CRIMES: An official Serbian inquiry says Srebrenica's dead were victim's of "exhaustion."
Wednesday, Sep. 11, 2002
Authorities in the Federation Entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the international community have severely condemned a report released by authorities in the Republika Srpska claiming the July 1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica never happened. Though it is widely accepted that between 7,000 and 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were massacred by Bosnian Serb forces when they took control of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia between 11 and 15 July 1995, the report offers a completely different story, blaming deaths on "exhaustion," among other things.
The report — conducted in early September by the Republika Srpska's Government Bureau for Relations with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) — claims that no more than 2,000 were killed, and that all were armed soldiers of the Bosnian Army and not civilians. Of those 2,000, the new study says that 1,600 were killed in battle or while attempting escape, and 100 died simply because they were "exhausted." The study also claims that it is possible that fewer than 200 members of the Bosnian Army were killed by members of the Bosnian Serb Army in acts of revenge or because they were not aware of the particulars of the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war.
"To walk for almost 20 days in an area that might be full of landmines, without any food and water, under the fear of being shot from any direction was such a trauma that soldiers sometimes mixed reality with illusions," the report concluded, referring to a member of the Bosnian Serb army who confessed to having taken part in the mass killings as "mentally disturbed." The controversial study is to be presented to officials at the ICTY and to a handful of local and international nongovernmental organizations to be used in the defense of Bosnian Serb soldiers and politicians accused of war crimes between 1992 and 1995.
The study is partially a compilation from other, earlier studies conducted by various institutions, including the United Nations and the International Crisis Group (ICG). But those institutions have accused the Bosnian Serb authorities of manipulating the earlier reports and using only parts of statements to change context. Across the board, the international community has harshly criticized the report as an attempt to cover up the heinous crimes committed at that time. The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) released a statement on 6 September, calling the report a gross distortion of the facts.
"Manipulation of the issue of the missing for political purposes, including the manipulation of numbers of missing, has been an ongoing practice within Bosnia and Herzegovina that only serves to cause further pain and suffering in a society that has already suffered so much. The study regarding the numbers of missing from the 1995 fall of Srebrenica made by the Republika Srpska's Government Bureau for Relations with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) contains what ICMP believes to be serious inaccuracies," ICMP's statement read.
According to information from ICMP, "there are approximately 7,500 bags of human remains currently in storage, which have been exhumed from various gravesites in northeast BiH. These remains are stored in three locations in Tuzla and one location in Visoko. Almost 2,000 of these bags contain complete bodies, another 2,000 bags contain partial bodies of one individual, and the remaining 3,500 bags contain 'commingled remains.'"
However, the government of Republika Srpska, of which the bureau that conducted the report is a part, is dragging its feet over a public rejection. The entity's media has largely come out in favor of the report, while Republika Srpska President Mirko Sarovic has said only that the report should not be dismissed entirely, but does warrant further investigation.
When Srebrenica fell under Bosnian Serb control, the report says, between 25,000 and 40,000 local residents decided to surrender themselves at the UN base. According to the study, most of those who surrendered were women, children, and the elderly, with approximately 2 to 3 percent soldiers. Bosnian Serb officials claim that they transferred those civilians to safe territory under Bosnian government control, and took the soldiers to a prison camp in the town of Bratunac.
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"So far, more than 30 mass graves have been discovered along those escape routes," Amor Masovic, president of the Bosnian Commission for Missing Persons, told TOL*. Masovic said that no one from the Republika Srpska bureau has ever been present at mass grave exhumations in that region. And if any of them did show up at those graves, Masovic says he would gladly give them evidence of heinous crimes.
Sinisa Djordjevic, adviser to Republika Srpska's prime minister for relations with The Hague, told the ONASA news agency that there can be more than one truth about Srebrenica during the war because over 1,000 Bosnian Serb civilians were also killed. "We want to find out the truth about Srebrenica. We want to bury the hatchet, but we want the facts to be known to the public in order to secure peace in Bosnia," Djordjevic was quoted as saying. Djordjevic is a member of the prime minister's Party of Democratic Progress (PDP). Analysts link the emergence of the report with the October general elections in Bosnia, when the PDP will compete with the ultra-nationalist Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) for the votes of a still rather nationalist electorate.
Djordjevic said that he doesn't believe that more than 7,000 Bosniaks were killed when Bosnian Serbs took control of Srebrenica. "The study shows that the crimes committed in Srebrenica according to Bosniak politicians are not backed up by complete information about victims' names, and the lists that exist of those killed are very suspicious. In addition, the details of those who committed the so-called crimes and when they were committed are unknown," he said. Djordjevic claims that Bosniak politicians manipulated the number of victims in order to turn the international community against Bosnian Serbs.
All major politicians and media outlets in the federation condemned the report. But Prime Minister Ivanic claimed last week that "the federation media made fuss over the report for their own purposes."