A former intelligence officer of the Serb Army, retired General Jovan Milanovic, stated to SRNA that the operation for the explosion at the Markale market in Sarajevo was planned, and American intelligence services and Muslim forces from Bosnia and Herzegovina were working on it.
Milanovic said that he received information from two sources among international forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina that a model of the Markale market was made near Washington in Alexandria on the Potomac River and that the project was carried out by American intelligence services with the involvement of Muslim forces from Bosnia and Herzegovina.
They, as he said, placed the model where they usually prepared the entire action in the United States and calculated the effects, i.e., losses, so the entire operation was prepared a month earlier than it was carried out.
They concluded, Milanovic added, that this project could succeed by finding a model that would be incriminating for the Republika Srpska at that moment, meaning the places from which it was allegedly shelled, the weapons used, and other details.
The entire information and data collected at that time, he noted, were hidden for two to three days in UNPROFOR and the forces present in that area, and they sent it to the UN Security Council when it was already too late and when the Republika Srpska was accused of being the actor in the “Markale” operation and an attack was imminent.
“The goal was to retaliate against the Republiка Srpska, and in military terms, this implies destroying everything existing and incapacitating one territory, both in infrastructure and combat equipment and personnel. Accordingly, it was very radical,” said Milanovic.
He reminded that even in the memoirs of former mediator Lord David Owen, the entire operation carried out at Markale is somewhat described, in which he did not accuse the Serbs, but he did not skip accusing the Muslims.
“Therefore, in his memoirs, there is no accusation of responsibility for the Serbs for the operation carried out at Markale. That is a key thing that can serve as a conclusion for the entire scenario that was created,” emphasized Milanovic.
He said he received information about Markale from two sources who were members of international forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of them being French officer Pierre Henri Binel, while the other source still refuses to reveal his identity due to security reasons.
Milanovic pointed out that he delivered the information he received to Belgrade on August 7, 1998, five months before the incident in “Račak” in Kosovo and Metohija, which served as an excuse for the NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
“Markale served as a scenario for the operation they planned in relation to the aggression against Yugoslavia. Therefore, it was already clear and obvious, but it was not possible to prevent it,” Milanovic emphasized.
He said he knows the Markale market because he lived in Sarajevo for four years, and it is not realistic that a Serbian grenade could have fallen on the market.
“There was also Russian and French expertise on that event. The French were also not allowed to exploit that expertise with the aim of finding the truth. Others made assessments, but everything was stopped, hidden, and manipulated until the UN completed the job they had assigned. The point of that was to use that model for future operations, as was done in Racak on January 15, 1999,” Milanovic noted.
He assessed that lies were attributed to the Serbs and that secret services worked all the time on preparing potentially incriminating operations for the Serbs related to human rights, genocide, humanitarian catastrophe, and torture, which is a call to the international community, i.e., the Western world, to support any form of aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Source: RTRS
