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And why has EU policy not become anti American after the Faluja massacres? An entire city of 350 000 people was ground to rubble : 60% of the buildings were damaged, 20% completely destroyed.

Between 700 000 and 1 million Iraqi dead caused by the US led invasion. But who wants to talk about Fallujah? Rupert Murdoch? European Parliament? RELEX?

Yet Srebrenica gets the lime light in our "free Western" media. I'm a BBC regular, and I find the number of articles on Srebrenica revealing of British foreign policy in the Balkans. Every year, the chorus starts in June, reaching a pitch in July - the anniversary of the Srebrenica massacres. And every year, 14 years after the event, Bosnian Muslims are reburying and reburying and reburying their dead. Of course, any opportunity to demonize the Serbs is good.

Here is an excellent example of the anti-Serb spin in Western media:
The Sunday Times, Nov. 3, 1996, Jon Swain
In several months of digging at mass graves in the macabre hinterland around Srebrenica, the investigators recovered far fewer bodies than they had expected. Of the thousands of men and boys from the UN safe area who were executed by Bosnian Serbs in July 1995, only a few hundred - less than 10% of the 7,000 Muslims missing - have been dug up.
The empty graves speak volumes about the conspiracy by Bosnian Serbs to cover up the massacre at Srebrenica... The more plausible theory is that bodies have been made to "disappear". As long as a year ago, American spy satellites first revealed evidence of tampering at several grave sites which, when later exhumed, yielded fewer corpses than expected.

Fantastic really. We went from 14 000 dead in Srebrenica at the height of the war, to 8 000 dead, to 7 000 dead to 1 500 bodies - mostly of adult males - were they fighters? Western media knows that most were underage women, dressed up to look like men before being raped then massacred and then « made to disappear ».

Through 1992 and 1993, Srebrenica was a safe haven for Bosnian Muslim and their Arab Mujahideen allies. Serbs in surrounding villages were constant targets of attacks coming from Srebrenica. Then came the offensive in July. There's no war without blood.

My point is this: Srebrenica wasn't the defining moment in EU politics. Srebrenica was seized by the Anglo (and German in this case) business elites as an event to (over)publicize Serb "brutality" and sell a war to pacifist European populations that would otherwise have not supported one - as was Racak in Kosovo.

by vladimir on Tue Dec 11th, 2007 at 04:08:34 AM EST
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