Shurygin: “Genocide in Srebrenica” and the Malaysian Boeing are a psychological and information war of the West”
What is genocide for the West and what is not? Why did Russia support and will continue to support the Bosnian Serbs? What Serbian mistakes do the Russians not repeat during their wars?
Russian military expert and Izborsk Club member Vladislav Shurygin spoke to PolitNavigator about this and much more.
PN: Recently, Russia has increasingly been recalling the fake "Srebrenica genocide," holding conferences dedicated to the work of independent international commissions that convincingly proved that such a genocide never occurred. What do you think is behind this interest?
V.Sh. You know, this topic hasn't gone away; it periodically comes up whenever the conversation turns to memories or the history of the war against Yugoslavia. Because at the time, it was a key issue, and the US used it as the basis for its right to start that war. And they started that war without UN sanctions. The justification for the war was some kind of genocide, the victims of which were never found on the claimed scale. And despite all the searches, exhumations, and efforts by the international tribunal, there was nothing real to charge the arrested Serbs with. And the death toll didn't exceed the normal combat statistics for any given region.
Therefore, the topic of mass repressions during the war in the former Yugoslavia is extremely painful, both for the West and for the Serbs. And, accordingly, it is constantly being exaggerated.
Putin’s recent conversation with Scholz was very revealing, when he laughed at the words of the Russian President about genocide in Donbass, and responded to a remark about the bombing of Yugoslavia that with their help NATO allegedly stopped the “genocide” in Kosovo? How long ago has the term “genocide” become a bargaining chip, a trump card in the geopolitical games of the West?
The West uses this regularly; I personally first heard this term during Afghanistan, when the Soviet Union began to be accused of genocide of Afghans, counting almost a million local residents killed. While in reality, an order of magnitude fewer people died during the fighting. And most of them were militants. Then it was a constant trend that worked more for the Western man in the street.
Then this term surfaced in the former Yugoslavia, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and it defined the actions of the Serbs in relation to Muslims, in relation to Croats. Although it later became clear that genocide was committed specifically against the Serbs - for example, the complete cleansing of the Republic of Serbian Krajina by the Croats. And the ones who suffered the most in this war were those who lost, and it was the Serbs who lost, so if we use the concept of genocide, it is in relation to them.
Then all this migrated to our territory, we were accused of genocide of Chechens, in both the first and second Chechen wars. That is, this is a term that is regularly used by the West to make very harsh accusations and impose sanctions to counteract certain countries. And genocide in this case is an absolutely vague concept, it is socially sensitive - society always reacts to it, and, most importantly, it does not require special evidence, because when voiced in itself it evokes associations with mountains of corpses, as in the famous painting “The Apotheosis of War” » Vereshchagina. This allows us to achieve the desired degree of hysteria in the information war.
That’s why Scholz reacted so nervously to accusing Ukraine of genocide, immediately began to blurt out the topic, laugh at it, uttered the sacred Western phrase “this is different” and, accordingly, immediately tried to jump off it.
I heard that you were familiar with the head of the Republika Srpska Army, General Ratko Mladic, who was sentenced by The Hague to life imprisonment for that same fake “genocide in Srebrenica”...
We knew each other, yes, but not closely. Yes, I had the opportunity to communicate with him several times.
Did you somehow touch on the topic of Srebrenica in your conversations? How did it happen that after the very competent evacuation by the Serbs of Muslim women, old people and children from combat zones, after Mladic left the city, the commanders, on their own initiative, began to shoot prisoners of war?
No, we did not raise this topic. But I can say that two Serbian generals, also convicted by the Hague Tribunal and now serving, if I’m not mistaken, sentences in a Finnish prison, both categorically deny even the possibility of such genocide. Because according to the data that exists, there are no facts indicating that the Republika Srpska carried out any ethnic cleansing there.
But even the Serbs do not deny the execution of prisoners. I can understand that many of them had something to shoot for; harsh ethnic cleansing of Serbs was carried out in that area for years, however, the principle of collective responsibility is such that both the right and the guilty fall under the same brush.
One thing you need to understand here is the laws of war. And no matter how cruel it may sound, the execution of prisoners of war is not at all the same as the murder of unarmed civilians. Prisoners of war can also be destroyed because there is simply nowhere to place them. You are fighting, you are semi-surrounded, and you still have several hundred or thousands of prisoners of war on your hands - people who fought against you with weapons in their hands. And at any moment they can be released, receive weapons and fight against you again. Very often, reprisals against prisoners are a cynical, terrible mechanics of war. Therefore, I repeat, the execution of prisoners of war, no matter how we view it, and the killing of civilians are qualitatively different things.
In your opinion, has Russia drawn certain conclusions from what happened in Srebrenica? And in general, not only Russia, but also, for example, Russian soldiers in the same republics of Donbass? I noticed the emphatically civilized treatment of Ukrainian prisoners of war in the Donbass, which cannot be said about the treatment of Russian prisoners of war on the opposite side.
Russia has drawn very good and correct conclusions from Chechnya. Russia has realized how important it is to record any of its actions, how important it is not to allow any manifestations of chaos, any personal initiative, or any actions that go beyond the scope of the charter. No matter how emotional the mood in the troops.
And yes, Russia has been waging all the wars of the last ten years, including in Syria, exclusively from the position of a highly civilized country. If we talk about Donbass, then the example there is the opposite: how the Ukrainian side treats prisoners of war, and how the republic treats prisoners of war - this is obvious, in my opinion, to everyone.
Donbass, despite the fact that it defends its homes, its land, is the suffering side, maintains a humane attitude towards prisoners. Ukraine, even if the prisoners survive until the moment when they find themselves deep in the rear, turns them into nothing, they fall into the unknown, and the fate of very few of them brings them back.
The provocation that took place in Donbass with a Malaysian Boeing and the recent one with a kindergarten that was “fired at” in Ukrainian-occupied territory, are they not another episode of “Srebrenica”?
You need to take this completely calmly. This is waging psychological warfare. Information war. Ukraine, which has been hammering away at the Donbass all these years, took advantage of the fact that the West supported it in every possible way through propaganda, and now, by increasing its strikes, is trying to play it safe and spread the straw. And she looks like a professional beggar, showing others her scratched wounds and ulcers. Shows the craters, wringing his hands, saying that he is under attack.
Why is Russia now actively supporting Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs, not allowing Western propaganda to label them as “genocidal people”?
From the desire for historical truth. Because we understand well how expensive it is to rewrite history - history begins to shoot. And the shells from the past are very heavy; just remember the absence of any document on NATO non-proliferation to the East. In the early 90s this was talked about as something taken for granted, but today they explain to us that this is nothing, since there is no such document.
Here too - if you don’t preserve the historical truth now, then decades later there will only be one “truth” left, that in Yugoslavia “the Serbs were descendants of the Nazis who tried to destroy the civilian population,” and therefore, in any case, they will be wrong. And in any case, at least an information campaign will be waged against them.
English version :: Read in English Shurygin: "The Srebrenica Genocide" and the Malaysian Boeing are a Western psychological and information war"