>I've read a number of books on the Balkan wars (apart from Chomsky,
>Herman, Johnstone and Michael Parenti) all of which accept the
>conclusion that Milosevic is a pig and that the Serbs were responsible
>for the greatest number of atrocities. Nonetheless they also accept
>that by the time of Srebrenica, Milosevic wanted an end to the
>conflict because of the serious damage it was doing to the rump
>Yugoslavia's economy. Karadzic and Mladic were loose cannons who he'd
>long since ceased to have any control over. I'd be sceptical of
>claims that he was "appalled" by the massacre for any sort of moral or
>principled reasons, but he would certainly understand that it wasn't
>in his interest.
It is quite possible that Milosevic was taken by surprise by the enormous size of the massacre, and had no special need for it, but it certainly was in his interests for Karadzic's Chetnik forces, whatever his conflicts with them, to take Srebrenica, precisely as part of his desire to have the war end. And there is no doubt whatsoever that the 'Yugoslav" army (as it was still called) and its satellite Bosnian Serb Army coordinated in that conquest. Of course, in doing so, Milosevic must have been aware that he was facilitating the entry of a maniac like Mladic into the town, and thus the likelihood that there would be some level of massacre.
It had been clear for some time that the only objection Karadzic and co had to the 51/49 Contact Group partition plan the US announced in 1994 was not so much the percentages, but the fact that they wanted their cleansed 'Republika Srspka' to have more solid and 'tidier' borders, which above all meant widening the northern 'corridor' in the former Muslim-Croat majority region of Brcko-Posavina, and eliminating the remaining Muslim holdouts in Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde from their thoroughly cleansed, former Muslim majority, property of east Bosnia. It had also been clear for some time that the US govt. was in full agreement with this view. The US idea was to give Karadzic and the Chetniks everything they had been fighting for so that they would agree to a US partition plan, but do a little bombing at the last moment to make it look as if the US 'forced' Karadzic to sign on and thus the US had brought peace. Part of this also was to have the more 'moderate' and respectable Milosevic do the signing on behalf of the more openly fascistic and uncouth Karadzic, allowing the latter to maintain his hero image to Chetnik fanatics, allowing the US to appear to have forced his hand, and allowing Milosevic to assume the title of great peace-maker.
The only way it would have been against Milosevic's interests would have been if the reaction to the massacre had been so loud that the West had been forced to demand the return of Srebrenica, and thus the US-Milosevic plan had fallen apart. Given that the modifications the US-inspired Dayton plan made to the 1994 Contact Group plan were precisely the widening of the northern corridor and the acceptance of the Chetnik conquest of Srebrenica and Zepa (only Gorazde esacped) and their inclusion into Republika Srpska, as if nothing had happened in July 1995, it is clear that Miloseivic's gamble in allowing and facilitating Mladic into Srebrenica paid off handomely.