The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

The Numbers Game
very seriously at this stage.
Although seldom remembered, when the International Commission
on Missing Persons (ICMP) was first established by the U.S. government
in late 1996, its full title included the phrase “in the Former Yugoslavia.”
The new ICMP was headed by former U.S. Secretary of State
Cyrus Vance (who was succeeded by former U.S. Senator Bob Dole),
and it was openly described as a “pressure group” that will “make clear
to authorities on the ground that they have to cooperate in the process
of identifying missing persons, opening up mass graves and clearing the
sites of mortal remains,” in the words of Michael Steiner, a deputy U.S.
representative for Yugoslavia. 62
Beyond serving this high-publicity role, the ICMP also assumed the
partisan functions of the Sarajevo Muslims’ old wartime Commission
for Missing Persons, with the addition of an international supervisory
board and a few international forensic scientists and technicians to foster
an air of independence, integrity, and professionalism. Nevertheless,
the ICMP’s chief purpose was, and to this day remains, the discovery,
exhumation, and positive identification of Bosnian Muslim victims of
the war, and of Srebrenica “safe area” victims specifically. 63 Scrutiny of
published information suggests that it was the ICMP, during 1997 -
1998, that defined and publicized the cover-up hypothesis, mainly
through briefings given to journalists whenever the location of a mass
grave was announced. 64 Some three years after the Dayton accords, with
only 400 or so bodies recovered, some kind of explanation for the lack
of progress was needed. The convenience of the cover-up or exhumation-and-reburial
theory was that it bought time and enabled the ICTY
and ICMP to greatly extend the catchment area for the officially-designated
“Srebrenica-related” graves. The whole concept of “primary,” “secondary,”
and “tertiary” mass graves thus gave investigators the rationale
they needed to make the ultimate body-count the function of an openended,
potentially limitless search process, and to increase the bodycount
from the “Srebrenica Massacre” to whichever total they desire.
Perhaps the most glaring inconsistency revealed by a close study of the
evolution of the cover-up theory is that, while it was clearly not part of
the official view during 1996, the orthodox account of Srebrenica now
maintains that the cover-up was known from the start. This is certainly
not the impression given in Eric Stover and Gilles Peress’ 1998 book,
122