Srebrenica

Srebrenica – the big doubts about the official story

  1. The town of Srebrenica fell to a Bosnian Serb force numbering 200-300, with 4 or 5 tanks in support.  The defending force or more than 6,000 troops of the 28th division of the Bosnian Muslim Army, equipped with state-of-the-art weaponry secretly flown in by the USA, put up no defence.  The Bosnian Serbs could not possibly have anticipated this – which makes a mockery of the idea that they had drawn up carefully prepared plans to carry out a genocide.
  2. Reports of massacres have been traced back to a handful of men who all claimed to have survived by playing dead.  Each of these men spoke to several western journalists.  Every one of them told markedly different stories to different journalists.  
  3. Although the area was crawling with intelligence operatives from many different countries, as well as UN and Red Cross staff, and a host of aid workers, there were no independent witnesses of massacres.
  4. There were no population records for Srebrenica in 1995.  The last census had been taken in 1991, before the civil wars had started.   All the Serbs, apart from those in the farming communities in outlying villages, left immediately; so too did 75% of the pre-war Bosnian Muslim population.  By 1995 the population of the safe area was overwhelmingly made up of refugees from elsewhere in Bosnia together with 6000+ soldiers of the 28th division of the ABiH (the Bosnian Muslim Army.  The only basis the authorities had for constructing the list of those missing from Srebrenica came from the lists of missing people compiled by the Red Cross and other aid agencies on the basis of reports from relatives and friends.  In the vast majority of cases, there was no means of checking whether individuals reported missing had ever been in Srebrenica.
  5. Estimates of the population of Srebrenica in July 1995 range from the low 30,000s up to the figure of 42,000 provided to the Red Cross by the Bosnian Muslim government for the basis of food aid deliveries.  This higher figure was never taken very seriously because it was established practice for the food aid figure to be exaggerated so that surplus food can be sold on the black market.  The consensus figure privately settled on by the aid agencies was 38,000.  This figure makes the official claim that more than 8,000 men and boys were killed at Srebrenica mathematically impossible:  more than 35,600 survivors were recorded by the International Commission of the Red Cross by early August 1995.  A further 2,000 or so soldiers of the 28th division of the ABiH were seen safe behind Muslim lines by UN personnel.  These men were immediately re-deployed to other areas “without their families being informed”.  Other survivors were located elsewhere – some 700 who had escaped to Zepa, and another 800 or so who had escaped into Serbia.  In all, at least 39,000 survivors could be accounted for.  And both sides agreed that at least 2,000 soldiers from both sides had died in military engagements as the column of men fought its way towards Muslim lines.  So for 8,000 to have been executed, there would need to have been at least 49,000 people in Srebrenica when it fell – a figure far, far beyond likelihood.  This irresolvable numbers problem alone comprehensively undermines the official story.
  6. An early indication of the unreliability of the missing list came when more than 3,000 of those on the list voted in the 1996 elections in Bosnia.  This was either welcome news that the total of missing people was much lower than the lists suggested, or evidence that there had been massive abuse of the electoral process.  The American-run Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) had been responsible for running these elections.  When asked to investigate the OSCE did nothing, pleading feebly that all the voting records had been locked up in warehouses and, even with their multi-million dollar budget, they did not have the funds to recover and analyse the data – though this was clearly their duty as election organisers.  
  7. Rumours have always abounded that President Bill Clinton had told Alijah Izetbegovic that the US would intervene on the Bosnian Muslim side if an atrocity involving at least 5,000 people were to be carried out by the Bosnian Serbs.  There are many indications that what happened in July 1995 was that Srebrenica was deliberately allowed to fall to the Bosnian Serbs.  Perhaps the clearest sign was the decision by the Bosnian political leadership to withdraw the brutal commander of the 28th decision in Srebrenica, Nasir Oric, a few weeks before the fall of the enclave.  With the Bosnian Muslim leadership calling world leaders to claim massacres were taking place even before news that the town had fallen had become official, the propaganda exercise was already underway before anything had happened.
  8. The mass grave sites identified by the United States in August 1995 were investigated by an organisation called Physicians for Human Rights in the summer and early autumn of 1996.  They found no mass graves there, but eventually recovered some 200 bodies from a total of 20 different sites.  The international community decide not to fund this work any further.  Bill Clinton then announced that he had set up a new organisation called the International Commission for Missing Persons to investigate further.  This body, which was always Chaired by an American, had a staff that was more than 90% Bosnian Muslim throughout its existence.  Its forensic work, especially in the early years, was extremely poor:  many photos on the internet showing excavations being carried out by people without gloves and masks, often with numerous members of the public intermingling with them.  There were also many instances where the management of human remains could be seen to be chaotic.  The DNA side of the ICMP’s work was less controversial, but only because they released precious little information about it to the outside world.  No outsider has ever been allowed to see the primary DNA they have collected, not even the Tribunal which paid the organisation to do this work.
  9. Although Madeleine Albright publicly warned the Bosnian Serbs on 10 August 1995 not to try to cover up evidence of massacres, there was no serious suggestion that anything of the sort had happened until 1998.  Indeed, in November 1996 Jon Swain of the London Sunday Times wrote that it was a big mystery why so few bodies had been recovered.  He dismissed the most likely possibility that this was because there had been no massacres and suggested that  there had been some kind of unspecified cover-up. But the very fact he wrote the article at this time casts great doubt on the story that began to emerge in 1998 that the Bosnian Serb Army had carried out a huge cover-up operation in September /October 1995, moving some 500 tons of human remains to new grave sites, apparently without anyone noticing and with no one spotting any signs of ground disturbance in the mass of surveillance material fed back to the USA from satellites, drones and spy planes.  The lack of bodies was becoming an increasingly awkward problem.
  10. What began to emerge in 1998 was an entirely new version of history, almost certainly devised by western intelligence services.  This put forward the implausible theory that the Bosnian Serbs had decided to mount a huge cover-up in the belief that moving bodies to new graves (in a way that was bound to be detected) would be a sensible thing to do and would prevent detection.  The fact that they are supposed to have done this so well that nobody noticed at the time makes it even stranger that, when re-burying the bodies, they allegedly re-buried with them what has been seen as incriminating evidence in the form of ‘ligatures and bindings’.  There were immediate practical reasons also for considering this theory risible:  the Bosnian Serb Army was known to be at a very low ebb, exhausted by defending a front line almost 1,000 miles long, desperately short of petrol (to the point where it was forced to buy it on the black market from the Bosnian Muslims), and under huge pressure from NATO bombing in the lead-up to Dayton.
  11. The ICTY had played its part in this deception by appointing people with little or no relevant experience to lead its investigatory team.  A former French policeman and a former Australian policeman presented the new theory of what had happened at Srebrenica.   Since they had minimal resources at their disposal, their evidence was largely based on extensive briefings from US and European intelligence.  Yet their evidence was used to support this unlikely theory in all the major ICTY trials. 
  12. Western media seized hungrily on the new version of history because its own credibility was coming under close scrutiny.  The Tribunal’s impartial investigators had established the truth and ICTY trials were soon reinforcing the legend – mainly by denying defence teams access to all primary evidence.  The processes were rigged at every step.
  13. There was no let up either in the immense propaganda efforts of the international community.  For example, when Paddy Ashdown was UN High Representative in Bosnia, he spent large sums of money creating a Srebrenica memorial in Poticari.   He had 11,000 crosses erected the memory of the 8,000 who had allegedly been murdered in July 1995 and organised a huge circus  of the great and good and the international media to make sure that the official Srebrenica narrative remained in the minds of people throughout the world.  Similarly, The lavishly-funded operation which saw the “Women of Srebrenica” make visits to many parts of the world to publicise their quest for justice was no more than sophisticated professional lobbying.  
  14. James Harff of the Ruder Finn public affairs company took great pride in his achievement of winning the support of the Jewish lobby against the Serbs for perpetrating a latter-day Holocaust.  This had significant consequences.  Serbs quickly became a pariah nation, to the extent that the 1.5 million Serbs who had perished during world war two in the Croatian-run Jasenovac concentration camp were airbrushed from the Washington Holocaust memorial.  Jasenovac became a place where only gypsies, Croats and Hungarians had died.    
  15. More than 20 years after the events of July 1995 no primary forensic and DNA evidence has been made available to the world.  In contravention of accepted legal norms, the ICTY has denied the basic right of defendants to be able to see such evidence and to have it examined by their own independent expert witnesses.  The convictions handed down by the ICTY to Serb and Bosnian Serb political and military leaders rest entirely on evidence that has been reported to the Tribunal, not provided to the Tribunal – in other words, hearsay evidence.  This something that no proper court would countenance.
  16. The weight of evidence which has come into the public domain indicates the strong likelihood that mass killings at Srebrenica, if they happened at all, were restricted to reprisals taken against members of the 28th division of the Bosnian Muslim Army in revenge for their attacks on Serbian villages in outlying areas in which some 2,000 – 3,000 mainly elderly and defenceless Serbs were murdered.  And by far the most plausible theory in the light of the facts is that Srebrenica was deliberately allowed to fall by the Bosnian Muslim leadership.  Among other things, this allowed the  USA to assist Croatia in its expulsion of some 250,000 Serbs from land where they had lived for hundreds of years in Krijina and enabled US President Clinton to use Srebrenica as the decisive reason for intervening to set up the Dayton conference.