Greek role in Srebrenica massacre investigated
By Daniel Howden
Published: 29 June 2005

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article295548.ece

Greece has launched a judicial inquiry to discover the
extent of its involvement in the Srebrenica massacre,
Europe's worst atrocity since the Second World War.

An Athens prosecutor announced a preliminary
investigation to find what role Greek volunteers
played in the slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men, women and
children in the UN enclave in Bosnia in 1995. With the
10th anniversary of the massacre on 11 July, and
Bosnian Serb authorities admitting the extent of the
massacre, any confirmed Greek involvement would
embarrass Athens seriously.

Greece was a staunch ally of the Milosevic regime in
the Yugoslav wars of succession in the 1990s but the
presence of Greek paramilitaries fighting with Bosnian
Serbs has not been fully investigated. The part played
by the so-called Greek Volunteer Brigade in the
assault on Srebrenica was widely reported in Greece at
the time but veterans of the brigade have gone to
ground since the formation of the war crimes tribunal
that indicted the former Serb and Yugoslav president
Slobodan Milosevic.

Four members of the unit received medals of honour
from the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, within
a month of Srebrenica's fall.

A report in 2002 by the Dutch government - whose own
armed forces, in Srebrenica as UN peacekeepers, were
heavily criticised for failing to protect civilians -
describes how the unit raised the Greek flag in the
town after the takeover.

It also cited video footage of the event and revealed
that Greece sent arms shipments to the Bosnian Serb
army in contravention of sanctions. The report
detailed communications between the volunteer brigade
and the Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic - now
wanted for alleged war crimes - in which he urged them
to raise the Greek flag over the conquered enclave. In
an intercepted phone call, General Mladic is heard
telling them to record the flag-raising for propaganda
purposes.

The investigation could be a watershed for Greece,
which despite belatedly distancing itself from Mr
Milosivec, now on trial at The Hague, has done little
to acknowledge its own support for the worst excesses
of Serb nationalism in the 1990s. The Greek government
has previously ignored calls for an investigation into
the public recruitment of its citizens into
paramilitary brigades to fight in the Yugoslav wars.
In what appeared to be a pre-emptive admission, the
Greek Justice Minister, Anastasios Papaligouras, told
parliament last Friday that Greeks may have
participated in the slaughter but said they were not
members of the armed forces.

An article run at the time in the Greek daily Ethnos
newspaper on the "heroic" exploits of the volunteers
in Srebrenica, prompted an overwhelming response from
enthusiastic readers wanting to sign up to fight.

Takis Michas, whose book Unholy Alliance: Greece and
Milosevic's Serbia, lifted the veil of silence on the
issue said many would be shocked at Greek complicity
in Bosnia: "What seemed incomprehensible during the
Bosnia and Kosovo wars was not so much that Greece
sided with Milosevic, but that it sided with Serbia's
darkest side."





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