The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

U.K. Media Coverage of Srebrenica
report, Rohde claimed to have visited a site shown in one of Albright’s
photographs, where he found “a decomposing human leg protruding
from freshly turned dirt.” At this stage, Rohde still mentioned a “United
Nations official estimate that 4,000 to 6,000 Muslim men are still missing,”
but by October 1995, the commonly accepted estimate had risen
to around 8,000, apparently originating from the Red Cross (see the
Preface). At the beginning of October, The Independent reported that
“The Red Cross has said 8,000 of the 42,000 people in Srebrenica before
its fall remain unaccounted for,” 27 and an editorial at the end of
the month said that “More than 8,000 men and teenage boys are still
missing following the fall of Srebrenica. Most, it is assumed, were massacred
when the Bosnian Serbs overran the town in July.” 28
III. Reporting in 2001
There are three points of interest which emerge from articles about
Srebrenica in 2001: First, the role of the International Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in interpreting what happened;
second, related to this, the now unequivocal labelling of Srebrenica as
“genocide,” with frequent parallels drawn with the Second World War;
and third, the alleged proof of the massacre provided by the corpses in
Tuzla morgue.
(i) The ICTY
The arrest of Dragan Obrenovic in April 2001, and the conviction of
Radislav Krstic on genocide-related charges in August that same year,
were the occasion for reports summing up the significance of Srebrenica.
The use of Second World War parallels is examined below, but first it
is worth pointing out how the ICTY itself gave some very clear signals
about how the event should be treated.
The indictment of Obrenovic stated that he “participated in a criminal
plan and enterprise, the common purpose of which was to detain,
capture, and summarily execute by firing squad and bury over five thousand
Muslim men and boys from the Srebrenica enclave, including the
exhumation of the victims’ bodies and re-burial in hidden locations….”
29 In The Independent, the ICTY was quoted as saying that “the
Muslim population of Srebrenica was virtually eliminated,” 30 which implicitly
conflates the wartime expulsion of the population with the peo-
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