign observers who happened to be in the immediate vicinity or who were following the events on the ground in some official capacity have shed light on this mystery. For example, Portuguese General Martins Branco, Deputy Commander of the UN Observation Mission at the time of the events in question, made the following observation in his memoir, “The War in the Balkans,” published in 2017:

“The topography of the Srebrenica region, as well as Eastern Bosnia as a whole, is very hilly. The virgin, densely forested landscapes and deep ditches make it difficult to move combat vehicles and facilitate infantry operations. The numerical ratio of forces, when considered in relation to the terrain properties, which undoubtedly favors the defenders, suggests that the ARBiH forces had more than enough manpower to defend themselves. However, they failed to do so.”

Other observers made similar assertions as Martins Branco (here, pp. 47-48). So once again the British documents did not reveal anything fundamentally new, but the fact that they have been made public is nevertheless helpful because one can never go too far stressing the startling fact that in Srebrenica there was no resistance and that the armed and much more numerous “men and boys” withdrew to the mountains, leaving their womenfolk and elderly unprotected in the face of an “aggressor” who by that time in their eyes had already acquired a genocidal reputation.

Finally, the question must be raised: why did they act that way? Was it to take the opportunity to lure the Serb forces into a strategic trap (remember General Morillon’s testimony at The Hague, where he used precisely such language to describe the situation), hoping the Serbs would slaughter several thousand refugees in Potocari? That certainly would have satisfied the terms of Izetbegovic’s and Clinton’s secret convention, which envisioned exactly such a scenario in order to ensure the political preconditions for a US intervention in the conflict.

It is almost always the case when new files concerning Srebrenica are opened, whether the result is really new data or just a confirmation of already known facts, that not only do these disclosures in no way help the official narrative, but on the contrary they systematically undermine it. It is not surprising therefore for such information to have been kept under lock and key for decades precisely so as not to disturb the prevailing, concocted narrative in the expectation that buying time (and criminalizing “genocide denial”) would assist the narrative in taking hold.

The Karl Rovian way the process of rearranging reality now unfolds was recently explained by Craig Murray, a former British ambassador, in a remarkable article, “The Terrifying Rise of the Zombie State Narrative”. The ruling establishment, Murray claims, has learnt one important lesson from the collapse of the official lies about the non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction: “Never to admit they lied, never to admit they were wrong.”

And the same goes now for all their monumental lies, from the pretext for invading Iraq to Srebrenica, and more recently the political crisis engendered by the cold-blooded assassination at Baghdad airport on January 3. The security services, Murray writes, understand “that in future they just have to brazen it out.” If a hypothetical situation like the mythical Iraqi weapons were to recur today “and the security services decided to brazen it out” by asserting deliberately the false claim that the armaments were in fact found, “there is not a mainstream media outlet that would contradict them.“

The rebuttable or easily refuted claims that are blatantly disseminated and parroted, and believed by millions who blindly take them at face value even though evidence refuting them is close at hand, Murray christens “zombie narratives.” Srebrenica is undoubtedly one of the prominent illustrations of Murray’s thesis.

The “declassification” of the British documents is therefore no evidence of Western transparency or democratic will to keep the public informed. It is proof, rather, of a perfidious damage-control tactic. As we have seen, some of the major “disclosures” in the British documents have long been in the public domain and have gradually been seeping into the public discourse. Extending the embargo would accomplish nothing, but the removal of the secrecy mark should impress the simpleminded who may imagine that this is evidence of regrettably belated, but still highly commendable “transparency” of the Western system.

Those who think this way have already forgotten the farce about finally making public the remaining, most sensitive documents about the assassination of John Kennedy. In the 1990s, Congress explicitly ordered that by 2017 everything must be disclosed, even the last scrap of paper. Yet, under a Presidential directive countermanding Congressional instructions, 2017 has come and gone but the most compromising documents remain locked away for several additional decades, for the reasons of “national security” to which Murray has alluded. Locked away and unpublished documents on Srebrenica surely also abound in the secret files of “all the usual suspects,” as Captain Louis Renault picturesquely put in the movie “Casablanca.”

The availability of these British Srebrenica documents — assuming Ambassador Murray is correct — may in some circles achieve a favorable propaganda effect for the UK, but in relation to Srebrenica, a wall of blatantly imposed lies will not permit them to change or meaningfully challenge anything. Tactical damage control operations should not be confused with permission to touch the core of a protected zombie narrative.

If in 2015 the general public were unaware of these “sensational” documents kept in the British Defense Ministry safe, the British government certainly were. Yet, that did not prevent them from attempting to push through in the UN Security Council a resolution chastising the Serbian nation for genocide in Srebrenica. The resolution failed only thanks to the veto placed by the Russian Federation. And as we now learn, British government sources, in their own contemporaneous and confidential report, had frankly stated that their misleading resolution alleging genocide in Srebrenica was to do with an attack undertaken by a local commander, not by the Bosnian Serb military and political leadership in Pale, and therefore even less probably so by the Serbian leadership in Belgrade.

Canada is the latest champion of Western, trans-Atlantic values that is sending a clear message to the world that such assumptions are poppycock.

A major scrupulously legal assault on freedom of speech and conscience as well as scholarly research (and we are not talking here about the rampaging of informal terror squads such as Antifa) is in the works in Canada. A Srebrenica genocide denial law is coming up soon for parliamentary vote in Ottawa. It is being sponsored by MP Brian Masse (brian.masse@parl.gc.ca). The pending bill is the result of a petition filed by a Bosniak lobby group in Canada, “Institute for genocide research.” The “institute” is not known to have published a single serious and academically viable book or scholarly paper on any subject whatsoever, including Srebrenica. It is a comically misnamed ethnic pressure group financed, as usual, by mysterious patrons. But given the manufactured climate of opinion, unless this bill is strongly and competently opposed, there is little doubt about the outcome.

Here is some basic information about this parliamentary project, now known as Petition No. 421-03975, presented to the House of Commons on May 29, 2019.

And here is the maudlin nonsense the measure’s sponsor, Brian Masse, spouted in Canada’s House of Commons as he put the matter before his colleagues:

“Madam Speaker … the House unanimously declared April as ‘Genocide Remembrance, Condemnation and Awareness Month’ and named genocides, which have been recognized by Canada’s House of Commons, including the Srebrenica genocide.

“It is time for the government to extend resources to commemorate the victims and survivors of genocide, educate the public and to take specific action to counteract genocide denial, a pernicious form of hate which reopens wounds and reinvigorates division. Truth is justice; honesty is the path to reconciliation and peace.”

Just so that no one is taken in by this fine rhetoric, the geopolitical significance of Srebrenica (forget about truth, justice, reconciliation, and peace) should briefly be recalled. The alleged failure in July of 1995 of the collective West to come to the rescue of 8,000 “men and boys” in Srebrenica was transfigured into the pretext for the “Right to protect” (R2P) doctrine. That fraudulent rationale was used for subsequent “humanitarian interventions” which wrecked and plundered at least half a dozen countries and cost about two million mostly Muslim lives.

But contrary to interventionist propaganda and the simplistic cant of politicians, always campaigning to attract a few more ethnic votes and to impress the political correctness brigade with their loyalty to the right causes, in the real-world there exist complex issues not given to simplistic reductionism. Srebrenica is one of them. (Also here, here, and here.) To paraphrase Polonius, there are indeed “more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of by politicians,” eager to please special interests.

One of the major pertinent issues here, of course, is the factual question of what actually happened in Srebrenica. A staggering amount of research has been done on that subject that one supposes busy politicians, long out of school, may be excusably ignorant of. Canadian politicians in particular may be generously excused for not keeping up with Srebrenica developments because their hands are presumably full sorting out genocides closer to home.

A fundamental issue that comes to mind straightaway, and voters anxious to protect their liberties might want to bring it to the attention of their parliamentary deputies, has to do with freedom of speech and conscience, not whether or not genocide occurred in Srebrenica. Section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms rather unambiguously guarantees “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication” as fundamental rights. May the supreme law of the land be taken at face value? Or is it a flexible document, like the Stalin Constitution of 1936? How do MP Masse and colleagues who are contemplating to vote for his “genocide denial” bill propose to reconcile its language with the liberties which are constitutionally guaranteed to all citizens of Canada (and presumably also to foreign nationals on Canadian territory)? Or with the fact that Canada is also party to international agreements which guarantee freedom of conscience and expression, such as the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Articles 18 and 19 of the Declaration, which deal with freedoms of thought, opinion, and expression should in particular be pondered by Canada’s lawmakers.

The ghastly thing about this is that the Srebrenica genocide denial law would not even change anybody’s mind about Srebrenica. But it would suppress (have a “chilling effect,” as they aptly put it in neighboring America) public discourse on the subject and would therefore constitute a serious infringement of Canadian citizens’ human rights. That is the issue of principle. All but zealous Balkan combatants should manage easily to agree on this much, and it ought to be gently stressed to befuddled Canadian legislators. A member of parliament is free to think whatever he or she wants about Srebrenica, with or without adequate information on the subject, including that it was genocide. But for Canadian citizens of all stripes and backgrounds, including those who happen to be legislators, their fellow-citizens’ freedom of expression should take absolute priority over the agenda of a Balkan lobby. A legislator who sincerely thinks that Srebrenica was genocide can and should still vote against Petition no. 421-03975 on freedom of speech and conscience grounds alone. Assuming that those values matter in countries that boastfully claim to have copyrighted them.

It so happens that the aforementioned bogus “Institute for genocide research” has a record of attempts at free speech suppression, targeting those who think differently about its pet projects. In 2011 the “institute” made an unsuccessful attempt to steer a Srebrenica genocide denial law through the Canadian parliament. “Institute” scholars then took their revenge on American-Serbian professor Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, preventing his entry into Canada to deliver a lecture in Vancouver by falsely alleging to immigration authorities that he was a dangerous hatemonger, or something to that effect. The incident at the time was amply covered by Global Research. Prof. Trifkovic fought the spurious allegation against him energetically in Canadian courts and won. The upshot of it was that Canadian taxpayers lost considerable treasure in a wasteful judicial confrontation instigated by agenda-driven lobbyists.

The proposed law, be it mentioned in passing, is also manifestly discriminatory in relation to the Canadian-Serbian community. Considering the cultural role of spitefulness (inat is the native word) in the region that the lobbyists come from, that may well be its true and ultimate inspiration. Is there a single Canadian Serb who thinks that what occurred in Srebrenica was genocide? The proposed law would nevertheless have a discriminatory effect on the ability of members of the Canadian Serbian community, as such, to enjoy the freedom of expression guaranteed to them and to all Canadians by Canada’s constitution. As Canadian Serbs, they would be obliged to either maintain public silence about an issue they regard as being of vital interest to their nation and community or, were they to speak up in accordance with the dictates of their conscience, to face criminal prosecution. So much for all the “Atlantic Charters” and their associated “freedoms.”

Canadian legislators should ponder the fact that Canada does not have a Holocaust denial law protecting the dignity of six million victims, yet its parliament is contemplating a massive curtailment of its citizens’ civil rights in a matter involving 8,000 unverified deaths. That is a degradation and in-the-face mockery of the pain of the Jewish community. But it gets even worse, or tragicomic if one prefers. In its Tolimir judgment in 2012, the vaunted Hague Tribunal ruled that the killing of three individuals in the nearby enclave of Zepa (which is part of the same conceptual package with Srebrenica) constituted genocide (Trial Judgment, Par. 1147 – 1154). That was allegedly because those individuals were endowed with such extraordinary importance within the community of Zepa that, as a result of their demise, the community was rendered unviable, hence subjected to genocide. The point is that denying this absurd and tortuously reasoned finding of the Hague Tribunal concerning Zepa (a place that assuredly no member of the Canadian parliament had ever even heard of) by operation of the projected genocide denial law would also subject the careless speaker who took his rights seriously to criminal liability. That is the absurd level to which the “genocide denial” rhetoric has degenerated.

As an American citizen, this writer is quite prepared to stand in any public square in Canada and to proclaim that Srebrenica was not genocide. It would in fact be a pleasure to be detained by Her Majesty’s authorities in order to accomplish a lofty civic purpose that should benefit all Canadians. The resulting proceedings would ultimately enhance Canada’s judicial culture by testing the constitutionality of this legal travesty before the Canadian supreme court.

In the immortal words of Diana Johnstone, the “denial” of Srebrenica “genocide” is sufficiently justified by the fact that it is not true. The Srebrenica lobby and its eager acolytes in Canada’s Federal Parliament in Ottawa should grow up and accept that.

Stephen Kinzer’s 1994 New York Times piece on Amanpour succinctly described her – and her employer’s – methods, quoting a “network insider” wishing to remain anonymous:

“I have winced at some of what she's done, at what used to be called advocacy journalism," he said. “She was sitting in Belgrade when that marketplace massacre happened, and she went on the air to say that the Serbs had probably done it. There was no way she could have known that. She was assuming an omniscience which no journalist has.”

The massacre in question was the explosion at the Sarajevo “Markale” marketplace of February 5, 1994, which led to a NATO ultimatum to the Bosnian Serbs to withdraw their heavy weapons from around the Bosnian capital, part of a steady march towards NATO’s first military engagement in the alliance’s history, which opened the doors to its subsequent eastward expansion, which has just about revived the Cold War in Europe.

As it turned out, it wasn’t the Serbs that were responsible for the shelling that caused the massacre, which resulted in over 200 casualties, including 68 civilian dead – but the Western media darling Bosnian Muslims. According to a Deutsche Presse-Agentur report, “a U.N. report clearly blamed the Muslims for firing on their own people in order to create international sympathy and get the West to fight on their side against the Serbs.”

Unfortunately, the DPA report was published only after two years of systematic obfuscation:

“Until Thursday, U.N. officials strongly denied the report existed, even after it was quoted in press reports. [U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Yasushi] Akashi told DPA that not only did the first report exist, but that some journalists already had a copy. He said the details were in a 1995 story by U.S. journalist David Binder, who quoted from the confidential report.

According to Binder, the report said U.N. peacekeepers were prevented by Muslim police from entering the site in the aftermath of the explosion. No doctors were allowed on the scene and the 197 victims were carried away to a hospital within 25 minutes.

After studying the crater left by the mortar shell and the distribution of the shrapnel, the report concluded that the shell was fired from behind Muslim lines. U.N. monitors reported no Serbian shelling that day from points near the marketplace.

The official U.N. report that was subsequently released said the evidence as to who fired the shell was inconclusive, since it originated from an area where Muslim and Serb lines were very close. The two reports represented divergent views, but the United Nations chose to publish the neutral report and keep the other secret.”

By the time the truth came out (the DPA report was dated June 6, 1996), NATO had found a new meaning in life, Bosnia and Herzegovina had been turned into a Western protectorate, “humanitarian interventionism” had gained the necessary momentum, and the unipolar war machine could move on to the bombing of what remained of Yugoslavia – Serbia and Montenegro – in spring of 1999, without bothering to get a U.N. mandate, leading to the subsequent forcible secession of Serbia’s Kosovo province and its transformation into a crime-ridden, Islamist infested, terrorist-ruled failed state, proudly overseen by the EU and NATO. Well done Amanpour and CNN! (Note also the striking similarities with the Syrian “poison gas” false flag attacks – it seems that the Yugoslav civil war was a veritable breeding ground for interventionist ideas and media scenography.)

The Markale deception was far from the only one involving CNN and its star reporter in their coverage of the Yugoslav wars. There was, for example, the deliberate misidentification of the Bosnian Muslim/Croat stronghold of Kiseljak as Serb only to underscore faux Serb “cruelty” (“While people in Sarajevo are dying from starvation, the Serbs are living here in plenty”). There was the staging of scenes involving Kosovo Albanian refugees fleeing the NATO bombing to neighboring Macedonia: 

“Mr. Stojcic… witnessed a CNN camera crew coaching refugees on how to act for the cameras. He eye-witnessed a man cross the border with two children. CNN spoke to the man and sent him back to cross the border so that he could cross again in front of the camera, the second time the man crossed over he had his children crying for the cameras.

Mr. Stojcic also witnessed a group of refugees throwing a child in to the mud; a CNN camera crew then filmed the child after it was crying and covered in mud. The witness identified Christiane Amanpour as the CNN reporter who was on the spot in the refugee camps. He said that CNN was the worst media outlet, as it was the most prone to staging scenes for its news broadcasts”.

And there was involvement in the choreography surrounding the staged “massacre” in the Kosovo village of Racak, where Serbian police liquidated terrorists belonging to the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) during a firefight, but which was used as the “humanitarian” trigger (“galvanizing incident” in the words of then U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright) for the illegal NATO bombing of Yugoslavia:

“Further investigation shows that two TV journalists for Associated Press and two teams of OSCE observers also saw the fight for Racak from a hill, entered when Serb security forces did and left when they left. The AP crew filmed a deserted village. It was overnight that the KLA returned and gathered their dead from the fighting. Next day, [Head of OSCE’s Kosovo Verification Mission, U.S. diplomat William] Walker told the world how adults and children had been ‘executed,’ some as they tried to flee. CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour, wife of U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin, showed little skepticism in reporting on the ‘massacre of civilians’.”

CNN was even caught using Pentagon psyops personnel from the Fourth Psychological Operations Group based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to “help” with its reporting of NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, surely to make it more “objective.”

But it was the construction of the narrative of the Srebrenica “genocide” that was perhaps the crown jewel of CNN’s and the rest of Western MSM reporting from ex-Yugoslavia. Its function was not just to demonize the Serbs, but rather the construction of one of the “founding myths” of post-Cold War Western interventionism, embodied in the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine, subsequently used to justify worldwide “humanitarian interventions” – spearheaded by the usual suspects, the U.S. and/or NATO – from Kosovo, to Iraq, Libya, and Syria (hello CNN!). During the two decades long unipolar moment, Srebrenica was manufactured into one of the most important symbols of militant neolibcon globalism and its unchained “tyranny of good intentions.”

So it was not surprising that CNN and fading Hollywood globalist icon Angelina Jolie recently teamed up in order to keep the Srebrenica myth flame burning. Using the occasion of the death of Hatidza Mehmedovic, a Bosnian woman that led the Association of the Mothers of Srebrenica, Jolie and CNN regurgitated the now familiar Western propaganda claims about the “the worst massacre on European soil since the Holocaust,” and the “at least 8,000 innocent men and boys” that were executed by bloodthirsty Serb troops in July 1995.

Never mind the fact that not even the NATO-financed War Crimes Tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia in The Hague has dared invoke the now discredited “more than 8,000” figure in its later judgments; that one of the Tribunal’s judges recently admitted that “if any of the victims’ family members were to ask him who ordered the executions and why, he would be unable to answer”; that no mention is ever made of the thousands of Serb civilians from nearby villages brutally massacred during the previous three years by armed Bosnian Muslim troops using Srebrenica’s UN “demilitarized zone” status as a base of operations; of the “black flights” bringing arms to Srebrenica (while NATO was enforcing the “no fly zone” above Bosnia-Herzegovina); of Bill Clinton having assured the Bosnian Muslim leader, Alija Izetbegovich, that there would be a NATO intervention if the Serbs were to kill “at least 5,000 people” in Srebrenica; that incoming Serb forces were vastly outnumbered and outgunned by the defending Bosnian Muslim troops; that credible sources, UN and even U.S. officials and experts have put the number of executed prisoners into the hundreds, rather than thousands, while estimating that anywhere from 2000 to 5000 of the “genocide” victims were in fact Bosnian Muslim Army military casualties fallen in battle with Serb forces or internecine fighting; that the forensic evidence used by the Tribunal to pass “genocide” verdicts is highly suspect and not subject to independent verification; that a number of family members of “genocide victims” have reburied their loved ones’ bodies outside of the Srebrenica Memorial cemetery having become aware of the massive manipulation with victim numbers, identities, and true causes of death; that the Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center himself has publicly stated on several occasions that what happened in Srebrenica “does not fit the description or definition of genocide” (but, of course, Angelina Jolie and CNN know better!) etc. (See here for a more detailed debunking of the Srebrenica propaganda myth.)

But, why quibble about the facts if you can continue your fake news narrative in parallel with “atrocity porn” virtue-signaling, keeping alive the humanitarian interventionist flame in the face of NATO’s increasingly uncertain future in the Age of Trump, if you can use the occasion of someone’s death to keep the Clintonite legacy on life support at least until 2020, and the CNN and MSM-manufactured Fake-News Balkans protectorate – based on the lie of “Serb aggression” and scapegoating for the German and, later, U.S.-led dismemberment of Yugoslavia – somehow intact in the face of “malign Russian influence” and the unthinkable prospect of U.S.-Russian rapprochement…

If anything useful can be gleaned out of “CNNgelina’s” latest addition to the Srebrenica and Balkan faux narrative, it is the reminder that it’s not just Trump who has the fake news problem, and that it didn’t start with him or his election. By repeating for the umpteenth time the discredited Srebrenica lies, CNN has reminded us just how much they are willing and able to lie about everything else. And just how great a danger to global peace the unrepentantly Orwellian and potent combination of Western MSM propaganda, Hollywood “liberalism” and NATO’s globalized militarism truly represents.

Irrespective of whether one is prepared or not to attribute serious weight to this information as presented by the British media, it is highly unlikely that in the context of the Security Council debate the reference to the sinister “package” meant much, if anything at all, to the ordinary viewer. However, someone versed in the Srebrenica controversy recognized immediately the message embedded in the emerging narrative. The British intelligence “Russian package intercept” was the rehashing of a story already seen and heard before.

Under remarkably similar circumstances during the war in Bosnia, an allegedly “intercepted conversation,” also allegedly couched in highly coded language, and also referring to sinister “packages,” played a crucial role in the trial and conviction of Serbian General Radislav Krstić for “aiding and abetting in the commission of Srebrenica genocide.” In that alleged intercept which was, incidentally, accepted into evidence by the Hague Tribunal without ever being subjected to a proper forensic analysis, the conversation supposedly revolved around “3,500 packages that must be distributed.” The trial chamber of the Hague Tribunal which heard the Krstić case deciphered these cleverly constructed shibboleths very conveniently to mean that the 3,500 packages was a reference to as many captured enemy soldiers, while the mysterious word „distribution“ was held by the court to be a coded allusion to their imminent execution.

So, the lineage of the extraordinary information shared by the London “Times” on 9 April 2018 about the appearance of sinister “packages” in Syria takes us directly back to the Srebrenica “genocide” intercept hoax of two decades ago. The fact that the metaphor has now been resuscitated, at just the right time to be conveniently fitted into both false narratives de jour, the Sergey Skripal poisoning in England and the fabricated mass poisoning in Syria, points irrefutably to the advanced state of sclerosis gripping Western propaganda mavens. Their reserves of imagination are exhausted, so they invariably always return to yesterday’s threadbare matrix. Whatever partial success in mass deception they are still having, the credit is due not to the brilliancy of their skills but exclusively to the public’s notoriously short memory and even shorter attention span. For quite a long time they have not produced a single original idea. Another example comes to mind.

When the Norwegian documentary “Srebrenica: A Town Betrayed”, was broadcast in 2011, great offense was taken because testimony was included that Bosnian Muslim President Alija Izetbegović used the occasion of a Muslim political gathering in Sarajevo in late September 1993 to discuss an amazing offer made to him by President Bill Clinton. If Serbs could be lured into capturing Srebrenica and then committing the slaughter of at least 5,000 residents – so this callous offer allegedly went — the massacre would impress American public opinion sufficiently to gain public support for President Clinton’s intervention in the war on the Bosnian Muslim side.

The probability that this version of events, shocking as it may be, might contain a grain of truth gained considerable corroboration somewhat later when another curious set of circumstance came to light. In the aftermath of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, it turned out that Kosovo Albanians were also being talked by someone into entertaining expectations very similar to those held by the Bosnian Muslims shortly before. They were told, as we subsequently learned, that if they managed to engineer the sacrifice of about 5,000 Albanian civilians at the hands of Serbian forces in Kosovo, the resulting outrage would ensure the intervention of NATO forces on their behalf. In a broadcast on BBC2, 12 March 2000, Kosovo Albanian negotiator Dugi Gorani expounds that proposition as follows: “The more civilians were killed, the chances of international intervention became bigger, and the Kosovo Liberation Army [KLA] of course realised that. There was this foreign diplomat who once told me, 'Look unless you pass the quota of five thousand deaths you'll never have anybody permanently present in Kosovo from the foreign diplomacy’”. 

It used to be possible to view a video clip of Gorani’s remarks until inexplicably it disappeared from the internet. Luckily, the transcript still survives on BBC’s website. 

For those inclined to believe that Izetbegović and Kosovo Albanian leaders would have hesitated to inflict such an outrage on their own people for mere political gain, the following segment of the same BBC broadcast suggests otherwise:

ALAN LITTLE [programme announcer] : [1]
It was a calculated but dangerous gamble. The KLA's political leader Hashim Thaqi now admits that he knew the Serbs would retaliate against innocent civilians.

HASIM THACI [KLA leader]:
Any armed action we undertook would bring retaliation against civilians. We knew we were endangering a great number of civilian lives. 

The calculating stance of the Albanian side, devoid of humanitarian compunctions, was reaffirmed by Gorani as follows: “Every single Albanian realised that the more civilians die, intervention comes nearer…” 

BBC’s NATO bombing post-mortem in the year 2000 is of interest also for laying bare the interventionist rationale on the Western side.

ALAN LITTLE [programme announcer]:
The western world was still haunted by a profound collective guilt: it knew it had waited too long to intervene in Bosnia. Now one woman resolved not to make the same mistake again. 

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT [US Secretary of State]:
I believed in the ultimate power, the goodness of the power of the allies and led by the United States. We were dealing with such a basic evil that could not be tolerated… I thought it behooved me to say to my colleagues that we could not repeat the kinds of mistakes that had happened over in Bosnia, where there was a lot of talk and no action and that history would judge us very, very severely. 

That evil, it was helpfully explained by Little, were the designs of Slobodan Milošević: “He'd persuaded the Serbian people that they were surrounded by predatory enemies, and led them to war against their neighbours… The world had failed to defend the Bosnians against Milosevic. In 1995, Serb forces marched into Srebrenica and murdered seven thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys. In the West, many came to believe that the lessons of Bosnia could now be applied to the very different circumstances of Kosovo.”

Referring to the factors that finally prevailed in favour of Kosovo intervention, Mrs. Albright declared in the BBC interview that “I decided it was worth it”, a déjà vu if there ever was one from that lady [2]

The invocation of the 5,000 victim figure as a trigger for military intervention in the context of Kosovo not only lends corroboration to the report of an identical offer having been made during the war in Bosnia; it serves also as another striking illustration of Diana Johnstone’s thesis about “the political uses of Srebrenica”. Madeleine Albright repeatedly made it clear that she used the alleged failure to intervene to prevent a humanitarian disaster in Srebrenica as the rationale for later successfully advocating military action in Kosovo.

This also illustrates something else. In both cases, when the need arose to induce a Western “humanitarian intervention”, first in Bosnia, then in Kosovo, the “magic number,” 5,000 victims required to trigger political action, was invariably the same. Today, when the playbook calls for smearing Russia, they are engaged in the digging up and conceptual adaptation of “intercepts” dating back to the Krstić Srebrenica trial of almost two decades ago.

Western policy-makers and their media appendages are devoid of creative imagination. They can do little more than stick to the same, worn-out, constantly recycled templates. [3]

Endnotes:

Predictably (making accurate predictions is easy when arrogant but unimaginative propaganda hacks keep warming over the same cliches) the impending collapse of the terrorist-held enclave of East Ghouta in close proximity to Damascus is being bitterly denounced by their Western sponsors as a new "Srebrenica" in the making. That is meant primarily to evoke genocidal connotations and to create the pretext and concoct the appearance of moral legitimacy for broadening the scope of the current open-ended imperialist intervention on the ground in Syria. On cue, on February 20, and not mincing words either, the London Guardian newspaper made it unambiguously clear where the upcoming Propagandaministerium campaign is going, even as it was gathering steam: "Eastern Ghouta is another Srebrenica, we are looking away again — The horror of the Bosnian Muslim massacre of 1995 is being repeated today in Syria."

The Guardian's colleagues over at CNN rushed the following day to fill in the gaps with an equally predictable litany of unverified allegations and rehashed sob stories which have been the standard feature of each of the previous Syrian psyops:

"The devastation wrought in Eastern Ghouta by a relentless bombardment by the Syrian regime," CNN disinforms its viewers, "has forced doctors to use expired drugs and scramble for water as the number of dead reached 300 in three days, medics and activists said. At least 260 people were killed and 500 injured in the rebel held-enclave between Monday and Tuesday evening, the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), said. Activists with the Damascus Media Center activist group said another 45 deaths had been reported on Wednesday."

In order not to be unfairly accused of originality in churning out war-escalation propaganda, the following day, February 23, the Guardian reiterated its by now forgotten Aleppo allegations of slightly over a year ago, but now recast to fit the new East Ghouta scenario: "Medical crisis in east Ghouta as hospitals 'systematically targeted'".

Determined to drive its Srebrenica parallel home, the Guardian served up to its bamboozled audience a few not so subtle hints about the background of the current East Ghouta controversy:

“'This could be one of the worst attacks in Syrian history, even worse than the siege on Aleppo … To systematically target and kill civilians amounts to a war crime and the international community must act to stop it,' said Zaidoun al-Zoabi of the independent Union of Medical Care and Relief Organisations. But for now at least, Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad – like Mladic in 1995 – appears to be impervious to reason or outside pressure. The evidence implicating Assad in war crimes and crimes against humanity is plentiful. So far no charges have been brought, and he carries on regardless."

However, a perspective that was somewhat different was offered by Vanessa Beeley, an independent journalist who has actually been on the ground in Damascus over the past few days and has considerable knowledge and experience in Syrian affairs:

"We have to ask if these factions are starving, as they claim, where they are receiving the supplies to continue targeting civilians in Damascus city. Where are they receiving these ammunitions and missiles from? So I think this story, this comparison to Srebrenica genocide, this comparison to the Day of Judgment, to Armageddon, to apocalyptic events is simply another way of the Western media calling for war, calling to escalate the conflict, calling to protect their assets on the ground, which also includes the White Helmets, who we know to be affiliated with the al-Qaeda and are financed by the UK’s foreign office, primarily."

The utter contempt with which Western propaganda mavens regard their zombified audience, its capacity to connect the dots, and even ability to recall the most recent events, is best illustrated by juxtaposing the current "Srebrenica in East Ghouta" cant to mirror image Aleppo drivel that was broadcast not long ago, in late 2016.

As the Syrian Army was closing in on the terrorist stronghold of East Aleppo, and in the wake of the unsuccessful December 5 2016 Security Council Aleppo Resolution designed to stop its advance, which failed due to Russian and Chinese vetoes, just as now, as if on cue, the Western propaganda machinery moved into high gear with the same familiar and ominous rhetoric pointing unmistakably at Srebrenica.

Without any direct, verifiable evidence from the field whatsoever, just as with East Ghouta today, and reenacting uncreatively the threadbare Srebrenica scenario of 1995, Western government and media sources in 2016 began asserting in unison that Syrian authorities in Aleppo were arresting “hundreds of men and boys,” a standard Srebrenica meme for those who are familiar with the subject. Predictably, and also following the Srebrenica template, the abducted “men and boys” were allegedly disappearing in unknown directions.

On December 9 2016, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Rupert Colville (today, for East Ghouta, the PR job is assigned to the man at the top personally, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres) dutifully set the stage for the Aleppo moves that were planned to follow by issuing a harrowing report on rampant improprieties in the domain under his supervision, with the Syrian government squarely to blame. After unctuously expressing “grave concern about the safety of civilians in Aleppo,” Colville pointedly stressed “very worrying allegations that hundreds of men have gone missing after crossing into Government-controlled areas.” For good measure, and to drive the vital Srebrenica point home, Colville added “reports that men were being separated from women and children.” And in case anybody missed the hint, the UN Report also conveniently recalled that “given the terrible record of arbitrary detention, torture and enforced disappearances by the Syrian Government, we are of course deeply concerned about the fate of these individuals.”

With just the right dossier thus helpfully furnished by the UN Human Rights department, Britain’s UN ambassador Matthew Rycroft sprang into action. (In the current East Ghouta scenario, the analogous task has been assigned to chief hegemon's UN whip, Nikki Haley.) After a heartrending account of the situation in Aleppo, backed by not a shred of verifiable evidence and based entirely on an inversion of reality derived from Western mass media disinformation, Rycroft made his point: “And yet, despite all of this, it could still get worse. Hundreds of men and boys are disappearing as they flee eastern Aleppo, taken by the regime, their fate unknown.”

On December 9, BBC issued its summary of the Aleppo allegations for international MSM dissemination and consumption. Under the headline “Aleppo battle: UN says hundreds of men missing”, the BBC World Service gave its imprimatur to the unsubstantiated allegation that “hundreds of men appear to have gone missing after crossing from rebel-held areas of Aleppo into government territory, UN officials say.”

Dissemination of similar Srebrenica-evoking imagery may confidently be expected in the coming days as the Syrian Army proceeds to clear East Ghouta of its terrorist occupiers.

The “debate” staged in the British parliament on December 13 2016 was very likely conceived in order to solidify the psychologically prepared public opinion behind the “humanitarian intervention” option in Syria, whenever the signal was given. The current East Ghouta hype has exactly the same purpose, and we should watch for attempts soon to pass highsounding parliamentary resolutions asserting the Srebrenica-anchored "R2P" (Right to protect) rationale.

In December 2016 the Aleppo intervention R2P scenario fizzled out when the Syrian Army swiftly defeated the terrorists in time to enable the people of Aleppo to celebrate a joyous Christmas holiday. Hopefully, the people of East Ghouta will soon be delivered with equal speed from their five-year nightmare in the clutches of Western-backed terrorists on Damascus' doorstep.