The UNPROFOR Cables

Historical Events Little Known Facts 92 Comments

The established mythos of the Bosnian War is that Serb separatists, encouraged and directed by Slobodan Milošević and his acolytes in Belgrade, sought to forcibly seize Croat and Bosniak territory in service of creating an irredentist “Greater Serbia.” Every step of the way, they purged indigenous Muslims in a concerted, deliberate genocide, while refusing to engage in constructive peace talks.

This narrative was aggressively perpetuated by the mainstream media at the time, and further legitimized by the UN-created International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) once the conflict ended. It has become axiomatic and unquestionable in Western consciousness ever since, enforcing the sense that negotiation invariably amounts to appeasement, a mentality that has enabled NATO war hawks to justify multiple military interventions over subsequent years.

However, a vast trove of intelligence cables sent by Canadian peacekeeping troops in Bosnia to Ottawa’s National Defence Headquarters, first published by Canada Declassified at the start of 2022, exposes this narrative as cynical farce.

Flashback: We bombed the wrong side

92 Replies to “The UNPROFOR Cables”

    1. “””Sometime in the last decade, many people — I was one — began to feel robbed of their sense of normalcy by something we couldn’t define. Increasingly glued to our phones, we saw that the version of the world that was spat out at us from them seemed distorted. The public’s reactions to various news events seemed off-kilter, being either way too intense, not intense enough, or simply unbelievable. You’d read that seemingly everyone in the world was in agreement that a certain thing was true, except it seemed ridiculous to you, which put you in an awkward place with friends, family, others. Should you say something? Are you the crazy one? I can’t have been the only person to have struggled psychologically during this time. “”” / taibbi.substack.com

      1. The best advice? Don’t believe anything until the Kremlin denies it. This is from the self-help book “Tankie”.

    2. Ljh – apparently the well respected Canadian, Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, a Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame (CMHF) inductee whose incredible leadership and bravery in opening the Sarajevo airport while under fire earned him a second Meritorious Service Cross, making him the only Canadian to be so honoured, told Canadians we bombed the wrong side back in 2004. If only we had had a subscription to the National Post we would have read that.

      1. I’ve always said we bombed the wrong people in the Bosnian war, and again just an excuse for NATO practice in the Kosovo war. NATO has been going for the trifector since the 1990s and made a great advance in 2014.

        1. In the former Yugoslavia, we should have stayed the hell out. This goes for Bosnia and Croatia in the mid-’90s and Kosovo in 1999. In Libya, we should have stayed the hell out. In Syria, our intelligence agencies should have stayed the hell out, even before their attempt to suck us into another forever war failed. (They did turn the Syrian Civil War into a forever war, just not for us.) And then when the Ukraine fell into a civil war in 2014, we should have stayed the hell out. Instead, we are being dragged ever closer to the abyss, as an intervention in the Ukraine won’t be a “short victorious war”.

          1. Civil wars are the worst. I’ve had work colleagues and neighbours who were Serb, Croatian and Bosnian. All were smart, loving and generous people. Politics and in some cases religion, made them hate each other. It can happen anywhere, especially where land and resources become rare or disputed. Pit one group against another and boom!

          2. We should always oppose Nazis and bomb them to oblivion (Werner Von Braun notwithstanding).

            Destroyed them in WW2, but now our gubermints are funding and supporting the Ukraine Nazis? Yes, the enemy resides in Ottawa and DC

    3. Read Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, “The Untold History of the United States” and you might get that reinforced – bigly .

      And that only goes up to Obama 1

  3. I know a few people who spent time there who have told me we were bombing the wrong side.

  6. Now where’s the A-hole who questioned my post as to not trusting anything I’v read about Putin in the last 30 years?

    1. He’s probably hiding because he fears your razor sharp intellect. BTW, how many pages did you actually read over the last thirty years?
      Spotting Putin isn’t much of a feat.

  7. Bosnia was a successful training exercise for NATO wrt to the propaganda and bombing campaigns. Embassies, TV stations and crowed bridges on market day were legitimate military targets. Then came Kosovo. Let’s not forget Iraq and Afghanistan. And Canada led the air campaign against Libya. And now they want to carve up Syria. In celebration why not name a navy ship the USS Fallujah?

    In the unipolar “rules based world order”, preventive war & self determination of ethnic minorities trumps territorial integrity & sovereignty unless it is the Ukraine.

    2. & self determination of ethnic minorities trumps territorial integrity Not if you’re Russian, according to NATO.

  8. My husband served there for eight months, he has nothing nice to say about all those involved. One side was as bad as the other.

    1. Precisely.

      We should simply remain out of these ethnic conflicts and not have them exported here.

    2. It was a nasty situation. Everybody were assholes. Also the first air campaign where they were trying to bomb shit, but not hurt anybody

    1. Lori; Thanks for that. Yes, disinformation IS everywhere,and Blumenthal seems about as trustworthy as Michael Chomiak.

  10. I hate to break it to all the conspiracy theorists here but four key parties are to blame for precipitating the fall of Yugoslavia and the resultant interconnected series of conflicts.

    And here they are: the Slovenes, the Croats, the Serbs and the Bosnian Muslims (the Bosniacs). In other words, the people of the Former Yugoslavia themselves.

    Without their actions, there would have been no UNPROFOR, no IFOR/SFOR, no KFOR and no EUFOR.

    The rest is an argument to nowhere over incompetence (step forward the UN and the fledgling EU!) and competing international perspectives (US, NATO, EU, Russian) on what should be done about the mess made by – the Slovenes, the Croats, the Serbs and the Bosnian Muslims.

    1. I guess you can add Yugoslavia to the long list of places (other than Canada of course) where multiculturalism wasn’t their great strength.

      1. I worked with people from various provinces of Yugoslavia ever the years. The factor that at first surprised me was the utter contempt of the people from each province for the other .
        My first experience with was two Croatians in 1965 who swore “there IS NO Yugoslavia”. I then worked with Croatians, Slovenians, Bosnians, Serbs, all of whom had nothing good to say about anyone from the Other provinces,but all agreed there never WAS a Yugoslavia.
        I was young and a little shocked by these (second) experiences with tribalism, things weren’t as we were taught in school.
        My first experience with tribalism was of course in dear little Canader where the local Indians would get really pissed off if you mistook them for a member of a different tribe. A friend who was Salteaux had little use for Crees,etc.

    2. It’s not as simple as blaning the people on the ground. It could have been prevented if Germany hadn’t bounced the rest of Europe into recognizing Croatia and Bosnia as independent states without ensuring the safety of ethnic minorities. The last time Germany had recognized client states in Bosnia and Croatia in 1941 the result was an extremely violent genocide against Serbs, Jews and Gypsies. The Croatian nationalist government in Zagreb in 1991 was making Ustashe-like noises and needless to say the local Serbs remembered what happened fifty years prior. Britain and France were proposing that recognition not take place until safeguards were in place for ethnic minorities but the unilateral German recognition of their Croatian and Bosnia client governments made the point moot. Then the US piled on and decided the Croats and Bosnians would be more pliable than the Serbs and the narrative was reinforced.
      Nice people, the Krauts but they’re entirely lacking in self-awareness.

      1. This ^
        And add the Roman Catholic Church to that too.
        The Krauts want to bring back the heady days of Charlemagne, King of the Holy Roman Empire.

  11. Now apply what we are learning now about Bosnia and apply that to the Ukraine. Same problems, if you naively assume that we are getting involved for the reasons they say we are getting involved.

    The rational conclusion is that we are getting deeply involved in the Ukraine fiasco for reasons that are not being admitted, by people in high places. We poked the Bear, and then claim it is the Bear who is aggressive. Maybe WE are the bad guys.

    1. Excellent point. I’m getting sick of the hysteria from people who will turn around and scream about getting out in a month.
      Of course, no one will know how.

    2. “The Bear” is the “bad guy”.

      The Russians made themselves the bad guy overnight on 24 February 2022 when they chose to mount a coup d’état against Ukraine and failed miserably.

      1. No, the Russians became the “bad guys” in 2008 when they called America’s bluff over Georgia. The Georgians started a war, were “promised” American aid, and got the sh!t beaten out of them. The Yankee deep state has been out for revenge ever since, and the Ukraine is their means to that end. The US wants Russia laid low, and they don’t really care that the cost will be the ruination of the Ukraine. Kiev and the the rest of the country smashed. Casualties that would not be out of place in the First World War. (For the Ukraine, 200,000 and counting.) And an enormous debt owed to foreign banks.

        All of that, except perhaps the last, is not America’s problem. Problem is, it has not worked like it was supposed to. Russia is still fighting, not weak and prostrated before Uncle Sam. And the Yanks don’t want to take another loss, so they keep doubling down. And move the whole world ever closer to ruination by nuclear war.

        1. Did the Georgians invade themselves?

          Putin has always been an autocrat and decidedly untouchable by the West.

          I guess that there is too much money or some other lucrative reason to get involved in Ukraine.

          1. During the fall of the USSR, a couple bits of the then Georgian SSR decided that they didn’t want to be part of an independent Georgia. So they broke away (in 1989 or 1990, before the outright breakup of the USSR in 1991) and came under the protection of the then Russian RFSSR. The agreement remained in force for next two decades, with the Russian Federation deploying a small number of soldiers to the regions to keep the peace.

            For some reason, in 2008 the Georgians thought that they could invade and annex those territories and not face reprisal from the Russians. Given that the Bush administration had made noises about admitting Georgia and the Ukraine into NATO, the Georgians likely thought that the US would back them in their war against Russia. So they invaded Abkhazia and South Ossetia. And the Russians went on the offensive against Georgia, having seen the Georgian military buildup and deployed an army of their own. Georgia, now being trashed, demanded an American intervention to save them from their self-inflicted disaster. The Americans, quite rightly, balked at that bit of insanity as war with a nuclear power that could ruin America was a bad idea. The Americans, until that point, had enjoyed good relations with Georgia and had insinuated that Georgia was under America’s protection. The offer was a bluff that the Russians called. And the US hasn’t be willing to forgive that, because they came out of the affair looking weak.

      2. Look up the Minsk Agreement first.
        Then, recall what that Stasi East German Merkel said recently about the Minsk Agreement, (sic) “We were not serious about the Minsk Accord, never planned to honour it, we were just buying time for Ukraine to build up its forces.”
        Then, recall, that since 2014, the Nazi Ukes have consistently bombed the Donbass region, killing 14,000 ethnic Russians.

        I wouldn’t call the Russian action an “invasion”, rather, its putting an end to Nazis and stopping the needless killing of an ethnic cleansing operation. And, the Russians are about to waste the rest of the Ukraine forces this winter. The MSM lies like a rug, as does the Bidinh and Eu regimes. These people are insane, don’t believe the insanity. Ukraine has lost over 100,000 troops, the Russians are wasting them at an 8:1 ratio. Do the math, the Nazis are almost finished

        Are you defending Nazis like Allah and the colon?

      1. And weapons will be bought. Weapons are sold when there are people who want to buy them.

          1. Lots of people apparently. People blame weapons manufacturers for war all the time, like there wouldn’t be war if there weren’t people making arms when people have been beating each other to death with whatever comes to hand since we climbed down from the trees.

          2. “Lots of people apparently. People blame weapons manufacturers for war all the time, like there wouldn’t be war if there weren’t people making arms”

            The military-industrial complex will have their wars no matter what. There is far too much money to be made and it is frighteningly easy for a government (any government) to maneuver others into war. In the case of Ukraine, for example, Joe Biden could have stopped this war before it even started with a simple policy announcement, but he refused to do so.

  12. I met a young woman from there while the war was ongoing. I was pretty neutral as to which side was the good guys but she convinced me that the UN/NATO was the evil side. She went on to laugh at her having moved to Canada she woke up one morning and heard two fellow refugees loudly arguing in front of her apartment. She didn’t know them but she understood every word they were saying.

    1. The people of the Former Yugoslavia blame everybody else for their misfortunes, even though they themselves were the architects.

      Old UNPROFOR joke:

      “Never ask anyone in the Balkans why they’re fighting each other. They’ll tell you.”

        1. If this is even true take it up with the people who gave it to him. Maybe they’re the bad guys. If someone offered me 100000,000,000 dollars I’d take them too.

        1. Some people don’t seem to have noticed this fact. Don’t know whether you’re one of them or not. But since you seem a bit thick I figured you might not be aware,

          2. Indeed.

            The Russians only have themselves to blame for making the Ukrainian president a “star”. On 24 February, they aimed to seize Kyiv and remove the Ukrainian government, perhaps assessing the Ukrainian political leadership would either be killed, captured or would just run away and abandon the country. They did none of these things, leaving the Russians looking like incompetent, brutal bullies (which is now how they’re going to look for the foreseeable future).

            Had the Russians contented themselves with carefully expanding their control and influence over the Donbas, this conflict might well still be bumping along, outside the main attention span of the West, with no major ramifications for Russia’s economy and prestige.

            But no, the Russians went all in and blew it.

          3. The Russians haven’t blown anything. Those who don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it.
            The Nazis are about to be wiped out, this quarter, in winter warfare, another thing the Russkies are pros at.

            I see you get your information from CNN/CTV/CBC. No wonder you’re misinformed. Try somewhere else other than the propaganda garbage issued by Bidinh, EU, and Perogy politicians. Its out there, and paints a real picture of the clusterfck of the Uke Nazis and what they are now facing, utter defeat.

      4. “He is the guy who had his sovereign country invaded, so there is that.”

        Also the guy who banned opposing political parties and shut down all news media that wasn’t supporting him, so there is that too.

    1. “Politics.. Much like how black on black crime is ignored so they can talk about racism..”

      Exactly.

  15. “We bombed the wrong people”

    that should surprise no one, because the government decided to bomb people, in a place that the government didn’t understand.

  16. Its been standard practice for the media and opportunistic political figures for almost a century. The narrative for the Spanish Civil War was largely a creation of the Soviet Union and largely a lie.

    1. So … like today, the Nazis are the good guys? Maybe we should stop taking sides in other people’s fights. Especially when everything we are being told is probably a lie.

      1. The Nazis in Spain (how one can be Spanish and a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party is a bit of a mystery, but still…) were the good guys as far as I’m concerned. Sometimes extreme measures are required to prevent communists from destroying civilization.

      2. Yes,that’s a good point.We outsiders really have NO idea what’s going on.

        As for early day propaganda, W.R. Hearst hired Richard Remington, then known as “America’s greatest writer of fiction” to report on the Spanish-American War. Thus we were treated to Teddy Roosevelt’s famous charge up San Juan Hill.

        We shouldn’t get our egos all bent out of shape over differing opinions on things we don’t and can’t know anything about. Who is the “bad guy” of the Russia/Ukrainian conflict? According to the Russia Times, it’s 100% Ukraine’s fault, and according to the CBC it’s Russia’s fault.
        I don’t know and neither does anyone else posting about it on the internet, much as some like to think they know.

          1. Yes, McGregor is probably the basest expert on the Nazi-Russia war. Of course, the Lying Lame Media ignores him as he doesn’t follow the lying narrative of Bidinh and his puppet Zelensky.
            No one should beleive the media about anything, ever.
            They lie about Climey Changey, Glowbull Warming.
            They lied about Harper.
            They lied about Trudeau and continue to.
            They lied about The Donald.
            They lied about Biden, and continue to.
            They lied about Covid, and continue to.
            So, suddenly, the media is telling the “truth” about the Ukraine, which was a US regime change project, and now they continue to lie about the huge losses the Nazis have suffered. Sure, go ahead, selectively believe the media at your own risk.
            How can you tell when the media is telling the truth or lying? Shinier teeth? Bigger boobs? Better haircut? More puppy stories?
            What is the defining factor to determine media lies, narrative and “truth”?
            CRICKETS……………..

        1. “Neither side in the Spanish Civil War were the “good guys”.”

          Much like the current Ukraine/Russia conflict. One side may be somewhat “less bad” than the other…so what?

      4. Nope, I never said that, but the Republicans were definitely a bunch of evil creatures. They went on a rampage about a week after they were elected in 1931 and burned convents, churches killed and raped priests and nuns, and the ‘Republicans stated that they would no prosecution was coming for these crimes.

        Further, they deified the Republicans in the western press, when at the same time, they had imported Soviet NKVD into the country, which then proceeded to butcher, torture their own people for not being sufficiently Marxist.

    1. Sometimes people think it’s their business to screw with you, then you’re forced to do something about it.

  20. Meh.
    I knew it.
    It smelt bad at the time.
    Then a 12 year cone of silence imposed on our soldiers..
    And the media playbook had begun to look very familiar.
    More evidence my enemies are not in the Ukraine or Russia.
    Neil Oliver is right.
    Such deceit will never self correct.
    Every lie these creatures sell us,is another success in their war.
    I say their war,because we have not received the message yet.
    Forget their words,those lies mean nothing.
    Actions..
    The accumulation of these actions forces one to observe..They mean us harm.
    Intend us harm.
    And have caused enormous harm in the guise of their “Doing Good”.
    Happy New Year.

  21. Another War bought, paid for and given to the world by the Saudis, Turks, and of course with the involvement of the CIA, George Bush and the “New World Odor.”

    1. ” CIA, George Bush and the “New World Odor.”

      That wasn’t really a typo, was it? 😉

  22. During an interview with Jay Dyer regarding Ukraine “theater” , Col. Douglas MacGregor discussed ( 4:20 min) an incident in 1995 in Sarajevo (Bosnia Capitol) where a mortar was fired into a marketplace , which triggered the US led intervention in the Balkans. It turned out, much later, the mortar was fired , not by the Serbs , but by the Bosnians on their own people.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6i0GqT1QvI

    1. “It turned out, much later, the mortar was fired , not by the Serbs , but by the Bosnians on their own people.”

      Quite so – but a tad disingenuous.

      The only reason the Bosnian government was able to orchestrate this ruse was because the Bosnian Serbs were routinely (and indiscriminately) targeting Sarajevo from the surrounding heights with artillery, tank and other heavy weapons fire. So of course they’d get the blame.

      1. “Quite so – but a tad disingenuous. ”
        There were no good guys , especially the US and the UN as Yugoslavia at the time had only been held together by force during the Soviet era , and once Tito was gone the various factions took control. As history shows , wherever a Muslim boundary meets a Christian boundary the result is violence … Greece/Turkey … and now within France , Germany and Sweden with “no go” zones.

  24. A new (to me) favourite site REDACTED favours the GreyZone as its most trusted news org.

    I have a casual relationship with a small group of ex-pat Serbs here, one of whom has been tutoring me on that war. They seem to me to be very fine fellows. What has surprised me is that, like the Japanese, they seem to harbour less resentment and hatred than would be expected given that they were subjected to such vicious US neocon criminality; certainly infinitely less hatred than one of our prime haters here at SDA.

  25. Serbs needed curb stomping then (and now) just like russia needs it now (and then). Serbs are mini russians. World is better with less of them. Film at 11.

    1. Being at the forefront of every Muslim invasion of central Europe will tend to do that to you over time.

      1. Irrelevant and they weren’t the only ones anyway, that’s just bullshit Serb narrative, just like russian great patriotic war narrative, also bullshit. Indeed Serbs are mini russians delusional about their right to subjugate their betters. That is all there is to it.

  26. The best book to come out of the Yugoslav wars is Trusted Mole by Milos Stankovic, a Serbo-Scottish officer who served there with the British Army. As he spoke the local language he was used as an interpreter and troublshooter and had unique access to all three sides as well as high level peacekeepers and western diplomats/soldiers.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Mole

  27. Someone above mentioned that GrayZone was founded by far left journalist Max Blumenthal. I had discovered that shortly after viewing it a while back. Confession: know nothing about him.

    But, as a conservative/libertarian of long standing, I am more inclined to summarily dismiss labels like far left today for obvious reasons I need not itemize here.

    I joked with a friend the other day:
    You come into this world crying from an as* slap, you discover that Chomsky was right, you die and they shovel dirt on your face.

    For most of my life I’ve hated Chomsky BUT somehow I read Manufacturing Consent. . Look around!

    1. I find myself following intellectually honesty lefties more than the right these days. I consider it a check on my own biases. I have no opinion on Blumenthal, but I do respect Mackenzie and when opinions from opposite universes align, it’s usually a good time to pay attention.

  28. Had the Democrats spent 4 years trying to tie Trump to corruption in the Ukraine, NATO would be arming Putin instead of Zelensky.

    1. Brilliant, also majority of the SDA would be simping for Zelensky. I would be one of very few whose position would not change.

  29. Have had many conversations with CDN soldiers, various Balkan state soldiers and civilians, but the best and most insightful one by far was with a Macedonian. The real enemies all along were foreign Jihadists.

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