[A-List] Balkans: Milosevic Srebrenica testimony

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

If you scroll down you'll see an interesting article that simply
"appeared" in the Herald newspaper over a year ago and which prompted
little commentary at the time, but which looks a lot more significant
after this. Below that there is further evidence of Western complicity
in what transpired at Srebrenica.


French behind Srebrenica massacre, claims Milosevic
By Stephen Castle
The Independent, 28 September 2002

The former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic claimed yesterday that
the massacre of about 7,000 men and boys at Srebrenica was orchestrated
by the French secret service to turn world opinion against the Serbs.

Mr Milosevic, who faces genocide charges for atrocities in Bosnia,
denied involvement in the mass murder, which took place in July 1995. He
told the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague that Bosnian Serb
paramilitaries had been paid by the French secret service to carry out
the executions as part of an international propaganda campaign.

He also denied any involvement on the part of the senior Yugoslav
military commander, Ratko Mladic, or Radislav Krstic, the Bosnian Serb
general who has already been convicted of genocide by the tribunal for
his role at Srebrenica. Neither man "knew anything of this massacre and
I'm sure that military honour would never have permitted them to execute
innocent civilians," Mr Milosevic said.

"Ask [French president] Jacques Chirac about Srebrenica," he added,
claiming that Bosnian Muslim officials and the United Nations' French
general, Bernard Janvier, had colluded in a deal designed to trigger
international outrage and prompt Nato air raids against the Bosnian
Serbs. "I claim with full responsibility before the eyes of the world
public that Serbia's policy was consistent with peace," Mr Milosevic
said.

In all, Mr Milosevic faces 61 war charges and the prosecution, which has
already completed its case against him for events in Kosovo, has just
begun outlining its allegations concerning Croatia and Bosnia.

The first witness in this part of his trial was a Serb Democratic Party
member whose image was blurred and voice changed to protect his
identity. He said that in the run-up to the Croatian war in 1990,
Belgrade used the Serb-controlled media to play on the Serb minority's
fears and rally support for hardline leaders backing armed rebellion
against Zagreb. Mr Milosevic called the testimony "preposterous".

-----

Cover-up led Nato to betray Muslims
IAN BRUCE
The Herald, 20 April 2001

THE United States, France, and Germany deliberately sacrificed the
Bosnian "safe haven" of Srebrenica in July 1995 and paved the way for
the worst massacre in Europe since the Nazi atrocities of the Second
World War, according to intelligence sources.

The move was designed to discredit and undermine the United Nations and
give Nato an excuse to intervene in the Balkans and transfer authority
for peace-keeping in the volatile region to its own military command.

Jacques Chirac, the French president, ordered Lieutenant General Bernard
Janvier, then the supreme commander of UN protection forces in Bosnia,
to veto airstrikes which might have halted the advancing Serbs as they
closed on the Muslim enclave and its 60,000 inhabitants.

More than 7500 Muslim men and boys of military age were either separated
from their families and executed in batches after the town was overrun,
or hunted through the hills as they fled and shot down in ambushes.

On the day after Colonel Dragan Obrenovic, then a Serb brigade
commander, appeared before the Hague war crimes tribunal on charges of
complicity in genocide at Srebrenica, sources told The Herald the
Americans and others were aware of Serb plans long before the final
assault on the town.

A joint CIA-German secret service electronic listening post in the
Austrian Alps had monitored every conversation between Ratko Mladic, the
Bosnian Serb military commander, and the Yugoslav army's high command in
Belgrade for three weeks and were aware of the detailed plans for the
offensive.

In addition, US surveillance drones and satellite imagery had revealed
the build-up of Serb troops. The information was not shared with the UN
or Britain.

Dutch conscripts "protecting" Srebrenica on the UN's behalf when Mladic
unleashed a seven-day bombardment on July 5 made five separate requests
for air support. All were denied.

A source said: "Yasushi Akashi, the Japanese UN special envoy to Bosnia,
was told by the French they would not sanction air strikes or ground
intervention to save Srebrenica.

"Akashi sent a cable to UN headquarters in New York which detailed a
conversation between himself and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevich
in which Milosevich claimed he had been advised by Chirac of US
president Bill Clinton's agreement that air strikes would not occur if
they were unacceptable to France.

"Even earlier, General Janvier had asked the UN security council to give
up the "safe haven" status of Srebrenica, Gorazde, and Zepa, all Muslim
enclaves in eastern Bosnia. That should have set alarm bells ringing as
to the direction of French intentions.

"The ensuing massacre was a betrayal of all of the participants. It
suited a number of governments because it displayed UN incompetence,
demonstrated that the ruthless Serbs must now be stopped by resolute
intervention from Nato."

* Exhumations at a mass grave in Croatia by the UN war crimes tribunal
may unearth about 250 bodies of Serbs killed during Croatia's 1995
offensive.

A Croatian government official said the process should determine whether
the Serbs were slaughtered by vengeful Croat troops or killed in combat.

-----

America used Islamists to arm the Bosnian Muslims

The Srebrenica report reveals the Pentagon's role in a dirty war

Richard J Aldrich
Monday April 22, 2002
The Guardian

The official Dutch inquiry into the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, released
last week, contains one of the most sensational reports on western
intelligence ever published. Officials have been staggered by its
findings and the Dutch government has resigned. One of its many volumes
is devoted to clandestine activities during the Bosnian war of the early
1990s. For five years, Professor Cees Wiebes of Amsterdam University has
had unrestricted access to Dutch intelligence files and has stalked the
corridors of secret service headquarters in western capitals, as well as
in Bosnia, asking questions.

His findings are set out in "Intelligence and the war in Bosnia,
1992-1995". It includes remarkable material on covert operations,
signals interception, human agents and double-crossing by dozens of
agencies in one of dirtiest wars of the new world disorder. Now we have
the full story of the secret alliance between the Pentagon and radical
Islamist groups from the Middle East designed to assist the Bosnian
Muslims - some of the same groups that the Pentagon is now fighting in
"the war against terrorism". Pentagon operations in Bosnia have
delivered their own "blowback".

In the 1980s Washington's secret services had assisted Saddam Hussein in
his war against Iran. Then, in 1990, the US fought him in the Gulf. In
both Afghanistan and the Gulf, the Pentagon had incurred debts to
Islamist groups and their Middle Eastern sponsors. By 1993 these groups,
many supported by Iran and Saudi Arabia, were anxious to help Bosnian
Muslims fighting in the former Yugoslavia and called in their debts with
the Americans. Bill Clinton and the Pentagon were keen to be seen as
creditworthy and repaid in the form of an Iran-Contra style operation -
in flagrant violation of the UN security council arms embargo against
all combatants in the former Yugoslavia.

The result was a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though
Croatia. This was arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey
and Iran, together with a range of radical Islamist groups, including
Afghan mojahedin and the pro-Iranian Hizbullah. Wiebes reveals that the
British intelligence services obtained documents early on in the Bosnian
war proving that Iran was making direct deliveries.

Arms purchased by Iran and Turkey with the financial backing of Saudi
Arabia made their way by night from the Middle East. Initially aircraft
from Iran Air were used, but as the volume increased they were joined by
a mysterious fleet of black C-130 Hercules aircraft. The report stresses
that the US was "very closely involved" in the airlift. Mojahedin
fighters were also flown in, but they were reserved as shock troops for
especially hazardous operations.

Light weapons are the familiar currency of secret services seeking to
influence such conflicts. The volume of weapons flown into Croatia was
enormous, partly because of a steep Croatian "transit tax". Croatian
forces creamed off between 20% and 50% of the arms. The report stresses
that this entire trade was clearly illicit. The Croats themselves also
obtained massive quantities of illegal weapons from Germany, Belgium and
Argentina - again in contravention of the UN arms embargo. The German
secret services were fully aware of the trade.

Rather than the CIA, the Pentagon's own secret service was the hidden
force behind these operations. The UN protection force, UNPROFOR, was
dependent on its troop-contributing nations for intelligence, and above
all on the sophisticated monitoring capabilities of the US to police the
arms embargo. This gave the Pentagon the ability to manipulate the
embargo at will: ensuring that American Awacs aircraft covered crucial
areas and were able to turn a blind eye to the frequent nightime comings
and goings at Tuzla.

Weapons flown in during the spring of 1995 were to turn up only a
fortnight later in the besieged and demilitarised enclave at Srebrenica.
When these shipments were noticed, Americans pressured UNPROFOR to
rewrite reports, and when Norwegian officials protested about the
flights, they were reportedly threatened into silence.

Both the CIA and British SIS had a more sophisticated perspective on the
conflict than the Pentagon, insisting that no side had clean hands and
arguing for caution. James Woolsey, director of the CIA until May 1995,
had increasingly found himself out of step with the Clinton White House
over his reluctance to develop close relations with the Islamists. The
sentiments were reciprocated. In the spring of 1995, when the CIA sent
its first head of station to Sarajevo to liaise with Bosnia's security
authorities, the Bosnians tipped off Iranian intelligence. The CIA
learned that the Iranians had targeted him for liquidation and quickly
withdrew him.

Iranian and Afghan veterans' training camps had also been identified in
Bosnia. Later, in the Dayton Accords of November 1995, the stipulation
appeared that all foreign forces be withdrawn. This was a deliberate
attempt to cleanse Bosnia of Iranian-run training camps. The CIA's main
opponents in Bosnia were now the mojahedin fighters and their Iranian
trainers - whom the Pentagon had been helping to supply months earlier.

Meanwhile, the secret services of Ukraine, Greece and Israel were busy
arming the Bosnian Serbs. Mossad was especially active and concluded a
deal with the Bosnian Serbs at Pale involving a substantial supply of
artillery shells and mortar bombs. In return they secured safe passage
for the Jewish population out of the besieged town of Sarajevo.
Subsequently, the remaining population was perplexed to find that
unexploded mortar bombs landing in Sarajevo sometimes had Hebrew
markings.

The broader lessons of the intelligence report on Srebrenica are clear.
Those who were able to deploy intelligence power, including the
Americans and their enemies, the Bosnian Serbs, were both able to get
their way. Conversely, the UN and the Dutch government were "deprived of
the means and capacity for obtaining intelligence" for the Srebrenica
deployment, helping to explain why they blundered in, and contributed to
the terrible events there.

Secret intelligence techniques can be war-winning and life-saving. But
they are not being properly applied. How the UN can have good
intelligence in the context of multinational peace operations is a
vexing question. Removing light weapons from a conflict can be crucial
to drawing it down. But the secret services of some states - including
Israel and Iran - continue to be a major source of covert supply,
pouring petrol on the flames of already bitter conflicts.

· Richard J Aldrich is Professor of Politics at the University of
Nottingham. His 'The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret
Intelligence' is published in paperback by John Murray in August.