New research reveals that Britain and the US knew six weeks before massacre that enclave would fall – but they decided to sacrifice it in their efforts for peace.
Now a survey of the mass of evidence reveals that the fall of Srebrenica formed part of a policy by the three “great powers” – Britain, France and the US – and by the UN leadership, in pursuit of peace at any price; peace at the terrible expense of Srebrenica, which gathered critical mass from 1994 onwards, and reached its bloody denouement in July 1995.
Until now, it has always been asserted that the so-called “endgame strategy” that forged a peace settlement for – and postwar map of – Bosnia followed the “reality on the ground” after the fall, and ceding, of Srebrenica. What can now be revealed is that the “endgame” preceded that fall, and was – as it turned out – conditional upon it.
The western powers whose negotiations led to Srebrenica’s downfall cannot be said to have known the extent of the massacre that would follow, but the evidence demonstrates they were aware – or should have been – of Mladic’s declared intention to have the Bosniak Muslim population of the entire region “vanish completely”. In the history of eastern Bosnia over the three years that preceded the massacre, that can only have meant one thing.
The following month, April 1993, the UN security council passed a resolution whereby any peace in Bosnia must “be based on withdrawal from territories seized by the use of force and ‘ethnic cleansing’.” And in the same month, a report from that same security council warned specifically of a “potential massacre in which there could be 25,000 victims if Serb forces were to enter Srebrenica”.
Its fears were justified: Karadžic promised the Bosnian Serb assembly the following July that if his army entered Srebrenica there would be “blood up to the knees”.
Two years later, Srebrenica remained under relentless siege, while the UN, European Union and Contact Group of five nations dealt for peace. Bosnia’s carnage had confounded the world’s most experienced diplomats; ineffective talks and plans had played out and failed for three bloody years. All the while, Karadžic’s hand was eagerly clasped beneath the chandeliers of London and Geneva; diplomats also courted the Serbian president, Slobodan Miloševic, while Mladic dined and exchanged gifts with the UN’s military commanders, soldier to soldier, as they ineffectively sought his cooperation.
By spring 1995, the Contact Group – the US, UK, France, Germany and Russia – appeared to abandon the 1993 resolution against rewarding ethnic cleansing, as it sought to partition Bosnia between a Serb statelet and a Muslim-Croat federation. Then the French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, had privately confided the working map in mid-1994: it showed the three eastern “safe areas” to be contiguous with one another and part of the federation.
(Source: klix, the guardian)
