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How did the ICTY deal with Srebrenica?
It kept very quiet about it until, in the early 2000s, the International Commission for Missing Persons began to ‘identify’ Srebrenica bodies at an unprecedented rate.
What did it do then?
It allowed the ICMP to report a radically revised story of what had happened at Srebrenica, apparently based on briefings from US intelligence. The story now was that the mass graves had not been found because, unbeknown to anyone, the Bosnian Serbs had carried out a massive cover up operation at the end of 1995 to conceal the evidence of genocide.
Was this story plausible?
No. On 10 August 1995 Madeleine Albright issued a public warning to the Bosnian Serbs that they should not try to cover up the truth – the US ‘would be watching’. The excavation, transportation and re-burial of 500 tons of human remains could not possibly have been hidden from US satellites and geostationary drones.
How did the ICTY support the story?
The prosecution called many alleged eyewitnesses to massacres in the various Srebrenica-related cases. Almost all of them gave their evidence anonymously via video link. Invariably, there was no corroboration of their accounts. Nor was there any attempt to explain how these people had been found, given that the UN had not managed to uncover a single atrocity eyewitness among the 35,600 Srebrenica survivors at the Tuzla reception camp.
Did the ICTY judges show awareness of any of these matters?
No. ICTY Judge Patricia Wald sat on several Srebrenica-related trials. She later wrote a book which described Srebrenica as having some 37,000 inhabitants at the time it fell to the Bosnian Serbs. But we know that at least 38,000 people survived Srebrenica. Was she simply unaware that her figures did not begin to add up? And who were the 6,800 Srebrenica bodies which the ICMP claimed to have identified?
But surely the DNA identifications were conclusive?
Not at all. The ICMP never disclosed its methodology beyond claiming that they had developed a ‘breakthrough’ technique. Its raw DNA samples have never been made available for independent review – a big defect when the vast majority of bodies had been decaying in the ground for at least 5 years before the claimed DNA examinations. This time lag was a huge challenge to DNA identification.