Notorious war reporter Ed Vulliamy – whose claim to fame was “witnessing” the genocide in Bosnia through paid PR plants – came out swinging in Tuesday’s Guardian, accusing Russia of hiding Balkans war crimes suspects.
Unlike most articles putting forth allegations of such seriousness, Vulliamy’s tone is that of absolute truth and verified facts – yet he offers little or no corroboration for his claim. No one in the story is ever quoted by name; it’s all “sources at The Hague and other intelligence sources,” “one senior diplomat,” and “[o]ther western intelligence sources.”
The entire shocking expose stinks of nothing so much as the “revelation” of Saddam Hussein’s WMD’s. At least Colin Powell had pretty pictures when he got up and lied at the Security Council. Vulliamy don’t need no stinkin’ evidence; he’s got it all figured out in his head…
In addition to slinging mud at the Russians – who have actually given asylum to several Serb officials, who were [i]later[/i] charged with war crimes – Vulliamy also uses the article as a vehicle for propaganda about Bosnia. He thus makes unattributed assertions calculated to sound as established truth. For example:
“A number of girls and women were kept (along with some other civilians) in a school, a sports hall and a military facility. There, and in a network of apartments and motels, they were subjected to serial sexual assault by Serbian soldiers and paramilitaries.” [referring to Foca, 1992]
It is presented as fact, but who established it as such – the ICTY indictment? ICTY verdict? IWPR? Ed Vulliamy? That, we’re never told.
About Srebrenica, the favorite atrocity of mainstream propaganda peddlers, Vulliamy says:
“Under the direction of the now fugitive Serb general Ratko Mladic, Bosnian Serb and Serbian soldiers and paramilitaries separated men from women and children while Dutch UN troops watched, and took the men to a series of execution sites. They also ambushed a column trying to escape through the woods, executing thousands more.”
Vulliamy is deliberately creating a false impression of an execution witnessed by the UN and the women and children of Srebrenica, though in fact UN officers and officials have said repeatedly they never witnessed any atrocities (see here for statement by Hubert Wieland). The “column trying to escape through the woods” was the Bosnian Muslim Army’s 28th Division, and it wasn’t “ambushed” or “executed”, but engaged in a running battle between Srebrenica and Tuzla, in which the numerically inferior Serb forces took many casualties. But to give Vulliamy credit, he actually mentions the column. Most other propagandists stick with the deliberately misleading image of civilians separated from their families and shot en masse. A grain of truth helps the lie go down, maybe?
The final straw surely must be Vulliamy’s spin of Paddy Ashdown’s reign of terror in Bosnia, which he blames squarely on the Serbs and Russians, who have “persistently crossed swords” with the vulgar viceroy.