Exaggerated, One-Sided Victim Numbers Fuel Hatred

The International Strategic Studies Association Balkan & Eastern Mediterranean Policy Council

On the eve of the dedication of a monument to Muslims killed at Srebrenica (Bosnia-Herzegovina) in 1995, a group which includes a former UN official, intelligence experts, and journalists, released a statement challenging the official alleged casualty number of 7,000 victims as “vastly inflated and unsupported by evidence.”

They asserted that one-sided interventionist policies permitted al-Qaeda forces and radical Islamists backed by the Iranian clerical government to take root during the Bosnian war, which clouding the future of the region. As well, they agreed that the “memorialization” of false numbers in the monument actually appeared to be intended to perpetuate regional ethnic hatred and distrust and to deliberately punish one of the victim groups in the Bosnian civil war.

Former US President Bill Clinton is expected to attend and legitimize the dedication of the monument at Srebrenica, which was constructed with using one million in dollars of US Embassy funds at the request of High Representative Paddy Ashdown. But former BBC journalist Jonathan Rooper, who has researched the events in Srebrenica since 1995, says that the region was a graveyard for Serbs as well as Muslims and that a monument to inflated casualties on one side “serves neither truth nor the goal of reconciliation.”

Phillip Corwin, former UN Civilian Affairs Coordinator in Bosnia during the 1990s, said:

Mr. Corwin is author of Dubious Mandate, an account of about his experiences during the conflict. He points out that Srebrenica, which was designated a safe zone, it was never demilitarized as it was claimed to be, and that Muslim paramilitary leader Nasir Oric, who controlled Srebrenica, launched repeated attacks on surrounding Serb villages. He noted:

Intelligence expert and strategist Gregory Copley, President of the International Strategic Studies Association and the ISSA’s Balkan & Eastern Mediterranean Policy Council, accused the US Ambassador David Donald Hays, who serves as Deputy High Representative of Bosnia-Herzegovina, of using the power of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) governing Bosnia

Copley added:

Copley added that, according to intelligence obtained from Islamist sources, the monument was likely intended to become a shrine for radical Islamists in Europe and site for annual pilgrimages. He added:

Yossef Bodansky, who has written several books on the war in Yugoslavia and also serves as Chief of Staff of the Subcomittee on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare Research Director of ISSA, calls the 7,000 figure “disinformation” and notes that “all independent forensic evidence points to Muslim casualties in the hundreds, possibly the low hundreds. Continued emphasis on such allegedly high numbers of Muslim deaths at Srebrenica also obfuscates the Muslim murders in that city, earlier, of Serb civilians.” Bodansky also wrote extensively on the link between Osama bin Laden and the Bosnian Islamists in numerous articles and special reports and three books, including Offensive in the Balkans: the Potential for a Wider War as a Result of Foreign Intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1995), Some Call it Peace: Waiting for War in the Balkans (1996), and Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America (1999).

Rooper says that at least one thousand Serbs, mostly civilians, were killed by forces led by Oric who did not bother to hide his crimes, even showing videotapes of slaughtered Serbs to Western journalists.

Meanwhile a group of academic experts and journalists from the United States, Canada, Germany, France, Serbia, and the United Kingdom has been organized by Professor Edward S. Herman of the University of Pennsylvania to examine the evidence regarding events at Srebrenica in July 1995 and earlier, how the media reported these events, and the political role of claims about Srebrenica. It is expected that a report from this group will be available in June 2004.

Rooper points out that the 40,000 inhabitants the UN used in July of 1995 before the capture of Srebrenica roughly matches the number of former residents accounted for in the aftermath. A commander of the Muslim-dominated Army of BiH (Bosnia-Herzegovina) later confirmed to parliament in Sarajevo that 5,000 BiH troops escaped largely intact to Tuzla while the UN registered some 35,632 civilian survivors.

While the capture of Srebrenica was reported in July 1995, as it unfolded, an international outcry only took place a month later, after Madeleine Albright, then US representative to the UN, held up a photo which she said provided evidence that thousands of Muslim victims had been buried at a field near Nova Kasaba, 19 kilometers from Srebrenica. Excavations which took place following the war, however, yielded only 33 bodies at Nova Kasaba. Two years after the event, a total of 400 bodies had been found at 20 sites near Srebrenica, an area which had seen bloody fighting over a three year period.

Instead of acknowledging that there was no support for the original figures, Rooper says that various means were used to prop up the official story. Spokesmen for the Clinton Administration suggested that Serbs might have moved the bodies to other locations. Rooper points out that excavating, transporting, and reburying 7,000 bodies was “not only beyond the capabilities of the thinly stretched, petrol-starved Bosnian Serb Army, but would have been easily detected under intense surveillance from satellites and geostationary drones.

By 1998, thousands of bodies excavated from all across Bosnia were stored at the Tuzla airport. Despite state of the art DNA testing, only 200 bodies have been linked to Srebrenica.

Around three thousand names on a list of Srebrenica victims compiled by the Red Cross matched voters in the Bosnian election in 1996, says Rooper:

The inflated Srebrenica statistics are part of a larger picture that intelligence experts such as Bodansky and Copley find troubling. They say US policy makers have been slow to recognize that Bosnia is viewed as a strategic base for operations in Europe by al-Qaieda and the Hizbollah. In 1993, when the Clinton administration was strongly backing the Muslim President of Bosnia, Alija Izetbegovic, Osama Bin Ladin was regular visitor to his office, according to Renate Flottau of the German weekly Der Spiegel. The Bosnian daily Dani reported that the Vienna Embassy of BiH issued a passport to Bin Ladin in 1993.

As special report by Copley, issued Tuesday, September 16, 2003, notes that BiH Bosnia-Herzegovina Ambassador Huso Zivalj, who issued the passport to Bin-Ladin, later served as Bosnian Ambassador to the United Nations in September 11. Copley said:

© Washington, DC, September 18, 2003

Editor’s Remark

This statement deserves unconditional support, but not only in the context of the war discussed above, but for all false propaganda figures spread about the victims of any conflict – including, of course, the exaggerated victim numbers of alleged murder sites of World War II, i.e., of the so-called Holocaust. But as we all know, exaggerating or inventing alleged events of the ‘Holocaust’ cannot perpetuate hatred against Germans. Germans are immune against being hated… or perhaps they have to put up with being hated, after what they did (exaggerated or not)…

Another statement in the above article is also worth reading twice:

Sure, perpetuating exaggerated and invented Holocaust propaganda and not recognizing the injustice done to Germans in and after two World Wars is a highly effective way of “helping to heal the wounds of war.” Or consider the refusal to accept responsibility for the huge damage done to Vietnam in that war waged in order to uphold Euro-American colonial influence. It puzzles me, where the author of these lines got his impression, there would exist a tradition of such healing assistance.

Be that as it may, this Srebrenica revisionism is another good example of how truth is one of the first victims of war, which is very often not restored even in the following peacetime. The victors write the history, but vae victis!