The amount of signals intelligence ABiH listening posts could gather on the Serbs is an issue of great importance in sorting out what was known and when it became known about Serb intentions and operations in July of 1995 around Srebrenica. A separate appendix in the Dutch War Institute Report on Srebrenica prepared for the Dutch Parliament in 2002 deals with ABiH intelligence capabilities. The most interesting part of the report from the research standpoint is on pp. 263 – 266, where questions about real- and near-real-time ABiH signals intelligence gathering capabilities are asked, and answered, mainly in the negative. That should explain the frequent absence of real-time responses by ABiH, which otherwise should have been naturally expected. But it also raises questions about how reams of purported and often very compromising Serbian intercepts were produced and turned over to the Tribunal by ABiH with such limited means at its disposal. The fact that Hague Prosecution chief investigator Jean-Rene Ruez initially requested the intercepts from the Sarajevo authorities in 1996 but received them only three years later, in 1999, offers a clue. Three years would have been plenty of time to fabricate some and doctor others.
The authors of the NIOD report do ask a logical question: “If the Bosnian Muslims had intercepted calls relating to the attack on Srebrenica, the hunt for the column of men and boys, and the orders to kill everyone and carry out mass executions – calls made by Krstic and other Bosnian Serbs – why did they not loudly announce this to the world in the summer of 1995? It is after all very hard to believe that the Bosnian signals services would have listened in ‘live’ to the killing of their friends, colleagues and perhaps even members of their family without raising the alarm (p. 248 -249).”
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