WEST AND MUSLIMS UNJUSTIFIABLY ACCUSED SERBS OF MARKALE TWO MASSACRE

BIJELJINA, AUGUST 27 /SRNA/ – A mortar shell killed 37 people and wounded 85 at the Markale marketplace in Sarajevo on August 28, 1995, which both the Muslim authorities and the West unjustifiably accused the Serbs for that served as a pretext for massive NATO air strikes against Republika Srpska.

As in the incident at the same marketplace in 1994, the Serb political leadership denied any responsibility and accused the Muslim authorities of targeting their own people in order to provoke the international community and possible foreign intervention.

Several days before the 1995 massacre, Serb institutions issued a statement warning that they had information indicating that another incident could take place at Markale, just as had happened a year earlier.

Then-UNPROFOR commander General Michael Rose said after the incident that it could not be established from where the shell had been fired.

Russian Colonel Andrey Demurenko stated immediately after the shelling of the Markale marketplace in Sarajevo that the Serbs had been unjustifiably accused solely to create a pretext for NATO to attack them.

Demurenko, who was chief of staff of a peacekeeping sector in Sarajevo and commander of the Russian peacekeeping battalion, preserved the complete documentation relating to Markale.

He read two reports, one written by a French officer, while the author of the other was an officer whom the colonel could not determine to have been Muslim or Croat.

The colonel said that the reports calculated the projectile's angle of arrival and its angle of impact at the site of the explosion.

"Based on the analysis conducted by the French, I went to the location from which the Serb mortars were supposedly firing. On an area 100 metres wide, where that ominous mortar was supposedly positioned, there were absolutely no traces on the grass. Soldiers know very well that wherever mortars are set up, they must leave a trace.

The second location where, according to the French calculations, the Serb mortars were supposedly positioned was wooded. It is well known that mortars cannot fire from a forest because branches can stop a shell. In addition, because of the buildings surrounding Markale, a shell could not possibly have arrived from Serb positions.

Anyone who knows even a little about artillery understands that a shell cannot `wander`. Moreover, it was illogical for one shell to kill and wound so many people, while the other two did not even scratch anyone," Demurenko testified.

Moscow-based historian Konstantin Nikiforov, who at one point wrote speeches for former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, also mentions the Markale massacres in his book.

Nikiforov claims that officers of the Russian battalion stationed around Sarajevo categorically maintained that the Serbs could not have shelled the Sarajevo marketplace.

He obtained information that Markale was not shelled by mortars in August 1995, but that, according to a scenario devised by Western intelligence services, the bloody operation was carried out by members of the Muslim forces from one of the neighbouring multi-storey buildings.

Nikiforov was convinced that Western intelligence services had also organised the Cyclone One operation in February 1994, when many people were killed at Markale.

The aim of both massacres was to create a pretext for NATO to attack Serb positions.