The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

The Numbers Game
dition to Muslims, it included “persons of other nationalities and
faiths,” some individuals who were known to be still alive, people who
had never existed, as well as “many that committed crimes in this region
and in whose interest it is that they are listed as ‘disappeared’. They
change names and under other identity continue living in [Bosnia and
Herzegovina] or in foreign countries as refugees.” 86 We return to some
of these topics below.
Dead people who vote in elections
There has also been a conspicuous lack of interest on the part of the
international community in following up indications that the “missing”
from Srebrenica might not even be dead at all. As noted earlier, in July
and August 1995 the Bosnian Muslim government was unwilling to
disclose the names of the Bosnian Muslim soldiers evacuating Srebrenica
who had reached Tuzla and elsewhere behind Bosnian Muslim lines.
And the non-trivial numbers who reached Serbia and were eventually released,
or used in prisoner exchanges, or repatriated to settle in other
countries, have always been ignored; or treated in a low key.
There is also the evidence of post-1995 electoral rolls and voting.
Thus, in 1997 the Bosnian Serbs claimed that more than 3,000 of the
names of people who voted in the 1996 elections in Bosnia were on the
list of 7,300 missing from Srebrenica drawn up by the Red Cross. While
working as a journalist for BBC News at the time, the author of this
chapter contacted the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in
Europe (OSCE), which had overseen the elections, to ask if they could
investigate a problem on numbers. I pointed out that either some 3,000
persons on the missing list were still alive, or there had been massive
election fraud. The OSCE were not very interested, and promises by
OSCE officials to look into this matter ultimately went nowhere. As
the OSCE’s David Foley explained to this author, the electoral records
from 1996 had been locked away in warehouses around Bosnia and the
OSCE allegedly did not have the resources to recover them and cross
reference the names that appeared on both the electoral roll and the
ICRC missing list. Nothing further seems to have been done after
1996. 87
Separately, this author also was sent a very small sample of the 1996
voting list and was able to cross-reference more than 100 names be-
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