Realistically Estimating the Number of Srebrenica Massacre
Victims
www.slobodan-milosevic.org –
Written by: Andy Wilcoxson
Like any war, the warring factions in the 1992-95 Bosnian
war used hyperbole, exaggeration, propaganda, and outright lies to demonize
their opponents. The Western news media uncritically regurgitated the
propaganda spoon-fed to it by the Bosnian government and published absurd reports
of 250,000 to 300,000 people killed in the war.
They went on repeating the myth of a death toll in excess of
a quarter of a million for ten years after the war until cooler heads prevailed
and sober research revealed that the death toll was really closer to 100,000 –
less than half the number originally reported.[1]
It took ten years, from 1995 until 2005, for people to
figure out that the death toll of the war itself was grossly exaggerated. If
the death toll of the war could be exaggerated, then it stands to reason that
individual events that happened during the war could have been exaggerated too,
and the particular event that comes to mind is the Srebrenica massacre.
Unfortunately, the same sort of research and logical
reasoning that debunked the exaggerated death toll of the Bosnian War itself
has not been applied to what happened with regard to Srebrenica.
The reason why there isn’t any serious inquiry is because in
2001 the UN War Crime Tribunal in The Hague (ICTY) passed a verdict stating that
it had been “proven beyond all reasonable doubt that genocide, crimes against
humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war were perpetrated against
the Bosnian Muslims, at Srebrenica, in July 1995.”[2]
By finding that “genocide” had been committed, the ICTY
turned anyone who questioned the allegation that Bosnian-Serb forces “summarily
executed 8,000 men and boys” in the “the worst atrocity in
Debunking the death toll of the Srebrenica massacre isn’t as
simple as debunking the death toll of the war itself. When lists of victims
were compiled and the numbers didn’t add up to anywhere close to 250,000 it was
pretty obvious that the numbers had been fudged.
However, the Srebrenica massacre took place in the context
of combat that was taking place in the area and legitimate combat casualties
are being counted as if they were massacre victims that had been captured and
executed by Bosnian-Serb forces.
The Dead and Missing
Prosecutors at the ICTY have compiled a list of 7,661
persons who were killed or reported missing in connection with the fall of the
Srebrenica enclave.[3]
Exhumations of Srebrenica-related mass graves have been going on for years, and
at last count the ICMP have identified the remains of 6,838 persons through DNA
analysis.[4]
When the Srebrenica fell on
Of the 7,661 persons who were reported missing or confirmed
dead, about 1,000 were captured from among the refugees gathered at the UN Base
in Potocari, and the rest were from the column.[5]
The Column Was a Legitimate Target
There is no dispute that the column was a legitimate
military target. The ICTY prosecutor’s own military expert readily admitted
that the column did “qualify as a legitimate military target.”[6]
Even the prosecutors themselves acknowledged the military
character of the column. Senior prosecutor Peter McCloskey told the court point
blank, “It was a military column. You don't see any war crimes being charged on
the attack of this column. And the head of this column was a military column
and it did a hell of an attack on 16 July and many Serb soldiers were killed.”[7]
The Column Suffered Thousands of Combat Casualties
Thousands of the men in the column were killed in combat
with Bosnian-Serb forces as they fought their way across Serbian territory
towards
Carl Bildt served as the European
Union co-Chairman of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia. He
was the Prime Minister of Sweden 1991-1994, Co-Chairman of the Dayton Peace
Conference and subsequently the first High Representative in
Bosnia-Herzegovina. He wrote in his book Peace Journey that “when we
eventually, in early August, began to understand what had really happened the
picture became even more gruesome. In five days of massacres, Mladic had
arranged for the methodical execution of more than three thousand men who had
stayed behind and become prisoners of war. And probably more than four thousand
people had lost their lives in a week of brutal ambushes and fighting in the
forests, by the roadside and in the valleys between Srebrenica and the
The UN Secretary General’s report on the fall of Srebrenica
states that when “men began arriving in the
A contemporaneous report from the UN Protection Force Civil
Affairs office dated 17 July 1995 corroborates the findings of the Secretary
General’s report and states that those who had arrived at the Tuzla Air Base
from Srebrenica had said that up to 3,000 of those who left Srebrenica were
killed on the way mostly by mines and engagement with the Bosnian-Serb army.[10]
In addition to official UN reports, a contemporaneous
videotape of interviews with the men from the column as they arrived in
Richard Butler, the ICTY prosecutor’s military expert,
conceded that a number between 1,000 and 2,000 people from the column killed in
combat engagements “sounds reasonable.”[12]
Even though he later admitted that he “never did an analysis as to how many
people from the column were killed as a result of the combat operations.”[13]
What Became of the Remains of the Combat Casualties?
At his war crimes trial former Bosnian-Serb president
Radovan Karadzic asked Jean-Rene Ruez, the officer in charge of the ICTY
prosecution’s Srebrenica investigation, the following question: “Where were the
combat casualties buried in July 1995?”
Mr. Ruez answered, “This I don't know. I repeat, we were not
looking for combat casualties but to identify the detention sites, the nearby
execution sites, and the successive burial places of these prisoners.”[14]
What Ruez meant by “successive burial places” was the
practice of exhuming and reburying Srebrenica massacre victims to conceal
evidence of the killings. In ICTY jargon “primary graves” are the graves in
which the victims were placed immediately after or at the time of their
execution. A “secondary grave” is one in which the bodies are placed after
they've been removed from the primary grave and placed into secondary graves.[15]
“Secondary”
Dr. William Haglund was the senior forensic advisor to the
ICTY prosecutor and a forensic anthropologist who personally oversaw the ICTY’s
exhumation of many Srebrenica-related graves. He was asked by Judge O-Gon Kwon
of
Judge Kwon also asked Dusan Janc, a Slovenian police
inspector who investigated Srebrenica for the ICTY prosecutor, “if somebody
might have brought some other corpses to [a] secondary grave, do you exclude
that possibility?” And Janc also conceded “that possibility can't be excluded
for sure.”[17]
In 2009 Janc prepared a report detailing the connections between
the primary and the secondary graves. According to the data published in
his report, out of the 5,358 persons identified by DNA analysis as of 2009;
more than two-thirds -- 3,582, were buried in secondary graves and the rest
were either buried in primary graves or found on the surface. The remains of
517 people were found in more than one grave. There were 207 DNA connections
between a primary grave and one or more secondary graves. There were 13 DNA
connections between one primary grave and another primary grave, and were 297
DNA connections between one secondary grave and another secondary grave. [18]
There is no doubt that DNA and other forensic connections
(soil, pollen, artifacts, etc…) exist between certain “primary” and “secondary”
graves. The question is to what degree the graves are connected to
one another. Just because some of the bodies in a secondary grave are
connected to a primary grave, it doesn’t mean that all of the bodies in
that secondary grave came from the primary grave. According to the data
published in Annex C of Janc’s report, less than 6% of the bodies found in the
secondary graves had a DNA connection to a primary grave.[19]
The Proximity of the Secondary
The possibility of combat casualties being placed in the
secondary graves along with massacre victims is seems quite probable in light
of the fact that the secondary graves are, without exception, located in the
immediate vicinity (5 kilometers or less) of places where combat associated the
fall of Srebrenica and combat associated with the column is known to have taken
place.
The following map is an amalgamation of several maps
tendered into evidence by prosecutors at the ICTY.[20] The yellow markers denote secondary
graves and flames denote places where combat took place. Red markers denote
primary disturbed graves where remains were taken from, and white markers
denote primary undisturbed graves where no remains were taken. Red lines show
the path taken by the column. The blue lines show the enclave boundary and the
Bosnian Army’s forward lines around
As you can see from the map, the secondary graves are located very close to the
enclave boundary where fighting took place between July 6th when the
Bosnian-Serb Army first attacked the enclave until July 11th when
Srebrenica fell, or in areas where the column was known to have fought with the
Bosnian-Serb Army on its trek towards Tuzla.
Put simply, the “secondary” graves
are located in precisely the area where one would expect to find combat
casualties associated with Srebrenica.
We know that there were thousands of combat casualties
because the men from the column said so when they arrived in
Persons wishing to hide evidence of the massacre may have
attempted to exploit battlefield clean-up operations in the weeks and months
following the fighting by placing the remains of massacre victims in graves
intended for the burial of combat casualties.
I say “attempted to exploit” because the people who
attempted to re-bury the massacre victims did a rather sloppy job of it. Dusan
Janc told the Tolimir trial chamber that of “the excavation of the primary
graves, not a single one of these primary graves was a complete one. There were
a lot of bodies left there, and a lot of bodies were taken apart, so a lot of
body parts were found in these primary graves and also in the secondary graves.
So that's how it was done. None of these primary graves was re-exhumed in its
entirety.”[21]
The ICTY has collected thousands of documents and heard
testimony from hundreds of witnesses about events surrounding the fall of
Srebrenica. Unfortunately, very little information and testimony concerning the
individuals who actually constructed these graves has been adduced and so we’re
left to speculate about how the remains came to be in those graves. Are they
combat casualties collected from the battlefield, or are they massacre victims
robbed from primary graves in an effort to conceal evidence of killings?
Obviously it’s a combination of the two. If the combat
casualties weren’t buried in the graves in the immediate vicinity of where the
fighting took place, then where did their bodies go? There weren’t thousands of
remains left on the surface. The “secondary” graves are the only logical
explanation for where their remains could have gone.
The Ratio of Combat Casualties to Massacre Victims
As I’ve previously documented, the most likely number of
prisoners to have been captured by the Bosnian-Serb Army was between 3,000 and
4,000. [22]
The Serbs could not have executed more prisoners than they
captured, and there is strong evidence that the number of prisoners taken to
Zvornik was somewhere around 3,000.
The only contemporaneous documentation that exists
concerning the number of prisoners is the Zvornik Brigade’s July 18th
combat report where Commander Vinko Pandurevic writes that “During the last ten
days or so the
If anything, Pandurevic’s estimate of 3,000 prisoners seems
credible in light of the fact that the combined floor space of all the
buildings in Zvornik that were used to detain the prisoners was only 1,866.91
square meters.[24]
It would have been a pretty tight squeeze to cram 3,000 military aged men into
that amount of space, but it’s possible.
Alija Izetbegovic himself estimated the number of massacre
victims to be about 3,000. A month after the fall of Srebrenica Izetbegovic met
with Haris Silajdzic and Rasim Delic at the Bosnian Presidency and he said:
“The number of people killed is most probably somewhere around 3,000. This is
the figure that has been mentioned from the first day there. In fact, we
intercepted a very clear Chetnik (Serbian) telephone conversation, obviously
authentic, where they say: ‘there was a massacre here yesterday. It was a real
slaughterhouse.’ So, how many, 300? ‘No, add another zero’, said one Chetnik to
the other. He was talking about the massacre of 3,000 people - one Chetnik to
another.”
Izetbegovic reiterated that “This is according to the
Chetnik information, which in this case could be the most reliable. This is
their information, where they speak to one another about what happened. The man
who took part in the massacre talked about it. He was telling someone else.
This conversation is available if you are interested. It is one month old.”[25]
Unfortunately, no intercept resembling the one Izetbegovic
is quoting from was ever tendered into evidence at the ICTY. The fact that
Izetbegovic is quoting from an intercept that the Bosnian government never
turned over to the ICTY is smoking gun evidence that they withheld intercepts
that undermined their allegation of 8,000 massacre victims, but that’s another
story.
It seems likely that the 3,000 prisoners in Pandurevic’s
report are the same 3,000 people that were said to have been massacred in the
intercept that Izetbegovic was quoting from.
Of course the 3,000 prisoners around Zvornik weren’t the
only prisoners to be killed. There was also the massacre at Kravica warehouse.
The Kravica warehouse had a total floor space of 589.5 square meters[26] and part of that space was occupied by
material being stored inside of the warehouse.[27] This would suggest that the warehouse
could have held up to 600 or 700 prisoners. There were also a few smaller
incidents that all together total about 200 people, like Cerska, the infamous
video of the six prisoners being executed by the Skorpions paramilitary group
near Trnovo, etc… but the most significant episodes
of mass killings associated with Srebrenica are by far what happened around Zvornik and at Kravica warehouse.
The ratio of combat casualties to massacre victims is
probably somewhere in the 50/50 neighborhood. The total number of dead and
missing is 7,661. There are credible reports of 2,000 to 4,000 members of the
column getting killed in combat. The exact numbers are impossible to establish,
but if you divide 7,661 in half you get 3,831 which falls within the range of
2,000 to 4,000 combat casualties and within the range of 3,000 to 4,000
massacre victims.
The figure of 8,000
Srebrenica massacre victims is every bit as exaggerated as the figure of
250,000 dead in the war itself. The evidence is there, and it’s only a matter
of time until it the truth comes out. Even the ICTY itself is starting to
backpedal. Eleven years after the Krstic “genocide” conviction was handed down,
the Tolimir trial chamber estimated that the death toll of the massacre could
have been as low as 4,970.[28]
Their number is still too high, but at least it’s starting to approach the
neighborhood of reality.
[1] Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Bosnian war "claimed 100,000 lives,"
[2] ICTY Krstic Verdict,
[3] ICTY Tolimir Exhibit
P01794
[4] ICMP Press Release,
[5] Prosecutor v. Zdravko Tolimir, Prosecution's Final Trial Brief, para 378
See also: Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic, Judgment,
[6] OTP military expert Richard Butler, ICTY Popovic trial transcript,
[7] Lead prosecutor Peter McCloskey, ICTY Popovic trial transcript,
[8] Carl Bildt, Peace
Journey: The struggle for peace in
[9] Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to General
Assembly resolution 53/35 The fall of Srebrenica,
A/54/549,
[10] ICTY Tolimir Exhibit
P00588
[11] ICTY Tolimir Exhibit
D00280, time code 00:
[12] OTP military expert Richard Butler, ICTY Popovic trial transcript,
[13] OTP military expert Richard Butler, ICTY Karadzic
trial transcript,
[14] Chief OTP Srebrenica Investigator Jean-Rene Ruez, ICTY Karadzic trial transcript,
[15] Dean Manning, ICTY Krstic
trial transcript,
[16] Dr. William Haglund, ICTY
Karadzic trial transcript,
[17] Dusan Janc,
ICTY Popovic trial transcript,
[18] ICTY Popovic exhibit
P04490
[19] Ibid., Annex C (207 ÷ 3,582
= 5.78%)
[20] Krstic exhibit P00159 (Map
of enclave boundary, and Route taken by column according to prosecution witness
R), Popovic exhibit P02996 (Map showing location of
primary and secondary graves), Krstic exhibit P00002
(Map produced by Bosnian Serb Army showing route taken by column, Confrontation
lines, Where the VRS entered the enclave, and where the Bosnian Serb Army had
its positions), Krstic exhibit P00549 (Map produced
by Richard Butler showing enclave boundary and locations where combat took
place on 14 July 1995), Krstic exhibit P00613 (Map
produced by Richard Butler showing enclave boundary and locations where combat
took place on 15 through 16 July 1995), Map produced by the Bosnian Government
in cooperation with the ICMP showing locations were surface remains were found.
[21] Dusan Janc,
ICTY Tolimir transcript,
[23] ICTY Popovic Exhibit
P00334
[24] ICTY Popovic Exhibit
4D00653
[25] ICTY Oric Exhibit D300
[26] ICTY Popovic Exhibit
P04529
[27] PW-111, ICTY Popovic trial
transcript,
[28] ICTY Tolimir Judgment,
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