Jonathan Rooper
Anyone who raises doubts about the fate that allegedly befell the Sre-brenica “safe area” population in July 1995 is invariably treated with withering scorn. At best they are characterized as “revisionists;” at worst, as “deniers” of a modern-day holocaust.
No serious analysis of events in and around Srebrenica in the summer of 1995 would be complete without a detailed examination of the num-bers killed and their manner of death. But from the outset, both the number of Bosnian Muslim deaths and how these individuals actually died were exploited for a variety of political purposes.
There can be no clearer example of this than the 10,000 symbolic graves erected at the Srebrenica memorial in Potocari1—a number which is 25% greater than the highest official estimate of those massacred.2
Before looking at the evolution of numbers in relation to Srebrenica, it will be helpful to look at the numbers in relation to the war as a whole.
For years the death toll quoted in almost every news story relating to the Bosnian war was 200,000 or 250,000 and sometimes even 300,000.3Usage of these numbers was so ubiquitous that most people assumed they were as well founded as the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust.
In fact, the source for these figures was often the Bosnian Muslim regime in Sarajevo, including President Alija Izetbegovic, who by the start of 1993 was claiming that 200,000 Muslims were facing immi-nent death.4This figure was quickly adopted by reporters who did not question whether it was likely that roughly 82 percent as many Bosn-ian Muslims had died during the first nine months of a civil war in a small Balkan country of 4 million people as the British armed forces lost during the whole of World War II (244,6215). Despite nearly three more years of conflict, the Bosnian total did not rise much beyond its 1992 level, though there was heavy fighting in the last year of the war.
A few critics suggested that the 200,000 figure (or greater) was exag-geration and wartime propaganda, not rooted in facts; but such warn-ings received little attention, and those making them were often dismissed as “Serb apologists.”
However, in June 2005 the European Journal of Population published a paper by two demographers funded by the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY), Eva Tabeau and Jakub Bijak, which showed that there was indeed no solid founda-tion for the commonly used figures.6 Using established demographic techniques, based on the best records available, and allowing missing persons to be counted among the dead, they estimated a total of 102,622 war-related deaths in Bosnia - Herzegovina for all sides.7
That the total number of victims in the wars of Bosnia-Herzegovina had previously been claimed to be more than double the total found by Tabeau-Bijak was startling, but the composition of the victims was also wildly misrepresented: Some 52% of the recorded Muslim fatalities were soldiers rather than civilians.8The lasting impression of two and even three hundred thousand unarmed Muslim civilians being slaughtered by Serb soldiers and paramilitaries was just that: an impression established by the constant repetition of the larger numbers—and a misleading one.
In November 2005, Bosnian Muslim researcher Mirsad Tokaca of the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Centre let it be known that his group’s work, funded by the Norwegian government, had de-termined that the overall total would be “100,000 give or take.”9 By June 2007, Tokaca’s RDC refined this number down to 96,895 deaths on all sides.10
As far as mainstream opinion is concerned, it is hard to imagine more authoritative sources for the new, dramatically reduced estimates. No-body could credibly dismiss either members of the ICTY prosecution team or a Bosnian Muslim funded by the Norwegian government as
“Serb apologists.” Nor could anyone argue that these researchers did not have access to the relevant data, which is quoted chapter and verse by Tabeau - Bijak as well as Tokaca’s RDC.
But the findings of Tabeau - Bijak and Tokaca did not cause the sort of stir that might have been expected from the discovery of one of the worst examples of sustained misreporting in recent times: These drastic downward-revisions in the Bosnian death toll passed almost unnoticed.
For sources such as these to be ignored and the media fail to ac-knowledge their 12-year-plus numbers-error, the commitment to the old, erroneous, inflated numbers must have been deeply rooted. The higher numbers (200,000, 250,000, 300,000) had always been cited as
proof of Serb evil and villainy; their constant repetition over many years reinforced this belief, and their downward-revision simply could not be reconciled with it.
Proper discussion of the motives for this refusal to admit a major error would fill many pages but can perhaps be summarized as a reluc-tance to equivocate on a cause which, for so many, had long provided a black-and-white moral compass during the first years of the post-Cold War world. For the purposes of this chapter, it is sufficient to note that there has been a noticeable lack of interest in accurate numbers about victims of the war in Bosnia in favor of a “good guys versus bad guys”
war-story. This general tendency is greatly sharpened in the particular case of Srebrenica.
The current chapter looks closely at the numbers data and explores them against the backdrop of the official version of what happened in the weeks after the fall of the Srebrenica safe area. It will show that, rather than Srebrenica being the “worst atrocity in Europe since the Sec-ond World War,”11 a “stain on our collective conscience” in which
“8,000 men and boys were murdered,”12it is the official version that is at odds with key facts, and fails to provide a consistent and coherent representation of the relevant events in 1995.
Origins of the massacre allegations
The original ballpark estimates for the number of persons who might have died following the fall of Srebrenica corresponded closely to the list of some 8,000 “missing” persons compiled by the International Com-mittee of the Red Cross (ICRC). (See the Preface and Chapter 1.) But this early figure was based on nothing more than the combination of an estimated 3,000 men last seen at the UN base at Potocari, plus an esti-mated 5,000 men reported “to have left the enclave before it fell.”13 Nei-ther of these figures could be considered reliable: The estimate by the Dutch peacekeeping force in Srebrenica (Dutchbat) for the number of males at Potocari was far lower.14As the British journalist Linda Ryan pointed out in 1996, the phrase “before it fell” could include people who left the enclave safely long before the Bosnian Serbs assumed con-trol on July 11, 1995.15
Perhaps the most startling aspect of the 8,000 figure for persons miss-ing is that it has always been used as synonymous with the number
exe-cuted. This was never a possibility: numerous contemporary accounts noted that UN and other independent observers had witnessed fierce fighting with significant casualties on both sides. It was also known that others had fled to Bosnian government-controlled territory around Tuzla and Zepa, that some had made their way westward and northward, and that some had fled into Serbia. Putting precise numbers to all these cat-egories is not possible; but as we know that there were significant num-bers in each category, this alone tells us that nowhere near the total number then listed as “missing” really were missing, let alone executed.
These are strong reasons for skepticism about the massacre claims.
As further information has emerged over the years, the official version of events which was established in 1995 (and subtly modified since then) appears more and more unlikely. The most fundamental problem of all is that the math does not begin to add up.
The unchanging number total
The numbers listed as “missing” from Srebrenica are noteworthy pre-cisely because they have not increased or decreased since the second-half of 1995. Military actions and terrorist incidents usually follow a very different pattern, as the 9/11 attacks on U.S. targets clearly demon-strates: The Office of the Medical Examiner of New York City reported in January 2004 that it had issued a total of 2,749 death certificates in connection with the hijacker attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. “We believe this is the final num-ber,” a spokesperson for the medical examiner said.
“Two weeks after the attack,” Associated Press reported, “the number of missing-person reports [filed with New York authorities] peaked at 6,886 amid confusion and calls from frantic relatives. The number stood at 2,792 from December 2002 until October [2003], when 40 unsolved cases were removed from the list.”16
This final 2,749 figure represents less than half (39.9 percent) of the peak-number of missing-person reports that were filed amid the an-guish and confusion of the early days. The outrage took place in the richest city in the richest country in the world, with all of the resources necessary to get the body count right. Unlike Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was not a relatively impoverished, war-torn country with internally-displaced people scattered in all directions. Yet, once the ICRC had
set-tled on the figure 8,000 for persons “missing” from Srebrenica, in the second week of September 1995,17this number has never changed.
The sums that don’t work
By mid-July 1995, 23,000 displaced Bosnian Muslim persons had been transferred from Potocari to Bosnian government-controlled ter18xviiiThe ICRC reported that “several thousand” armed Muslim men from Srebrenica had passed safely behind Muslim lines to an area called the Sapna Finger, where they were redeployed to fight elsewhere “with-out their families being informed.”19 According to Amnesty Interna-tional, a total of 35,632 persons from the Srebrenica safe area had registered as displaced persons with UN authorities by the first week of August—in other words, as survivors of the fall of Srebrenica. Addition-ally, a “total of 796 people who fled into the [Federal Republic of Yu-goslavia] from Srebrenica and Zepa enclaves were registered by UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) and ICRC and either resettled in third countries or were repatriated to Bosnia-Herzegovina (more may have entered the FRY without making their whereabouts known to the UNHCR).”20Some 700 soldiers and civilians from Sre-brenica also made their way to Zepa, emerging safely from that town when it fell to the Serbs during the last week of July 1995.21Indeed, the numbers may have been still greater. During the ICTY’s trial of Slobo-dan Milosevic it was claimed that between 840 and 950 Bosnian Mus-lims from Srebrenica and Zepa swam across the river Drina to find safety between July 11 and 13, 1995. These refugees—an entire brigade of the Bosnian Muslim Army (BMA)—were apprehended, processed and pro-vided with accommodation and care (including visits by the Red Cross, which also delivered mail and cigarettes) by the Yugoslav authorities.22In addition, several hundred Bosnian Muslim soldiers were held in Bosn-ian Serb prisons for periods of weeks or months before being handed over. So it is clear that there were in total at least (and probably rather more than) 38,000 to 39,000 documented survivors of the fall of Sre-brenica—a figure that matches or exceeds the total pre-fall population es-timates of the major aid agencies.
Reconciling the math becomes even more difficult when fatalities from the fighting between the Bosnian Serb Army (BSA) and the armed Bosnian Muslim column that left Srebrenica for Muslim-held territory
are taken into account. It is common ground in reports of what hap-pened that there were significant casualties on both sides from these clashes.23A report published in September 2002 by Republika Srpska estimated 2,000 BMA combat deaths, in addition to some 500 BSA fa-talities.24While some of the dead were from the BMA Tuzla brigade, which had come out in support, the vast majority were from the very large armed BMA column which had left Srebrenica.
It doesn’t end there. Both Dutchbat and undercover British Special Air Service intelligence officers who were in Srebrenica when it fell said they had witnessed bitter fighting between Muslims shortly before Bosn-ian Serb forces entered the town. Descriptions suggest that around 100 may have died and that their bodies were left where they had fallen.
There are also reports that considerable numbers of Muslims died when they crossed a minefield which had been laid by their own side.25
Taking all these factors together, in order for 8,000 “men and boys”
from the Srebrenica safe area to have been massacred or died during the population transfer that followed July 11, 1995, the population of this safe area before it fell would have had to be well over 46,000—a figure far in excess of any credible estimate put forward at any time.
There is in fact relatively little variation in the figures given in the accounts which presume that massacres took place. They agree that the majority of Srebrenica’s population went to Potocari (estimates range from 24,000 to 27,000) and a minority went to the column that set off for Tuzla (estimates range from 10,000 to 15,000).26The consensus total for Srebrenica safe area inhabitants was approximately 37,000 per-sons in all, made up of some 25,000 who went to Potocari, and 12,000 who left in the column.
This ties in with remarks made by the Bosnian Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic when he was interviewed in Sarajevo by Belmin Karamehmedovic on August 13, 1995. Izetbegovic said that “35,000 to 36,000” persons were present in Srebrenica “at the time” it fell into the hands of the BSA.27It is also significant that Patricia Wald, one of the ICTY’s judges in the case against the Bosnian Serb Army General Radislav Krstic, estimated the total pre-fall population of Srebrenica to have been 37,000 when she wrote her account of the case. According to Wald, “Prior to the attack, Srebrenica was a village of some 37,000 in-habitants.”28 Apparently, Wald was unaware that the figure 37,000
makes it mathematically impossible for the crimes to have taken place for which she had voted to convict General Krstic.
The under-playing of military casualties
From the beginning it was convenient in the orthodox account of the Srebrenica events to pretend that all the missing were executed, and the limited information on the battle deaths in the retreat from Sre-brenica helped make this possible. But both Serb and Muslim authori-ties acknowledged at one time or another that between 2,000 and 3,000 Muslim soldiers were killed in those battles; in his testimony at trial of Radislav Krstic, the Bosnian Muslim Chief of the Supreme Command Staff General Enver Hadzihasanovic stated that he could “claim for cer-tainty that 2,628 members, both soldiers and commanding officers, members of the 28th Division, were killed” during this retreat.29
After studying a total of 3,568 autopsy reports produced by the Of-fice of the Prosecutor at the ICTY between 1995 and 2002, the Serb forensic analyst Ljubisa Simic concluded that the number of actual sets of remains represented by these reports totaled less than 2,000, and probably between 1,919 and 1,923—not 3,568. Some 44.4 percent of autopsy reports (1,583 in all) consisted of “only a few body parts…often just a single bone,” Simic notes; in 92.4 percent of these cases, “no de-termination of the cause of death was made.” Overall, 442 bodies were associated with blindfolds and/or ligatures, indicating death by execu-tion. Of the other approximately 1,480 bodies autopsied, it is impossi-ble to conclude the cause of death for 1,066 of them (i.e., by execution or in combat), while for 477 of them, “it would be reasonable to con-clude that they were not executed because of the presence of shrapnel and other metal fragments which are not bullet related,” suggesting death in combat, not execution.30
In his 2009 book Srebrenica—The History of Salon Racism, the Swiss analyst Alexander Dorin also stresses the fact that the number of bod-ies found by ICTY investigators in graves in the Srebrenica vicinity—
2,570 in the November 2003 testimony in the Milosevic trial of the ICTY investigator Dean Paul Manning31—were roughly the same as the numbers of Bosnian Muslims killed in the fighting (i.e., 2,628, ac-cording to Bosnian Muslim Chief of the Supreme Command Staff Gen-eral Enver Hadzihasanovic32). Stefan Karganovic of the Dutch-based
Srebrenica Historical Project has shown that the Srebrenica safe area and its surroundings had been heavily mined by both sides.33 Knowl-edge of those minefields was sparse so that, when the column of perhaps 12,000 men left Srebrenica to trek through the forest to Muslim-con-trolled territory, the soldiers and other men repeatedly blundered into minefields they didn’t know about. Simic found that quite a few of the Srebrenica area bodies had shrapnel and metal fragments in the feet and legs. These studies and their results are of course not reported in the Western mainstream media.
Unreliable witnesses
Witness evidence on executions has been equally insubstantial. With the exception of one execution at Potocari that was virtually witnessed by a UN soldier (though it did not quite occur within his sight), and a separate incident in which ten men were led behind a building and nine bodies were subsequently discovered, the main supporting evidence for summary executions comes from the handful of men who claim to be eyewitness survivors of mass executions, along with the very problem-atic testimony of one of the alleged executioners, Drazen Erdemovic (whose claims and record are discussed in detail in Chapter 5). It is on this flimsy basis that the crude 3,000-plus-5,000 sum is accepted as ev-idence for massacre estimates.
The very first claims that many thousands of people might have been massacred at Srebrenica began to be made by members of the Bosnian Muslim government before the enclave had even fallen. President Alija Izetbegovic and Foreign Minister Mohamed Sacirbey were on the tele-phone to world statesmen with a series of ominous warnings. In a let-ter dated July 9, 1995 to the heads of state of the United States, Britain, France, and Germany, Izetbegovic asked them to use their “influence that the international community may fulfill its obligations towards this UN protected zone and prevent an act of terrorism and genocide against the civilian population of Srebrenica.”34Further allegations were made by refugees when they began to arrive at Tuzla a few days after Sre-brenica had fallen. Such claims had by this time become a stock-in-trade of the Balkan conflicts.
Evidence of Bosnian Muslim stage-management of the aftermath of Srebrenica can be seen from their refusal to admit refugees into Tuzla for
the first 48 hours after they started arriving. UNPROFOR had warned on June 26 that Srebrenica would fall and said that all the measures nec-essary to house the refugees had been taken. An official from the Red
the first 48 hours after they started arriving. UNPROFOR had warned on June 26 that Srebrenica would fall and said that all the measures nec-essary to house the refugees had been taken. An official from the Red