Muslim Duplicity and Barbarism in Bosnia

The problem for the Muslims was that the Serbs had the stronger military, and
unless they could win international support and intervention, they would
likely be defeated.

However, as far as the Bosnian Serbs were concerned, they weren't going to be
ruled by Muslims, who, the Serbs believed, were intent on creating an Islamic
fundamentalist state. War was the only alternative once the Bosnian
Muslims withdrew from the Lisbon Agreement.

MacKenzie recalled a meeting with Izetbegovic (Bosnian Muslim
"president") in which the president said, " 'Look, Gen. MacKenzie, I've
been told that when I have 10,000 dead, I'll get intervention. How am I
doing?' he was asking me every day, sarcastically." Izetbegovic would never
reveal who promised the intervention, MacKenzie said, except that it was a
"senior diplomat."

"To achieve international sympathy there was
circumstantial evidence that mortar rounds
landing amongst Bosnian Muslim civilians were fired from Bosnian Muslim
territory and not from the Bosnian Serb side."

The Bosnian Serbs
soon started shelling Sarajevo and, as it seems, the Muslims tried to gain the world's sympathy and
U.S. intervention by supposedly staging atrocities against their own
people.

As for the Serbs, while they had "legitimate
concerns" regarding the Muslims' political motives and intentions, their
means of opposition were, as MacKenzie put it, "disproportionate" to those
concerns.