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NATO's Full-Spectrum War against Yugoslavia: Demonization of Serbs Was Key

by Edward S. Herman, reposted from sott.net

Many well-qualified observers of the Bosnia wars were appalled at the biased reporting and gullibility of mainstream journalists.

The successful demonization of the Serbs, making them largely responsible for the Yugoslav wars, and as unique and genocidal killers, was one of the great propaganda triumphs of our era. It was done so quickly, with such uniformity and uncritical zeal in the mainstream Western media, that disinformation had (and still has, after almost two decades) a field day.

mostar1Mostar’s Ottoman-era bridge damaged by Croatian forces’ shelling

The demonization flowed from the gullibility of Western interests and media (and intellectuals). With Yugoslavia no longer useful as an ally after the fall of the Soviet Union, and actually an obstacle as an independent state with a still social democratic bent, the NATO powers aimed at its dismantlement, and they actively supported the secession of Slovenia, Croatia, the Bosnian Muslims, and the Kosovo Albanians. That these were driven away by Serb actions and threats is untrue: they had their own nationalistic and economic motives for exit, stronger than those of the Serbs.

Milosevic’s famous speeches of 1987 and 1989 weren’t nationalistic — despite the lies to the contrary, both speeches called for tolerance of all “nations” within Yugoslavia. He also never sought a “Greater Serbia,” but rather tried to maintain a unified Yugoslavia, and when this failed — with the active assistance of the NATO powers — he tried, only fitfully, to allow stranded Serb minorities to stay within Yugoslavia or join Serbia, a matter of obvious “self-determination” that NATO granted to Kosovo Albanians and everybody but Serbs (for documentation on these points, see this Monthly Review article I co-authored with David Peterson in October, 2007).
Biased Reporting
Many well-qualified observers of the Bosnia wars were appalled at the biased reporting and gullibility of mainstream journalists, who followed a party line and swallowed anything the Bosnian Muslim (and U.S.) officials told them. The remarkable inflation of claims of Serb evil and violence (and playing down of NATO-clients’ violence), with fabricated “concentration camps,” “rape camps,” and similar Nazi- and Auschwitz-like analogies, caused the onetime head of the U.S. intelligence section in Sarajevo, Lieutenant Colonel John Sray, to state back in 1995 that

America has not been so pathetically deceived since Robert McNamara helped to micromanage and escalate the Vietnam War…Popular perceptions pertaining to the Bosnian Muslim government…have been forged by a prolific propaganda machine. A strange combination of three major spin doctors, including public relations (PR) firms in the employ of the Bosniacs, media pundits, and sympathetic elements of the US State Department, have managed to manipulate illusions to further Muslim goals.

Numerous others made the same point: Cedric Thornberry, a high UN official who investigated atrocities in Bosnia wrote in Foreign Policy in 1996 that

By early 1993 a consensus developed — especially in the United States, but also in some Western European countries and prominently in parts of the international liberal media — that the Serbs were the only villains… This view did not correspond to the perceptions of successive senior UN personnel in touch with daily events [and one kindly soul at UN headquarters] warned me to take cover — the fix is on.

The same point was made by Canadian General Lewis Mackenzie, who insisted that “it was not a black-and-white picture and that ‘bad’ buys had not killed ‘good’ guys. The situation was far more complex” (Globe & Mail, July 15, 2005). The same was said by former NATO Deputy Commander Charles Boyd, former UNPROFOR Commander Satish Nambiar, UN officials Philip Corwin and Carlos Martins Branco, and former U.S. State Department official George Kenney. But anybody who parted from the party line was ignored or marginalized.
When George Kenney changed his mind from anti-Serb interventionist to critic, he was quickly dropped by the mainstream media. Journalist Peter Brock, who wrote “Dateline Yugoslavia: The Partisan Press,” in Foreign Policy‘s Winter 1993-1994 issue, which documented systematic bias and errors, was viciously attacked and driven into multi-year silence. A reporter like David Binder of The New York Times who refused to adhere to the party-demonization line was soon taken off the beat.
An important part of the fix was dishonest demonization, as with the famous August 1992 picture of Fikret Alic, an emaciated prisoner behind barbed wire in a Serb “concentration camp.”  But the UK journalists had pushed forward a man who was sick and quite unrepresentative: the barbed wire was around the journalists, not the camp, and it was a transit camp, not a concentration camp. Western journalists went berserk over these alleged camps, but failed to report the Red Cross finding that “Serbs, Croats, and Muslims all run detention camps and must share equal blame.” John Burns’ Pulitzer for 1993 was based heavily on his interview with an alleged Serb killer-rapist, Borislav Herak, who later confessed that after torture he had recited lines forced on him by his Bosnian Muslim captors.

Gutman's Fikret Alic staged photoGrotesque image, but not for the reason everyone believed at the time

The joint Pulitzer winner in 1993 was Roy Gutman, who specialized in hearsay evidence and handouts from Croatian and Bosnian Muslim propaganda sources. Gutman never got around to Croat and Muslim camps. His and other journalists’ claims about “an archipelago of [Serb] sex-enslavement camps” were spectacular and wrong — ultimately, there were more credible affidavits of Serb than Bosnian Muslim women rape victims. (For an excellent discussion of the wild news reports versus ascertainable facts, see Chapter Five of Peter Brock’s Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting [GM Books, 2005]). All these journalists portrayed the Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic as a devotee of ethnic tolerance; none ever quoted his Islamic Declaration, which proclaimed that “there is neither peace nor coexistence between the ‘Islamic religion’ and non-Islamic social and political institutions.” For an extensive discussion of Izetbegovic’s close relations with Iran and commitment to an Islamic state, see John Schindler’s Unholy Terror (Zenith Press, 2007), which I reviewed in Z Magazine.
Retaliation
Another part of the fix was the failure to pay any attention to crimes that preceded brutal Serb actions. This was frequent, although there certainly were cases where the Serbs (mainly paramilitary forces) struck first. But the tit-for-tat was common and much of it, and many of the mutual fears, were traceable back to the mass murders — disproportionately of Serbs — of World War II, the Nazi occupation, and Croatian fascist Ustasha. This background of truly mass killing was blacked out in the mainstream propaganda system.
Most important in recent tit-for-tat was the Srebrenica case, where the background to the Serb behavior in July 1995 was (and remains) ignored. You won’t read in the U.S. press the claim by veteran British journalist Joan Phillips that by March 31, 1993,out of 9,300 Serbs who used to live (in the Srebrenica municipality), less than 900 remain… only three Serbian villages remain and around 26 have been destroyed.” (“Victims and Villains in Bosnia’s War,” South Slav Journal, Spring-Summer 1992 — published in 1993). Many more were destroyed after that, and a 1995 Serb monograph entitled The Book of the Dead listed 3,287 Serbs from the Srebrenica region who were killed in the three years before July 1995. Serb forensic expert Dr. Zoran Stankovic and his team uncovered over a thousand Serb bodies in the Srebrenica area well before July 1995, and General Lewis Mackenzie has stated that “evidence to date suggests that he (Naser Oric, a Bosnian Muslim commander in Srebrenica) was responsible for killing as many Serb civilians outside Srebrenica as the Bosnian Serb army was for massacring Bosnian Muslims inside the town.” Stankovic and the Serb authorities could never get the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) or Western media interested in these massacres.

Bringing the Serbs to HeelBreathtaking doublespeak: ‘A massive [NATO] bombing attack opens the door to peace’

A microcosm of the bias of the ICTY can be seen in its treatment of Naser Oric. When a video turned up in 2005 showing an alleged Bosnian Serb execution of six Bosnian Muslims (its provenance and authenticity uncertain), this received widespread and indignant attention in the West, and was alleged to be a “smoking gun” proving the 8,000 executed at Srebrenica. But there are more clearly authentic videos that Oric showed to Toronto Star journalist Bill Schiller and Washington Post reporter John Pomfret, in which Oric brags about the Serb killings and beheadings displayed for them, and claims to have killed 114 Serbs in just one of these incidents. Pomfret had a single back-page article on this, Schiller two, and otherwise silence reigned. Nobody said this was a “smoking gun” proving that Serb victimization in the Srebrenica area was massive and that the supposed “demilitarization” of that “safe area” was a fraud. There was no comment when it took the ICTY till 2002 to indict Oric, charging him not with killing but failure to control his subordinates in six cases, and ultimately throwing out the case on a technicality. The ICTY never took evidence from Schiller or Pomfret, and failed to use the videos they had seen as part of the evidence.
The ICTY also failed to take the evidence of Ibran Mustafic, a Bosnian Muslim official in Srebrenica, who in his recent book, Planned Chaos, declares Oric to be “a war criminal without par,” and describes personally observed gruesome murders by Oric. French General Philippe Morillon was also not called, although he had testified in the Milosevic trial, claiming that Oric “took no prisoners,” and that his mass killings from the “safe area” had been the key factor in explaining Serb vengefulness in their takeover of Srebrenica.
The ICTY wasn’t an instrument of justice — it was a faux-judicial arm of NATO, created to service its aims in the Balkan wars, which it did in numerous ways. But a key role was to focus on, demonize, isolate and condemn Serbs, who were the NATO target. Whenever NATO needed a lift, the ICTY was there to help — indicting Karadzic and Mladic explicitly to remove them as negotiators at Dayton; indicting Milosevic in May 1999 just as NATO was starting to draw criticism for its bombing of Serbian civilian facilities (war crimes). For crushing analyses of the ICTY and its role, see Travesty by John Laughland (Pluto Press, 2007) and Michael Mandel’s How America Gets Away with Murder (Pluto Press, 2004).
Inflated Killings
Inflating Serb killings was institutionalized early in the Yugoslavia conflict, crucially helped by media and liberal-left gullibility. There was huge dependence on Bosnian Muslim and U.S. officials, who lied often, but were never doubted by the press. In the case of the infamous Markale Market massacre on August 27, 1993, timed just before a NATO meeting at which bombing the Serbs was approved, key experts and observers on the scene — UK, French, Canadian, UN, even U.S. — were convinced that this was carried out by the Bosnian Muslims. But this could make no headway in the mainstream media. The Bosnian Muslims claimed 200,000 dead by early 1993 (and of course, exclusively Serb concentration and rape camps) and it was swallowed, along with the alleged drive for a “Greater Serbia.”
The same inflation took place regarding Kosovo both before and after the bombing war, with an alleged pre-war genocide and a more wildly claimed bombing-war genocide (with the State Department estimating as many as 500,000 Kosovo Albanians murdered). These were all big lies. The 200,000 (later, up to 300,000) has shrunk to 100,000, including about 65,000 civilians, on all sides in Bosnia. The prewar Kosovo toll was diminished to some 2,000 in the year before the bombing, a majority of them victims of the KLA rather than the Serbs (according to British Defense Secretary George Robertson), and the body-plus-missing total for Kosovo during the bombing war contracted to some 6,000-7,000 on all sides. But there were neither apologies nor reassessment from the mainstream media or liberal apologists for the “good war.”
They still have Srebrenica. But like the other inflated or untrue elements of the demonization process, they have it by cheating. There’s no doubt that there were executions at Srebrenica, but nothing like 8,000 and very possibly not any more than the number of Serb civilians killed by Naser Oric in the Srebrenica areas, as suggested by General Lewis Mackenzie (who in my opinion was conservative on this point). The morality tale rests heavily on failure to acknowledge that Srebrenica wasn’t a demilitarized “safe area” but a protected Bosnian Muslim military base that had been used to decimate the local Serb population. It also rests on the failure to see that the massacre was immensely useful, like the Markale Market massacre, with the hope and expectation that it would produce a NATO military response. Bosnian Muslim leaders were crying “genocide” even before the Serbs captured Srebrenica.
It also rests on numbers manipulation. There were only about 2,000 bodies found near Srebrenica after intense searches over the next six years, not all Bosnian Muslims and those that were not necessarily executed. There had been intense fighting outside Srebrenica, but it was convenient for numbers inflation that these deaths could be ignored and any “missing” could be assumed executed.
The idea that the Serbs moved several thousand bodies en masse has never been plausible: Trucking them would have been easily caught by satellite surveillance — no such pictures have been produced — and some of the alleged new graves were closer to Srebrenica than the alleged places of removal. The belated grave findings after the year 2000 have been under the control of the Bosnian Muslim leadership, which has provided disinformation from 1992 on a very consistent basis. Their post-2000 findings and DNA identifications have been further compromised by their very unscientific handling of the body remains (in the ground five or more years), their inability to distinguish between bodies killed in fighting and executed, or those that may have died before or after 1995, and their frequent timing to reinforce political events.
The continuous publicity over Srebrenica, like its initial surge, has been hugely political — this selective and inflated victimization has political payoffs for the victims and their patrons, along with psychological rewards in inflicting pain on longstanding enemies and targets. And in this case, the imperial rulers aren’t only able to point to an allegedly justified “humanitarian intervention” to help cover over their larger plans in a global projection of power, but they have been able to transform the Balkans into a staging ground for NATO’s post-Cold war expansionist order.


Edward S. Herman, Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, is the author of many books on economics, foreign policy, and the media, including Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis (with Philip Hammond, eds., Pluto, 2000).
 

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sapun_od_srpske_masti
sapun_od_srpske_masti
Apr 13, 2017 5:32 AM

wow, this website is filled with serbian propaganda.
and it all boils down to: serb dindu nuffin.

Dejan
Dejan
Mar 29, 2016 10:00 PM

How I wish that all of us (Serbs, Croats , Muslims) could sit together at one table and TALK to each other.
Is that too much to ask?

Gareth Walker (@Dewazza72)
Gareth Walker (@Dewazza72)
Mar 24, 2016 2:24 AM

I’m now being pre moderated on the Guardian website for my views on Yugoslavia.

Vaska
Vaska
Mar 24, 2016 8:29 PM

The Guardian had among the most biased reporting of the break-up of Yugoslavia. It was as bad and as disgraceful as what it’s been doing with its “reporting” on Russia and Ukraine the past couple of years.

Miki Martinela
Miki Martinela
Mar 16, 2016 7:18 PM

Vaska,
Hvala vam puno.

Davide
Davide
Mar 15, 2016 4:52 AM

I missed this article when it was published, but a couple years ago I wrote a 30-page paper on the reasons for the collapse of Yugoslavia and a 20-page paper on the war in Bosnia, so it piqued my interest. I completely agree with Vaska’s comments about Tito’s constitutional reforms making the collapse of the federation after his death inevitable, though it does seem to me that Tito was one of very few politicians who truly believed in the idea of Yugoslavia. According to what I’ve read it also seems that the lot of Slavic and non-Slavic minorities in the different republics improved significantly under his leadership, at least in later years. Unfortunately the mass graves in Slovenia and the rest of former Yugoslavia whose existence became widely known in the early 90s probably hold the evidence that the partisans committed large-scale massacres between the last years of the war and the early 50s. Please correct me if I’m wrong on any of the above.
I have several Bosnian-Canadian friends and communicate with a couple other Bosnians I’ve met online, and while I know perfectly well that a handful of people from a country don’t speak for everyone, something striking is that each of them has antipathy only towards NATO for their role in the conflict, and not towards Serbia or Serbians. Before beginning my paper on the Bosnian war I essentially had no opinion on foreign intervention, and if you read the Wikipedia article on the conflict it essentially presents the view that the UN peacekeepers and NATO bombers were unambiguously a force for good. But after doing real research and reading actual contemporary reports, even those from the western media, it became very clear that at the absolute least the west’s interference prolonged the war, expanded its scale and made it much, much bloodier than it otherwise would have been. The Srebrenica massacre and the lion’s share of the other atrocities during the war could never have happened had it not been for western intervention. The moral of the story is crystal-clear for anyone to see: do not interfere in other nations’ affairs (back then I naively assumed that NATO must have had even a passing interest in morality). I have no more or less sympathy for any one post-Yugoslav republic than I do for the others, but its clear that NATO has taken full advantage of its breakup to move in and play divide-and-conquer.
Another thing that threw me right off is that ‘Yugonostalgia’ is apparently very prevalent in Bosnia, which, if you believe that Yugoslavia was only a vehicle to further Serbia’s aims, should not be the case. I can’t find it right now, but there is a very striking photo of a group of Bosnian children firing toy pistols at NATO bombers flying overhead.

Vaska
Vaska
Mar 15, 2016 6:14 PM
Reply to  Davide

Sometime in 1997 or so, I wrote a paper on the break-up of Yugoslavia, using a lot of archival materials made available to me via the alternative media I was involved with and the student groups I had helped online during the Belgrade protests of 1996-97. One of the things I discovered in the course of my research was that there had been a huge civil-society movement in the very early 1990s, all across the territories of former Yugoslavia, petitioning foreign powers against the break-up of the country. The materials in question are, to my knowledge, still held by the Helsinki Group in Prague; they show that in the period before the Internet and mass use of email technology, activists in Bosnia, Macedonia, Monte Negro, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia had managed to collect over 1,000,000 signatures demanding popular representation in any negotiations and talks on the future of the country. The EU (British and German) diplomats to whom this was presented refused to so much as acknowledge the petition. In the course of same research I also discovered that a poll taken shortly before Croatia had seceded from Yugoslavia showed the population split evenly, with 50% for and 50% against secession.
I mention the civil society initiative deliberately ignored by the West because it goes to explain why, as you point out, many Bosniaks feel betrayed by NATO: the majority of the local population in Bosnia, with the exception of a relatively small number of hard-core Islamists and Croatian nationalists, strongly supported the federation and opposed its dismemberment.
You’re also right to point out that from 1960 on the federal Communist Party had promulgated policies and laws which significantly improved the standing of the minorities in Yugoslavia: by the end of the 1960s, Yugoslavia had the most advanced multicultural provisions for minorities in all of Europe.
Finally, the question of the mass graves in Slovenia (the greatest number of them) and elsewhere that you also mention: communist/partisan revanchist atrocities on Yugoslav fascists have been known for decades now, though the mass executions could not be publicly discussed or acknowledged during Tito’s lifetime. In the assessment of many both in and outside of former Yugoslavia, the fact that the dismemberment of the country started with the secession of the two republics which had had the largest fascist movements during WWII — Croatian fascists based in the then Western Germany were still committing acts of terrorism in Yugoslavia as late as the early 1970s — feels like something more than a historical coincidence.
Seeing the current revival of fascist parties in Ukraine and the Baltics, parties which trace their roots to Nazi-collaborationist groups, shows also how the political crimes of mid-20th-century still haunt Europe and how their perpetrator groups are still capable of spawning ideological progeny today.
P.S. Davide: I’d very much like to read your two papers, so could you email me a copy of each using our “Submissions” and [email protected]. For some mysterious technical reason, the latter is not always reliable, so if you don’t mind, please do send them via Submissions, too. Thanks!

Davide
Davide
Apr 14, 2016 4:21 AM
Reply to  Vaska

Hi Vaska, my apologies for taking so long to get back to this. I’ve switched computers since then, so this summer I’ll have to go through my old hard drive and find them. You’ll probably be disappointed, as they were written for a night school class (I’m currently doing my undergrad) and I didn’t have access to any primary sources, but I’ll email them to you nonetheless when I can.

Vaska
Vaska
Apr 14, 2016 5:12 AM
Reply to  Davide

Hello Davide, and no apologies necessary! Am looking forward to the email, some time this summer.

Sisyphus47
Sisyphus47
Mar 2, 2016 12:30 PM

Reblogged this on Where do We go from Here? and commented:
Lies upon lies, never to admit them, more lies covering old ones…

elenits
elenits
Mar 2, 2016 9:06 AM

About time.
Greece supported the Serbs through this shameful dismemberment and genocide.

John
John
Mar 2, 2016 1:03 PM
Reply to  elenits

Because they are both orthodox christian regimes.

Gareth Walker
Gareth Walker
Mar 6, 2016 11:17 AM
Reply to  John

I’ve been thinking about this for sometime, I do believe it’s the schism.

siemreapnews
siemreapnews
Mar 2, 2016 1:12 AM

Reblogged this on Siem Reap Mirror.

susannapanevin
susannapanevin
Mar 1, 2016 10:07 PM

Reblogged this on Susanna Panevin.

John
John
Mar 1, 2016 9:06 PM

I recall reading accounts of how during the Nazi occupation in the Second World War, Serbians were murdered by the hundreds by having their throats cut while alive and their bodies were thrown into a river, causing the river to turn red.
The SS recruited large numbers of Bosnian Muslims to fight against Yugoslav partisans and on the Russian front.
British officer Robert Maxwell was also involved in military activity in league with the Yugoslav partisans, from memory.
Even now, it seems, there is a great deal of historical bitterness causing deep divisions in the area.
Most of it religiously connected, with the division between ‘Catholic’ Rome and ‘Orthodox’ Constantinople starting it off.
This was followed by Muslim conquest – and the area remains deeply divided to this day, largely due to religion.
In retrospect, Tito was clearly a great person in terms of restraining and restricting religious and nationalist tensions.

jj
jj
Mar 3, 2016 2:02 AM
Reply to  John

No, Tito never expected Yugoslavia to survive after he died and things he was doing since the late 1960’s- early 1970’s – specifically with changes to the constitution, helped set Yugoslavia up for separation.
Also, Tito murdered at least a quarter million anti-communists AFTER the war and his regime stole left and right, taking the homes of Serbs in Belgrade, for instance, and giving them to his officials or for government use.
Many people were taking their valuables to the museums rather than have them be directly stolen by the communists.

Vaska
Vaska
Mar 7, 2016 4:26 AM
Reply to  jj

Tito was a classic egomaniac, and with him it was literally, “apres moi, le deluge”. The 1973 constitution Tito had presided over set things up in such a way that only scuppering it could have saved Yugoslavia. Realistically speaking, not even that would have helped as by the time the Old Man died, he’d made sure to allow the federalization of the Communist Party, which in practice meant the segmentation and devolution of power to the republics, thus creating local power structures and power struggles which began to gather steam immediately following his death. Not even a military coup could have saved the country as by that point even the Army had been segmented.

Mihail
Mihail
Mar 16, 2016 6:50 PM
Reply to  Vaska

I still have the belief that a military coup would have saved Yugoslavia from internal political collapse however the question of what government would’ve replaced the communist government is difficult. It could’ve lead to an even sterner military intervention by the western powers.

stuartbramhall
stuartbramhall
Mar 1, 2016 6:44 PM

Thanks you for posting things. It’s long past time the hatchet job Clinton promulgated against the Serbs was rectified. In Seattle in the 1990s I worked with Serb refugees with severe PTSD. They talked about Croatian troops in Nazi uniforms committing horrendous atrocities while their Muslim neighbors tried to hide them. Obviously it was nothing like I was reading or hearing in the corporate media so I had to do some digging of my own.
It was at this point I learned about the US run World Bank deliberately splitting up Yugoslavia as a condition of funding and the secret CIA aid to Croatia – all due to the mistaken belief there were vast amounts of oil in the Caspian Basin for US oil companies to exploit. Which ultimately turned out not to be there.
Utterly unconscionable to destroy so many lives for greed. Bill Clinton is a classic sociopath.

Vaska
Vaska
Mar 1, 2016 6:59 PM
Reply to  stuartbramhall

The Adriatic Sea, I think you meant.
The real history of post-WWII attempts — eventually successful, as we know — by Ustasha Nazi-collaborators given refuge in West Germany, the US, and Canada to undermine and destroy the non-aligned, socialist Yugoslavia is still to be written. I hope that those who will write it have access to reports such as yours.

srb
srb
Mar 16, 2016 7:13 PM
Reply to  Vaska

vaska hvala za vasu pomoc o istini za nas srbe al kako mi to vidimo za nas srbe istina je samo kod BOGA nasi junaci koji su branili svoj narod i otadzbinu sada su u hagu i po zatvorima evrope umiru da niko nedigne glas sta se desava sa njima za to bi vas zamolijo da vi i vase kolege kje isto misle i znaju istinu da se skupite i sa dokumentima pravac u hag da svedoci te za karadzica i mladica da vidimo stace da vam kazu u napred zahvalan bozidar

Zeljko Cvijanovic
Zeljko Cvijanovic
Mar 18, 2016 8:01 AM
Reply to  Vaska

Ustasha Nazi-collaborators given refuge in West Germany, the US, and Canada , do not forget that the great majority of them took refuge in Australia.

jj
jj
Mar 3, 2016 1:57 AM
Reply to  stuartbramhall

The Muslims that hid Serbs were probably those in the north or northwest (and area which was also overrun by Croatia’s army). Muslims there were more tolerant and there was even a moderate Muslim leader, Fikret Abdic, who actually won the pre-war election for presidency, but in some kind of deal agreed to step aside to the radical Islamic Alija Izetbegovic (who spelled out his want for a Muslim/sharia law dominated BiH in his book “Islamic Declarations” – yet was promoted by the west as a moderate).
In the end these moderate Muslims were attacked by the Sarajevo government forces and 10s of thousands (mostly civilians) fled to Croatia, where they were kept from moving further north by the Croatian forces. Eventually they were given refuge in other countries, including the U.S. There have actually been some violent fights between these “Western Bosniaks” and the others settled in the U.S.
Also, a former SFOR soldier (SFOR was the occupying NATO forces right after the war ended) said that Bosnian Muslims south of Brcko were allied to Serbs during the entire war.

mohandeer
mohandeer
Mar 1, 2016 6:20 PM

Reblogged this on wgrovedotnet.