The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

The Numbers Game
mate for the total number of victims to be only slightly higher, 7,536” (p. 244).
3 As recently as the July 2008 arrest of former Bosnian Serb President Radovan
Karadzic in Belgrade, the U.K. media especially resorted to the 250,000 figure.
See, e.g., Shan Ross, “Serb leader Karadzic held after more than a decade on the
run,” The Scotsman, July 22, 2008; Janine di Giovanni, “Spectres of Sarajevo:
News of the arrest conjures memories of those dreadful days of death. Next, for
Mladic,” The Guardian, July 23, 2008; Ian Bruce, “Ultra-nationalist beginnings
that led to a brutal and disastrous conflict,” The Herald, July 23, 2008; and
“Genocide’s legacy in Bosnia, Darfur,” Editorial, Toronto Star, July 23, 2008.
Richard Holbrooke, the former lead U.S. negotiator for Bosnia - Herzegovina in
1995, used the phrase “nearly 300,000” in a commentary he wrote at the same
time: “The Face of Evil,” Washington Post, July 23, 2008.
4 As early as the negotiations that began in Geneva on January 2, 1993, the Bosnian
Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic warned of 200,000 dead (and tens-ofthousands
of women raped); several days later, speaking outside the United
Nations in New York, Izetbegovic repeated this warning. See Juliajana Mojsilovic,
“Peace Talks Recessed; Mediators Say Serbs Hold Up Deal,” Associated Press,
January 4, 1993; Anthony Goodman, “Bosnian leader evokes memories of Munich
appeasement,” Reuters, January 7, 1993; and Barry Schweid, “Bosnian
Leader Appeals for U.S. Support,” Associated Press, January 8, 1993.
5 See the entry for “United Kingdom and Colonies,” the “1939-1945 War,” in
“Breakdown of Numbers of War Dead by Forces,” a PDF maintained by the
Commonwealth War Graves Commission, United Kingdom,
.
6 Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak, “War-related Deaths in the 1992-1995 Armed Conflicts
in Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Critique of Previous Estimates and Recent Results,”
European Journal of Population, Volume 21, 2005, pp. 187-215; here p.
207. At the time, Tabeau - Bijak worked for the Demographic Unit of the Office
of the Prosecutor, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
(ICTY).
7 Ibid. Using the data in Tabeau - Bijak, it seems the ethnic breakdown of the estimated
total is 60% Muslims, 29% Serbs, 7% Croats and 4% “others” (comprising
mostly Roma and those who declared themselves to be “Yugoslavs”). One
should bear in mind that, despite being almost entirely ignored in the standard
version of events, a significant number of Muslims in the Bihac area of western
Bosnia followed the leadership of the independent Bosnian Muslim Fikret Abdic,
and his force of 5,000 fought against the Sarajevo-controlled Bosnian Muslim
Army.
8 Ibid. See Table 5, “Minimum war-related deaths by ethnicity, status as of mid-
2003,” p. 204. Out of a minimum 45,980 war-related Bosnian Muslim deaths,
23,755 (51.66 percent) were soldiers at the time of death, and 22,225 (48.33
percent) civilians.
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