A smoking gun has come to light in the case of the 10-year-old Srebrenica massacre. Serbian authorities have obtained a videotape that shows, in graphic detail, Serbian paramilitary police torturing and killing Muslim men at Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina in July 1995. Serbian security forces killed more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in that massacre, which is said to be the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II. But many Serbs deny the event took place, or claim that the perpetrators were Bosnian Serbs, not Serbian nationals. The videotape shows the faces of some of the killers, and Serbia's prime minister says that some already have been arrested.Sometimes, it takes a mandate to prevent the slaughter of an entire village. Posted by Kyer at June 3, 2005 04:31 PMPrague, 3 June 2005 (RFE/RL) -- Srebrenica: the eastern Bosnia town's name has festered like a sore for nearly 10 years.
It was the second week of July 1995. War raged in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Bosnian Serb Army chief Ratko Mladic led a powerful Serbian advance. An estimated 30,000 terrified Muslims took welcome refuge in and around the enclave of Srebrenica, which the United Nations had declared a safe area. It was protected by Dutch troops wearing the blue helmets of UN peacekeepers.
But the peacekeepers, hopelessly outnumbered and without the mandate or means to resist, in the end did little to prevent the Serbs from taking away thousands of Muslim men and boys from outside the enclave.
On 11 July, Mladic's forces entered the enclave itself. They methodically sorted the Muslim men and boys from the rest and took them away. The world learned later that Mladic's forces had massacred up to 7,000 people in the incident.