Dear All,

Today marks twenty years since the day that Bosnian Serb troops entered the United Nations compound in Srebrenica and, as the UN troops looked on, took away over 8000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys, who they then killed and dumped in mass graves. The project of finding and identifying the remains is ongoing, a macabre and heart-rending ‘work in progress’.

The Srebrenica incident is, according to a report in The Observer, "the worst massacre on European soil since the Third Reich", and in all the horrors and atrocities of war it is particularly horrific and atrocious because of the sense that the International Community simply stood by and watched as these people were rounded up and taken away like lambs to the slaughter. When Ratko Mladic’s forces entered Srebrenica, civilians fled to the United Nations compound, thinking the UN troops there would protect them. Instead the (Dutch) soldiers of the UN Protection Force (Unprofor) just watched as the Serb troops separated the women and children from the men and took the latter away for elimination.

A new book, by Florence Hartman, reveals it was not just the UN soldiers who looked on as the massacre plan unfolded: it was the very western powers who were attempting to find a resolution to the conflict. In the book The Srebrenica Affair: The Blood of Realpolitik, Hartman says "a survey of the mass 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 cost, at the terrible expense of Srebrenica". Hartman details the sort of negotiations the UN/western alliance was busy conducting with the Bosnian Serbs and the Bosnian president and how their actions reflect a conscious decision to sacrifice Srebrenica.

It seems that Britain, France and the US were well aware of the fact of what the Serbs were planning and how they intended to act, yet at every step they continued polite negotiations with Mladic and they desisted from air strikes because the Serbs opposed them (by, for example, taking 400 UN troops hostage). The aim, apparently, was to forge a peace settlement and create a postwar map of Bosnia. Never mind that this involved the massacre of over 8000 people, what Hartman so aptly labels "The Blood of Realpolitik".

The details of the western/UN role in the incident are chilling: the UN actually provided the Serbs with the fuel (30,000 litres of petrol) that was needed for this act of genocide: it was used not just to transport the males to the killing fields but also to power "the bulldozers which ploughed the 8000 corpses into mass graves". In addition to providing fuel, the western intelligence looked on as the Serb Death Squads finished their assignment: in her Observer article (co-authored with Ed Vulliamy) Hartman writes "CIA operatives watched almost ‘live’ at a satellite post in Vienna" -- seeing first images of "standing men held by armed guards, then images of them lying in the fields, dead". And despite the fact that Mladic had clearly said that he intended to make the Bosniak population of the region "vanish completely", international officials chose to downplay this.

Srebrenica is a horrific moment in the history of the modern world: a bloody event overseen -- at a distance -- by bureaucrats and politicians. I’m not sure which is worse: primitive, brutal war or a war ‘mediated’ by the civilised world and its institutions…

Never forget