Srebrenica: The urban legend

The alleged Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims in July 1995 is referred to regularly by the mainstream media as a moral touchstone, an example of “genocide” that can take place when the U.S. is not the moral arbiter or when the U.S. hesitates to intervene on behalf of an endangered part of humanity somewhere in the world. And many Americans, conditioned by sixteen years of media saturation, responded reflexively and have come to agree that a genocide occurred in Srebrenica even though there is still no proof sixteen years later.

(Photo: Bosnian Nazi soldiers reading Nazi propaganda. “Before WWI, Serbs accounted for 75% of the population of the municipality of Srebrenica. Before WWII, they accounted for 50% of the population. Before the outbreak of the Bosnian War, they accounted for only 30% of the population. This tremendous population decline was not caused by a drop in the birth rate or migration. It was a direct result of genocide carried out by Muslim and Croat neighbors. “Srebrenica Before It Happened,”)

The credulity of ordinary Americans did not last long. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11, triggered the invasion of Afghanistan. Later, Americans found out that the casus belli, “that we’re fighting them over there so that we don’t have to fight them here” was fraught with lies, as well. UNOCAL, a U.S. oil company, was interested in bringing Central Asian oil to market via a proposed Afghan oil pipeline. Then the American public learned that Condoleeza Rice, Secretary of State, and Hamid Karzai, the President of Afghanistan, were former members of UNOCAL’s board of directors. It turned out to be simply another war for profit. After the invasion of Iraq, Americans began to further doubt the veracity of U.S. government public statements. It appeared, after all, that Sadam Hussein did not possess weapons of destruction. “No matter,” replied the Bush II Administration, “invading Iraq was still the right thing to do because we took control of Iraq’s oil fields.” Few Americans know that U.S. intervention in the Wars of Succession on the territory of the Former Yugoslavia were also based on lies, even though the U.S. Government still refers to these interventions with pride as necessary and successful international efforts. Yet reality is sobering. It turns out, in hindsight, that the Saudis wanted a Muslim state in Bosnia in exchange for staying out of Gulf War I, so U.S. President Clinton was delighted to show his good faith and granted, like a genie from the Arabian Nights, the Saudis their wish. One cannot help but wonder why “a Muslim state” (i.e., a theocratic state based on sharia law) was created in Europe, when all the other European states are secular. Later, it was revealed that there were untapped oil reserves in Tuzla in Bosnia, coincidentally the location of U.S. Eagle military base. Then the war in Kosovo, also considered a model of interventionist probity, turned out to have an oil pipeline hidden beneath the humanitarian rhetoric. AMBO, the Albanian-Macedonian-Bulgarian Oil Company, began construction in 2010 of an oil pipeline from Burgas on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria to Durres in Albania. Coincidentally, U.S. Camp Bondsteel is conveniently located in Kosovo to protect this pipeline and its putative future profits.

Thus, the Bosnian War generally, and the alleged Srebrenica massacre of July 1995 specifically, were testing grounds for not only new weapons, but also new media techniques to win broad support from the U.S. population for future wars of imperialist aggression, such as the current war being waged against Libya, which employs many of the same media techniques and military approaches that were developed during the Bosnian War: the leader is declared to be “insane”; NATO introduces “no-fly zones” during the opening phase of the conflict; then an invasion is planned to “protect” citizens from an “insane” dictator. These propaganda techniques were then, as now, enormously successful, and are based on selective reporting and selective omission of critical facts in order to create a perception of U.S. virtue and enemy villainy.

The Srebrenica massacre stands as a nearly perfect propaganda campaign, which is nurtured to this very day. For example, given Don McLean’s lyrics “Drove my Chevy to the levee…” almost any American can reflexively complete the verse with “but the levee was dry”; likewise, any American, upon hearing “Srebrenica”, can add a phrase standing in apposition, “where the Serbs killed 8,000 men and boys” without any prompting. But the Srebrenica levee is, as we shall see, also dry.