The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

The Numbers Game
tled on the figure 8,000 for persons “missing” from Srebrenica, in the
second week of September 1995, 17 this number has never changed.
The sums that don’t work
By mid-July 1995, 23,000 displaced Bosnian Muslim persons had
been transferred from Potocari to Bosnian government-controlled
ter18 xviii The ICRC reported that “several thousand” armed Muslim men
from Srebrenica had passed safely behind Muslim lines to an area called
the Sapna Finger, where they were redeployed to fight elsewhere “without
their families being informed.” 19 According to Amnesty International,
a total of 35,632 persons from the Srebrenica safe area had
registered as displaced persons with UN authorities by the first week of
August—in other words, as survivors of the fall of Srebrenica. Additionally,
a “total of 796 people who fled into the [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia]
from Srebrenica and Zepa enclaves were registered by UNHCR
(United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) and ICRC and either
resettled in third countries or were repatriated to Bosnia-Herzegovina
(more may have entered the FRY without making their whereabouts
known to the UNHCR).” 20 Some 700 soldiers and civilians from Srebrenica
also made their way to Zepa, emerging safely from that town
when it fell to the Serbs during the last week of July 1995. 21 Indeed, the
numbers may have been still greater. During the ICTY’s trial of Slobodan
Milosevic it was claimed that between 840 and 950 Bosnian Muslims
from Srebrenica and Zepa swam across the river Drina to find safety
between July 11 and 13, 1995. These refugees—an entire brigade of the
Bosnian Muslim Army (BMA)—were apprehended, processed and provided
with accommodation and care (including visits by the Red Cross,
which also delivered mail and cigarettes) by the Yugoslav authorities. 22 In
addition, several hundred Bosnian Muslim soldiers were held in Bosnian
Serb prisons for periods of weeks or months before being handed
over. So it is clear that there were in total at least (and probably rather
more than) 38,000 to 39,000 documented survivors of the fall of Srebrenica—a
figure that matches or exceeds the total pre-fall population estimates
of the major aid agencies.
Reconciling the math becomes even more difficult when fatalities
from the fighting between the Bosnian Serb Army (BSA) and the armed
Bosnian Muslim column that left Srebrenica for Muslim-held territory
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