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What was the Srebrenica cover-up?
A story that began to emerge several years after the event that, in an attempt to cover-up genocide, the Bosnian Serb Army mounted a huge, secret operation in September 1995 to excavate the mass graves near Srebrenica town where they had buried their victims in order to move the bodies and incriminating evidence to new mass graves further away.
How did this story emerge?
It seems that US and other intelligence services briefed the small team of ICTY investigators that this is what had happened. It explained, they claimed, why the search for bodies during 1996 had been so unproductive.
Was it a plausible theory?
No, it was preposterous. At the end of the long and very hot summer of 1995, an operation on this scale could not have been kept secret. The excavation of some 7,000 bodies and their transportation in fleets of trucks over unmade-up mountain roads would have created dust clouds visible from the moon. Since the USA had the area covered by geostationary drones and satellites, not to mention intelligence operatives, the operation would have been instantly detected.
Then why did it gain traction?
The world had been brainwashed into a state of anti-Serb hysteria. No one was allowed to question that there had been an appalling genocide at Srebrenica even though no hard evidence to support this had ever been brought forward.
But what about the detailed and harrowing stories told by many eyewitnesses?
When a UN team of investigators spent more than a week at the camp in Tuzla where 35,600 Srebrenica survivors were gathered, they were unable to find a single person who claimed to have seen an atrocity take place. More than 5 years later, The Hague prosecutors had apparently unearthed more than 300. Their testimony was invariably uncorroborated and given anonymously. Many bore signs of careful coaching. In legal terms, they added virtually nothing to the prosecution case (and should not have been allowed to testify in such numbers). In PR terms, of course, they were dynamite.
Surely some of them must have been telling the truth?
Who knows. The Bosnian Muslim government was renowned for false accusations. Some of the ministers had been on the phone alleging widespread massacres to western politicians and media before the Bosnian Serbs had even entered Srebrenica.
What else casts doubt on the story?
It doesn’t make any sense. The chance that the Bosnian Serbs could have achieved this kind of cover-up without anyone noticing were zero. And, if by a miracle, they had done so, what hope would there have been that the new graves would not be detected?
So what did happen at Srebrenica?
Just like Racak did later on for Kosovo , Srebrenica provided the pretext for the US to enforce an end to the Bosnian war on its own terms. Within days of the genocide furore, NATO had started bombing the Bosnian Serbs, the US assisted Croatia to ethnically cleanse Krajina of the Serbs who had lived there for many generations, and the US began the process that lead to the Dayton conference in November 1995. Game over.