The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

The Numbers Game
However, in June 2005 the European Journal of Population published
a paper by two demographers funded by the Office of the Prosecutor at
the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY), Eva Tabeau
and Jakub Bijak, which showed that there was indeed no solid foundation
for the commonly used figures. 6 Using established demographic
techniques, based on the best records available, and allowing missing
persons to be counted among the dead, they estimated a total of
102,622 war-related deaths in Bosnia - Herzegovina for all sides. 7
That the total number of victims in the wars of Bosnia-Herzegovina
had previously been claimed to be more than double the total found by
Tabeau-Bijak was startling, but the composition of the victims was also
wildly misrepresented: Some 52% of the recorded Muslim fatalities were
soldiers rather than civilians. 8 The lasting impression of two and even
three hundred thousand unarmed Muslim civilians being slaughtered by
Serb soldiers and paramilitaries was just that: an impression established
by the constant repetition of the larger numbers—and a misleading one.
In November 2005, Bosnian Muslim researcher Mirsad Tokaca of
the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Centre let it be known
that his group’s work, funded by the Norwegian government, had determined
that the overall total would be “100,000 give or take.” 9 By
June 2007, Tokaca’s RDC refined this number down to 96,895 deaths
on all sides. 10
As far as mainstream opinion is concerned, it is hard to imagine more
authoritative sources for the new, dramatically reduced estimates. Nobody
could credibly dismiss either members of the ICTY prosecution
team or a Bosnian Muslim funded by the Norwegian government as
“Serb apologists.” Nor could anyone argue that these researchers did
not have access to the relevant data, which is quoted chapter and verse
by Tabeau - Bijak as well as Tokaca’s RDC.
But the findings of Tabeau - Bijak and Tokaca did not cause the sort
of stir that might have been expected from the discovery of one of the
worst examples of sustained misreporting in recent times: These drastic
downward-revisions in the Bosnian death toll passed almost unnoticed.
For sources such as these to be ignored and the media fail to acknowledge
their 12-year-plus numbers-error, the commitment to the
old, erroneous, inflated numbers must have been deeply rooted. The
higher numbers (200,000, 250,000, 300,000) had always been cited as
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