Just about all serious Srebrenica researchers, whatever their particular view may be, will agree on at least one point: when we are talking about Srebrenica – termed by Professor Edward Herman as the greatest triumph of propaganda at the end of the twenthieth century [1] – nothing is really clear and few things are as they as represented to be.
Everything that we “know” about Srebrenica can be reduced to a construct consisting of a series of interdependent assertions, every one of which is questionable and barely sustainable. Not a single one of them is documented so persuasively that it could withstand a thorough critique or sustain the credibility of the story as a whole. Whenever, by the application of deeper and critical analysis, we neutralise one of the key components of the Srebrenica story, the narrative as a whole is inevitably undermined. It seems that the overall stability of that shaky construction always depends on the reliability of each single brick that went into its making.
If, for example, we discard as fraudulent and unreliable the evidence of Dražen Erdemović, we no longer have a single participating witness of the “most horrific crime committed in Europe after World War II,” although it is by its nature a crime in which much more than a single individual must have taken part. Where are Erdemovic’s accomplices, whom he lists by name in his testimony? Where are between 1,000 and 1,200 bodies of the prisoners that were allegedly shot by him and his detachment at Pilica, in view of the fact that when the mass grave at that location was exhumed it contained the remains of only 137 persons? Is that not a huge discrepancy between noisy assertions and demonstrable facts, and would it not strike even the most gullible as such?
Erdemović is a bizarre wartime passepartout who served stints in the armies of all the ethnic groups which took part in the Bosnian fighting and who ultimately ended up as a member of the so-called 10th Sabotage Detachment of the Bosnian Serb Army [VRS]. The unit in which Erdemović served at the time when he allegedly took part in the Srebrenica massacre is itself an oddity. While said to be hierarchically integrated within VRS, precise information about the superior military unit or command to which it was subordinated is lacking. Heavily implicated in Srebrenica killings, the 10th Sabotage Detachment does not seem to have a clear and unequivocal place in any known order of battle. It was a sort of special operations unit that pops in and out. Equally curious was its composition. In the midst of an ethnic conflict marked by extreme intolerance and mutual cruelty, it seems to have been an ethnically mixed homicidal fraternity with soldiers in its ranks representing all of Bosnian warring communities, Serbs, Croats, Moslems, and even a Slovene![2] Erdemović himself, be it noted, was an ethnic Croat serving in the Bosnian Serb army (again, after having served in the armies of Bosnia’s other two ethnic groups).
These unusual details, quite understandably, attracted the attention of Žerminal Čivikov, a long-time Deutsche Welle journalist who happens to live in The Hague and was an habitué of ICTY proceedings, particularly while the Milošević trial was still in progress. Struck by some of the more bizarre elements of the Erdemović testimony, Čivikov began to ask serious analytical questions. The result is his book Der Kronzeuge,[3] which is now also available in English and may be downloaded from the Books about Srebrenica section of this website.
In his book, Čivikov goes methodically through the inconsistencies of Erdemović’s evidence, his constantly changing versions of events and some of the key claims he makes, that can only be regarded with utmost incredulity. One such claim in fact is that at the Pilica execution site Erdemović and his unit had managed to execute about 1,200 prisoners in just five hours. Given the manner and pace of execution, as described by Erdemović, Čivikov calculates that close to a day would actually have been required for the task. In the end, the exhumation of the Pilica mass grave, performed under the auspices of ICTY prosecution’s forensic teams, produced the remains of only 137 potential victims. Yet once again ICTY chambers accepted without a murmur evidence of very debatable quality, but with a direct factual bearing on an issue of Srebrenica’s legal, moral, and political magnitude. And Erdemović, be it noted once again, is the prosecution’s key percipient witness and participant in the incriminated events. It is upon his credibility that a large portion of the official Srebrenica narrative depends.
So where is reliable evidence to prove the number of executions? For the legal character of the crime to be properly established, numbers are of paramount significance. If we insist that the crime be characterised as “genocide” we must discard the often heard rationalisation that “it does not matter how many victims there were, 100 or 8,000, because it is still a huge crime.” Of course it is, but it may not be genocide. The adherents of the official Srebrenica story are by and large fervent admirers of ICTY and its work. They ought, therefore, to pay heed to the chamber’s dictum in the landmark Krstić case that “the scale of killing” is of great relevance to whether or not genocide was committed (par. 35, Appellate verdict). To deprive the prosecution of such an argument (or to concede it to them, should the evidence turn out in their favor), Dr. Ljubiša Simić, member of the Beara defence team at ICTY, examined the evidence. [4] He performed the arduous task of closely reading some 30,000 pages of prosecution forensic material and examining each and every single “case” that ICTY prosecutors have so far put in evidence in their Srebrenica trials. The results of his analysis are very interesting, to put it modestly.
First of all, he reached the conclusion that 3,658 reported “cases” does not equal 3,658 exhumed bodies. If it did, that would of course put the prosecution at least half way and to within striking distance of the magic figure of “8,000 executed men and boys of Srebrenica.” But as his analysis has established, one autopsy report in ICTY’s forensic evidence does not necessarily stand for the body of one killed or executed person. It may represent, and in many cases it does, just a body fragment, or even a single bone. To be fair, one does not recall the Tribunal ever having explicitly made the misleading claim that each autopsy case represented a single body, but there is a strong (albeit tacit) suggestion to that effect. It is so deeply ingrained on the subliminal level that although unstated, this misconception can easily be confused with the facts.[5]
But this is by no means the end to surprises yielded by the close scrutiny of the prosecution’s crucial (and until now only superficially examined) Srebrenica forensic evidence. It turns out that in about 44% of the “cases”, or a total of 1,583 of the available ICTY autopsy reports, not only was there absolutely nothing resembling a complete body from which meaningful forensic conclusions could be drawn,[6] but that what was termed a “case” may have consisted of no more than a body fragment, often a single bone, incapable of generating any forensic conclusions at all. In fact, even the prosecution’s own forensic experts concede that in 92,4% of reports from this category, which consisted of body fragments, the cause of death could not be determined. Curiously, the admitted inability of prosecution’s own experts in close to half the exhumed cases to make a professionally sustainable determination of the cause of death does not seem to have bothered successive ICTY chambers. It did not deter them at all from making the now manifestly unsupported finding that, in fact, as many victims were executed as was asserted by the prosecution in its indictments, and that the crime occurred in precisely the manner the prosecution claimed it did.
Dr. Simić’s analysis also demonstrates that the slightly over 50% of the exhumed remains which do allow for the possibility of some forensic conclusions nevertheless do not present a uniform picture and that even they do not necessarily support the prosecution’s case. The 442 who were found with blindfolds and/or ligatures indisputably were victims of execution. But there were also hundreds of victims in other categories that clearly demand more nuanced treatment. Remains with only a bullet wound (655) may be compatible with the hypothesis of execution, but there is no absolute proof of that. Some of them could just as likely have been killed in combat. As for those remains (477) which show evidence of bullet wounds and metal fragments, or only of the latter, with this pattern of injury the possibility of execution can reasonably be excluded altogether.[7] For them, the hypothesis of death in combat is far more likely. Finally, there are the bodies (411) whose condition does not allow the formulation of any reasonable cause of death hypothesis whatsoever.
If we combine victims with blindfolds and ligatures, 442, and those with bullet wounds only (which is at least consistent with the theory of execution, although by itself not absolutely probative), 655, the total of victims whose condition and pattern of injury at the time of exhumation were consistent with the theory of execution is 1,097. That is less than a third of the cases in ICTY prosecution’s forensic evidence, and far short of the official figure of 8,000.
A control analysis was also conducted by Dr. Simić to determine the total number of victims in the 13 exhumed Srebrenica mass graves, irrespective of other relevant factors. The method Dr. Simić selected was simple: count all the right and left femur bones, which happens to be one of the sturdiest skeletal components.[8] When paired, the femurs yield a total of just under 2,000 victims (1,919),[9] which is about 6,000 short of the 8,000 figure which must be properly documented if the authorized version of Srebrenica events is not to collapse.
Dr. Simić’s analysis of the forensic evidence has reframed fundamentally the terms and the parameters of the debate about Srebrenica. It will no longer be possible to refer to fanciful numbers, unsupported by the physical evidence. [10]
The situation that we are facing is simply that the prosecution’s forensic material does not support the conclusion that more than could have been 1,100 executed, and even that many only on condition that the available evidence be judged in the light most favorable to the prosecution’s case. As commented by highly placed foreign observers, the real number does not exceed 600 – 700 (Phillip Corwin, UN Civil affaits representative in Bosnia in July of 1995). Would such an immense discrepancy between research data (1,100 executed at most) and the factually unsustainable conclusion derived from it (8,000 executed victims) be admissible in the conduct of a serious and politically neutral criminal investigation? Does that gap between verifiable facts and bombastic “judgments” extrapolated from them not suggest, exactly as Phillip Corwin has been claiming for a long time, that the difference between the two figures is “political”?
Unanswered questions abound. How is it possible that a respectable judicial institution, which the International Court of Justice is said to be, having ruled that Serbia was not responsible for genocide, could then proceed to the conclusion that Serbia “did not do enough” to prevent that genocide? What does that puzzling and (to put it charitably) from a legal perspective quite unusual dictum actually mean? Should we interpret it in the sense that Serbia did take some steps to prevent genocide, but that they were ineffective? Or does it mean that it had done nothing at all to prevent it? The insertion of the word “enough” suggests that the former is what the court had in mind. But if so, why did the court fail to enumerate the measures that Serbia did take to prevent genocide? And which precisely are the measures that Serbia could have taken, but did not, but which – had Serbia acted properly by the court’s standards – would have ensured that the genocide would not have occurred or that its scope would have been significantly reduced? Why does the International Court of Justice not provide answers to those and other similar, quite simple and logical questions?
Here are a few more of those questions. Based on the facts established by the chamber in the Krstić trial, which is the principal ICTY case which ICJ took over and incorporated into its judgment, at what point was the genocidal plan created, if there was one? What was established at the Krstić trial in relation to this important issue? Who were the authors and participants in this plan? In Serbia itself, who among the significant decision-makers was aware of the existence of such a plan, to be able to react to it preventively? We may put aside the Krstić chamber’s legally bizarre conclusion that, although direct evidence of the plan’s inception was lacking, it is in fact unnecessary because the plan’s existence can be inferred inductively (par. 572 of the Trial verdict). But let us hypothetically take as our point of departure the chamber’s bare assumption (as Prof. Herman would have put it) that the agreement to shoot the prisoners most likely crystallised on July 11 or 12, 1995 (par. 362, Trial Judgment) during meetings at Hotel Fontana in Bratunac, while the actual executions started on July 13 (par. 67, Trial Judgment). The question may still reasonably be raised: was there enough time for Serbia to be apprised of the Bosnian Serbs’ “genocidal plan” and was it possible in such a short time for it to react effectively to frustrate its implementation? These are purely technical questions, of course, but they are nevertheless most appropriate for an honest discussion of genocide “prevention”. The International Court of Justice, having incorporated the results of the Krstić case into its own judgment by a copy and paste operation, does owe specific answers to these questions.
But it is not just the main elements of the Srebrenica story which are disputable, that applies in equal measure to the contextual framework. Accustomed to a tendencious depiction of the Bosnian war which portrays virtually all events – including Srebrenica – in the light most unfavorable to the Serbian side, we rarely consider the possibility of viewing the same events from another angle. Change of perspective may give us a fresh interpretation and assessment of identical events. In that regard, the thoughts of an experienced American analyst, Andy Wilcoxson, are quite challenging:
“The Bosnian Muslims,” Wilcoxson says, “had been grooming paramilitary groups for two years before the war started. They chose to use armed violence as a means to seize Yugoslavia’s territory and advance their political ambitions. The Bosnian-Muslims have nobody but themselves to blame for the horrible consequences of their actions. Death, refugees, and the destruction of property are the easily foreseeable consequences of starting any war, they knew that going in and they have no right to complain about it now.”
He continues: “Whatever war crimes the Bosnian Serbs committed, they committed in the context of a civil war that the Bosnian Muslims started. The Bosnian-Muslims are not victims of the Bosnian Serbs; they are victims of their political leaders’ belligerence. If the Muslims want to blame somebody for the suffering they endured in the war, they’d be well advised to point the finger at their leaders in Sarajevo, because it is getting extremely tiresome to listen to them blame the Serbs for the consequences of a war that they started themselves. Belgrade should not pass any resolution that could be construed as indulging the idea of Muslim victimization at the hands of the Serbs.
“No resolution memorializing the victims of the Bosnian war would be just without a strong condemnation of Alija Izetbegovic’s regime for starting the war. It makes absolutely no sense to memorialize the victims without pointing out whose victims they are. Belgrade should pass a resolution memorializing the victims, and they should be certain that it includes a strongly worded condemnation of Alija Izetbegovic’s regime for starting the war that caused these unfortunate people to be victims in the first place.”
Indeed, who triggered the chain of events of which Srebrenica was one of the ultimate consequences? That certainly is a very important question.
We said that any reexamination of the evidence is almost sure to lead to undermining of the official Srebrenica narrative. Here are two items that emerged after the fact that invite serious reflection on the essential validity of the official Srebrenica narrative.
First, there is a U.N. document created on July 24, 1995, which means that it is generally contemporary to the events it refers to. The document’s ICTY designation is R 002 1272. Its official name is: Debrief of UNMOS from the Srebrenica enclave. [Attachment 1] It is a summary of the debriefing of three U.N. military observers in the enclave of Srebrenica, one each from the Netherlands, Ghana, and Kenya. In par. 2 of the document, it is stated that the accounts of the three observers coincided to such a degree that their virtually unanimous statements about the enclave’s fall and the events that followed can be merged in a single continuous narrative.
This document ought to be read in its entirety and then compared critically to the description of identical events in some often quoted ICTY judgments, notably in the Krstić case. The impression is that U.N. military observers, who were there, and the judges of the Krstić chamber, who were not, are referring to two entirely different locations and two completely different events. We will focus only on par. 28 of the U.N. debriefing report where these striking differences are the most evident:
“28. There were no armed men amongst the refugees. The rumour was that they were trying to fight their way out via the Bandera triangle and OP ‘N’ and OP’M’ to Tuzla. There wa sa suggestion that they would try to take BSA hostages in order to get out. The UNMO were with the refugees for 24 hours a day and knew nothing of the reports of the killing of men of military age. Single gun shots were heard but there was nothing to suggest that they were from executions [italics added]. A group of Dutch soldiers said that on the first night that the men were taken they saw 9 men taken behind a house and then heard shots and the men never came back, however, on investigation there were no bodies or signs of executions.”
Anyone who took the trouble to read the Krstić judgment will have noted that it abounds in references to fantastic reports of evidence given by witnesses whom – we may speculate – the Bosnian Muslim intelligence service, AID, had carefully coached for the purpose. The Krstić chamber by and large accepted their assertions uncritically (see, for instance, par. 43 and 44 of the Trial Judgment) and then used them as the basis for drawing further and often very significant conclusions. The difference between those witness’ bombastic stories, and the professional report of foreign military observers, who were under no compulsion to mould their impressions to suit either side, is drastic. It is difficult to imagine that murders of the sort and scope suggested by local witnesses could have occurred while so completely escaping the attention of trained foreign observers.
Incidentally, this is an ICTY prosecution document, which means that its content must have been known to the prosecutors. That gives rise to at least three questions. First, did the prosecution adhere to Rule 68 (i) of Rules of evidence and procedure, and did it show this document – in view of its undoubtedly extentuating nature – to the defence of General Krstić to give it the opportunity to call upon these important foreign observers to give evidence on the accused’s behalf? If not, why not? Finally, if an error was made by the prosecution in not following the requirements of Rule 68 (i) in this particular matter, how does that impact the integrity of the Krstić trial and the judgment that was rendered in that case which – one hardly needs to be reminded – has become the foundation stone of the official Srebrenica narrative?
The second recently emerged example holds no less interest. It concerns an interview given by Jean-René Ruez, former ICTY lead investigator (1996 – 2001). The interview was published in Cultures & Conflicts, 2007 – 1, number 65. It is available on the internet at: http://conflits.revues.org/index2198.html . [Attachment 2]
The broad topic of the interview were Ruez’ impressions of ICTY prosecution evidence gathering activities, particularly in relation to the Srebrenica massacre. Inevitably, the conversation turned round to the “satellite evidence” dramatically offered to the U.N. by Madeleine Albright on August 10, 1995, as the public introduction to the genocidal Srebrenica story. As noted in the Netherlands War Documentation (NIOD) report in 2002, “Albright used the photos to provide the Security Council with evidence of the atrocities and to pressurize both the Security Council and the Clinton Administration into taking a harder line. She stated that there definitely was sharper and better Imint but this had not been released in order to safeguard the techniques and the technology. Albright also reputedly used the photos in an attempt to win support for the idea of a larger peacekeeping operation in Bosnia with US involvement.” [NIOD Report, Annex 2, chapter 7, part 4] The complete NIOD Report is available for downloading elsewhere on this website.
Asked by the interviewer, Isabelle Delpla, concerning the significance of the famous photos which suggest that “the massacre could be observed simultaneously as it unfolded,” ICTY prosecution’s former chief investigator made the following stunning comment:
“That is a good question, but the phrase ‘satellite photos’ must be discarded. The official designation is ‘photographs taken from aerial recognissance platforms’. These are pictures that were taken by the U2…in relation to this, we must refute certain erroneous assumptions. U2 planes feature technology from the sixties. The picture encompasses an area 30 km in diameter and potentially everything there may be visible… Theoretically, if you have the picture you know what is going on in that zone; but, practically speaking, the picture is impossible to interpret unless you happen to know in advance what you are looking for and only if you are comparing it to observations made in the field.”
Begging your pardon? That means, doesn’t it, that those photos, which are said to be critical evidence, were not made by satellites at all, using the most advanced available technological equipment, but that the Bosnian war theater was being reconnoitered using obsolete spy technology from the sixties? But in that case, the concealment of those “crucial” photographs for the next 50 years makes no sense whatsoever. The absurd official story, that making it public would compromise US aerial intelligence gathering technology, must now definitely be discarded. It should be recalled that in 1960 Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union in a U2 spy plane. The plane fell on Soviet territory and we may therefore safely assume that its features have long been familiar to Russian intelligence. What purpose, then, is served by the veil of secrecy shrouding the U2 photos which – if we are to take ICTY seriously – are capable of removing most of the remaining dilemmas in relation to the Srebrenica genocide?
And then, what precisely are these aerial photographs, touted as a smoking gun? Are we to understand now that the images are not susceptible of proper interpretation without supplementary field information, allegedly to assist the analyst to figure out what exactly it is that he is looking for? Is that a photograph which depicts something relatively clear and reasonably defined, or is it a Rorschash test, where the important thing is not so much the interpretation of the picture itself, as the subjective perception of what the picture depicts?
Surprisingly, or perhaps not, Ruez points out some additional analytical complexities:
“The picture in and of itself never displays anything specific, and it may even be the cause of very serious errors in the process of interpretation.”
So that is what the most exotic evidence of Srebrenica “genocide” offered so far really amounts to?
It is indeed regrettable that Ruez chose to share his invaluable insights with the public seven years after the conclusion of the Krstić trial.
Finally, in his interview Ruez revealed a new detail which is bound to be quite intriguing. It most certainly corroborates the view that where Srebrenica is concerned, nothing is quite as it is portrayed. Ruez presents the fact that in her famous discourse before the U.N. (en toute bonne foi, Ruez assures us as a perfect gentleman) Madelain Albricht was less than forthright with the international community. She displayed first a U2 photo of the Nova Kasaba football field, which at that moment happened to be crowded with refugees, followed by the picture of a mass grave. The impression generated by the performance was that, after the football field, the mass grave was the assembled individuals’ next destination. However, as Ruez now tells us, with a slight seven-year delay, there was no geographical or other link whatsoever to tie those two sensational pictures together.
En toute bonne foi, should we not now proceed to a thorough review not only of the Krstić judgment, but also of the official Srebrenica narrative as a whole?
Endnotes:
[1] For Prof. Herman’s views, see https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-srebrenica-massacre-was-a-gigantic-political-fraud/5321388 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbMeMH0_lPE
[2] Testimony of Dražen Erdemović in Prosecutor v. Popović et al., ICTY, 7 May 2007. In his open court testimony, Erdemović named his fellow Detachment members and accomplices, their whereabouts are quite well known – with some residing in Western countries, including the US – yet for a long time, until after the publication of Civikov’s book in 2009 to be exact, no criminal investigation into the role of these direct perpetrators of a horrific crime was even initiated. This must be another in a string of unexplained Srebrenica anomalies.
[3] Germinal Čivikov: Der Kronzeuge [Crown Witness], Edition Brennpunkt Osteuropa, 2009.
[4] Dr. Ljubiša Simić, Forensic analysis of post-mortem reports: http://www.srebrenica-project.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=18&Itemid=16
[5] This is an example of the Tribunal’s subtle manipulation of key facts with full deniability ensured in case they are ever—as they now have been—caught in the act.
[6] “Meaningful” in this case refers to being able to answer questions about the cause and manner of death.
[7] The reason for that hardly requires elaboration: executions are not performed with cannon or mortar shells.
[8] Since the human skeleton has over 200 bones of various shapes and sizes, they can easily be arranged to create the impression of more individuals than there actually are. But since every person has only two femurs, the number of paired femur bone gives us a fairly reliable idea of the total number of individuals, reducing to a minimum the possibility of manipulating the count.
[9] There were slightly more left femur bone (1,923), meaning that four were missing their right pair, and in addition there were 28 femur bone fragments.
[10] By this we mean the dogmatic insistence that 8,000 people were lined up and shot, but of course a prisoner massacre of significant but considerably more modest proportions did occur.
Attachment 1: UNMO Debrief
Attachment 2: Ruez on satellite images