Bored by the UK election campaign already? Missing meaning in your life? Or just nothing much to do tomorrow?
Pop over to Toronto for a gathering on the subject of Srebrenica: Myth, Manipulation, Historic Truth at St Sava church hall, 203 River Street. 3pm.
There you can expect to hear a range of speakers argue variously that the Srebrenica massacre didn’t happen, and/or that if it did happen it was only a miserably small and irrelevant massacre, and/or and that the West/Moslems/UN/Holbrooke were ‘really’ reposnsible for it.
Check out this stunning thought from the Srebrenica Research Group:
With 8,000 executed and thousands killed in the fighting, there should have been huge grave sites and satellite evidence of both executions, burials, and any body removals.
But the body searches in the Srebrenica vicinity were painfully disappointing, with only some two thousand bodies found in searches through 2001, including bodies killed in action and possibly Serb bodies, some pre-dating July 1995.
Read that again: the body searches … were painfully disappointing, with only some two thousand bodies found…
In the conference materials for this gathering, Srdja Trifkovic denounces the US State Department for downplaying the scale of the WW2 Croatian atrocities against Serbs at the Jasenovac concentration camp and elsewhere (my emphasis) and quotes General Lothar Rendulic who commanded German forces in the western Balkans in 1943/44:
When I objected to a high official who was close to Pavelic that, in spite of the accumulated hatred, I failed to comprehend the murder of half a million Orthodox, the answer I received was characteristic of the mentality that prevailed there: Half a million, that’s too much – there weren’t more than 200,000!
Indeed. Disappointingly small numbers.
As HM Ambassador in Belgrade I in vain pressed FRY President Kostunica and his creepy officials to grip the war crimes issue and give a moral lead:
When, for example, a truck containing the bodies of Albanians massacred by Milosevic’s forces was found in the Danube, I urged Kostunica’s team to aim to win international praise by eg organising a decent high-profile ceremony in their honour and sending personal messages to all their relatives.
I tried to get through to them that some sort of civilised European human gesture would be right in itself, plus a strong sign that post-Milosevic Serbia understood the way international opinion was formed and wanted to be a nimble part of it.
Back came the appalling answer. “There are many mass graves in and around Belgrade from WW2 – what difference does another one make?”
Are all Balkan massacres – and the hideous, stunted attitudes towards them shown by otherwise seemingly intelligent people – by some chance related?