The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

The Numbers Game
More than 600 detailed autopsies of Serbs were carried out before 1995
by a team led by the eminent forensic investigator Dr Zoran Stankovic.
These bodies were buried locally. Furthermore, the approximately 6,500
identifications claimed by the ICMP through the middle of 2010, even
if 100 percent accurate, also fail to make the crucial distinction between
deaths from executions, combat, and other causes. There were many
combat deaths.
DNA identification has come to be seen, in much the same way as
fingerprint technology, as a gold standard. The perception is that, if
there is a DNA match, it constitutes unassailable evidence. This may be
the case for matches made on the basis of readily available samples of uncontaminated
DNA from recently deceased bodies; but whether it applies
to DNA recovered in circumstances such as those associated with
the ICMP’s work is very much a matter of conjecture.
The ICMP claim to be using DNA profiles retrieved from bones, not
only for identification of remains by comparing them to samples provided
by living relatives of the missing, but also to assemble disarticulated
skeletons where bones have ended up in different graves. But
elsewhere it is stated that viable DNA profiles are usually obtained only
from teeth or femurs. The potential for questionable identification and
multiple counting under these conditions would seem great. An ICMP
official has mentioned that a single disarticulated body’s traces have been
found in four separate graves, but she never suggests the possibility that
this might show a defective methodology. 93
Phrases such as “based upon DNA analysis” appear throughout the
ICTY’s Srebrenica-related judgments, giving these judgments and the
evidence upon which they allegedly rest the air of scientific authority. So
do phrases like “DNA connections” that are alleged to link “secondary”
graves to “primary” graves, and even “secondary” graves to other “secondary”
graves, and so on. But as the Trial Chamber explained in its
2010 Judgment in the Popovic case (to date, the latest of the ICTY’s
Srebrenica-related judgments), the “ICMP Standard Operating Procedures
for statistical calculations of DNA-based identification lists anybody
with a biological blood relationship to a missing individual as a
potential [DNA] donor,” and not strictly one or both parents. 94 This
makes the process of finding DNA donors as open-ended as is the coverup
theory’s notion of “primary,” “secondary,” and “tertiary” graves. The
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