The Srebrenica Massacre — 11 July 1995

It kills me that I forgot this anniversary, because if I forgot, I'm sure most people forgot. Why bother about it? It was a long time ago. It was far away. It it worth remembering because it was a massacre carried out with help from the United Nations Peacekeeping troops that were supposed to stop exactly this kind of thing.

What follows is a copy of what I posted in 2022, so the days are wrong. (The 11th of July was a week ago.) But the links in the post still work, and the facts haven't changed. I would remind people that the UN was created expressly to be sure that genocide and ethnic cleansing never happened again. 30 years ago they were helping out, and yet we still support this organization. Why? I don't know. This certainly isn't the only time the UN failed to prevent genocide. It may be the only time they helped out.

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I will be very surprised if governments do anything to mark this anniversary on Monday, because it was in many ways the failure of government. It is certainly a failure of the United Nations. Bosnia's Srebrenica massacre 25 years on - in pictures - BBC News. The referenced article is from 2 years ago.

The UN had promised safety, enforced by its "Peace Keepers" (so called). That didn't work out too well.

On 11 July 1995, Bosnian Serb units captured the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

In less than two weeks, their forces systematically murdered more than 8,000 Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) - the worst act of mass killing on European soil since the end of World War Two.

Ratko Mladic, commander of the Bosnian Serb units, told the terrified civilians not to be afraid as his forces began the slaughter. They did not stop for 10 days.

The Bosnian War broke out in the early 1990s as Yugoslavia disintegrated after the fall of the Soviet Union. There were a couple of interim states, but today, what was formerly Yugoslavia is divided between Bosnia and Herzegovina (one country), Montenegro, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, and North Macedonia. Early on, Serbia did not accept some of the divisions, and declared war on Bosnia-Herzegovina. Serbia instituted a policy of ethnic cleansing to remove Bosniaks from the area in an effort to create Greater Serbia.

Srebrenica was a town in Bosnia and Herzegovina established as a UN safe zone. However the Useless Nitwits at the United Nations only could assign a lightly armed, quite small force of Dutch soldiers to provide "peacekeeping" force for Srebrenica.

In April 1993, the UN Security Council declared the enclave a "safe area... free from any armed attack or any other hostile act".

That sounds nice, but the UN (useless nitwits) did almost nothing to make that statement true. Srebrenica had been under siege since 1992. In 1993 supplies for both the citizens and the Dutch peacekeeping force gave out. People started dying of starvation. I don't know about you, but classic siege warfare sounds like fairly "hostile act" to me.

That is the beauty of the debating society known as The UN. They can say whatever the hell they want. Doesn't make it true.

On 6 July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces attacked Srebrenica in earnest. UN forces surrendered or retreated into the town, and Nato air strikes, called in to help, did little to slow the advance.

Five days later the city fell, and the killing began. 20,000 people were able to escape to the main UN base, but not all escaped.

Under-equipped Dutch soldiers witnessing the Serb aggression did nothing and about 5,000 Muslims sheltering at their base were handed over.

The Dutch military and government would later be blamed for 350 of the 8,000 deaths. The UN was never held accountable for anything.

Ratko Mladic would be captured in 2011, and convicted in the Hague in 2017. Serbia has apologized for the incident, but continues to deny that it constituted genocide.

The citizens of the disintegrating Yugoslavia in the 1990s, like the citizens of Ukraine in 2022, were not allowed to own arms. When a hostile neighbor decided that they were better off dead, there was little they could do, but put their faith in the UN and NATO. That didn't work out so well.

This is not a new phenomenon.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

That is an excerpt from "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" by Rudyard Kipling (1919)