The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

The Numbers Game
gument it appears to advance is that 2,028 bodies had been found, some
kind of DNA link has been established with some names on the ICRC’s
missing-persons list, some materials (blindfolds, ligatures, etc.) which
might have been associated with mass executions had been discovered
in the grave sites, and that—because there were no significant inconsistencies
between the evidence, the demographic information from the
ICRC’s missing-persons list and the accounts of the small number of
claimed massacre eyewitnesses (whose accounts are deeply problematic,
as described above and in Chapter 5)—the forensic and demographic
evidence could be seen as mutually supportive and provided solid corroboration
of the massacre theory. How many criminal justice systems
around the world would accept this kind of logic?
No adequate control of grave excavations and body storage
From the outset ICTY prosecutors and investigators made repeated
public pronouncements that the Serbs had massacred thousands of
Muslim men from Srebrenica, even though initially the only evidence
that such crimes had taken place was uncorroborated and suspect witness
testimony. There was some respectability attaching to the search
for mass graves when it was in the hands of an apparently independent
organization, Physicians for Human Rights; but the process became fatally
compromised when, from 1997 onwards, this work was carried
out by the ICMP, an organization originally created by the Clinton administration,
centered in Sarajevo, and effectively merged with the
Bosnian Commission for Missing Persons and under Bosnian Muslim
management and control.
In their book, The Graves, Eric Stover and Gilles Peress reveal the inadequate
nature of the ICMP’s forensic work. 83 But the much more serious
problem is the ICMP’s obvious vested interest in sustaining the
massacre claims and the substantial evidence that the Bosnian Muslim
leadership has never refrained from bending facts to produce the desired
results (see Chapter 1). Yet it is the ICMP that has emerged as the
chief institutional supporter of the massacre allegations. In particular, it
has created and fostered the belief that the Serbs had mounted a major
cover-up operation in the late months of 1995 in which mass graves
close to Srebrenica had been dug up and the bodies removed for reburial
at more distant sites along the Drina valley.
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