Newsweek
November 4, 1996, UNITED STATES EDITION
SECTION: NATIONAL AFFAIRS; Bosnia; Pg. 37
HEADLINE: Genocide Without Corpses
BYLINE: BY STACY SULLIVAN
HIGHLIGHT: Srebrenica was said to be Europe ‘s biggest atrocity since World War II. So why haven’t more bodies been found?
IN THE HILLS OUTSIDE SREBRENICA, winter’s onset has forced United Nations war-crimes investigators to lay down their shovels. When the ground thaws next spring they will resume the job of exhuming mass graves and trying to identify the remains of Muslims who were murdered in July 1995, when Bosnian Serb troops allegedly carried out Europe ‘s deadliest atrocity since the end of the Third Reich. [By this time Bill Clinton had unilaterally put ‘investigations’ in the hands of the ICMP – the International Commission for Missing Persons – an organisation more than 90% staffed by Bosnian Muslims. Questions were beginning to be asked about the lack of progress in recovering the bodies alleged to be concealed in mass graves after the fall of Srebrenica to the Bosnian Serbs in July 1995. With hindsight this article looks like a very early attempt at damage limitation, hinting that some kind of cover-up operation had been mounted by the Serbs. By 1997/8 this was no longer hinted but claimed as a proven fact.]
The International Committee of the Red Cross lists more than 6,600 Muslim men and women as missing since the Srebrenica massacre. The Bosnian government puts the number at 10,300. Yet after nine months of searching and digging, fewer than 750 corpses have been found. [Because no population data existed for those in Srebrenica at the time that it fell – overwhelmingly those displaced from elsewhere in Bosnia during the war – the Red Cross could only make a list of those reported missing by relatives and others following a public appeal from the Bosnian Muslim leadership for relatives to come forward. This list may or may not have been helpful, but it had no evidential value. We do know, however, that UN officials had recorded 35,600 survivors of Srebrenica at the Tuzla reception camp by early August 1995. UN officials also saw some 5,000 Bosnian Muslim Army soldiers safely behind Muslim lines in the Sapna Finger. They were quietly re-deployed to other areas ‘without their families being informed’. The aggregate of these two figures comfortably exceeds the 38,000 consensus estimate of aid agencies for the Srebrenica population at the time it fell. This strongly suggests that no large-scale massacre had taken place.]
Why so few? The Bosnian Serb leadership says the bodies are scarce because the massacre was wildly exaggerated . The U.N. investigators are convinced they’re lying. Evidence collected so far suggests that the Serbs have compounded their crimes against humanity with a massive cover-up to bury the truth. NEWSWEEK examines what the mass graves have revealed. [The ICMP were not UN investigators. The ICMP was a law unto itself and operated in the greatest secrecy, preventing all access to its laboratory in Tuzla where the claimed forensic analysis and DNA identification work was done. Laws were passed in both Bosnia and Croatia which gave the ICMP complete immunity to refuse all requests to give outside access to its primary forensic and DNA evidence.]
Sahanici : At this site, also called Lazete , investigators expected to find 800 bodies, based on the testimony of survivors and an examination of U.S. satellite photos. The grave yielded the remains of 160 victims. But the ground had been freshly disturbed when the U.N. team arrived there in April to begin digging.
David Rohde, the Christian Science Monitor reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for finding the grave late last year, says the soil there was “flat and hard” on his first visit. When he returned to the site in April, it had become a plowed-up mess of mud and green but half-buried sod. Fresh tire tracks led from the site. Investigators are sure some bodies were removed beforehand. “We have several bags of extra limbs and other body parts,” says Dr. Robert Kirschner , a forensic specialist who worked with the U.N. team. “The fact that we found parts of bodies indicates there has been tampering.” The war-crimes tribunal’s sleuths say the missing corpses may have been reburied in a railway tunnel nearby. They plan to check it out next spring. [This amounts to very little. Nothing ever came of the railway tunnel claim. Bags of extra limbs and body parts were routine in areas where military clashes had taken place. David Rohde reached his conclusion from finding one bone, which he thought was human, protruding from the ground.]
Pilica: Drazen Erdemovic, a confessed Serb executioner, testified to the Hague tribunal that roughly 1,200 Muslims died here on July 16, 1995. The U.N. team found only 200 bodies, along with miscellaneous unmatched limbs and appendages. U.S. satellite photos made the day after the killings show bodies and earthmoving equipment at the site. The equipment returned three months later. [Erdemovic was a Croatian, not a Serb, and had fought as a mercenary on all sides during the Balkan conflicts. He claimed to have been part of a group of eight men called the Skorpions that murdered 1,200 Bosnian Muslims in a single day. His story was highly improbable. Attempts to link the Scorpions to the Serbs came to nothing. They could have been working for anyone. A video of the alleged executions was shown in the Milosevic ICTY trial. It was soon discredited when a longer version appeared on the internet showing the executed men miraculously recovering and shaking hands with their killers. Even the ICTY orginally decided that Erdemovic was mentally unfit to give evidence, though later it made him the ‘Star Witness’ in genocide trials. He spent hardly any time in prison and was taken into witness protection the moment he left prison.]
About the same time the satellites spotted activity at a nearby aluminum plant that had been shut down. The factory’s former manager, a Muslim now living in Tuzla , says the plant had 62 vats of sodium hydroxide, a highly caustic chemical used in turning bauxite ore into aluminum. Kirschner says industrial quantities of sodium hydroxide could be used to dissolve human corpses. “It would probably leave a big sludge, but it would definitely destroy soft tissue and hair.” [This also turned out to be complete garbage.]
Nova Kasaba: Roughly 600 Srebrenica men were thought to have been buried in four graves after being executed on a roadside during the night of July 13, 1995 . According to Dutch troops who were in the area that night, the gunfire, squeezed off one shot at a time, continued for more than two hours. Two of the graves have been exhumed now, but they held only 33 bodies. The team has discovered no signs of tampering, either from satellite pictures or from evidence on the ground. The two untouched graves don’t look much bigger than the two that have been dug up. Investigators can’t say why more bodies haven’t been unearthed here.
Karakaj Dam and Glogova : The two sites, neither of which has been excavated yet, could contain more than 1,000 victims. Although survivors of the mass execution at the dam say the bodies were trucked away to an unknown destination, U.S. intelligence spotted heavy equipment working at the dam a few days afterward. Test probes in the soil have found human bone fragments, but they were scattered in a way suggesting that the graves have been disturbed. Satellite photos from Glogova show new excavations taking place three months after the grave there was first dug on July 27, 1995 . Investigators say they believe that bodies from Glogova were moved to another location just south of Srebrenica where three new mounds of earth have been discovered. The teams will go back next spring to find out. They can only hope they won’t be beaten by the war criminals who live there year-round. [The idea that the Serbs could have carried out a huge cover-up operation in the autumn of 1995 was always a non-starter. There is no possible way that an operation of this kind could have evaded immediate detection. The entire Srebrenica safe area was full of UN observers, Nato forces and personnel and was under intense surveillance from geostationary drones and orbiting satellites .]