The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

The Numbers Game
sions such as these are parts of a far-reaching misapprehension.
It is a significant and enduring feature of the Western treatment of
Srebrenica that there is a simultaneous uncritical acceptance and inflation
of evidence of Serb executions in July 1995, suppression and denial
of the prior Serb victims in the area, and ignoring of questions related
to the real identity, the actual manner of death, and the chain-ofcustody
of the mortal remains of some of the Bosnian Muslim soldiers
buried at Potocari.
The DNA evidence
If details of the mass grave excavations were few and far between, so
was information about the breakthrough DNA technique, developed
in Bosnia, which had suddenly allowed identifications to be made at
the claimed rate of three a day—something of an improvement on the
total of three managed during the entire first year of investigations. Until
recently, this excerpt from an article in Science magazine on August 24,
2001 was the most detailed explanation of the new technique:
The ICMP project got going last year, when it began dispatching
teams to collect blood from relatives of the missing
persons. So far the ICMP has amassed more than 12,000 samples,
with some relatives coming here from as far away as Australia.
On average, it requires 2.5 donors to identify a body….
The ICMP has 100,000 blood kits in hand, enough in principle
to identify 40,000 bodies. “Once we have 100,000 samples,
then we can expect that almost every body we find can be identified,”
says Amor Masovic, director of the Bosnian Muslims’
missing persons commission. 92
We may note the assumption by Masovic that all the bodies found
correspond to persons missing from Srebrenica and on the official missing-persons
list. This is far from certain. For example, we have no means
of knowing the origin and chain-of-custody of the several thousand
bodies put on display at Tuzla in 1999 by the Bosnian Muslim authorities.
These bodies may have come from literally anywhere in Bosnia.
They may even have had little or nothing to do with the 1992-1995
civil war. Some, perhaps many, may have been non-Muslims. Over
3,000 Serbs living in the area were reported killed between 1992 and
1995 by Naser Oric and his 28 th division of the Bosnian Muslim Army.
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