There is one thing I like about Bosnia genocide-deniers. When I first started taking them on a few years ago, their arguments were already easy to refute, and I was hampered only by the limits of my own knowledge. Now, nearly two decades on, I know a lot more, but I still periodically find myself repeating the same old refutations of the same old arguments – arguments that sound increasingly silly as time goes by. That Germany 'encouraged' Croatia's secession from Yugoslavia, or that the Western media was 'biased' against the Serb side in the war, or that Bosnian forces shelled their own civilians to provoke Western military intervention against the Serb rebels. These are some of their main arguments and not a single piece of evidence has ever been produced to support any of them. The steady gathering of forensic evidence has made the Srebrenica massacre the most well-documented genocidal crime in history. Yet like lambs to the slaughter, new waves of deniers step forward to sacrifice any reputations they might have in the service of a long-discredited cause.
This tract is the next such lamb. Promoted as an exposé of how Western countries mishandled the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, it's really something else —dishonest, sometimes outright racist, nearly three-hour apologea on behalf of Serbian murderers.
The film was made by George Bogdanich, identified on the film's web site as "an independent documentary producer, reporter, freelance journalist and editor." What this does not tell you is that Bogdanich has spent years as a Serbian-American activist with groups identified variously as SerbNet and the Serbian American Media Center. Bogdanich raised money for the film from the Serbian-American community.
Other interviewees include Peter Handke, a poet and author with no expertise on the subject matter at all, James George Jatras, an Orthadox anti-semite and anti-Muslim bigot who described Islam as a a "gigantic Christian-killing machine" and says the religion grew from "the darkness of heathen Araby." and David Binder, a speaker at the Serbian Unity Congress and who described Mladic's as a "superb professional", and white-surpremacist magazine "Chronicles". All the usual deadbeat Serb propogandists, even down to Trifkovic, are there as well.
The tract claims that the concentration camps exposed by Roy Gutman were
basically peaceful holding camps. (To prove it, we see footage of a cafeteria. It's very clean) In fact, the routine murder and torture at the camps is thoroughly documented through statements of the camp survivors themselves in not only Gutman's articles but also 80 pages of testimony in the Helsinki Watch (Human Rights Watch). Although the camps did not conduct an industrialized form of mass extermination, allowing the filmmakers to claim that they were not Auschwitz-style "concentration camps," executions were a daily event.
The film also claims that there wasn't really a large-scale massacre in Srebrenica, saying that women and children were bused out of the city, it claims that only a small number of people were killed, with the rest having been found alive later in other locations, and it blames only an unnamed Croat for participating in the murders. Not once does it mention any Serb killing anybody. And whatever the Serbs did, the U.N., the U.S. and the Muslims made them do it. In fact, contemporary press accounts reported that the Serbs deported many of the women and children from Srebrenica, then rounded up the men, removed them to remote locations, and, according to escapees, massacred them and buried the bodies in mass graves. Subsequent discovery of the mass graves confirmed the massacres of thousands of people in the Srebrenica area.
The film also goes on to practice the old denialist trick in relation to the Srebrenica massacre, of describing (and greatly exaggerating) the military actions of the Bosnian military commander in the Srebrenica region, Naser Oric – involving attacks on Serb villages around Srebrenica and atrocities against Serb civilians – while neglecting to mention the incomparably larger-scale Serbian offensives that preceded Oric's actions, and to which the latter were a response. Anyone watching this who didn't know better would be left unaware that, prior to Oric's offensives, Serb forces had massacred and expelled Muslims across the whole of East Bosnia – at Bijeljina, Zvornik, Visegrad, Foca, Bratunac, Srebrenica itself and elsewhere; that 94.83% of the civilians from the Podrinje (East Bosnia) region killed during the war were Muslims and only 4.87% were Serbs (according to the figures of the Research and Documentation Centre); or that more Muslims from Podrinje were killed in 1992 than in the year of the Srebrenica massacre. The military actions of Oric's forces against neighbouring Serb villages were those of defenders of a beleaguered enclave whose inhabitants were threatened with massacre, rape, torture and expulsion already inflicted on other towns all over East Bosnia. That the film lays such stress on Oric's atrocities while wholly neglecting to mention the incomparably greater-in-scale Serb atrocities in the same region that preceded them is distortion of the most blatant kind
There is also an incredibly racist attitude in the film. It cites the Croats' alliance with the Nazis of 50 years earlier as though it's self-evident that the Croats of today are born as amoral killers. There is of course no mention of the Serbian nazi collaborationist Chetniks, the Serbian quisling Nedic regime (which exterminated 94% of Serbian Jewry) nor of the fact that a very large number of Croats and Bosniaks fought against the Nazis as well (Serbians were never more than 44% of the total Partisans).
That's just a few of the omissions and distortions in this 'documentry', and should give you an idea of the quality of its scholarship. Unfortunately the character limit means I cannot comment further, but I will say that there is nothind daring or original at all in the film, it is merely regurgitating discredited Milosevic-era propaganda.
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