The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

U.K. Media Coverage of Srebrenica
ports; second, that the estimates of numbers missing and presumed dead
vary widely and develop into an orthodoxy only slowly over a period of
weeks.
(i) Context, background and explanation
On July 16, 1995, John Sweeney noted in The Guardian that “The
fall started with a massacre of the villagers of Visnijca. Burning roofs,
butchered peasants: a familiar sight but with a twist. The killers were
Muslims, the victims Serbs. In early June a commando of Bosnian
armija, loyal to the multi-ethnic but mainly Muslim Sarajevo government,
had left the enclave to torch Visnijca.” This is thin, but it does
present the Serb attack on Srebrenica as part of an on-going conflict between
two sides, rather than a premeditated plan for genocide. Sweeney’s
explanation of the attack was that “Their blood up, the Bosnian Serbs
took their revenge.” 14
In The Independent, Robert Block reported that “Muslim soldiers
from Srebrenica were effective fighters and on several occasions during
the war managed to break out of the enclave and raze several nearby villages,
killing many Serb civilians in the process.” 15 Again, this is hardly
substantial, but does at least differ from the way that later reporting
often tended to present the Muslims of Srebrenica purely as victims.
(ii) Estimates of numbers missing
With hindsight, it is instructive to examine how the estimates of
numbers missing or killed varied widely, and to track the sources who
were suggesting different figures. John Sweeney’s July 16 report, quoted
above, asserted that “Everyone knows what is happening to the Muslim
men of Srebrenica right now. Around 10,000 of them have gone missing.
They are being ‘questioned’.” 16 In the same day’s edition of The
Guardian, E.U. commissioner for humanitarian affairs Emma Bonino
was quoted as saying that “The major problem is missing
persons…some 15,000 of them.” 17
It seems clear that the 10,000 estimate was worked out on the basis
of subtracting the number of refugees from Srebrenica from the estimated
1993 population of the town. As Christopher Bellamy reported
in The Independent: “There were some 42,000 people in the enclave in
1993. Yesterday the UN refugee camp at Tuzla had registered 6,440
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