The video clip linked to below is taken from a Channel 4 News report by Sheena McDonald which was broadcast c1998. At this stage, just 15 Srebrenica bodies had been ‘identified’ from a claimed total of 1,000 bodies recovered.
The ICTY spokeswoman featured in the report speaks of ‘secondary graves’, the ICTY’s new theory of where the bodies were buried, which helped to explain the why so few bodies had been recovered to this point. What is not explained is why the Bosnian Serbs would ever have wanted to mount a cover-up operation. The risks of discovery in the act would have been huge. And what would be the point of taking such risks for the sake of moving bodies to other graves that were bound to be discovered in due course. This story was the feeble creation of the intelligence services who had masterminded the ICTY narrative of Srebrenica. They’d clearly not given much thought to the difficulty of exhuming 500 tons of human remains, transporting them by truck to the other graves and then reburying them – all without anyone noticing.
She also gives a tortuous explanation of the ICTY’s decision to focus only on identifications that were needed to provide evidence for trial proceedings rather than identifications aimed at accounting for everyone allegedly missing after the fall of Srebrenica. This was very convenient for the ICTY because it removed much of the pressure on them to provide evidence to support their claim that there had been a genocide of 8,000 people at Srebrenica.
Among the other points that are visible from a close study of the footage are:
- Very poor professional standards in the handling and storing of body parts. We see bags of human remains stored in open bags of the sort used for building debris. We see remains stored in tunnels and racks, moved by people not wearing gloves or masks.
- The remains appear to be from decomposed bodies – any DNA recovered for identification purposes would have to be recovered by advanced DNA techniques such as Low Copy Number DNA, which are both complex and particularly vulnerable to contamination (especially when stored and handled in the ways we have seen).
This short clip contains enough information to show that the ICMP’s eventual claim to have identified 6,800 bodies from Srebrenica at a rate of more than 1,000 a year at a per-body success rate of close to 100% must be viewed with incredulity.