© Screenshot / vesti.ruOne of Russia’s most well-known scholars and an expert in the Balkans, Elena Guskova
This week saw the failure of the UK-backed UNSC draft resolution calling to declare the 20-year-old mass murder of thousands of Muslims near the town of Srebrenica as genocide committed by the Serbian army; and while some Western countries strongly criticize the failure, a Russian expert explains what actually might be behind the proposed document.
Saturday, July 11, marked the 20th anniversary of the tragic events in the Muslim-majority town of the mainly Serb eastern part of Bosnia.
Back in 1995 thousands of Muslims, mainly men and boys, were murdered in and around the town of Srebrenica after it was occupied by the Bosnian Serb militia under the command of Gen. Ratko Mladic. The former general is now on trial for genocide in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, along with the former President of the Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina Radovan Karadžić.
The massacre in Srebrenica has previously been classified as an act of genocide by the UN International Court of Justice and ICTY, now the draft resolution pushed for the same classification, claiming that a failure to adopt it will hinder reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
However, one of Russia's most well-known scholars and an expert in the Balkans, Elena Guskova, who was there on the ground during the years of the Bosnian war, believes that despite the enormity of the crime, there are insufficient grounds to consider the killings an act of genocide.
"We can't talk about genocide here," she told Rossiya 1 TV show "Vesti on Saturday". "What is genocide by definition? It is the elimination of a particular nation on the territory of another country. It is a systematic, deliberate killing. There was nothing of the kind on the territory of Srebrenica. Those were military actions."
She also debated the actual number of those killed, saying that now it stands at 8,000, but it is absolutely unclear where this figure comes from and it has fluctuated all the time, dropping down to 5,000 and then rising up to 25,000.
"This does not reflect the truth in any way," she said. "This massacre has already become a myth, which can't be either reviewed or otherwise disputed."
Comment: The U.S. did something similar in Libya, only then, they didn't bother to use their Al Qaeda proxy as a pretext. They just presented them as rebels with a cause worth supporting, even if that cause included rape, murder, torture, cannibalism, and a string of other psychopathic atrocities. (The same applies to the so-called moderate rebels in Syria.)
When it comes down to it, all the biggest, baddest, extremist Muslim groups simply do the bidding of the U.S. and its allies, whether the individuals involved know it or not. Obama knows it: Once-in-a-lifetime event! Obama tells the truth: "We're speeding up training of ISIL forces" (VIDEO)