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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 |
