Fuzzy Math and "Genocide"
I should have noted this Monday, when I first read the article, but was so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of articles about Srebrenica - the vast majority repeating exactly the same tired propaganda - that I haven't got around to it. But this article, in the London Sunday Times, was somewhat different - not just because it admitted there was a history of massacres on both sides in Srebrenica, or that Serbs and Muslims in the area still very much hate each other, or even that most of the dead came from a military column, and were therefore not "civilians." What caught my eye was the "factoid" at the end, "How a safe haven turned into hell." Look carefully at the numbers.
July 11:
• 5,000 Muslim refugees enter base at Potocari, 20,000 more wait in fields outside. 10,000-15,000 others flee through forest
• Mladic enters Srebrenica
• Dutch at Potocari surrender weapons and stand by as Serbs separate Muslim men and women.
• Killings of the men begin
July 12: Serbs bus 23,000 women and children out of Potocari
• Escaping column in the forest ambushed
July 13: Dutch expel 5,000 Muslims from base at Serb request. Men are executed
July 13-20: Large-scale executions continue
• No man of military age handed by Dutch to Serbs is seen alive again
So, we have 25,000 people in Srebrenica, and another 10-15,000 fleeing through the woods (35-40,000 altogether). Earlier in the article, it is said that "fewer than 4,000" of the "10,000-strong column" survived the trek to Tuzla. Adding the 6000 that didn't and the 2,000 that were assumingly killed in Potocari - because Serbs evacuated 23,000 Muslims - and you get the official figure of 8,000.
However, all of a sudden it is claimed that the 5000 hiding in Potocari were not among the evacuees, but were seized from the Dutch camp two days later, and more men were allegedly killed at this point. But where did those extra 3000 evacuated Muslims come from? Everything becomes painfully unclear when one considers that the number of officially registered survivors in August 1995 was just north of 35,000, and the ICTY - which claims "genocide" - estimated the population in Srebrenica at 37,000. What is going on here?
Without a doubt, thousands of people died in Eastern Bosnia during the 1992-1995 war, Muslims and Serbs alike, at each other's hand. Some would say that quibbling about numbers misses the big picture. But this kind of fuzzy math deliberately creates a distorted picture of what happened, of "genocide" where there wasn't any, turning battles into "massacres" and soldiers into civilians for the purpose of political propaganda.
This isn't a debate about the numbers of Jews, Slavs and Roma murdered in Nazi concentration camps, however much the Srebrenica genocide industry seeks to make that parallel. With the Nazis, one has the books, speeches, orders, structures, organization... a mountain of evidence pointing to genocidal intent before numbers even come into consideration. With Srebrenica, there is nothing but the magical number, "8000 men and boys," accompanied with the phrase "Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two" in the attempt to make the Nazi analogy. Yet the numbers don't add up, and the claim of "genocide" in Srebrenica rests solely on the repeated assertions in the media that it took place.
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/comments.php?id=2219_0_1_0_C
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