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NEWS & LETTERS, NOVEMBER 2003Our Life and Times by Kevin A. BarryProof of Serbia role in Srebrenica massacreNew evidence of Serbian genocide keeps surfacing at the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. The most recent example was the October testimony by Dragan Obrenovic, a Bosnian Serb brigade commander, and Momir Nikolic, an intelligence officer. Their testimony concerned the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys that was carried out under the orders of General Ratko Mladic, who reported directly to Milosevic. Mladic, an indicted war criminal who is still considered a hero in Serbia, remains in hiding. Nikolic testified in October about how he received a direct order from Mladic to kill all the Bosnian Muslim men who had fallen into their hands after Serbian forces overran Srebrenica. Nikolic transmitted those orders down the line to men like Obrenovic, who carried them out. Nikolic also supervised subsequent efforts to dig up the bodies and hide them, in an effort to thwart any future war crimes prosecutions. Both Nikolic and Obrenovic have pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have testified in hopes of mitigating their sentences. This and other new testimony has come despite years of stonewalling by the Serbian military and government, abetted ideologically by the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, headed in the U.S. by the neo-Stalinist writer Michael Parenti. Unfortunately, the overly scrupulous judges at Milosevic’s trial have rarely allowed direct testimony by Serbian war criminals who have already pleaded guilty, not even from former Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic, who received her orders directly from Milosevic. |
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