Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt denies over half the Srebrenica massacre
By: Dr. Marko Attila Hoare (Greater Surbiton) – In his memoirs of the Bosnian war, Carl Bildt, the foreign minister of Sweden – which took over the EU presidency on 1 July – has this to say about the Srebrenica massacre:
‘In five days of massacres, Mladic had arranged for the methodical execution of more than three thousand men who had stayed behind and become prisoners of war. And probably more than four thousand people had lost their lives in a week of brutal ambushes and fighting in the forests, by the roadside and in the valleys between Srebrenica and the Tuzla district, as the column was trying to reach safety.’ (Carl Bildt, Peace Journey: The struggle for peace in Bosnia, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1998, p. 66 – all subsequent page references are to Bildt’s book).
The Srebrenica massacre, an act of genocide against the civilian population of Srebrenica that claimed the lives of approximately eight thousand victims, including at least five hundred children under the age of eighteen, has therefore been reduced by Bildt to ‘more than three thousand’, all of them ‘prisoners of war’, while four thousand of the victims are portrayed as battlefield deaths. This would be equivalent to claiming that only two and a quarter million Jewish ‘prisoners of war’ had perished in the Holocaust, while the rest of the six million had been killed in battle.
This was not a casual slip on Bildt’s part. At the time of the Srebrenica massacre, Bildt was the EU’s special envoy to the former Yugoslavia. His massive downplaying of the Serb genocide reflects the EU policy of the time, which was to collaborate with Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia and with Radovan Karadzic’s Bosnian Serb extremists, and to appease their expansionism. Unlike the US, the EU states staunchly supported the international arms embargo against Bosnia, which prevented the country from defending itself from Serb aggression.
In his memoirs, Bildt’s chapter on July 1995, the month when the Srebrenica massacre occurred, is entitled ‘Success and failure: July 1995′. He believes that when describing his record as EU peace mediator in Bosnia for the period of the Srebrenica massacre, the word ’success’ should appropriately be put before the word ‘failure’. Some might feel that using the word ’success’ in relation to EU policy that presided over a genocidal massacre of eight thousand people was just a wee bit inappropriate. But not Bildt, who seems quite proud of his record.
Following the Serb conquest of Srebrenica, Bildt records how he attempted in London on 21 July 1995 to dissuade the Western states from intervening militarily to defend a second Bosnian enclave that was being threatened with a similar fate:
https://bosniak.org/2009/08/01/swedish- ... -massacre/
