The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

U.K. Media Coverage of Srebrenica
victims will have been exhumed.” The article also noted that “even with
the help of DNA technology, only 100 or so a month are being identified.”
42 This prediction gets the number of bodies allegedly found closer
to the accepted total of 8,000 victims, though it is not clear why there
is an expectation that 6,000 will have been exhumed by the end of the
year. There is no attempt at consistency across different articles in the
same paper, even over a matter of a few days. 43
The most informative article on the topic appeared in The Guardian
on August 3. Jennifer Friedlin (who estimated 7,500 killed at Srebrenica)
noted that “About 4,000 plastic bags containing the remains of
an estimated 3,000 - 3,500 people slaughtered at Srebrenica have been
neatly stored and tagged on shelf after endless shelf.” This seems more
credible—not 4,000 or 4,700 or a “predicted” 6,000 bodies, but 4,000
bags, containing the remains of fewer people. Unusually, Friedlin also
raised the possibility that some of the bodies being exhumed may not
be Bosnian Muslims, citing the Sarajevo-based International Commission
on Missing Persons’ estimate at the time that “of the 30,000 missing
bodies in Bosnia Herzegovina, more than two-thirds are Muslim,
4,000 - 7,000 are Serb, and just under 1,000 are Croat.” 44
IV. Naser Oric: The “Muslim Robin Hood”
One of the most notable features of coverage of the Bosnian Serb assault
on Srebrenica is that the event is rarely understood and explained
in the context of civil war. One indication of this is the negligible number
of articles that mention the local Bosnian Muslim leader, Naser
Oric. Searching for articles about Srebrenica which mentioned Oric
since July 1995 turned up only nine articles across four papers over nine
years. 45 The press portrayal of Oric has changed over that time, but his
importance apparently remains marginal.
In the first, and most substantial article, from July 1995, 46 “General
Oric” is hailed as the “Muslim ‘Robin Hood’.” Despite reporting that
“Oric…is regarded by his own people as a Robin Hood figure whose
daring antics have helped to keep the enclave fed and defended,” the article
does mention Oric’s raids on Serb villages around Srebrenica as the
reason for the Serb attack. The impact of these raids is minimised, but
at least at this stage the reporter feels obliged to provide some semblance
of an explanation: “Those raids were used as the justification for the
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