The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

The Numbers Game
ber.” But on April 3, 1996, David Rohde asserted that “Two key mass
graves [five miles west of the town of Karakaj] in Bosnian Serb territory—that
American forces were assigned to safeguard—have been tampered
with,” and “dozens or more bodies of slaughtered Muslims may
have been removed from the site.” And the April 3, 1996 New York
Times had claimed that “Clinging to chunks of dirt, some piled in
mounds three feet high, are pieces of sod and delicate yellow flowers
growing at unnatural angles, suggesting that the dirt was broken and
piled up after it was covered by new spring plants.” The Times article
continued: “The strongest evidence that the site has been extensively
disturbed comes from the testimony of a reporter who visited the site
today. The reporter, David Rohde of the Christian Science Monitor, also
inspected the area in October, and said the ground covering about 70
percent of the area had been dug up since he had seen it last. ‘This is
what the whole place looked like in October’, he said as he pointed to
a nearly flat corner of the field covered with grass. ‘These dirt mounds
were not here. These deep tire ruts are new. All this broken dirt was not
here’.” 61
If this was the first serious statement of the cover-up hypothesis, it is
hardly convincing. Nor, as noted above, does it seem to have had any
influence on the locations chosen for the first meaningful forensic investigations
carried out by Physicians for Human Rights later in the
summer of 1996. Indeed, the PHR exhumation teams gave no indication
at any time during their work that they believed wide-scale tampering
had taken place.
The speculative reports by Jon Swain and others that were published
during the winter of 1996 - 1997 did not prompt any further disclosures.
Nor was there any enthusiasm to resume the search for bodies in
the spring and summer of 1997. The international community seemed
to have lost heart and was not forthcoming with funding for further investigations—which
they surely would have been if they had evidence
that a massive cover-up had taken place. It seems fair to conclude that
the “cover-up” hypothesis—or the propagation of the belief that the absence
of bodies can only be explained as the result of systematic tampering
with mass grave-sites, and the ethnic Serbs’ removal of mortal
remains from “primary” mass graves to “secondary” and even “tertiary”
mass graves with the intent of concealing their crimes—was not taken
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