Letters - Star reflected established view

Letters - Star reflected established view
Morning Star - July 28, 2005

The Morning Star's report on the 10th anniversary of Srebrenica (M Star July 12) faithfully reflected the established view of events. But a study carried out over the last three years by an international group suggests that the truth may be substantially different.

Despite impressions that allegations of large-scale massacres have been proved, that is not the case. Forty thousand of the people at Srebrenica when it fell to the Bosnian Serb army can be fully accounted for. Thirty-eight thousand survivors have been independently recorded and approximately 2,000 members of the Bosnian Muslim army, based in Srebrenica notwithstanding its "demilitarised" status, were killed in fighting as they made their way towards Tuzla.

Since accepted estimates of the population ranged from 38,000 to 42,000, it is mathematically impossible for 8,000 men and boys to have been massacred - to get to this figure there would have to have been at least 48,000 people in Srebrenica.

Close scrutiny reveals that evidence supporting massacre claims is not robust. Bodies have been recovered from graves and some have been identified as individuals listed as missing from Srebrenica by the International Committee of the Red Cross. But the ICRC list cannot be verified against population records for Srebrenica in July 1995 because there aren't any.

The list represents people reported missing by friends and relatives following a campaign to encourage them to come forward. It is a compromised sample, open to distortion.

Media descriptions of the recovery and analysis of bodies give no confidence that procedures were consistent with professional investigative and forensic standards. Nor does the witness testimony stand up well. Of the small group of claimed eyewitnesses, some have given contradictory accounts to different journalists.

The events that took place in July 1995 were confused. It is likely that there were some executions. But reconciling the official version of events with the facts as they are known requires a leap of faith - just such a leap as the creators of the Srebrenica memorial made when they erected 10,000 gravestones at the Potocari memorial site, casually inflating the highest estimated figure for massacres by a further 25 per cent.

JONATHAN ROOPER, Srebrenica Research Group, www.srebrenica-report.com.