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Srebrenica And the Politics of War Crimes Findings of
the Srebrenica Research Group into the allegations of events and the background
leading up to them, in Srebrenica, Bosnia & Herzegovina, in
1995. |
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THE NUMBERS GAME By Jonathan Rooper Those who have asked questions about the Srebrenica numbers over the
last ten years have invariably been treated with withering scorn. At best they have been characterised as
would-be revisionists; at worst, deniers of a modern-day holocaust. Yet no serious analysis of events in and
around Srebrenica in the summer of 1995 could be complete without detailed
examination of the numbers. From the
outset the numbers were used and abused, for a variety of political and other
purposes, to conceal the fundamental truth of what had happened. ******************* Origins of the massacre
allegations Over the years it has been held to be highly significant that original
ballpark estimates for the number who might have been massacred at Srebrenica
corresponded closely to the ‘missing’ list of 7,300 compiled by the
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). But the early estimates were based on nothing more than the
simple combination of an estimated 3,000 men last seen at the UN base at
Potocari and an estimated 5,000 people reported ‘to have left the enclave
before it fell’. Neither of these
figures could be considered reliable:
the estimate of the Dutch peacekeeping force in Srebrenica (Dutchbat) of
males at Potocari was far lower. And,
as the British journalist Linda Ryan pointed out in an article in 1996, the
words ‘before it fell’ probably refer to the substantial numbers of the refugee
population who had left the safe area days, weeks or months before the Serb
takeover to move to other Muslim controlled areas. It was only because the Bosnian Muslim government refused to
provide information on what had become of these people that they remained
technically ‘unaccounted for’. Perhaps the most startling aspect of the 7-8,000 figure is that it has
always been represented as synonymous
with the number of people executed.
This was never a possibility: numerous contemporary accounts noted that
UN and other independent observers had witnessed fierce fighting with
significant casualties on both sides.
It was also known that others had fled to Muslim-held territory around
Tuzla and Zepa, that some had made their way westwards and northwards, and that
some had fled into Serbia. It is
therefore certain that nowhere near all the missing could have been executed These points provide strong reasons for scepticism about the extent of
the massacre claims. As further
information has emerged over the last ten years, the version of events which
was established in 1995 has come to seem more and more unlikely. The most fundamental problem of all is that
the arithmetic does not add up. The sums that don’t add upBy the end of the first week in August 1995 35,632 people had been
registered by the World Health Organisation and Bosnian Government as displaced
persons from the Srebrenica safe area - in other words, survivors of
Srebrenica. The Red Cross had also seen
and noted that ‘several thousand’ armed Muslim men from Srebrenica had passed
safely behind Muslim lines to an area called Sapna Finger and had then been
redeployed to fight elsewhere ‘without their families being informed’. As noted above, some 700 soldiers from
Srebrenica had made their way to Zepa, emerging safely from that town when it
fell to the Serbs during the last week of July 1995. So there were in total at
least 38,000 / 39,000 survivors of Srebrenica – a figure that precisely
coincides with the total pre-fall population estimates of the major aid
agencies. Making the sums add up becomes even more difficult because the figures above take no account of casualties from the fighting between the Bosnian Serb Army (BSA) and the armed column that left Srebrenica for Muslim-held territory. It is common ground in accounts of what happened that there were significant casualties on both sides from these clashes. A report published in September 2002 by Republika Srpska estimated an overall figure of approximately 2,000 Bosnian Muslim Army (ABiH) combat deaths, in addition to some 500 BSA fatalities. Whilst some of these casualties were from the ABiH Tuzla brigade, which had come out in support, the vast majority were from the armed column which had left Srebrenica. It doesn’t end there. Both the Dutch peacekeeping force (Dutchbat) contingent in Srebrenica and undercover British SAS intelligence officers who were in the town when it fell said they had witnessed bitter fighting between Muslims in Srebrenica shortly before the Serbs entered the town. Descriptions suggest that around 100 may have died and that their bodies were left where they had fallen. There are also reports that considerable numbers of Muslims died when they crossed a minefield which had been laid by their own side. Taking all these factors together, in order for 7,300 people from Srebrenica to have been massacred, the population of the safe area before it fell to the Serbs would have had to be well over 46,000 – a figure far in excess of any credible estimate put forward at the time. It is immensely
significant that one of the judges in the Krstic case, Judge Patricia Wald,
estimated the total pre-fall population of Srebrenica at 37,000 when writing an
account of the Krstic case for the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics. (The
Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics Spring 2003, SECTION: Vol. 16, No. 3; Pg.
445; ISSN: 10415548, HEADLINE: General Radislav Krstic: A war crimes case study, BYLINE: PATRICIA M. WALD) “Prior to the attack, Srebrenica was a village of some 37,000
inhabitants.” Judge Wald was
apparently supremely unaware that her own figure made it impossible for the
crimes for which Krstic was convicted to have taken place. Unreliable witnesses Witness evidence has been equally insubstantial. With the exception of one execution at Potocari that was virtually witnessed by a UN soldier (though it did not quite occur within his sight), and a separate incident in which ten men were led behind a building and nine bodies were subsequently discovered, the main supporting evidence for summary executions comes from the handful of men who claimed to have survived mass executions by playing dead. It is on this flimsy basis that the crude 3,000 plus 5,000 sum remains the basis of massacre estimates. The figures have never been revised downwards. Indeed, it has been fashionable for human rights activists to inflate the Srebrenica figures to 10,000 or 12,000. In fact the very first claims that many thousands of people might have been massacred at Srebrenica began to be made by members of the Bosnian Muslim government before the enclave had even fallen. President Alijah Izetbegovic and Foreign Minister Mohamed Sacirbey were on the telephone to world statesmen with a series of prescient reports. Further allegations were made by refugees when they began to arrive at Tuzla a few days after Srebrenica had fallen. Such claims had by this time become a stock-in-trade of the Balkan conflicts. The story was fuelled, however, on 20 July when the Dutch Co-operation Minister Jan Pronk, who had been sent by his government to find out what had happened at Srebrenica, was reported by the ANP News organisation to have said (in an interview given to the Dutch current affairs television programme ‘Nova’) that ‘Thousands had been murdered by the Serbs’. The article went on: “Pronk said the claims of widespread abuses by Bosnian Serbs against
Muslims could not be dismissed on the grounds that they had not been confirmed
by the UN. "They have been confirmed by those involved," he said. In common with many politicians and journalists, Pronk[1]
was prepared to reach judgement on the basis of uncorroborated accounts. He apparently did so because they were vivid
and convincing – something which later found expression in the journalistic
formula ‘documented, consistent and credible’.
As a standard of proof, it did not amount to much. On 27 July 1995
The Boston Globe reported that atrocities were ‘unconfirmed so far’: (The Boston Globe
July 27, 1995, Thursday, City Edition , HEADLINE: Reports of atrocities
unconfirmed so far; US aerial surveillance reveals little. BYLINE: By Paul Quinn-Judge, Globe Staff) “The Clinton administration has not obtained
independent confirmation of reported atrocities by Bosnian Serbs but does not
doubt that they have occurred, State Department and other administration
officials said yesterday. Although no further evidence was forthcoming in the following weeks, ‘eyewitness’ accounts sustained the story. Analysis of official reports and press coverage reveals that the same half-dozen or so men, all purporting to have survived massacres by playing dead, provided the ‘evidence’ from which David Rohde and other journalists projected the mass killings to the world. Little effort was made to test the credibility of these witnesses. Their testimony was accepted at face value, even though one of the most articulate, Mevludin Oric[2][i] was a cousin of Naser Oric, the Bosnian Army Commander of Srebrenica. When asked several years later by journalism students how he knew which witnesses he could believe, Rohde explained that his acid test had been whether they presented themselves as heroes or terrified victims; if the latter, he found them credible. Whether this can be considered a valid basis for judgement is a matter of opinion; it certainly made Rohde a potential victim of deception. In an article entitled “The Construction of a
Trauma”, the Dutch anthropologist René Grémaux and the historian / journalist
Abe de Vries drew attention to the inconsistencies in the accounts given by
‘survivors’: “Oric’s personal history is reason enough
for doubt, but the inconsistencies in the accounts of Smail Hodzic and Hurem
Suljic are obvious as well. “Smail Hodzic: A basketball stadium becomes
a soccer stadium becomes a School. “Hodzic Story 1: Hodzic first said he
witnessed ambushes by the Serbs on the road to Zvornik. He was captured and
then moved to a "basketball stadium near Bratunac" and subsequently taken
to the execution spot, "a large field not far from a forest," he declared to
Alexandra Stiglmayer in Die Woche of July 28. Hodzic Story 2: Soon thereafter, Hodzic
told Roy Gutman (in Die Tageszeitung of August 11), that he was
held at the "soccer stadium in Nova Kasaba," from where he and others
were moved to be killed, "probably in a town called Grbavce." Hodzic Story 3: In the third version, told
on October 4 to Aida Cerkez of Associated Press, Hodzic went through
the same experience as Oric, Suljic and Avdic. Now he was taken to
"a school in Krizevci" and the executions now took place not far from Karakaj. “Hurem Suljic: Murder in a school becomes
beatings in a department store Murders were committed at this school
according to Suljic as well. On February 16 of that year, he spoke on BBC
Newsnight. Footage of a not specified "school near Karakaj" indeed
showed bullet holes, one in the ceiling and one at the toilet. But in the elaborate coverage of
Suljic in 'The Washington Post' of 6 November 1995, there isn't a word about
executions in a school; there is mention of beatings in a department store near
Bratunac, a location where Suljic supposedly was kept prisoner. Serbian woman: A school becomes a sports
complex “Woman's Story# 1: Bratunac is the location
of another school where Massacres supposedly took place, according
to Robert Block in The Independent, July, 1995. A woman is quoted. She is supposedly an inhabitant of Serbia who recently visited her brother-in-law, a
soldier in the Bosnian Serb Army: "He and his friends are quite open-hearted about what
happened over there," she said. "They are killing Muslim soldiers. They said that
only yesterday (note: Monday, July 17) they killed one thousand six hundred, and
they estimate to have killed about four thousand in total. They said to be in
great hurry, and therefore shot most of them." Woman's Story# 2: A few days later, Block’s colleague Louise
Branson of
The Sunday Times brought the Serbian woman into the spotlight. Her husband, also fighting in the Bosnian Serb
Army, mentioned mass shootings with more than three thousand
dead. But not in a school in Bratunac. In a sports complex. “Up to this
moment, human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch have not been able to trace survivors of this
crime. "There has to be a more detailed investigation, in order to establish the
scale of violation of human rights that have taken place in the area of
Bratunac," says their respective report.” Grémaux and de Vries went on to quote an interview given by a
Dutch soldier, Captain Schouten: “It is
noticeable, however, that there has been little attention to the account of Captain Schouten, although this Dutchman
was the only UN military officer in Bratunac, where he stayed for several days,
at the time the alleged bloodbath took place. Schouten, quoted in Het Parool
of July 27, 1995: "Everybody is parroting everybody, but
nobody shows hard evidence. I notice that in the Netherlands people want
to prove at all costs that genocide has been committed. (...) If executions
have taken place, the Serbs have been hiding it damn well. Thus, I don’t
believe any of it. The day after the collapse of Srebrenica, July 13, I arrived
in Bratunac and stayed there for eight days. I was able to go wherever I wanted
to. I was granted all possible assistance; nowhere was I stopped." So the official version of what happened in and around Srebrenica
in July 1995 rests heavily on the testimony of a small number of individuals
who contradicted themselves. Others who
have spoken to the media have also given accounts that test credibility to the
limits – for example, a report for BBC Newsnight in 1999 included this
‘witness’ narrative: “This mother she fell on the side of the truck
and broke her neck [demonstrates bringing both hands to her neck]. But as she
slid down she grabbed my legs asking me to help her. I could not help her. I
was holding my own child. She had a baby and I just managed to lift the baby
with my leg to save her baby. My son was saying “Mum, I will die do not let go
of me, hold me with both your hands”. I
said, “Son, let me save this tiny baby as well. Its mother is dead”. When we
finally reached Tuzla I handed the baby to the Red Cross and told them his
mother is dead. I bathed that baby in Coca Cola.” A lack of evidenceHard evidence of massacres was (and still is) in very short supply. Despite spending five days at the Tuzla airport refugee camp, where well over 20,000 Srebrenica survivors were gathered, the UN chief investigator into human rights abuses could find no eyewitnesses to atrocities: The Daily Telegraph Monday 24
July 1995 “Serb Atrocities In Srebrenica Are Unproved - By Tim Butcher in Tuzla After five days of
interviews the United Nations chief investigator into alleged human rights
abuses during the fall of Srebrenica has not found any first‑hand witnesses of atrocities... (UN High Commissioner for
Human Rights) Mr Henry Wieland said yesterday
“.. we have not found anyone who saw with their own eyes an atrocity
taking place. " ...Mr Wieland
travelled to Tuzla, the Bosnian city where almost all of the Srebrenica
refugees were taken, with a team of investigators to gather evidence of human
rights abuses...He said his team had spoken to scores of Muslims at the main
refugee camp at Tuzla airfield and at other collective centres but no first‑hand
witnesses had been found...” The Dutch were also unable to find any eyewitnesses. Dr Dick Schoonoord of the Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdoumentatie (NIOD) confirmed at the beginning of 2005: “It has been impossible during our investigations in Bosnia to find any people who witnessed the mass murder or would talk about the fate of the missing men.” There were other indications
from an early stage that the massacre claims were unreliable. A former US State
Department official, who remained in close contact with past colleagues at very
senior levels, wrote in 1997 that he had been told that the South Central
Europe section in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research ‘saw nothing, repeat nothing, that had
substantiated claims in the press’.
He added that the individual who had told him this had security
clearances to the highest level and ‘would
have had to know about it’ had any such information existed.[3] The last decade has been
littered with instances where strong and specific allegations have been made,
such as the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the 2003
war, which have later proved to be false. In 1999 NATO countries claimed that
thousands (one US government official suggested a total of 500,000) of Kosovo
Albanians had been summarily executed by the Serbs. When the post-war body hunt in Kosovo produced fewer than 3,000
bodies in total, from all sides and all causes of death, stories began to
emerge of a huge and immensely effective cover-up involving the mass
transportation of bodies to burial sites in Serbia. The parallels with Srebrenica are obvious. A rare example of consistencyThe unchanging numbers of missing from Srebrenica are noteworthy also
precisely because they have not moved in ten years. Military actions and terrorist incidents usually follow a very
different pattern, as 9/11 clearly demonstrates: The Office of the Medical Examiner of New York City reported
in January 2004 that it had issued a total of 2,749
death certificates in connection with the hijacker attacks on the twin towers
of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. "We believe this is the final number," a spokesperson
for the medical examiner said. "Two weeks after the attack," Associated Press
reported at the time (January 23, 2004), "the number of missing-person
reports [filed with New York authorities] peaked at 6,886 amid confusion and
calls from frantic relatives. The number stood at 2,792 from December 2002 until
October [2003], when 40 unsolved cases were removed from the list." This final 2,749 figure
represents less than half (39.9 percent) of the peak-number of missing-person
reports that were filed amid the anguish and confusion of the early days. The outrage took place in the richest city
in the richest country in the world, with all of the resources necessary to get
the body count right. It was not a
relatively impoverished, war-torn country with internally-displaced
people scattered in all directions. The role of Madeleine AlbrightInternational outrage over Srebrenica was first provoked by claims made
by the US Ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, in late July 1995. Mrs Albright displayed US surveillance
photographs to the UN Security Council, maintaining that they revealed mass
execution and grave sites. Following
the Dayton peace agreement in November 1995, the presumption was that these
sites, and the rest of the surrounding area, would be fully investigated as
soon as the winter was over. Mrs
Albright added that the US would keep careful watch to ensure any attempt to
cover up massacres was detected ('We will
keep watching to see if the Bosnian Serbs try to erase the evidence of what
they have done.'"). Shortly
after Mrs Albright’s UN performance, the Croatian army (with massive US
assistance[4])
invaded the Serbian Krijina, displacing some 200,000 people from their homeland
of 400 years’ standing. Many believed
that the Srebrenica massacre claims had provided a vital distraction from the
greatest act of ethnic cleansing of the 1990s Balkan wars. Mrs Albright never again showed much
interest in establishing what had happened at Srebrenica. The facts of this are remarkable.
Mrs Albright, as US Ambassador to the UN, had told the world that the
sites around Nova Kosaba, shown on the satellite images she had brandished at
the UN, might contain 2,700 bodies.
Eventually just 33 bodies were discovered at Nova Kasaba, at four
different sites and no detailed information was issued about circumstances of
death (i.e. whether or not there was evidence of execution). As Nova Kasaba is an isolated hamlet in the
mountains, 19km from Srebrenica, and accessible only by a single-track,
unmade-up road, it is difficult to imagine that anyone would have chosen it as
a mass execution site – particularly as there was a chronic shortage of
gasoline. Many lorries and journeys
would have been required to transport 2700 men there. Such an exercise would have been highly conspicuous and easily captured by satellite photo since, despite
the dry summer weather, the necessary levels of traffic would have been likely
to cause considerable and readily visible damage to the road. International journalistsIn March 1996, the UK magazine LM reported: “Many
(international TV) crews did not even bother to search out the site shown on
the CIA satellite photograph because it had generally been agreed in media
circles that it was not a mass grave”. This also probably reflected the fact that some 30 international journalists had visited the Srebrenica area soon after it fell. None had published any kind of confirmation of mass slaughter allegations and one of their number, Jacques Merlino of the French Antenne 2 station, had broadcast a story saying he had found nothing. Miroslav Deronjic, the civilian commissioner for the Srebrenica-Skelani municipality, was reported by Tanjug on 21 December 1995 as saying that on 25 August 1995 he received a group of 10 correspondents from the USA, Great Britain and Austria, led by Mike Wallace the anchor and co-editor of CBS’ 60 Minutes programme. They brought with them many photographs taken from an AWACS of alleged mass graves of Muslim victims. Deronjic is quoted thus: “They
insisted that we should take them to the sites in the photographs so that they
could assess for themselves the truth of the Muslim allegations. Without hesitation, in other words
immediately, although I had not seen the photographs, I agreed to take them
personally to every place in which they were interested. They showed me photographs in the region of
Hrncici, K. Polje and Kasaba, and asked to be taken to these places. I got into the car with Wallace and
immediately took the whole group to these locations. I spent 44 hours with them driving around the area, and allowed
them to see for themselves...after the investigation, Mike Wallace personally
thanked me and expressed his belief that the allegations were completely
unfounded, and that the entire international public had been manipulated”. Little appetite for investigation Scrutiny of media coverage over the last ten years suggests that, once made, the massacre claims, were treated as established fact by politicians and journalists. There are no indications of any ‘rational scepticism’. This is surprising on two counts. First, natural justice demands that indictments for appalling crimes should be made only on the basis of very strong evidence. Second, where there is a history of false accusations, new allegations should be treated with the greatest caution. By 1995 the wars in the Balkans had generated repeated massacre claims. One of the most notorious was the charge – delivered in live television broadcasts by the Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Siladzic - that Serbs had massacred 70,000 Muslims in Bihac. It transpired that this was completely untrue – Bihac was never captured by the Serbs. Of the allegations involving significant numbers, none has subsequently been proven. Veteran journalist John Pilger, in a December 2004 piece for the New Statesman magazine, noted a similar phenomenon during the Kosovo crisis of 1999: ‘Like the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, the media coverage in the spring of 1999 was a series of fraudulent justifications, beginning with US Defence Secretary William Cohen's claim that "we've now seen about 100,000 military-aged [Albanian] men missing... they may have been murdered." David Scheffer, the US ambassador at large for war crimes, announced that as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59" may have been killed. Blair invoked the Holocaust and "the spirit of the Second World War". The British press took its cue. "Flight from genocide," said the Daily Mail. "Echoes of the Holocaust," chorused the Sun and the Mirror. By June 1999, with the bombardment over, international forensic teams began subjecting Kosovo to minute examination. The American FBI arrived to investigate what was called "the largest crime scene in the FBI's forensic history". Several weeks later, having not found a single mass grave, the FBI went home. The Spanish forensic team also returned home, its leader complaining angrily that he and his colleagues had become part of "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one - not one - mass grave." In November 1999, the Wall Street Journal published the results of its own investigation, dismissing "the mass grave obsession". Instead of "the huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect ... the pattern is of scattered killings [mostly] in areas where the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army had been active." The Journal concluded that Nato stepped up its claims about Serb killing fields when it "saw a fatigued press corps drifting toward the contrarian story: civilians killed by Nato's bombs .... The war in Kosovo was "cruel, bitter, savage; genocide it wasn't."’ Revisionism Four months after Srebrenica fell to the Serbs the Dayton agreement brought an end to the wars in Bosnia-Hercegovina. The cold Balkan winter made it impracticable to search for mass graves until spring came, but the international community showed little urgency in getting the process underway. It was not until mid to late summer of 1996 that the Boston-based organisation Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) began work in the area around Srebrenica. When they halted work in the late autumn they had recovered a total of around 200 bodies from 20 separate sites. Notwithstanding hawkish comments by their leader William Haglund, this was clearly regarded as a very disappointing haul. During the winter this
surfaced in the media.
One of the earlier versions was a suggestion in the New York Times
that the Serbs had destroyed the corpses with a corrosive agent: "American officials said today that
they suspect Bosnian Serb soldiers may have tried to destroy evidence that they
killed thousands of Muslim men seized in and around the town of Srebrenica in
July. The Serbs are suspected of pouring corrosive chemicals on the bodies and
scattering corpses that had been buried in mass graves, the officials said. The
suspicions first arose in early August, after Central Intelligence Agency
experts analyzed pictures of the area taken in July by reconnaissance
satellites and U-2 planes." Jon Swain of The Sunday Times wrote an article on 3 November 1996 entitled “Empty Bosnian Graves baffle UN”. Ignoring the evident possibility that an ‘empty’ grave might hold no bodies because, in fact, it had never been a mass grave, Swain contrived a bizarre logic: “In several months of digging at mass graves in
the macabre hinterland around Srebrenica, the investigators recovered far fewer
bodies than they had expected. Of the thousands of men and boys from the UN
safe area who were executed by Bosnian Serbs in July 1995, only a few hundred ‑
less than 10% of the 7,000 Muslims missing ‑ have been dug up. The empty graves speak volumes about the conspiracy by Bosnian Serbs to cover up the massacre at Srebrenica. Their leadership claims that few bodies have been found because the stories of atrocities there were exaggerated. The more plausible theory is that bodies have been made to "disappear".” Surveillance The reality as far as Srebrenica is concerned is that a cover-up would almost certainly have been impossible to achieve in the manner suggested. The area was under intense electronic and on-the-ground surveillance throughout the period: “US satellites make at least
eight passes over Bosnia daily, according to John Pike, an expert on satellites
at the Federation of American Scientists.
These include Keyhole satellites, which can detect object as small as
four inches but which cannot see through clouds, and Lacrosse satellites, which
can see through clouds but cannot focus enough to detect something the size of
a human being. Then there are the Predators,
known technically as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, commonly referred to as drones.
Built by General Atomics, these small, remote controlled vehicles can hover
over targets for more than 24 hours at a time.
Four of the latest versions are thought to operate from a base in
Albania. Designed to provide
‘round-the-clock’ coverage, the Predators are almost invisible to the naked eye
and difficult to pick up on radar. They
can fly at up to 25,000 feet, have infrared detectors for night vision and can
purportedly relay video footage back to the Pentagon in real time.” – New York
Times 26 July 1995 Confirmation that electronic
surveillance had revealed nothing came in April 1996 when US LtCol John Batiste was quoted by AP as saying that
satellite surveillance of mass graves showed “they had not been tampered with”. The cover-up theory is also
unlikely for a host of low-tech reasons.
The excavation, removal, transportation and reburial of 7,000 bodies –
around 500 tonnes in total weight – could hardly have escaped normal human
detection. There were many UN personnel
in Bosnia throughout the autumn and winter of 1995/6. Moreover, the Bosnian Serb Army (BSA) was under immense military
pressure during the late summer and autumn of 1995, combating determined
offensives in several areas and defending a front line almost a thousand miles
long. It is inconceivable that the BSA
could have spared either the men or the equipment necessary for such an
operation. It is also unlikely that
they could have found the gasoline- their supplies were so low they had been
reduced to buying fuel from the Muslims on the black market. The hunt for gravesDuring
the first five years after Dayton, relatively few mass grave discoveries were
reported. It sometimes seemed, in fact,
that the search had been quietly
abandoned, only for occasional excitements of the kind described by Mike
O’Connor in the New York Times in May 1998: "Deep in a
remote rural stretch of Bosnia, war crimes investigators have found a tangle of
buried bodies that they say is the remains of some of the 7,500 Muslim men that
were hidden to try to thwart the prosecution of Bosnian Serb leaders for
genocide. (...) Exhumations in 1996 recovered 460 bodies, but 7,500 others were
still missing from the town of Srebrenica. Finding the others has been the goal
of war-crimes investigators for more than two years. (...) The discovery
Tuesday - and the thousands of bodies that investigators expect to find nearby
- will bolster the cases against 2 Bosnian Serb leaders, Radovan Karadzic and
General Ratko Mladic, the investigators say. Both have been indicted for
genocide by the tribunal in the Hague. Investigators for the tribunal spoke
Tuesday on condition of anonymity. Satellites that can locate bodies
decomposing underground, according to foreign military officers working with
the tribunal, aided the search. Witnesses to the reburial also offered
testimony, tribunal officials said. The first remains were uncovered Tuesday
morning. Investigators unfurled a thin silvery sheet to protect their find from
the sun. Next to it, small orange flags had been stuck in the ground to mark
pieces of evidence such as bits of clothing or shell casings. Tuesday evening,
according to a tribunal official, a layer of tangled bodies across an ares of
200 ft (18 m) had been exposed. The bones were so intertwined, the official
said, that it was not possible to exhume any of them Tuesday. Proving that the
soil around the bodies came from the original mass graves, or that shell
casings found here match those found at execution sites, will establish the
connection they are looking for, investigators said. When the
original sites were inspected in 1996, investigators suspected most of the
bodies had been moved. Doubts were cast on American military's satellite
surveillance, with some investigators charging at the time that slipshod
monitoring had allowed Bosnian Serb authorities to move the bodies undetected.
Now, however, tribunal officials say the bodies were moved in October 1995,
before the pinpoint satellite surveillance was requested by the tribunal. Once
the original sites were discovered to have been tampered with, American
satellite photographs of the region were reviewed and were found to show trucks
and earth-moving equipment at the original burial sites, according to tribunal
officials. In
2000/2001 there was a sea-change.
Reports such as this began to appear with great regularity : “AP 11 July 2001 Since the end of the war, tribunal experts and the Muslim
Commission for Missing Persons have exhumed the remains of about 4,800 victims,
of whom only about 100 have been identified. ``By the end of the year, we are
planning to exhume 1,000 more bodies'' said Amor Masovic, head of the
commission.” From this point
regular mass grave reports were to be seen in the international media. Some were prompted by further mass grave
discoveries; others, such as the one below, measured progress. Without exception, reports referred to
Srebrenica massacres as established fact, not allegation. Most included at least one reference to the
Holocaust: “Monday April 15, 2002 Above the bodies, each wrapped in white plastic and marked with a
serial number, are stacked brown paper bags, the kind American stores pack
groceries in. They contain the washed
and ironed clothes of the victims
below. This warehouse, on the outskirts of Tuzla in Bosnia, belongs to the International
Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), which has been exhuming the remains of
people killed in the massacre at Srebrenica.
The organisation was set up by Bill Clinton when he was US president to
return victims' bodies to their families. …Last week the ICMP made the 112th DNA identification.” Slowly
but surely media coverage helped to establish an impression that the missing
bodies were now being found and identified in very large numbers and that the
proof of large-scale massacres at Srebrenica had been assembled. Yet even within the terms of progress
defined by the international community, there had been hardly any advance. By April 2002 – nearly seven years after
Srebrenica fell - the BBC’s Alex Kroeger reported that only 200 bodies had been
identified: Wednesday, 10 April,
2002, 10:22 GMT 11:22 UK Identifying Srebrenica's
victims
Bosnian Muslim women remember
the massacre
By Alix Kroeger Around 6,000[5]
bodies from the Srebrenica massacre of Muslim men and boys have so far been
recovered, but fewer than 200 have been positively identified, most through DNA
analysis. ….Nearly 200 bodies have been matched with blood and bone
samples taken from their surviving relatives, and identifications are now going
ahead at a rate of two or three a day. “ Fifteen
months later, in July 2003, the Washington Times reported a huge leap in the
number of identified bodies: The Washington Times Even at this stage,
however, the picture remained confused.
Agence France Press in October 2003 placed a very different set of
figures in the public domain: ‘Since
its introduction two years ago [the new DNA testing technique] 5,000 Srebrenica
victims have been identified, compared to 73 in the six previous years’. The ICMP now (June 2005)
states on its website:
“One month before the 10th anniversary of the
fall of Srebrenica in 1995, the International Commission on Missing
Persons (ICMP) has completed identifications of more than 2,000 of the
Srebrenica victims.” This confusing coverage
reveals one thing above all – that at the time the ICTYindictments were issued
in 1995 against Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic the Tribunal had no hard
evidence to support its allegations of genocide. It had, in other words, issued indictments without having even
the basis of a case.
DNA
If details of the mass grave
excavations were few and far between, so was information about the breakthrough DNA technique, developed in
Bosnia, which had suddenly allowed identifications to be made at the claimed
rate of three a day – something of an improvement on the three managed during
the entire first year of investigations.
Until recently, this excerpt from an article in Science magazine on
August 24, 2001 was the most detailed explanation of the new technique:
“…The
ICMP project got going last year, when it began dispatching teams to collect
blood from relatives of the missing persons. So far the ICMP has amassed more
than 12,000 samples, with some relatives coming here from as far away as
Australia. On average, it requires 2.5 donors to identify a body, says Huffine.
The ICMP has 100,000 blood kits in hand, enough in principle to identify 40,000
bodies. "Once we have 100,000 samples, then we can expect that almost
every body we find can be identified," says Amor Masovic, director of the
Bosnian Muslims' missing persons commission.” A paper by John Crews, published by the OST publication on Science & technology in April 2005, gave more detail about the DNA methodology devised by the ICMP. Mr Crews noted that: “ As the DNA Laboratory Development and Operations Director from
March 2001 through December 2002, I was charged with establishing six DNA
laboratories throughout the former Yugoslavia to identify the remains of
missing persons exhumed from mass graves in the region. The work was
particularly difficult as high-end, high-purity supplies needed for a DNA
laboratory were difficult to procure in-country. Compounding this issue was the
lack of individuals with experience in such high-caliber laboratories and
knowledge of the equipment being used. However, by the end of 2001 a supply
line was established from both in-country and international vendors; the staff
had not only completed validation and begun work, but grew from only eight at
the beginning of 2001, to 34 – including three senior scientists – in less than
a year…. Mr Crews goes on to give some
information about the ‘cutting-edge’ DNA procedures developed by the ICMP: “The
process of DNA-based human identification relies upon the comparison of DNA
analysis of blood samples from living family members to the analyzed DNA from
bone samples cut from the femurs or molar teeth extracted from exhumed
remains…. “Blood
samples were collected using Schleicher & Schuell Specimen Collection Paper
and extracted using a simple, quick, and inexpensive water-based technique
(contact author for protocol). This process allows for the extraction and
amplification set-up of a plate of 96 samples in less than two hours. With this
capacity, the blood processing laboratory in Tuzla, BiH is capable of
processing up to 8,000 blood samples per month. The bone extraction procedure
(contact author for protocol) relies upon a technique pioneered in the Sarajevo
laboratory where DNA is bound to a silica membrane (DNA Blood Maxi Kit from Qiagen, www.qiagen.com),
effectively isolating the DNA from other cellular contaminants. The
silica-based DNA extraction procedure uses chaotropic salts that dehydrate the
DNA and enhance intermolecular attractions that bind the DNA to the silica
membrane. Elution of DNA from the membrane using ultra-pure (18 mOhms of
resistivity), UV-irradiated water (to kill microbes, inactivate enzymes, and
cross-link potentially contaminating DNA) provides approximately 30ml of DNA at
a concentration of 250pg/ml to 1ng/ml with ~90% recovery of extracted DNA.” DNA identification has come to be seen, in much the same way as
fingerprint technology, as something of a gold standard. The perception is that, if the DNA matches,
it constitutes unassailable evidence.
This may be the case for matches made on the basis of readily available
samples of uncontaminated DNA (from recently deceased bodies); whether it
applies to DNA recovered in circumstances such as those associated with the
ICMP’s work is a matter of debate. The
DNA community is deeply divided, for instance, on the validity of the DNA
identification of the Romanovs. No population databaseWhether or not the DNA technique is reliable, there are compelling reasons to doubt the identifications made by the ICMP. The ICRC list of missing persons from Srebrenica was drawn up following public appeals for relatives and friends of Srebrenica missing to come forward. This inevitably created enormous potential for both deliberate and unintentional distortion. Since there were no population records for the safe area in 1995, the ICRC had no control data against which they could verify their list. The most recent population records for Srebrenica were from 1991, when the municipality (the town and the many villages in the surrounding area) of Srebrenica had 37,211 inhabitants, of which 27,118 were Muslims (72.8 percent) and 9,381 Serbs (25.2 percent). It is certain that many members of the 1991 population – 25% of whom were Serbs – were no longer living there in 1995. This means that there is no database for the Srebrenica population of July 1995. As Serbian historian Milivoje Ivanisevic has concluded : “Anybody could add a disappeared person to the list, without any elementary check of the person doing this. ICRC should not be criticized for this. Notifications were often made by individuals who presented themselves without any proof as family members, colleagues, co-combatants, neighbors. This list, without any further actions and checking was declared and transformed into the list of Srebrenica victims, and still later this went further, and the list was transformed into the list of massacred Muslim civilians.” Ivanisevic noted a series of further points concerning the list. In addition to Muslims, it included “persons of other nationalities and faiths”, some individuals who were known to be still alive, people who had never existed, as well as: “many that committed crimes in this region and in whose interest it is that they are listed as "disappeared". They change names and under other identity continue living in B&H or in foreign countries as refugees.” No adequate control of grave
excavations and body storage It was at the end of 1996 that the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
(ICTY) quietly assumed control of continued investigations, taking over
from the UN. At
first sight it might seem quite reasonable for the ICTY to take charge of the
search for mass graves around Srebrenica.
But, as a Tribunal set up by nations that had played a direct part in
the Balkan conflicts and had an obvious political agenda, the ICTY had none of
the crucial checks and balances that characterise inquisitorial legal processes
such as the French system. From the outset ICTY prosecutors and investigators
made repeated public pronouncements that the Serbs massacred thousands of
Muslim men from Srebrenica, even though the only evidence that such
crimes had taken place was uncorroborated witness testimony. There was some
respectability attaching to the search for mass graves when it was in the hands
of an apparently independent organisation, PHR; the process became fatally
compromised when, from 1997 onwards, this work was carried out by the
International Commission for Missing Persons, an organisation originally
created by the Izetbegovic government – particularly as, notwithstanding the
inclusion of some foreign forensic experts in its team, the ICMP effectively
remained under Bosnian Muslim control. In his book, “The Graves”, Eric Stover reveals the
inadequate nature of the forensic work: “With the departure
of the tribunal's scientists in October 1996, the task of identifying
the Srebrenica remains fell to the director of the forensic instituteof the
University of Tuzla, Zdenko Cihlarz…. In the main
laboratory of the institute, Cihlarz stopped and swept his arm aroundthe room.
"So, you see, it's all improvisation. Here you have one of the biggest
forensic investigations of a war crime in European history and what have you got?
Forensics on a shoestring." In the dimly lit room I could make out boxes of bones
stacked against the tiled walls. Here and there, bones had fallen out,
collecting dust, on the floor. Makeshift examining tables had been fashioned
out of planksand sheets of thick cardboard. Several medical and forensic
textbooks laid strewn across
table tops, their covers torn and dog-eared. I picked one up and leafed to the title
page. It was more that thirty-five years old. On an examining table, laid out in
anatomical order, were less than half the bones of a skeleton, and next
to it a makeshift bone board, an instrument physical anthropologists use
for measuring stature from the long bones. It had been cobbled together by
attaching two metal bookends to a smooth wooden plank. Tacked to the top of the
board between the bookends was a cloth measuring tape. Fixed to the wall above
the table was an illustration of a skeleton cut from the pages of an anatomy book.” Yet it was the ICMP in particular that fostered the belief that the Serbs had mounted a major cover-up operation in the late months of 1995 in which mass graves close to Srebrenica had been dug up and the bodies removed for reburial at far more distant sites along the Drina valley. Once the cover-up theory had been widely reported, mass grave discoveries began to be announced on a regular basis. When details were given, it was evident that almost all these sites were far removed from Srebrenica – often fifty or sixty miles away. Their discovery was generally seen as confirmatory of the cover-up thesis, but no specific evidence to support the hypothesis was made public until the ICTY trials of Erdemovic and Krstic. This consisted of confessional evidence from Dragan Erdemovic, a Croatian, whose mental health had given cause for serious concern and whose motivation was open to doubt, and anecdotal evidence from other witnesses who claimed to have taken part. As with other ICTY cases, the testimony appeared to be part of a plea-bargaining process. So far as the mass grave discoveries were concerned, the fact that the work had been carried out (albeit under supervision of the ICTY) by an organisation set up by the Bosnian Muslim government would, under almost any accepted rules of evidence, be considered to have fundamentally compromised the value of the data gathered. Some official figures now suggest that around 6,000 bodies linked to
Srebrenica have been discovered in mass grave excavations. But there continues to be an absence of
detailed data about individual excavations.
In particular, there has been no serious explanation of how the finds
have been linked to Srebrenica; how many of the bodies can be specifically
linked to execution rather than other forms of death; and how many of the
bodies have been individually identified.
Nor has the ICTY (nor the International Commission for Missing Persons)
explained how the search for Srebrenica bodies has been kept separate from the
parallel search going on for the (now thought to be grossly exaggerated)
estimated 250,000[6] people said
to have died in the civil wars throughout Bosnia between 1992-95[ii]. A seminal moment came in 1999 when the authorities in Tuzla announced that thousands of Srebrenica bodies had been gathered in the town’s morgue. Once again, no detailed information was given about the provenance of the bodies, but Srebrenica relatives were requested to visit the morgue to see if they could identify their loved ones. Typical of the coverage was a report by David Sells of BBC Newsnight: ‘In
Tuzla there is a funeral parlour, called the Memorial Centre, a grim spot.
Stored there, topsy-turvy, are 3,000 bodies. Some are kept refrigerated, most
are not. They are victims of the Srebrenica massacre. Almost all are
unidentified. Why,
still, four years on? The process of identification is painfully slow. A
foreign pathologist told the Women of Srebrenica at a special Tuzla meeting:
"This work is going to go on for many years." And there are thousands
more Srebrenica citizens still unaccounted for. ..
Investigators from the Hague Tribunal, seeking to document the Srebrenica
massacre, have exhumed dozens of mass graves, but their interest ends there.
They are not concerned to identify individual bodies they dig up.” It is very clear from
this description that the bodies were stored chaotically at the Tuzla morgue
and that few, if any, steps had been taken to ensure the integrity of the
evidence. How David Sells could assert
that they ‘are victims of the Srebrenica massacre’ is unclear; he certainly
does not offer any explanation. If the
bodies had not been identified, how could anyone be sure that they were
connected with the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995? And, once again, there is no reference to evidence indicating
that these bodies had shown signs of execution. In any case, as Sells noted, the ICTY ‘are not concerned to
identify individual bodies they dig up’. Unidentified bodies were apparently
more useful for ICTY purposes. More light was shed
on the methodologies used in the search for mass graves in the broadcast report
that Sells made at this time for the BBC Newsnight programme. The transcript below reveals that the
quality of evidence-gathering was
amateurish in the extreme. It is also
noticeable – despite the rhetorical question in his commentary (“..the overall
problem remains: who is buried where?”)
that Sells did not ask his expert interviewee
how, without having made any identifications, she could be sure that the bodies
were those of people from Srebrenica who had died in 1995. Given the fighting that had gone on in the
area from 1992-95 (not to mention the fierce engagements there during the Second
World War), this seems a startling assumption.
Nor did Sells raise any question about the secondary grave theory,
although he must have been well aware that such an operation would have been
exceedingly difficult for the Serbs to carry out and even more difficult, in a
country under intense electronic and human surveillance, to achieve without
detection: “David Sells: This idyllic
valley, despite appearances, is a graveyard.
Some of the Muslims
who vanished in Srebrenica were massacred and when the Hague war
crimes tribunal began nosing about Bosnian Serbs quietly reburied the victims far
from the scene. This was one reburial site. Woman with
North American accent: This is it
right in front of us. You can see the faint outlines… David Sells: Under the logs? Woman: Yes, under
the logs. It’s right here. It came more or less right up to the
road and you can see where it’s dirt there and then the grass begins growing
again. And from this site we exhumed the remains of approximately 160 individuals. [a digger is shown shovelling out earth -
but not carefully, just shovelling] David Sells: They were dug up here just last year but
the overall problem remains: who is buried where? In one organised Srebrenica
massacre four years ago Muslim men were separated from women and children. Then
bussed, not to safety as General Mladic had so disarmingly promised, but out to
a state farm and firing squads. The Serbs on this occasion
taking revenge for butcheries they themselves had suffered at the hands of
Muslims. The Hague tribunal is
interested in the crime, one mass grave fully exhumed can be evidence enough to
make their point. Woman: This is what we call a secondary mass
grave. That means that they were originally buried someplace else
and then the perpetrators dug up their remains using heavy equipment and moved
them to this location and interred them here. So it’s quite obviously an effort to
hide evidence of the crimes that have been committed. [footage of grassy field] David Sells: This is another mass grave. The tribunal
has probed it, it knows there are more bodies beneath the
weeds but it now has evidence enough. It has no need for another exhumation. We were shown eight more such graves in this silent valley, probed but not exhumed.
So there’s a conflict of interest. Hasan Muhanovic’s
family could be buried here, but without precise identification he will never know.” Within the forensic science community
there is respect for the DNA work done by the ICMP. The technique it has developed is considered sound and the
quality of the laboratory processes is also thought to be good. But, whilst this has been useful in
identifying bodies recovered in Bosnia
which might otherwise have remained unidentified, it has shed relatively little
light on the events in and around Srebrenica in July 1995. This is because the conventional forensic
work carried out by the ICMP is perceived to have been of poor quality. Suspected grave sites were not kept secure;
excavations were carried out by personnel without adequate training, using
inappropriate tools and techniques; the transportation and storage of body
parts was not done according to professional forensic standards; and,
throughout the process, there was a failure to keep full and detailed
records. As a result, there is no
coherent data on such vital questions as time, cause and circumstances of
death. And it must be noted once again
that even the DNA identifications have served only to match body parts to
individuals listed on the ICRC missing list.
They provide no proof that the individuals concerned were casualties
following the fall of Srebrenica. An assumption of guiltAlthough for several years
after 1995 virtually no evidence was found to support the massacre allegations,
politicians and the media continued to suggest that they were proven beyond
doubt. This point was made as early as March 1996 by the British journalist
Linda Ryan: “Some
might think that bodies would come in handy
as evidence when charges of genocide are being levelled. There must be
tens of thousands buried all over Bosnia. Yet not one had been uncovered at the
alleged 'mass graves' near Srebrenica at the time of writing. All sorts of
excuses were given for the lack of bodies‑‑they had been covered by
snow, dismembered by machines, destroyed by chemicals and moved elsewhere by
the Bosnian Serbs. It almost seems like nobody wants to dig around in case they
discover the 'mass graves' are empty. This is what happened when British divers
went into the flooded mine at Ljubija, in north‑west Bosnia, alleged to
hold the bodies of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims and Croats. They found nothing.” Commentators have nevertheless characterised the body hunt as a great
success and have treated the ICMP as a bona-fide, impartial organisation. Although a measure of respectability was
conferred on it by the establishment of an international supervisory board, the
fact that former Senator Bob Dole and former AOL Chairman James V. Kimsey are
numbered among its Chairmen is not compatible with the notion that it is
impartial. Dole is an
anti-Serb of long standing. He set out
to undermine the economy of Federal Yugoslavia through provisions he added to
US legislation passed on 5 November 1990 which made further US aid payments to
Yugoslavia conditional on the holding of “democratic” elections in each of the
Yugoslav republics. These elections
were bound to give a boost to nationalists and encourage secessionist
aspirations; they also brought effective end to aid, which immediately threw
the Yugoslav Federal government into crisis because it was unable to pay the
enormous interest on its foreign debt or to continue the purchase of raw
materials for industry. Credit
collapsed, recriminations broke out on all sides and the pathway to conflict
was set. Subsequently Dole allowed his
Washington office to be used by Kosovo Albanian lobbyists and, as a member of a
group of US senators visiting Sarajevo in 1992, he was heard in a US TV News
report telling a group of Bosnian Muslims ‘We’re
on your side’. Kimsey is
distinct from Dole in that he had not expressed strong sympathies with
particular groups in the Balkans. He
does, however, have pronounced views about the United States’ role in the
world. In an article entitled “Former
AOL Chief Seeks to Fix Washington, World”, John Shaw quoted James V. Kimsey as
follows: “We
should be much more chess player-like in our view of the world. We should stop
thinking tactically and reactively and develop broad, strategic plans. Americans
think very near term. We don’t have long-range goals,” he said. “George
Marshall had a strategy after World War II. It was well thought out. We’re in a
war now, and we really haven’t thought our way through it—and we need to.” There were other fallacies in the massacre scenario. One was the notion that the inhabitants of the safe area were at the mercy of the BSA. This is unsustainable. By all accounts there were at least 5,000 armed ABiH (Muslim army) troops in Srebrenica – and probably many more. According to the UN contingent based in the safe area, the ABiH in Srebrenica was well armed – indeed, members of Dutchbat had noted that state-of-the-art armaments and communications equipment had been flowing into Srebrenica during 1995. The town’s defenders were also dug into excellent defensive positions. In the light of all this it was a great surprise that what appears to have been a very small BSA force took the town virtually without resistance and was then alleged to have overpowered and executed a vastly superior force of well-armed men over the ensuing days. The London Times’ long-standing and well- respected Defence Correspondent, Michael Evans, wrote on 14 July 1995: “There
were reports that up to 1,500 Serbs were involved in the assault on Srebrenica,
but intelligence sources estimated the main attack was carried out by a force
of about 200, with five tanks. "It
was a pretty low-level operation, but for some reason which we can't understand
the BiH (government) soldiers didn't put up much of a fight," one source
said.”
Some confirmation of this estimate can be taken from the fact that the Serbs were very concerned that the fleeing ABiH troops might be able to capture the town of Zvornik as they travelled towards Muslim lines. Writing in 1997, Carlos Martins Branco, who was one of the UNMO
Deputy Chief Operations Officers of UNPF (at theatre level) at Srebrenica in
July 1995, had this to say, based on information he had acquired from debriefing UNMOs who where posted to
Srebrenica during those days and from ‘some UN reports not disclosed to
public opinion’. “If there had been a premeditated plan of genocide, instead of
attacking in only one direction, from the south to the north - which left the
hypothesis to escape to the north and west, the Serbs would have established a
siege in order to ensure that no one escaped. The UN observation posts to the
north of the enclave were never disturbed and remained in activity after the
end of the military operations. There are obviously mass graves in the
outskirts of Srebrenica as in the rest of ex-Yugoslavia where combat has
occurred, but there are no grounds for the campaign which was mounted, nor the
numbers advanced by CNN. Tthere are also detailed reports
suggesting that the BSA, far from having genocidal intentions, immediately
wanted to pass responsibility for the displaced Srebrenica population to the UN peacekeepers and the
aid agencies. It makes sense: the BSA
force was small in number and short of supplies. Records show that there was
detailed discussion between Serbs and Muslims about the treatment of the
Srebrenica population. “The Srebrenica Committee for Civil Affairs made public the record of a meeting
held with Muslim representatives on July 12 in the "Fontana" hotel
(in Bratunac) which shows that the Serb side conducted properly, and as was
agreed, the evacuation of Srebrenica residents. "During the evacuation
there were no incidents from either side, with the Serb side respecting all the
terms of the Geneva Convention and International War Law", says the joint
communique signed by the former executive official of Srebrenica, Nesib
Mandzic, for the Muslim side. According to the minutes, the meeting was held at
the request of Muslim delegation, made by Camila Purkovic, Ibro Nuhanovic and
Nesib Mandzic. Representing the Serb
side were the chief‑of‑staff of the Republic of Srpska Army,
General Ratko Mladic, the head of Srebrenica Civil Affairs, Miroslav Deronic,
the mayor of Bratunac Municipality, Ljubislav Simic, and the president of the
Bratunac Municipality Executive Council, Srbislav Davidovic. It was agreed at
the meeting, also attended by the commander of UNPROFOR Dutch battalion, that
civilians may stay within enclave or be evacuated, depending on the wishes of
each resident. "In the event that we decide to be evacuated, we will be
allowed to decide where to go. We decided
to transfer the entire Srebrenica population to Kladanj Municipality",
says the agreement signed by Mandzic, which specifies that the RS Army and
Police will conduct the evacuation under UNPROFOR supervision.” - SRNA 18 July 1995. And over the years
there has also been evident a conspicuous lack of interest on the part of the
international community in following up indications that the ‘missing’ from
Srebrenica might not be dead. In 1997
the Bosnian Serbs claimed that more than 3,000 of the people on the electoral
roll for the 1996 elections in Srebrenica were also on the list of 7,300
missing from Srebrenica drawn up by the ICRC.
A BBC journalist contacted the Organisation for Security and
Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which had overseen the elections, to ask if they
could investigate. He pointed out that
either some 3,000 people on the missing list were either still alive, or there
had been massive election fraud. The
OSCE were not very interested, but – after some perseverance – the BBC journalist
spoke to an official called David Foley.
He promised to look into the matter and duly sent this e-mail to his
colleagues: Subject: FW: ICRC Missing
List cross‑ref Date: 23/07/97 Time: 5:44p resend with correct address. DF From: David Foley Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 1997 5:41 PM To: Linda Edgeworth; Deborah Alexander; Michael Yard; Christian
Christensen; Nicole Szulc Subject: ICRC Missing List cross‑reference with
PVL . A BBC journalist working on
the issue of the missing in BiH has asked an interesting question. He is
checking a claim made by Mr. Kalinic, the President of the National Assembly of
RS that 3,000 people who are on the ICRC list of missing from Srebrenica voted
in last year's elections. I have no memory of any attempt by OSCE to check the
refugee registration
database against the ICRC
computerized list, and I doubt whether there are records avialable of who
actually voted in the elections last year. Does anyone know if this is the
case? Would it be possible to check
the ICRC list against the 1996 PVL? This would potentially unite
people long separated, and would, at a stroke, potentially do more to cut
down the ICRC list of misery than any effort so far. We should do this if
it is at all possible. Thoughts? David Foley Spokesman and Senior Advisor for
Public Policy Phone: 444‑444 x222, e‑mail: davidf@oscebih.org). After several months with no further
response, the BBC journalist made repeated attempts to contact Mr Foley. Eventually he spoke to him. Foley explained that the electoral records
from 1996 had been locked away in warehouses around Bosnia and that the OSCE
did not have the resources to recover them and cross reference the names that
appeared on both the electoral roll and the ICRC missing list. The BBC journalist expressed surprise,
noting how important it was to get further information on the Srebrenica
missing. Mr Foley said the OSCE would
be sure to keep this in mind during the 1997 elections which were soon due, but
he could nothing more on 1996. The political background is also murky. There are confirmed witness reports that Alijah Izetbegovic, the Bosnian President, was pursuing a parallel strategy of exchanging Srebrenica for a strategic Serb-held part of Sarajevo, while seeking to engineer circumstances in which he could provide the Clinton administration with a pretext to renounce international impartiality and take sides with the Bosnian Muslims. The Dutch commentators, René Grémaux and Abe de Vries, reported this as follows: “Eventually, while the "Dayton"
agreement was in preparation, the Bosnian government [Izetbegovic] accepted the
concept of exchanging territory: Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde for the Serb
Sarajevo. Bosnian Minister of foreign affairs Muhammad Sacirbey had already
informed Secretary of State Voorhoeve about this option during talks held in
May (see De Volkskrant of 1 November 1995). The deal came as a blessing for the
Americans, so close to the start of an election campaign. The fiercely
criticized UN peace force very much wanted to abandon the "safe
havens" as well. Srebrenica became the turning point from a military,
political and publicity perspective. Only the retreat of the peacekeepers made
it possible for NATO to start with the air strikes in September. The wave of
horror stories about mass executions overshadowed the Croatian terror in the
Krajina and no word got out about the Muslim-Croatian crimes in cities like
Glamoc, Grahovo and Sanski Most... " Other reports claimed that Izetbegovic had told Muslim leaders from Srebrenica that Clinton had said to him that a ‘massacre of 5,000’ would give the US government an excuse to abandon neutrality. And of course, as noted above, Madeleine Albright’s production of US surveillance pictures of Srebrenica coincided with the US-backed Croatian invasion of Krijina and was soon followed by the three-day NATO bombing of BSA positions around Sarajevo. In addition to all
this there are two fundamental points that should not be forgotten: (i) that the finding of a "mass
grave" is not necessarily proof of a mass execution. In wartime the
battlefield victims of the opposing side may be disposed of in this way, until
a transfer of the remains can be negotiated with the other side, to avoid the
health problems that their decomposition on the surface could cause,
particularly in summer; and (ii) that ‘comingling’ of corpses and bones is not
necessarily an indication of a cover-up operation to hide evidence of a
massacre. As some of the accounts
quoted above make clear, the excavation of suspected mass graves in Bosnia
appears in many instances to have involved mechanical diggers going to
considerable depths – one report referred to bodies recovered from 9 metres
below ground level. Such techniques in
themselves would cause commingling. Reports and ‘confessions’During the past few years the international community has appeared
anxious to underpin the regnant version of events at Srebrenica. Successive UN High Representatives in
Bosnia, equipped with draconian powers, required the government of Republika
Srpska to produce a report admitting that massacres had been carried out by the
BSA. The original report, produced in
September 2002, was a detailed and thorough account. It concluded that there had been no massacres, but that some
2,500 Bosnian Muslims and 500 Serbs had been killed in fighting in the forests
as the column of men from Srebrenica had made their way towards Muslim
lines. Lord Paddy Ashdown, who had just
taken over as UN High Commissioner, was infuriated and ordered Republika Srpska
to produce a new report to his own prescription on pain of drastic penalties if
they did not co-operate. When the RS
government sought to approach the task with a degree of independence, he sacked
several members of the committee producing the report, replacing them with his
own placemen, including one Muslim.
This individual is believed to have largely drafted the report which
Ashdown published with a flourish in 2004.
To cement the massacre theory more firmly still, Ashdown had commissioned
an extremely expensive memorial at Srebrenica, complete with 10,000 token
gravestones, which was very publicly opened – with a speech by former US
President Bill Clinton – on the 8th anniversary of events in July
2003. The Skorpion Tape
As the 10th anniversary of Srebrenica approaches, attempts
to embed the massacre story have intensified.
In both the USA and the UK, newspapers began to carry lengthy features a
full two months before the anniversary date.
On the legal side, ICTY Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte redoubled her
media campaign for the arrest of Karadzic and Mladic, timing a visit to
Belgrade to coincide with the screening during the ICTY Milosevic trial of a
video purporting to show the execution of young Muslim men from Srebrenica by a
special Serbian unit called the Skorpions. This development, eagerly seized on by the world’s media as ‘final
proof’ of the Srebrenica massacres, was no more than a bizarre stunt. Geoffrey Nice, the ICTY prosecutor in the
Milosevic case, was clearly under instruction to use the video in his
cross-examination of a Serbian military commander, but had not been able to
work out any coherent legal basis for doing so. Nor had he even been able to disclose the evidence to the
defence. The witness was asked to
comment on video extracts which appeared to have been of extremely poor quality
in their original form (consumer-quality video, badly shot), further degraded
by compression to small-window streaming video format. The Court was given nothing more than Mr
Nice’s assurance that the video related to Srebrenica – and even Mr Nice
admitted that it had been shot at a place near Sarajevo, almost 200 km from
Srebrenica. The ostensible justification for the use of this material was that it established a link between Milosevic and the events in Srebrenica because, Mr Nice claimed, the Skorpions were a special unit of the Serbian police. Within a week of the screening of the video in Court, it had emerged that the Skorpions were a group of mercenaries who had, briefly it appeared, had some relationship with the forces of Republika Srpska Krijina, but no relationship with the Serbian police. Examination of the video demonstrated that both the pictures and sound
had been doctored. There were
indications that it had been edited together from tapes shot at different times
and in different places. And the weight
of clothing worn by both soldiers and prisoners did not appear consistent with
weather conditions around Srebrenica in July 1995, which were extremely hot. The provenance of the video was also highly suspect. According to official statements, it had
been provided to the ICTY by Nastasa Kandic, usually described as a Serbian
civil rights activist. Ms Kandic, who
is reported to receive funding from a number of national governments and such
sources as the George Soros foundation, had several times previously been
instrumental in providing timely support for the official line when it was
coming under question – for example, she was the source of the ‘freezer truck’ theory that the Serbs
had disposed of thousands of massacred Kosovo Albanians by removing them to
gravesites in Serbia in refrigerated trucks. Some conclusionsSo what has really
happened in the ten years since July 1995?
It might be summarised in this way:
In the late summer of
1995 the US produced satellite photographs at the UN which, the US claimed,
suggested that a number of mass graves had been dug in the close neighbourhood
of Srebrenica town. Madeleine Albright
warned that the US would monitor these sites closely to ensure that they were
not disturbed. No more was heard from
her about these sites, nor of the close monitoring which she had promised. Subsequently a number of journalists,
notably the cub reporter David Rohde, wrote reports in which they claimed to
have found evidence corroborating Mrs Albright’s allegations. In strict terms this evidence amounted to
nothing. In mid-summer of 1996
excavation work began on some of these sites, under the control of an
international organisation with at least some pretence of impartiality. From
1997 onwards one of the warring factions was allowed to act as independent
investigator of deeds alleged to have been carried out against it by another
warring faction. The products of this
investigation became the core evidence of the International Criminal Tribunal
set up to prosecute war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. This Tribunal fulfilled its remit by
indicting and prosecuting Serbs to the almost total exclusion of everyone else
– of the very few Muslims, Croats and Kosovo Albanians indicted, even fewer
were actually brought to trial.
Compounding this in the case of Srebrenica, the post-war administration
of Bosnia put in place by the international powers was, from the outset,
plainly and overtly biased against the Bosnian Serbs and used every means of
economic and political pressure to compel the Republika Srpska leadership to
confirm the received version of what had happened at Srebrenica. And throughout everything, western
politicians and media lost no opportunity to invoke the massacre story as
justification of international intervention and of the continued oppression of
Serbia. What seems far more
likely than the accepted version of events is that Srebrenica was a crucial
part in preparing the ground for the end-game for Bosnia which was concluded at
Dayton just a few months later. Alijah
Izetbegovic was fully prepared to sacrifice Srebrenica in exchange for total US
support; he gained the additional benefit that he could redeploy several
thousand troops from Srebrenica to other fronts such as the Bihac pocket. By the same token, the Clinton government
was delighted to be furnished with a propaganda coup that enabled them to give
the green light to Croatia’s Operation Storm in Krijina and to pressgang
Yugoslavia to the Dayton negotiations. Those who look
without prejudice at the available data on Srebrenica invariably conclude that
the orthodox version of what happened is extremely hard to reconcile with the
known facts. By contrast, there are
many clear indications that complex political strategies were being followed by
Alijah Izetbegovic, the USA, the UK, and other powers, and that Srebrenica
played a crucial part in the development of these strategies. [1] Jan Pronk was later to become Head of the United Nations’
operations in Sudan. In this capacity
he made a statement supporting allegations of rape in the Darfur region of
Sudan which had been made by the NGO, Medicins Sans Frontieres. Sudan charges MSF man over report The head of the Dutch wing of Medecins San Frontieres (MSF) has been
charged with crimes against the Sudanese state over a report on rape in
Darfur. Paul Foreman was arrested on
Monday and later released on bail. The state crime
prosecutor said Mr Foreman had failed to hand over evidence on which the report
was based. The charity says it is confidential. Pro-government militia in Darfur are accused of mass rape and
killings, but the government denies complicity. Jail
term The
BBC's Martin Plaut, who recently travelled to Darfur, says the charges are part
of a concerted drive by the Sudanese authorities to end western criticism of
their behaviour in the region. He
says that many Sudanese believe western aid workers have given information on
alleged human rights abuses in Darfur to the United Nations, which has passed a
sealed list of 51 war crimes suspects to the International Criminal Court. Our
correspondent says that in March, aid workers were threatened over their
reports of mass rape. "He (Mr Foreman)
is on bail and not allowed to leave the country, " MSF Holland spokesman
Geoff Prescott told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme. "He's been charged
with crimes against the state by the government on the grounds that they didn't
seem to have appreciated our report on rape in Darfur". Mr Foreman had said
"medical privilege" and patient confidentiality prevented him from
handing over documents requested by the authorities. Another reason for
respecting the information, Mr Prescott explained, was because women "made
pregnant as a result of rape outside wedlock can be arrested by the
authorities" in Sudan. He said the charity
stood by its report, which he described as "accurate and truthful". Sudan's state crime
prosecutor said he had come to conclusion that the report was false. Sensitive Mr Foreman could face
up to three years in prison if found guilty of falsifying the report. It is not
yet known when he will appear in court. "We would like to
reiterate that we think it's the people who perpetrate rape in Darfur who
should be in court, not the people who are trying to bring medical assistance
to the victims," Mr Prescott said. The report - The
Crushing Burden of Rape: Sexual Violence in Darfur - which came out in March,
was based on the treatment of 500 women over a four-and-a-half month period in
Darfur. It details nearly 300
of these cases, with several written up as witness statements, Mr Foreman said.
Contrary to Islam Rape is a sensitive
subject for the Sudanese government. The government had
always maintained that, as it runs contrary to Islam, rape is not taking place
on the scale that numerous United Nations and international agencies have
claimed. Jan Pronk, head of the
United Nations in Sudan, said he deplored the arrest. "That document was
a non-political document only based on humanitarian concern of MSF which has
done an excellent job of helping victims of rape," Mr Pronk told the BBC.
MSF says it has a
significant presence in Darfur, with more than 300 international staff and
3,000 local staff treating some one million patients. The UN says that about
180,000 people have died in the two-year conflict in Darfur, and more than two
million driven from their homes. Story from BBC
NEWS: [2] ¹ "Mevludin
Oric left as a volunteer to Croatia in January 1992, getting military training
there. He...ended up as a member of the infamous Croatian volunteer brigade
'King Tomislav' in Herzegovina, where he helped with the occupation of the barracks at Capljina (which later became a POW
camp for Serbs). After a short holiday in Croatia, Oric crossed the Sava River,
together with other volunteers, to fight the 'Chetniks' [name used for Serb
soldiers by the Muslims and Croats, meant to be derogatory] in the town of
Orasje. It is in this area, the Posavina, that the first mass murder took place
and the war hadn’t even started. Its victims were not Croats or Muslims, but
Serbs." (Sijekovac, March 27, 1992). [3] (Extract
from e-mail, June 1997: “One source .. often remarked to me at that time and
later that he saw nothing, repeat nothing, that had substantiated claims in the
press. Without going into all the
boring details of security clearances, it is enough that you know if, in fact,
there had been any such evidence xx would have had to know about it.”) [4] US Role in Storm Author: Ivo Pukanic Source: Nacional, Croatian
weekly magazine http://www.nacional.hr/index3e.php?broj=2005-05-24&kat=english&id=516 May 24, 2005 Thrilled with Operation
Flash, President Clinton gave the go ahead for Operation Storm ============================ The United States was
actively involved in the preparation, monitoring And initiation of Operation
Storm: the green light from President Clinton Was passed on by the US
military attache in Zagreb, and the operations were transmitted in real time
to the Pentagon. Considering that the US
was much more interested in the situation in BiH (Bosnia) than in
Croatia, they asked Croatia to permit them to install a Military base with
ummanned aircraft. The United States not only monitored the complete Operation Storm,
but they also actively participated with the Croatian Military in its
preparation, and in the end directly initiated The operation. The green
light from the White House and then President Clinton for Operation
Storm was passed on by Colonel Richard C. Herrick, then US military attache in
Zagreb. Several days prior to the commencement of Operation Storm, Herrick
visited Markica Rebia in Zagreb. Rebia, Miroslav Tudjman, then
director of HIS and Miro Medimurac, then head of SIS, held the most intensive
communications with the American military and intelligence agencies. As
such, in 1996, Rebia was awarded the Meritorius Service Medal by Peter Galbraith,
then US Ambassador to Croatia. Herrick passed on the
message that the US had no opposition to the Beginning of Operation
Storm, that the operation had to be 'clean and fast' and had to be completed in 5
days time. As Nacional has learned, Rebia was surprised that such an
important political and military message would be passed on through those channels,
and following Herrick's visit, he immediately informed the state
administration of the message in writing, and there is certain record of this
today in the archives. As such, it is important to note the Ambassador
Peter Galbraith was completely left out of the chain of 'command', and
that this message came directly from President Clinton, Anthony Lake (then
National Security Advisor) and Willian Perry (then Defense Secretary) via
Rebia to Minister Gojko Susak and President Tudjman. This was the climax of the
cooperation between the US and Croatia, which began to develop in
1992 at the beginning of the Serbian-Muslim war. In 1995, Clinton was
preparing for his re-election, and Bob Dole was the Republican candidate who
had requested that Congress remove the arms embargo for the Muslims in
BiH. For Clinton, the Balkans became an important issue due to internal
matters in the US and his stay in the White House. In their strategy to resolve
the crisis, they decided to use Croatia to attack the Serbian forces in BiH,
and therefore the Split Declaration was signed by Izetbegovia and Tudjman,
which permitted the entry of HV forces under the leadership of Ante
Gotovina into BiH for the purposes of cooperation with Army BiH. In order to
realize that operation, HV had to climb the Dinarid mountains above
Knin and liberate the city and Krajina through Operation Storm, and then
immediately transfer their troops into BiH in order to pressure the Serbs and
force Milosevia to sign the Peace Accord in Dayton. This was a battle against
the clock for Clinton, for he needed a quick solution to the crisis in
order to halt Dole's initiative and to prove himself before his voters
as a decisive president who could resolve such great crises such as
the one in the former Yugoslavia, the horrors of which were shown daily on
CNN and other American TV stations. In order to keep the English and
French off his back, Clinton bypassed the classical diplomatic channels, in
order to be able to claim that he had not participated if the operation were to go
sour. However, considering that the operation, led by Richard Holbrook on his
behalf, ended successfully, and the men emphasized their success
in their respective books. The first contact at the
highest intelligence levels began in 1992, When James Clapper was
director of DIA (the Defense Intelligence Agency). His men in Croatia were
Colonel Richard Herrick and his assistant Ivan Sarae. Sarae was a fourth order
[master] sergeant, the highest rank for a non-commissioned officer.
Of Croatian descent, he emigrated to the US when he was 17 years old.
After a few years, he enlisted in the army and was sent to Zagreb at the
beginning of the war there as he was familiar with the circumstances and knew the
language. Colonel Herrick was a construction engineer, however, over
time he climbed the ladder in the American military and became one of
Clapper's most trusted men. Quickly a sort of 'trade'
between the two agencies began. Croatia gave DIA Russian 500 kg
underwater mines and the most modern Russian torpedos as well as the encryption
codes used by the Yugoslav Army and the Russian army. These weapons were
transferred to the US via the Split airport. When The transport was
conducted, the entire airport was closed off. Hercules C-130s landed in the
night, the arms were loaded and transferred to the US or One of their European
bases under the greatest security measures. Also, the Croatian agency revealed
the location of a chemical weapons factory in Bijelo polje near Mostar
which the Serbs had transferred to Serbia. This was a well-concealed
factory which was unknown even to General Bienefeld, Who was the greatest
expert for chemical weapons in Croatia. With the help Of samples found, the
American experts were able to uncover all the types Of toxins produced there
which had possibly been sold to Iraq or other potential enemies of the
US. This was only the beginning of cooperation, by which the
US immediately delivered wiretapping equipment aimed at monitoring Serbia and
Montenegro, a system which could simultaneously record 20,000 telephone conversations.
This cooperation was conducted with the US NSA. Prior to Storm, the
operations Summer 94 and Summer 95 had to be Carried out. In planning
the operations of bringing Croatian troops above Knin, The US assisted in the
intelligence part of the operations. In order to precisely plan the
penetration into the Bosnian mountains inland of Knin, much information was
needed on the movement of Serbian troops, their communication system,
codes and establishment of shelling points. Considering that the US was
much more interested in the situation in BiH than in Croatia, they
asked Croatia to permit them to install a Military base with
ummanned aircraft. The basic condition was that this be the best-kept secret, so that
it would not appear that the US had taken sides in this war. The
island of Brac was selected, as it could be well protected. There all the
equipment and personnel led by the CIA experts, with the long-range unmanned
aircraft which could cover the entire territory of BiH to the Serbian corridor
on the Sava River. The entire Krajina region in Croatia was also in its
range. At that time, no one had any idea what Was going on and what was
being hidden on the island of Brac. Nor did the US allies, the Germans,
have any idea. They sent their military attache There on 1 January 1994.
He hired a rent-a-car and drove the outer fence of The base and began taking
pictures, thinking that the alertness in the base Had faltered on New Year's
Day. However, he was quickly spotted by SIS and arrested. Only when he was
brought into Gotovina for questioning was it learned that this was the
German military attache in Zagreb, Hans Schwan. After this incident, the
entire base was transferred to Sepurina near Zadar, and a triple line
of defense placed around it. Equipment was brought in From the US overnight, and
from Sepurina, the unmanned aircraft could cover Every corner of Krajina
and BiH. The Americans had a silent agreement with HV to hand over all the
photos of the terrain and the Serbian troops, while the images were
transferred via satellite in real time to the Pentagon. Three US and three
Croatian officers monitored the situation at all times. Prior to Operation Flash,
which was supposed to serve as a dress Rehearsal for Storm, at
exactly midnight, six hours prior to the beginning of the operation, Herrick and
Sarae were called into the police and were informed that the planned
action would begin in a few hours time. In the Police Ministry, at exactly
midnight, the staff of Operation Flash was formed, which was transferred to
the Defense Ministry at 6 a.m. When the staff was moved, the American
military attache moved with it. He constantly requested updates and sent
them directly to Clinton in the White House. Each morning, the American President
was informed of the preparations and every part of the operation. The
Americans were thrilled by the way Flash was carried out, they realized that
this model of cooperation with the Croatians was ideal, and could be
decisive in the battle against Milosevia in BiH and could ultimately result in
removing him from power. The Pentagon coordinated the entire action via
Richard Herrick, and the CIA activities were coordinated by Marc
Kelton, head of the CIA branch in Zagreb, who cooperated closely with Miroslav
Tudjman, then head of HIS. At the time Storm was
under preparation, the Americans supplied HV with intelligence on the
movements of Serbs in Krajina and the movements of YNA on the eastern borders
of Croatia. They feared that Milosevia would launch a counter-attack
with two tank brigades in eastern Slavonia if the Croats launched an attack on
Knin. Through intensive monitoring of communications between Belgrade and Knin,
and within Serbia, they came to the conclusion that there would be no counter-attack.
It was risky that the Serbs might launch an attack from Knin
itself when Gotovina and his units arrived on the Dinarid mountains
above the city. Had the unmanned aircraft and monitoring showed
offensive maneuvers by the troops, Storm would have begun ten days earlier. In the wee hours of 4
August 1995, the Croatian units were issued the command to turn off all
telecommunications devices between midnight and 4 am. Later it was learned
that the Americans had used that time to electronically intercept
and destroy the Serbian telecommunications devices. HV was left with one hour,
from 4-5 AM to use their radio ties to Coordinate the operation.
Just prior to Storm, the American military attache was Again called to the
operation staff. Ivan Sarae was again with him. One or two days prior to Storm,
Herrick, who had prepared Storm with the Croatian officers and gave the
operation the green light on Clinton's behalf, was replaced by Colonel
John Sadler. At exactly midnight, they arrived at the operative staff and
from there followed all the events in the field. This time, the entire
Operation was transmitted in real time via satellite to the Pentagon, where
these images remain archived today. The signal transmitted to the signal
by the Americans was also received by HV, and with the help of those images, the
firing upon Serbian positions and the military base near Knin could be
monitored to within millimeters. In addition to electronically destroying
the Serbian communications, the US military also acted militarily against the
Serbian positions, when it fired on the anti-aircraft battery near Knin from
American combat planes that flew over the battle area. That news was released
only once, on the 6 o'clock news. Afterwards, the US sharply condemned this,
and that news was never repeated. No one believed the official
American explanation for the rocket attack, and today the general perception is that
this was direct US assistance to HV, only that even ten years after
Storm this must not be admitted, due to US-British relations, as Britain had
a completely different perspective on how to resolve the Balkan issue.
And it still does today. The US was thrilled with
the how fast and clean the operation was conducted, and with its
outcome, which permitted the lightning fast entry of HV into BiH and penetration
all the way to Banja Luka and, finally, Belgrade's consent to sign the Dayton
Accord. The American control and satisfaction of the
complete operation was later confirmed in the statements that the operation was carried out
properly, and as such, the US-Croatian cooperation in
intelligence and military matters intensified. General Colonel Patrick Hughes, Clapper's
successor as director of DIA, visited Croatia, Intensified cooperation in
the sector of electronic monitoring of Serbia and Montenegro, other
intelligence was swapped, MPRI began its intensive training of The Croatian military and
Rebia was decorated for his efforts. The first word that
Croatian officers might have to stand trial for the events during Storm was
heard in 1997. The US immediately responded and requested on a dozen
occasions in discussions with the Hague Prosecutor that Storm, as a
militarily-clean operation, be left alone, as Nacional has learned from a high-ranking
diplomatic source. At that time, there was a problem concerning the
extradition of Mladen Naletilia Tuta to the Hague, and the US promised
Croatia that the Hague would not raise charges for Storm if they handed
Naletilia over. Naletilia was extradited, and Carla Del Ponte outwitted the
American administration and began with her demands that The Croatian generals be
investigated as suspects in Storm. The US was Dismayed but was not
allowed to show this, trying to resolve the matter through Quiet diplomacy instead,
which to this day has not succeeded. Therefore it Would be a step in the
right direction for the Hague to request that the Pentagon hand over all the
images recorded by the 'Predator' unmanned aircraft During and after Storm. Furthermore, for the
interests of truth, all of the high ranking American military and intelligence
officers involved in the entire operation, which ended the war in the
Balkans and removed Milosevic from power, should be called to testify in
the Hague. Those responsible for the crimes which took place after the
operation are known, and they are the ones which should stand before the court, as
they should have eight or nine years ago. Had these men been tried
then, Carla Del Ponte today would have no aces up her sleeve, and Croatia
would not have the problems it has, with the entire operation proclaimed a
'criminal operation' and the entire state administration of the time
a 'criminal organization'. http://cryptome.org/us-op-storm.htm [5] Quite how 5,800 unidentified bodies could be definitely linked to Srebrenica was not explained. Nor did the journalist appear to be aware that the 200 identified bodies were not those of people who were definitely in Srebrenica when it fell, just 200 people whose names were on the list of missing persons compiled by the ICRC. [6] [6]Reporters always find it difficult to establish accurate figures for casualties or displacements caused during conflicts. But, whilst this is readily understandable, there are indications that the use of such statistics during the conflicts in Yugoslavia was subject to even greater distortions than is normal. Media coverage from 1993/4 until the end of the decade routinely asserted that the war in Bosnia had claimed 250,000 lives. Those who have made serious efforts to discover the source of this figure believe that it was originally merely an estimate issued by the Bosnian Muslim government in Sarajevo. It was initially reported in this way, but as time passed the qualifications were gradually dropped and it became an official figure – despite the fact that it was not backed by supportive evidence. Large, uncorroborated figures of this kind are useful to journalists. They provide the simplest and most effective justification for the importance of a story. Aid agencies also find them helpful in their struggle to fundraise to support their activities. For the Bosnian Muslim government (and their overt and covert backers in Western countries), the statistics were crucial: the outside world was not going to intervene in a small local war, but was likely to do so if it could be portrayed as a cruel and vicious conflict with many casualties. Official UK deaths in the 2nd World War were 388,000, made up of 326,000 military and 62,000 civilian. This was a war that lasted more than five years and involved heavy fighting on land, sea and in the air in many different theatres of war. It is extremely hard to believe that deaths in the Bosnian war, which lasted half as long and was not comparable in terms of the scope and intensity of conflict, were on anything like the same scale – especially as the 200,000+ figure was circulating as early as 1993.. George Kenney was one of the first to question the figures coming out of Bosnia. He resigned from the US State Department Yugoslav desk in 1992 in protest at the US government’s lack of action over what he then perceived to be a great humanitarian tragedy. Over the following years he looked into matters in much more depth and significantly revised his views. He pointed out as far back as 1993 that estimated casualties were inflated. Twelve years later his criticisms still stand, yet little has apparently been done to establish the reality of what happened. Up to the present time, spring/summer 2005, a total of around 20,000 bodies from improvised graves appear to have been recovered in the whole of Bosnia. No attempt seems to have been made to count the people, on all sides, who died in the conflict and were buried in marked graves. A full ten years after it ended, therefore, there is no reliable total – indeed, no good ballpark figure – for the casualties of the war. A chart of the numbers of missing in Bosnia during each month from 1992 to 1995 suggests that causalties were on a far smaller scale than was suggested at the time. Only July 1995 (when people were actively encouraged to come forward to report relatives missing from Srebrenica) shows a total running to many thousands; for most months during the three year period, missing totals are negilible.
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