The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

CHAPTER 10
Summary and Conclusions
Edward S. Herman
1. Both the scale of the casualties at Srebrenica and the context surrounding
the July 1995 killings there have been misrepresented in official
reports from governmental and non-governmental organizations as
well as in the mainstream media. Senior UN military and civilian officials,
NATO intelligence officers, and independent intelligence analysts
dispute the official characterization by the ICTY of the fall of Srebrenica
and the evacuation of this “safe area” population as a unique atrocity in
the Bosnian conflict and as a case of genocide. The contention that as
many as 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were executed in the
span of one week, that the Srebrenica massacre was the “single worst
atrocity” of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and the “worst massacre
that occurred in Europe since the months after World War II,” has no
basis in available evidence and is essentially a political construct. 1
2. The 8,000 figure was first provided by the Red Cross, based on
their crude estimate that the Bosnian Serb Army had captured 3,000
men and that 5,000 were reported “missing.” 2 It is well established that
thousands of those “missing” had reached safety in cities such as Tuzla
or across the border in Serbia or were killed in fighting en route to Bosnian
Muslim territory. Yet, in a remarkable transformation prompted by
the eagerness to portray the Bosnian Serbs as evil perpetrators of heinous
crimes, and the Bosnian Muslims as their innocent victims, the categories
of those survivors reaching safety and those combatants killed-inaction
were ignored, and the resulting category of the “missing” was
identified with that of the executed. This misleading conflation of separate
categories of persons was helped along by the Red Cross’s reference
to the 5,000 as having “simply disappeared,” and its failure to correct
this politically-loaded usage despite its own recognition that “several
thousand” survivors had reached Bosnian Muslim territory.
It was also helped along by the Bosnian Muslim leadership’s refusal
to disclose the names and numbers of those who fled and reached safety.
But there was an extraordinary readiness on the part of Western governments
and media to ignore those reaching safety, to disregard deaths
in fighting, and to take dead bodies as proof of executions. The will to
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