Twenty-nine years ago today, the Bosnian Serb Army captured Srebrenica, an isolated town in Bosnia’s east that was jam-packed with Bosnian Muslims, most of them refugees. This small offensive, involving only a couple of battalions of Bosnian Serb troops, soon became the biggest story in the world. What happened around Srebrenica in mid-July 1995 permanently changed the West’s approach to war-making and diplomacy.
The essential facts of the Srebrenica massacre are not in dispute. The town was a United Nations “safe area” but U.N. peacekeepers there, an understrength Dutch battalion, failed to protect anyone. Over the week following Srebrenica’s quick fall, some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, almost all male, a mix of civilians and military personnel, were killed by Bosnian Serb forces. About 2,000 disarmed Bosnian Muslim prisoners of war were executed soon after the town’s capture. The rest died in the days that followed, all over eastern Bosnia.
As the world learned the extent of the massacre, by far the biggest atrocity in the Bosnian War that had raged since the spring of 1992, Western anger mounted. Six weeks later, President Bill Clinton ordered the Pentagon to bomb the Bosnian Serbs in Operation Deliberate Force, the first major military action in NATO’s history. By the year’s end, the war was concluded by American-led diplomacy.
Srebrenica changed history. America went to war for humanitarian reasons alone. Clinton would bomb the Serbs again in 1999 over Kosovo. Humanitarian military intervention became big business for the Pentagon.
In Bosnia, the massacre lingers as a permanent wound on the country, which has never healed from the fratricide three decades ago. Deemed by the U.N. to be an act of genocide, Srebrenica stands as a symbol of Serbian wickedness in the eyes of Muslims worldwide. In Bosnia, Muslims routinely assert that the Serbian entity in the country, the Republika Srpska, was “founded on genocide.” How can there be compromise with such monsters? Hence the endless political deadlock in that small and impoverished country.
Serbs consistently reject the term genocide connected to Srebrenica. Their leaders in Bosnia and Belgrade concede that this was a major war crime committed by Serbs. The recent effort at the U.N. to have July 11 proclaimed as Srebrenica Genocide Day, which had staunch backing by Washington, was opposed by Russia and China.
In fairness to the Serbs, the “official” account of the Srebrenica massacre is held as sacred by Muslims and their allies, who casually accuse anyone who dissents from the party line of “genocide denial.” However, I know things they don’t because I was technical director of the National Security Agency’s Balkans Division. American intelligence knew from the start that what happened around Srebrenica was considerably more complicated and cynical than the Western media reported.
What do I mean? I exposed the truth in my book Unholy Terror, but here’s the short list of what the “official” story omits about Srebrenica:
That for three years, Srebrenica, supposedly a U.N. “safe area,” served as a staging base for Bosnian Muslim attacks into Serb territory. The Muslim military’s 28th Division regularly attacked out of Srebrenica. Bosnian Serbs claim they lost over 3,000 people, civilian and military, to those attacks.
That the Bosnian Muslim commander at Srebrenica, Naser Oric, was a thug who tortured and killed Serb civilians (he showed Western journalists footage of his troops decapitating Serb prisoners), as well as fellow Muslims he disliked. Mysteriously, Oric fled Srebrenica three months before the town’s fall, leaving his troops to die.
That most of the Bosnian Muslim dead, some three-quarters of them, died not at Srebrenica but during an attempted breakout by troops of the 28th Division to reach their own lines around Tuzla. They showed little communications discipline, and Bosnian Serb forces called down their artillery on them, columns of Muslim military and civilians together, slaughtering them. This doesn’t meet any standard definition of genocide.
That the Muslims were flying weapons into the “safe area” by helicopter in the months before the Bosnian Serb offensive. (Controversially, the Pentagon knew this was happening but pretended it didn’t.) The Serbs repeatedly protested to the U.N. about this violation, to no avail. This was the reason for the offensive to take the town.
There’s also convincing evidence that the Muslim leadership in Sarajevo knew Srebrenica would be attacked and allowed it to fall. Their leader, Alija Izetbegovic, stated that if Srebrenica fell, the Serbs would massacre Muslims as payback, and America would intervene on the Muslim side in the war. He was right.
Above all, that Srebrenica represented the “worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.” That’s certainly not true today following extensive Russian killings of Ukrainian civilians since early 2022. But it wasn’t even true in 1995. During the Russian siege of the Chechen capital Groznyy during the bloody winter of 1994-95, intense artillery and air strikes over less than three months killed some 30,000 civilians (and perhaps even more), roughly the same as the number of Muslim civilians killed during the whole Bosnian War.
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This isn’t merely a historical matter. What happened in Bosnia is being repeated today in Gaza. Western journalists uncritically accept Muslim claims about war crimes and “genocide” to smear a Western state that’s at war with radical Islam.
Here the strange ideological affinity between jihadists and the Western Left plays a role, as it did during the Bosnian War as well. No claims of war crimes, which possess great political value on the world stage, should be accepted without independent confirmation. Srebrenica should have taught Western elites this essential truth, but it didn’t.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.
