We owe to Karl Popper the invaluable insight that for a hypothesis, proposition, or theory to be considered potentially true it must be falsifiable, or refutable. To be refuted, something must first be tested. It must be possible to produce a reproducible result that is in conflict with a claim, or that claim might as well be disregarded.
How does the official Srebrenica narrative fare when judged by these standards? It is said to constitute one of the best, if not the best, documented genocides in human history. That may well seem to be the case, but only provided its assertions are not subjected to verification. In fact, to make sure that they are not, aggressive mechanisms of repression have been put in place. They range from the informal but often quite effective and painful retribution for misconduct inflicted by the omnipresent thought police of political correctness to the threat of legal prosecution for “genocide denial”.
The gauntlet which the producers of the recently released Norwegian documentary “Srebrenica: A Town Betrayed” had to endure served as a warning to all who were contemplating a departure from what Professor Edward Herman aptly calls “the party line” on Srebrenica. In the event, the furious reaction of the Srebrenica lobby turned out to be not only futile but counter-productive; nonetheless, the damage to rational discourse has been done. The relentless campaign waged against producers Ola Flyum and David Hebditch will not deter them, but arguably it might have an inhibiting effect on others who feel inspired to investigate Srebrenica outside the bounds of conventional discourse. The stern warnings issued by ICTY to Swedish State Television, which had the temerity to air the offending documentary, will do little to stimulate the spirit of free inquiry, let alone to put controversial Srebrenica propositions to a Popperian test.
The vulnerability of the Srebrenica narrative to just such a procedure was illustrated recently by an unrelated revelation. In their effort to demonstrate damage to alleged Iranian nuclear facilities, Western intelligence agencies have published an aerial photograph, presumably made by an orbiting satellite, of a suspected Iranian site. The pros and cons of the Iranian controversy are not the issue here. The point is that in 2011 we were shown a clear image, produced by cutting edge modern technology, of a site said to contain some very incriminating evidence. Please observe in the following attachment.[1]
In July of 1995, after the fall of Srebrenica, Madeleine Albright made the allegation to the United Nations that American special services had in their possession dramatic photographic evidence of the genocide in Srebrenica as it unfolded. That evidence was presumably furnished by aerial surveillance facilities which were continuously monitoring events on the ground in Srebrenica and the surroundings. Indeed, Mrs. Albright used the occasion[2] to maximum effect to display to the international delegates one of those photographs which was alleged to constitute definitive visual proof of Serbian perfidy. But in contrast to the Iranian case, no close inspection of the evidence by experts or by anybody else was permitted and following the brief public display it was locked away for fifty years on the grounds that unauthorized analysis would be a grave threat to national security and could potentially compromise sensitive intelligence gathering techniques.
As a result, this purported evidence of mass executions amounting to genocide, which was adduced by Mrs. Albright in a major international forum, on the flimsiest of pretexts was never seen, examined, or tested by anyone with the requisite expertise to falsify or refute it. In Popperian terms, therefore, it constitutes no evidence at all and ought to be disregarded. But were it really to be disregarded, a significant prop would be knocked out from under the Srebrenica story.
Oddly, publishing the Iranian photographs in a situation that was in every respect analogous was not considered to be a problem at all. Will it not gravely compromise intelligence gathering techniques? If not, then what is the justification for keeping under lock and key evidence similarly gathered, whose probative value in the Karadžić and Mladić trials could be enormous? Does it make sense a decade and a half after the fact, when the technology which generated it must long ago have become obsolete?
Contempt for Karl Popper and his principles of scientific inquiry is endemic in Srebrenica lobby circles and it is by no means confined to photographic evidence from outer space.
Equally exempt from critical scrutiny, and thus the possibility of verification, are virtually all the other key components upon which the Srebrenica narrative is based. The corpus delicti evidence of the crime, human remains exhumed from mass graves, passes through several prophylactic layers before it reaches the public in unverifiable, anodyne form. Prosecution forensic expert Richard Wright testified in the Karadžić trial on December 1, 2011, that “no citizen of the former Yugoslavia was allowed to come to the sites in the four years that I excavated…at night the sites were under armed guard to prevent anyone coming in.”[3] The Tribunal’s policy of hermetically sealing off the sites of its Srebrenica excavations and the lengths to which it went to keep them under complete control are quite extraordinary. Not just independent experts from the former Yugoslavia, but from anywhere else for that matter, were not allowed to observe the proceedings. Be it noted that when the Germans were exhuming mass graves in the Katyn Forest in 1943, they had enough regard for transparency to invite as observers not just numerous forensic specialists from the neutral countries, but several Allied officers whom they specially brought for the purpose from prisoner of war camps as well.[4] No such niceties were observed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and thus there is little choice but to take much of their experts’ findings on faith.
Equally unfalsifiable, and thus of spurious validity, is the alleged DNA evidence that is presented as proof of murder on a mass scale. Putting aside some fundamental questions concerning relevance, such as whether DNA evidence can furnish any information at all about the time, place, and manner of death, without which a criminal case can scarcely be expected to proceed, in purely Popperian terms it is suspect in the formal sense. The institution charged with extracting and matching DNA samples, International Commission on Missing Persons [ICMP], claims – and the ICTY Chamber in the Popović case fully accepts – that it “found that at least 5,336 identified individuals were killed in the executions following the fall of Srebrenica”.[5] However, ICMP refused in the Popović case, and it continues to refuse in the ongoing Karadžić case, to make its biological samples available to the defence for independent testing and verification.[6]
Under such onerous conditions, the DNA claims are singularly difficult to refute.
It would not, therefore, be unfair to say that by Popper’s standards the official Srebrenica case fares quite dismally.
Endnotes:
[1] http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/12/09/images-iranian-nuclear-facility-provide-intel-into-recent-explosion/#ixzz1gFSfRJO0
[2] Closed session of the UN Security Council, August 10, 1995.
[3] Prosecutor v. Kardžić, December 1, 2011, Transcript, p. 22298.
[4] Sanford, George (2005). Katyn and the Soviet massacre of 1940: truth, justice and memory. Psychology Press. p. 130. ISBN 978-0-415-33873-8. http://books.google.com/books?id=ayq3CpH69HMC&pg=PA130.
[5] Prosecutor v. Popović et al, Judgment, http://www.icty.org/x/cases/popovic/tjug/en/100610summary.pdf
[6] The rationale used for this refusal, “privacy of the victims and their relatives,” seems as spurious as the stated reason for refusing access to satellite photos. The Chamber’s decision in 2010 to allow the Karadžić team limited access to materials in 300 of the DNA cases (and even that subject to stringent conditions, including written agreement of the surviving relatives) obviously does not address adequately the issue of verification. The defence must have complete access to all evidence used by the prosecution, and in particular to crucial data of this nature.