The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

The Numbers Game
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.”’ 56
In sum, repeated falsification of evidence on Balkans-related issues
has not registered with the media and humanitarian intellectuals. Their
critical capabilities have disappeared in dealing with this area.
The search for explanations of the missing bodies: The cover-up
theory
Four months after Srebrenica fell to the Serbs, the Dayton agreement
brought an end to the wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The cold Balkan
winter made it impracticable to search for mass graves until spring, but
the international community showed little urgency in getting the
process underway. It was not until July 1996 that the Boston-based organization
Physicians for Human Rights began work in the area around
Srebrenica. When they halted operations 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 result.
This led quickly to a number of “explanations” for the small number
of bodies found, most of them implausible, none compelling. One possible
explanation, regularly ignored, was that the initial claims of Bosnian
Muslim deaths had been greatly inflated. Instead, one of the earlier
establishment versions, suggested in the New York Times, was 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
119