re: #259 Justanotherhuman

That and this, which basically tries to excuse/downplay/deny the genocide in Bosnia, basically blaming the victims:

Schindler revises the death-toll of the Srebrenica massacre downward to ‘as many as two thousand Muslim men, mostly soldiers’ (p. 231) - although, in one of several internal contradictions in this book, he earlier put the figure at about seven thousand (p. 227). He argues that ‘[w]hile this was unquestionably a war crime, it is difficult to term it genocide’ (p. 231) - though it was not so difficult for the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, both of which formally described the Srebrenica massacre as ‘genocide’. Instead, Schindler portrays the Srebrenica massacre as Serb revenge for earlier Muslim attacks on Serb civilians, and employs a gross racial stereotype in the process: ‘To Mladic’s troops, who like all Bosnians believed in blood feuds and payback, this was simple revenge.’ (p. 231).

Schindler describes the siege of Sarajevo as a ‘siege manqu’ (p. 189) and as a ‘faux-siege’, where ‘conditions were much more normal than the Western media was willing to portray’ (p. 203), despite the Serb besiegers’ killing of thousands of people in Sarajevo during the war. Perhaps most tellingly of all, he claims (erroneously): ‘Ethnic cleansing, though unpleasant, was no more than the counterinsurgency doctrine learned by three generations of JNA [Yugoslav People’s Army] officers, who were trained in hunting down “fifth columnists” and “terrorists” by expelling sympathisers as well as fighters.’ (p. 82) He then endorses a CIA report, according to which: ‘The Bosnian Serb Army undertook these ethnic cleansing operations because it believed the Muslim population posed an armed threat or could act as a “Fifth Column” during the war with the Bosnian Government.’ (p. 82).