The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

The Numbers Game
known facts. We have spelled out many of those conflicting facts in this
chapter. We believe that the survival of this narrative on Srebrenica
rests heavily on political interests. There are many clear indications that
complex political strategies were being followed by Alija Izetbegovic,
the U.S., the U.K., and other powers, and that Srebrenica played a crucial
part in the development of these strategies.
From Dayton to the present, the Srebrenica massacre has been an extremely
useful symbol of Serb villainy and evil. It helped justify NATO’s
1999 “humanitarian” war against Yugoslavia and the indictments and
trials of Serb military personnel and leaders; and under the “Never
again” pretext, NATO and the advocates of a “responsibility to protect”
defenseless civilians inside sovereign states continue to use the alleged
“failure” to intervene to stop the Srebrenica massacre as a way of selling
Western military power and intervention more broadly. We believe that
these exceptional and valuable purposes have made the belief in “8,000
men and boys” murdered after the fall of Srebrenica sacrosanct within
the Western establishment.
Notes
1 A predecessor to The Center for the Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial and Cemetery
for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide was established in May 2001 by an act of
the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, and first commemorated
in its current form on September 20, 2003. See Paddy Ashdown, Office of the
High Representative, March 25, 2003, ;
and Christian Schwarz-Schilling, Office of the High Representative,
June 25, 2007, .
2 For what I here refer to as the “highest official estimate,” see the analysis conducted
by Helge Brunborg, Torkild Hodve Lyngstad, and Henrick Urdal on behalf
of the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for
Yugoslavia, “Accounting for Genocide: How Many Were Killed in Srebrenica?”
European Journal of Population, Volume 19, 2003, pp. 229-248. These authors
write: “The study concludes that at least 7,475 persons have been reported as
missing and are presumed dead after the fall of the Srebrenica enclave on 11 July
1995….Also, an unknown number of persons probably were not reported as
missing, for various reasons. Our estimate is lower than the commonly referred
to range of 8-10,000 killed persons. As previously stated, ours is a conservative
estimate based on highly reliable data. The actual number of genocide victims is
likely to be higher than 7,475 and this, this figure should be considered a minimum
estimate. By using multiple systems estimation we found the likely esti-
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