A reader prompted by my piece on Srebrenica points me to this long analysis by Milivoje Ivanišević of the 'context' of Srebrenica, including numerous massacres by Muslims/Bosniacs of Serbs in the area before the enclave fell:

The dead Muslim fighters of Srebrenica have now finally become completely innocent, and are present in various schemes developed by those who never knew them and who, today, still devoid of any sensible foundation, have adopted them and “defend” them.

The imposed cult of Srebrenica is still keeping watch over our conscience, and has become a metaphor for the unimaginable, and in addition to of all this, it has even become a metaphor of the genocidal crime Serbs carried out against the innocent local residents of an inaccessible Bosnian town situated at the bottom of a ravine.

Put some tedious rhetoric aside and there is a lot of noteworthy detail here which does offer a corrective of sorts to the conventional view. Go and read it.

But the piece ultimately fails:

During the next two days, a dozen soldiers from 10th Sabotage Detachment, who were on leave, were gathered, and they committed what is today qualified as a genocide. The shooting to death of captured Muslims is not the subject of this discussion...

Sorry, but if you don't take that as a central feature of the issue, something rather significant is being missed?

There ensues a long and somewhat confusing analysis of the numbers and names of people found in mass graves, and when precisely they died.

The conclusion? Instead of a Conclusion (sic):

The wartime pasts or biographies of commanders and soldiers of the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina are filled with attacks on Serbian villages and the killings of individuals of Serbian nationality. They showed no mercy to Serbian villages and their residents. The evidence is overwhelming.

These facts contradict the constantly proffered thesis that Srebrenica was about the victims of genocide or Muslim civilian victims. It is certain that some of them were executed after having been captured, but many more of them died in battles while attempting to break through [Serbian lines of defense] to Tuzla. They also suffered losses from internal conflicts and infighting.

This amounts to a macabre, neurotic view of the issue which does not helps Serbs or the wider Serbian cause.

There is an honourable way for Serbs to deal with Srebrenica.

Namely to follow the example of Sydney Kentridge QC and begin in chilling detail with the appalling facts of the mass Mladic killings of prisoners; acknowledge them for the war crime they were; accept in a spirit of true penitence that in one way or the other the Milosevic regime (as elected and supported by millions of Serbs) had some sort of responsibility for this situation; and only then move on to the 'context'.

Anything else is nothing but this:

They were dirty, so why blame us for being dirty in reply? Plus since we were only responding to their dirt, even if our dirt was bigger than theirs (which we dispute) it was justified. See?! Our dirt is cleaner than their dirt!

That is not good enough. It leads Serbs and Serbia deeper into a now familiar moral abyss.