This letter, dated 21 December 1994, was submitted to the Secretary General of the United Nations by the charge d'affaires of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and it deals with the persecution of the Serbian community in Srebrenica since the outbreak of the conflict in Bosnia in 1992.

Yugoslav government report on crimes in Srebrenica 1994.pdf [PDF - 5.55 MB]

Throughout the war period, 1992—1995, Serbian villages around Srebrenica were subjected to widespread and systematic attacks by Moslem military forces concentrated within the Srebrenica enclave. The fate of Srebrenica Serbs is but a microcosm of their wartime fate in Bosnia/Hercegovina as a whole. Serb inhabitants in the villages surrounding Srebrenica were murdered in the hundreds, abused, expelled, and kidnapped for ransom and exchange. Most of the villages were torched after the personal property of their Serbian inhabitants had been pillaged. The attacks were indiscriminate and they targeted Serbs as such, without any attempt being made to determine the victims’ personal position vis-à-vis the ongoing conflict in Bosnia/Hercegovina or the level of threat to Muslim armed forces they might have represented. It is important to note that the Muslim civilian and military authorities conducting these operations out of Srebrenica did not operate independently, but were linked in the political and military chain of command to the Alija Izetbegovic regime in Sarajevo. That “government” publicly claimed to be “multi-ethnic” and “multi-cultural,” and many in the West were misled by intense propaganda to accept its claims at face value. But all the while that regime’s Srebrenica representatives were conducting a ruthless three-year pogrom in complete disregard of the fact that their targeted victims were peaceful peasants, indistinguishable from their Moslem neighbors except by the fact that they were Serb and Christian. This is probably a unique case where an internationally recognized “government” used its military instruments to conduct a carnage of inhabitants that, when addressing the international community, it duplicitously claimed as its own citizens. These witness statements, and others that we will soon add, will make it abundantly clear why Serbs in Bosnia/Hercegovina uncompromisingly insist on being masters of their own fate and why they are entitled to the Republic of Srpska as their safe heaven just as the Jewish people are entitled to Israel.

Serbian witness statements I  [PDF - 1.10 MB]

Serbian witness statements II [PDF - 1.12 MB]