SREBRENICA HISTORICAL PROJECT
Postbus 90471,
2509LL
Den Haag, The Netherlands
+31 64 878 09078 (Holland)
+381 64 403 3612 (Serbia)
E-mail: srebrenica.historical.project@gmail.com
Web site: www.srebrenica-project.com
SERBIAN VICTIMS OF SREBRENICA, 1992–1995
English Summary
In order to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of events in the region
of Srebrenica during the Bosnian war in the 1990s, the treatment of the Serbian
population in areas surrounding Srebrenica by Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina
(ABiH) forces operating from inside the enclave must be taken into account.
“Srebrenica”, as it has come to be known in emotionally and politically charged
jargon, is not just three days in July of 1995, but also the three preceding years
of warfare.
This monograph is a systematic effort to shed factual light on that ignored
and in many ways taboo aspect of Srebrenica’s wartime history. It consists of 50
chapters in which ABiH attacks on Serbian villages surrounding Srebrenica and
their consequences are detailed. During those attacks, hundreds of Serbian civilians were killed. Dozens of Serbian villages were devastated and they continue
to be visibly in that condition today, over a decade and half after the conflict.
Statements by surviving victims of these attacks and official records are the principal sources of evidence used here. Based on data from these and other sources, a tentative list of 705 Serbian civilian victims of ABiH attacks has been compiled and is appended to this monograph.
Serbian victims of these military expeditions of ABiH forces from the enclave
of Srebrenica, specifically the 28th Division under the command of Naser
Ori}, include persons of both sexes and their age structure ranges from the early
teens into the eighties. Those victims who were not killed were expelled from
their places of residence or were compelled to flee because they faced an imminent threat to their physical safety. Neither the very young, the old, the infir, or other obvious non-combatants were spared. It should be noted that in the course of those attacks community infrastructure such as churches, cemeteries, schools, and agricultural equipment — the cultural basis for the sustainable life of Serbs as a group in Srebrenica — was systematically destroyed or desecrated, presumably in order to prevent the return of the expelled population and to obstruct the revitalisation of their community. The only discernible pattern in this process was that the victims were targeted principally on the basis of their ethnicity. The cumulative effect of this monograph is to raise a number of moral, political, and legal issues which do not conform easily to the dominant narrative
about “Srebrenica”.
On the moral level, there is the regional destruction of an entire community,
in this case the Serbs, which has not provoked the degree of interest and
condemnation within the international community which it obviously merits.
According to incomplete data presented in this monograph, between 1992 and
1995 at least 705 civilians of Serbian ethnicity were killed by ABiH forces in the
context of the systematic military attacks those forces conducted from within the
enclave of Srebrenica. For a part of that period (April 1993 — July 1995) by mutual
agreement reached under UN auspices those forces should have been emilitarised,
but as a result of international community’s unwillingness to assert itself that agreement was never implemented. Furthermore, according to the Report
on Srebrenica published in 2002 by the Dutch Institute for War Documentation
(NIOD), as a result of those attacks about 8,500 Serbian inhabitants of
Srebrenica region were forcibly expelled.21 These are not insignificant statistics.
On the political level, throughout the period of these attacks the international
community had forces on the ground, such as UNPROFOR, as well as
other instruments, sufficient to make it aware of what was happening and adequate to formulate an effective humanitarian response to restrain the attackers. It failed to do so. That failure to act strongly suggests that political considerations dictated a critical attitude toward the conduct of one side and, parallel to that, an attitude of benign neglect toward the conduct of the other.
Finally, on the legal level, if criteria that are used for the standard analysis
of events of July 1995 were applied to the factual matrix of this monograph, a
strong prima facie argument could be put forward that if the execution of ABiH
prisoners of war in 1995 qualifies as genocide, the systematic and targeted destruction of the Srebrenica Serbian community during the three preceding years qualifies for the identical classification.
The present monograph is an introduction to an almost totally overlooked
dimension of “Srebrenica”: massive casualties and destruction suffered by the
local Serbian population. Much additional research into the subject needs to be
done. However, even these incomplete data strongly suggest that the dimensions
of “Srebrenica” are much broader than the narrow scope of the institutionalised
narrative on that subject would convey. Srebrenica is not a mono-ethnic narrative,
but a human tragedy of major proportions which affected all inhabitants of
that region of Bosnia and Herzegovina, irrespective of their ethnicity or religion.
21 NIOD Report, Part I: The Yugoslavian problem and the role of the West, 1991–1994;
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