The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

Summary and Conclusions
believe the worst about Serbs was limitless. Reporter David Rohde reported
a bone sticking up from the ground near Srebrenica, and he took
for granted that it was a remnant of an execution and serious evidence
of a “massacre.” 3 It thus became standard media practice to move from
an asserted and unproven claim of thousands missing, or a report of the
uncovering of bodies in a grave site, or even a dubious videotape showing
six individuals allegedly executed by Serbs, to the conclusion that the
massacre of 8,000 was thereby demonstrated. 4
3. With 8,000 allegedly executed and many killed in fighting, there
should have been huge grave sites and imagery-intelligence in the form
of satellite and aerial photographs of the executions, the burials, and any
exhumations and reburials. But the body searches in the vicinity of Srebrenica
fell far short of predictions, with only some 2,570 bodies found
in searches through 2003, 5 including bodies killed in action and possibly
Serb bodies, some pre-dating July 1995. The sparseness of these findings
impelled the Prosecution at the ICTY to resort to claims of
large-scale body removal and reburial, but this was implausible and
lacked any evidential support. 6 This was the period when NATO was
bombing Serb positions and the Croat and Muslim armies were driving
towards Banja Luka in Serb-controlled territory. The BSA was on the defensive
and was extremely short of equipment and resources, including
fuel for its vehicles. To have mounted an operation of the magnitude required
to exhume, transport, and rebury thousands of corpses would
have been beyond the BSA’s capacity at that time. Furthermore, in carrying
out such an operation, they could hardly hope to escape observation
from OSCE personnel, local civilians, and imagery-intelligence.
4. On August 10, 1995, as part of a denunciation of the Bosnian
Serbs, U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright showed some photographic
images at a closed-session of the UN Security Council, including one
photo of people—allegedly Bosnian Muslims near Srebrenica—assembled
in a stadium, and one allegedly taken shortly thereafter showing a
nearby field with “disturbed” soil. 7 Only some of these photos have ever
been released to the public, but even if all of them are genuine, they don’t
prove what from this moment onward they have been widely accepted
as proving: Mass executions and burials. Furthermore, although
the ICTY has spoken of an “organised and comprehensive effort to conceal
and cover up the killings and executions by burying the bodies of the
279