The text that follows was produced by our colleagues from the Balkan Conflicts Research Team. It is based on the video “The Sham of the Hague Tribunal.” The full video may be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmXiX3RAdI4&feature=youtu.be
What formed the ICTY’s view of events?
It seems to have been based on the narrative of the BBC series “The Death of Yugoslavia”. Extracts were shown numerous times during ICTY trials.
Was that a bad thing?
Yes. For the most part the professional standards of the series were good, but its theory of how the collapse of Yugoslavia came about was wrong.
In what way?
The series argued that everything stemmed from a “Greater Serbia” policy devised by Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. In fact, the primary cause of Yugoslavia’s final disintegration was that the US decision in 1989 to cut off economic aid caused it to run out of money. Serbia went on trying to keep Yugoslavia together.
What about “Greater Serbia”?
It was a lie. The ICTY tried to substantiate it with a ‘smoking-gun’ document in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, but this backfired when the discovery in the document of a series of Croatian spellings showed it was a forgery.
Was there any other evidence of a “Greater Serbia”?
“The Death of Yugoslavia” misrepresented a speech made by Milosevic in Kosovo to represent him as an outright racist. The text of the speech shows this was nonsense. Milosevic was a pragmatic politician but his belief in multiculturalism was total. The full text of his Kosovo speech makes this absolutely clear.
How did the ICTY gather its evidence?
It had a small team of investigators led by a former French policeman and a former Australian policeman. Neither had prior experience of a complex humanitarian investigations. They were briefed by the US and other western intelligence services. Detailed forensic and DNA investigations were carried out by ICMP, a body set up by Bill Clinton in 1996, the International Commission for Missing Persons. More than 90% of its staff were Bosnian Muslims!
How effective were these arrangements
Very effective in allowing the US to pursue its interests. Hopeless for establishing the truth of what happened.
Was the ICMP to blame for this?
Yes. The ICMP was not a genuine investigative organisation. It generated “evidence” to support the ICTY’s indictments, safe in the knowledge that the forensic and DNA findings it reported to the Tribunal could never be challenged. Laws passed in Bosnia and Croatia ensured that the ICMP could never be forced to hand over its primary evidence.
But mightn’t their identification of 6,800 victims of Srebrenica be right?
Not a chance. Basic facts make these claimed ‘identifications’ impossible.
Such as?
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- No population records were kept for Srebrenica for the period 1992 – 95. The official missing from Srebrenica list was based on people responding to a campaign to report relatives or friends missing from Srebrenica. These “relatives and friends” were entirely self-selecting. The basis of the list is unscientific.
- Most mass grave discoveries came years after the event, when most recovered bodies were fully decomposed. DNA samples were not from blood or tissue; they were extracted from bone. The DNA techniques necessary for this are fraught with problems.
- Nevertheless, the ICMP claims to have conclusively identified almost every body they had recovered by matching it with one of the “relatives”.
- This claim far exceeds the success achieved by any other mass-DNA identification process, both in terms of speed and the percentage of identifications per bodies tested.
- The arithmetic is impossible. The consensus estimate is that there were fewer than 38,000 people in the Srebrenica safe area when it fell. The UN recorded 35,600 survivors in Tuzla and a further 4,000 were seen by UN staff in various places safely behind Muslim lines. 6,800 massacre victims would have required a pre-fall population of over 45,000.