Ravnice is one of the Srebrenica mass burial sites associated with the Kravica Agricultural Warehouse prisoner shooting incident which occurred on July 13, 1995. The other site associated with the victims of that shooting is Glogova. It would be a logical assumption that execution victims would generally show a similar pattern of injury and that injuries would have been inflicted by weapons and munitions generally used for the purpose of execution. Finding high velocity blast injuries among execution victims would be highly unusual and calls for a coherent explanation.
Some of the Ravnice autopsy reports which list high velocity bullet or blast injuries as the cause of death are shown in the appendix below. It is difficult to reconcile the presence of such munitions and injuries with the theory of execution. When account is taken of the fact that the day before, on July 12, Serbian forces conducted a combat operation in the proximity of the Kravica Warehouse against elements of the 28th Division column breaking out of Srebrenica and moving toward Tuzla, the presence of such artillery munitions and resulting injuries becomes more intelligible. As stated in the Dutch Parliament’s NIOD Report, “[t]here had also been combat in this area, and so it is possible that these victims fell on the battlefield. It will never be possible to distinguish victims of the executions from ‘regular’ casualties of war.” (NIOD Report, Srebrenica: a ‘safe’ area Part IV – The repercussion and the aftermath until the end of 1995, p. 78) ICTY chambers never devoted analytical attention to the anomalous presence of blast injuries in what were considered by it execution mass burial sites.
- Hannes Hofbauer: Judiciary as continuation of warfare — how the West uses Srebrenica to implement thought-crime legislation
- Basic Srebrenica forensic data