Excellent Study on the Context of the Srebrenica Genocide

It is my pleasure and honor to pass along this link to an important and necessary piece of scholarship by my comrade Daniel Toljaga, published by the Bosnia Institute:

Prelude to the Srebrenica Genocide

This was published on Nov. 18 after Daniel had put in a great deal of time researching, writing, editing, and soliciting input and advice from his wide circle of writers, scholars, activists, and other contacts. I apologize to Daniel for not having posted this immediately; if you haven't already read this piece, you need to do so immediately. And then bookmark this page so you have it handy as a reference whenever you are compelled to refute any of the ridiculous justifications for Serb nationalist actions at Srebrenica, the inaction of the international community at the time, or for attempts to derail the ongoing efforts to bring the responsible parties to justice. Daniel effectively demolishes the arguments which are used by revisionists to cloud the issue of responsibility and causation.

Open Letter from Ed Vulliamy to Amnesty International

[I am passing this open letter along. Please feel free to copy the entire text and post it in any forum you wish.]

Open Letter from Ed Vulliamy to Amnesty International

Noam Chomsky has been invited to give the annual Amnesty International Lecture in Belfast. This is second time in four years that Chomsky has been invited to give an Amnesty International Lecture (following Dublin in 2006). To celebrate Chomsky’s forthcoming Lecture appearance Amnesty gives him a respectful and uncritical platform for his views over three pages of the latest Amnesty (UK) Magazine.

Amnesty appears oblivious to the controversies that surround some of Chomsky’s views on human rights, and in particular the support that he has offered and continues to offer to polemicists who deny the substance, scope and authorship of the worst atrocities perpetrated during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.

In recent years Chomsky has caused particular controversy through his support for the author Diana Johnstone, known for her “revisionist” views on Bosnia concerning the Prijedor concentration camps, the Srebrenica genocide and the existence of the Bosnian rape camps. Chomsky salutes her “outstanding” scholarship and defends her “serious, honest work”.

He represents his support for Johnstone as a defence of her right to freedom of speech while at the same time he denigrates the eyewitness testimony of The Guardian's reporter Ed Vulliamy whose account of the reality of the Omarska and Trnopolje camps forced the horror of what was happening in Bosnia onto the attention of the rest of the world and in so doing saved the lives of many of the prisoners detained in them.

Without explanation Chomsky characterises Ed Vulliamy’s description of Omarska and Trnopolje as “probably” wrong while at the same time he endorses the claim by Thomas Deichmann and LM magazine that Vulliamy, Penny Marshall and Ian Williams gave a false account of the situation in the Prijedor camps as “probably” correct. Chomsky disregards the finding of a High Court libel action which - following the evidence of a doctor detained in one of the camps - confirmed that Vulliamy and his colleagues had told the truth.

When asked why Amnesty offers a platform to a man who challenges the reporting of human rights abuses that Amnesty itself substantiated and champions the seriousness and honesty of individuals who try to deny those abuses, Amnesty’s response was to observe that invitees are not representatives of Amnesty International nor expected to deliver an Amnesty International policy position within their lecture, but rather they have been invited as having something interesting and thought-provoking to say about human rights in the world today and Amnesty International does not necessarily endorse all their opinions.

When Ed Vulliamy was asked to comment on Amnesty’s invitation to Chomsky he wrote the open letter below. The language expresses his depth of feeling, not only on his own behalf but also on behalf of the friends forced to suffer “the ghastly, searing, devastating impact” of Chomsky’s denial of their experience.

Anyone who shares these concerns can express their views for the attention of Irene Khan, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, at
http://www.amnesty.org/en/contact
or Kate Allen, Director of Amnesty International UK (AIUK), at sct@amnesty.org.uk




Open Letter to Amnesty International

To whom it may concern:

I have been contacted by a number of people regarding Amnesty International’s invitation to Professor Noam Chomsky to lecture in Northern Ireland.

The communications I have received regard Prof. Chomsky’s role in revisionism in the story of the concentration camps in northwestern Bosnia in 1992, which it was my accursed honour to discover.
As everyone interested knows, a campaign was mounted to try and de-bunk the story of these murderous camps as a fake - ergo, to deny and/or justify them - the dichotomy between these position still puzzles me.

The horror of what happened at Omarska and Trnopolje has been borne out by painful history, innumerable trials at the Hague, and - most importantly by far - searing testimony from the survivors and the bereaved. These were places of extermination, torture, killing, rape and, literally “concentration” prior to enforced deportation, of people purely on grounds of ethnicity.

Prof. Chomsky was not among those (“Novo” of Germany and “Living Marxism” in the UK) who first proposed the idea that these camps were a fake. He was not among those who tried unsuccessfully (they were beaten back in the High Court in London, by a libel case taken by ITN) to put up grotesque arguments about fences around the camps, which were rather like Fred Leuchter’s questioning whether the thermal capacity of bricks was enough to contain the heat needed to gas Jews at Auschwitz. But Professor Chomsky said many things, from his ivory tower at MIT, to spur them on and give them the credibility and energy they required to spread their poisonous perversion and denials of these sufferings. Chomsky comes with academic pretensions, doing it all from a distance, and giving the revisionists his blessing. And the revisionists have revelled in his endorsement.

In an interview with the Guardian, Professor Chomsky paid me the kind compliment of calling me a good journalist, but added that on this occasion (the camps) I had “got it wrong”. Got what wrong?!?! Got wrong what we saw that day, August 5th 1992 (I didn’t see him there)? Got wrong the hundreds of thousands of families left bereaved, deported and scattered asunder? Got wrong the hundreds of testimonies I have gathered on murderous brutality? Got wrong the thousands whom I meet when I return to the commemorations? If I am making all this up, what are all the human remains found in mass graves around the camps and so painstakingly re-assembled by the International Commission for Missing Persons?

These people pretend neutrality over Bosnia, but are actually apologists for the Milosevic/Karadzic/Mladic plan, only too pathetic to admit it. And the one thing they never consider from their armchairs is the ghastly, searing, devastating impact of their game on the survivors and the bereaved. The pain they cause is immeasurable. This, along with the historical record, is my main concern. It is one thing to survive the camps, to lose one’s family and friends - quite another to be told by a bunch of academics with a didactic agenda in support of the pogrom that those camps never existed. The LM/Novo/Chomsky argument that the story of the camps was somehow fake has been used in countless (unsuccessful) attempts to defend mass murderers in The Hague.

For decades I have lived under the impression that Amnesty International was opposed to everything these people stand for, and existed to defend exactly the kind of people who lost their lives, family and friends in the camps and at Srebrenica three years later, a massacre on which Chomsky has also cast doubt. I have clearly been deluded about Amnesty. For Amnesty International, of all people, to honour this man is to tear up whatever credibility they have estimably and admirably won over the decades, and to reduce all they say hitherto to didactic nonsense.

Why Amnesty wants to identify with and endorse this revisionist obscenity, I do not know. It is baffling and grotesque. By inviting Chomsky to give this lecture, Amnesty condemns itself to ridicule at best, hurtful malice at worst - Amnesty joins the revisionists in spitting on the graves of the
dead. Which was not what the organisation was, as I understand, set up for. I have received a letter from an Amnesty official in Northern Ireland which reads rather like a letter from Tony Blair’s office after it has been caught out cosying up to British Aerospace or lying over the war in Iraq -
it is a piece of corporate gobbledygook, distancing Amnesty from Chomsky’s views on Bosnia, or mealy-mouthedly conceding that they are disagreed with.

There is no concern at all with the victims, which is, I suppose, what one would expect from a bureaucrat. In any event, the letter goes nowhere towards addressing the revisionism, dispelling what will no doubt be a fawning, self-satisfied introduction in Belfast and rapturous applause for
the man who gives such comfort to Messrs Karadzic and Mladic, and their death squads. How far would Amnesty go in inviting and honouring speakers whose views it does not necessarily share, in the miserable logic of this AI official in Belfast? A lecture by David Irving on Joseph Goebbels?
Alistair Campbell on how Saddam really did have those WMD? The Chilean Secret Police or Colonel Oliver North on the communist threat in Latin America during the 70s and 80s? What about Karadzic himself on the “Jihadi” threat in Bosnia, and the succulence of 14-year-old girls kept in rape camps?

I think I am still a member of AI - if so, I resign. If not, thank God for that. And to think: I recently came close to taking a full time job as media director for AI. That was a close shave - what would I be writing now, in the press release: “Come and hear the great Professor Chomsky inform you all that the stories about the camps in Bosnia were a lie - that I was hallucinating that day, that the skeletons of the dead so meticulously re-assembled by the International Commission for Missing Persons are all plastic? That the dear friends I have in Bosnia, the USA, the UK and elsewhere who struggle to put back together lives that were broken by Omarska and Trnopolje are making it all up?

Some press release that would have been. Along with the owner of the site of the Omarska camp, the mighty Mittal Steel Corporation, Amnesty International would have crushed it pretty quick. How fitting that Chomsky and Mittal Steel find common cause. Yet how logical, and to me, obvious. After all, during the Bosnian war, it was the British Foreign Office, the CIA, the UN and great powers who, like the revisionists Chomsky champions, most eagerly opposed any attempt to stop the genocide that lasted, as it was encouraged by them and their allies in high politics to last, for three bloody years from 1992 until the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.

Yours, in disgust and despair,

Ed Vulliamy,
The Observer.

---

On the heels of its announcement of the Chomsky lecture Amnesty published a report on the ongoing search for justice by the victims of rape in Bosnia.
http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details.asp?NewsID=18431

Nicola Duckworth, Amnesty International's Europe Programme Director, acknowledges that "During the war, thousands of women and girls were raped, often with extreme brutality. Many were held in prison camps, hotels and private houses where they were sexually exploited. Many women and girls were killed. To this day, survivors of these crimes have been denied access to justice. Those responsible for their suffering - members of military forces, the police or paramilitary groups - walk free. Some remain in positions of power or live in the same community as their victims."

Alisa Muratcaus of the Association of Concentration Camp Torture Survivors, Canton Sarajevo, insists that people who deny that the mass rape of Bosnian women was a strategic element of the war are talking “nonsense”. Her Association, composed of Muslim, Croat, Serb, and Romani members, many of them victims in camps and prisons throughout Bosnia of atrocities including rape and other forms of sexual torture, works closely with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague which has established beyond doubt that rape was used in Bosnia as a weapon of war.

"Why Yugoslavia Still Matters" by John Feffer

Big thanks to Roger Lippman for bringing this article from the Foreign Policy in Focus website.

Also, see the debate between Feffer and Bosnian revision Edward Hermann here.

Marko Attila Hoare on Seymours "The Liberal Case for Murder"

While I am in the middle of reviewing his mother's book, historian Marko Attila Hoare has tackled yet another in a long line of books adding to the genre of Bosnian/Balkan revisionism and Srebrenica Genocide denial literature. You can--and should--read his thorough demolition of what seems to be yet another example of this dreary, incestuous (revisionists always, ALWAYS quote each other), morally suspect school of disingenuous polemic here. I have some other works of this revisionism in my sights, but Dr. Hoare has pretty systematically made any commentary I would add redundant at best.

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I apologize that it has been over a week since my last post on The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Breakup 1980-92. I can only promise that I have not abandoned the project, I simply have been busier than usual lately. I will be posting on Part Three in the next day or two.

Also, in my original post on the book I said I would be writing four posts on the book, one for each Part. Which sounds sensible, except that the book has five parts, not four. Hopefully nobody who read that is already familiar with the book was concerned that my American edition was abridged!

UPDATE ON "DUTCHBAT 3" / MARCO VAN HEES STORY

Please see the update at Srebrenica Genocide Blog

Daniel has received some new information about Srebrenica Genocide denier Marco van Hees--turns out, the scumbag wasn't even in Srebrenica at the time of the massacres! Please read the above-linked story for this updated information.

Genocide Denial Goes Dutch

Thanks to Daniel at Srebrenica Genocide Blog for the following update on a very troubling and offensive story:

MARCO VAN HEES AND ALEKSANDAR GAVRILOVIC: SREBRENICA GENOCIDE DENIERS

The story focuses on Marco Van Hees, who seems to be the ringleader of the "Dutchbat III" group of 15 Dutch soldiers involved in Srebrenica genocide denial. The fact that these men are willing to add further shame to their record is almost numbing; it's almost--not quite, but nearly--impossible to muster any outrage against such an irrational act of betrayal and contrariness.

Daniel covers the story thoroughly, so I have nothing to add about the specifics. I do wonder if anyone out there has any insights into the psychology of someone like Marco Van Hees. The fact that he was present in Srebrenica, yet is able to claim a distorted and dishonest version of events, is troubling yet not difficult to believe--people often lie, and they often convince themselves to beleive a version of events which contradicts their own personal experiences. While unfortunate (to put it mildly), there is nothing extraordinary about Van Hees' ability to deny a horrible reality he should be bearing witness to.

It's not the ability of 15 or so Dutchbat soldiers to lie to the world, and seemingly to themselves, about a horrible atrocity they were witness to--and passive participants in--which puzzles me; rather, it is the motivation to do so which I cannot understand. I do have a theory, however, and I welcome any input from readers with more expertise, knowledge, and/or insight into individual and group psychology to correct, elaborate, or refute my (admittedly half-baked) notion.

Simply put, I believe that these few Dutch soldiers who have chosen to side with the fascist mass-murderers of Srebrenica are motivated at least partially from a feeling of powerlessness. I acknowledge that the more obvious answer would be that they are motivated by shame, and a desire to rewrite history so that their actions (and failures to act) in August of 1995 might seem more reasonable and justified. No doubt this plays a part, but I have read that violence is often a reaction to a feeling of powerlessness--a primal urge to lash out and assert control over a situation or perceived status.

The Dutch soldiers at Srebrenica, by a combination of factors both imposed and self-created, were passive pawns in a much larger game, and one can easily imagine the humiliation they must have felt. I realize I am not giving any attention to the incident where frustrated Bosniak soldiers inflicted casualities on the Dutchbat battalion in an attempt to force them to take a stand--that incident most certainly fueled some resentment on the part of the Dutchbat soldiers. And the stresses of being trapped in the enclave with thousands of desperate people of a different culture, language, and faith cannot be discounted.

Even acknowledging all that, I still contend that the humiliation inflicted on the Dutch soldiers by the Bosnian Serb forces, by General Mladic personally, and by the untenable position the UN and their own government had put them in--all of this contributed to a sense of powerlessness, and the dirty, desperate, and not always "grateful" Muslims who were nominally in their care were the most obvious, and easiest, targets for that frustrated rage to focus on.

At any rate, this is a story worth following. These foolish and dishonorable Dutch men will certainly provide ample ammunition for the Balkan revisionist crowd. We must be vigilant and tireless in response.

Darko Trifunovic--Srebrenica Denier

I haven't written anything on the case of the loathsome Darko Trifunovic, and rather than rehashing what others have written, I encourage you to read up on the story:

Daniel and Srebrenica Genocide Blog has followed the story, including this latest update.

I encourage all visitors to this blog to read Daniel's coverage of this troubling development in the ongoing Bosnian revisionist crusade against truth and reconciliation.