http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic/NewsViews.htm
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic04/NewsST122804.html
ChroniclesExtra! December 28, 2004
BOSNIAN WAR DEAD MYTH DEBUNKED:
CHRONICLES WAS RIGHT, AGAIN
by Srdja Trifkovic
The assertion that some 250,000 people were killed during the Bosnian war in
the 1990s is an obligatory part of the postmodern media ritual dealing with
the Balkans. Over the past 12 years the claim has been repeated ad nauseam
in countless outlets, and still continues to be repeated. It is routinely
inserted into wire reports that are carried by thousands of dailies. It is
repeated by the electronic media and by editorialists as a fact, not as an
estimate that is open to doubt or can be legitimately disputed. It is
presented as fact by the U.S. Government, and in particular by its
authoritative Country Report on Human Rights Practices, published by the
State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. President
"Bill" Clinton, addressing the nation on November 27 1995, repeated the
figure of 250,000. His Defense Secretary, William Perry, testifying before
the Senate Armed Services Committee on June 7, 1995, declared that "there
were, by our best estimate, about 130,000 civilian casualties"—and that in
1992 alone! Similar claims have been made on the Left and on the Right, by
Gentiles, Jews, and Muslims propagandists alike.
On December 10 we were finally told by a "mainstream" media outlet that the
facts of the Bosnian case may not be quite as clear cut as we had been led
to believe. "The death toll from Bosnia's 1992-95 war, widely estimated at
being at least 200,000, was considerably lower," a Reuters report announced
on that day. According to Reuters, a Bosnian Muslim investigator by the name
of Mirsad Tokaea, head of a team of researchers working on a Norwegian
government grant, has established that the true number is closer to 100,000;
but even that figure is yet to be verified: "After cross-referencing, we
have whittled down the number of those killed to about 80,000 right now."
A similar assessment had come some months earlier from an unexpected source.
According to the research done by The Hague Tribunal (International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY), "the number of people killed in
the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina was around 102,000." Since the Tribunal's
continued existence is critically dependent on the continued exaggeration of
all Yugoslav war crimes, even that figure should be taken with a grain of
salt. The research project was conducted by the two population experts, Ewa
Tabeau and Jacub Bijak, who work for the Office of the Prosecutor at The
Hague. They were nevertheless deemed so explosive that the findings were
presented at a conference for demographers in Norway a year ago "but they
have not been revealed to the wider public."
This extremely interesting report has been ignored by all English-language
media outlets that have embraced and propagated the myth of "250,000 dead in
Bosnia."
Chronicles readers do not need to depend on the good will of The Hague
Tribunal to make its politically sensitive findings widely known, however,
or on the willingness of the media to report such news even if they are
released. Eight years ago I published an article in the magazine ("The Hague
Tribunal: Bad Justice, Worse Politics," Chronicles No. 8, August 1996, pp.
15-19) that dealt with the number of dead in Bosnia on the basis of facts
readily available to the curious even at that time. The article noted that,
compared to the horrors of Afro-Asian postcolonial killing fields, the war
in the Balkans was no worse than a regular "medium-sized local conflict":
"The 'Bosnian Holocaust' story was fabricated by the Muslim side as part of
a wide-ranging and effective PR campaign. In December 1992, the Izetbegovic
authorities first claimed that there were 128,444 dead on the 'Bosnian' side
(including Croats and "Serbs loyal to the Bosnian Government"). According to
[ex-State Department official george] Kenney, this figure was cooked by
adding together the 17,466 confirmed dead until that time, and the 111,000
that the Muslims had already claimed as missing."
Kenney recalled the precise moment—on June 28, 1993—when Izetbegovic's
deputy minister of information, Senada Kreso, told journalists that "200,000
had died." He regarded that assertion as "an outburst of naive zeal," and
was taken aback when "the major newspapers and wire services quickly began
using these numbers, unsourced and unsupported." The figure eventually grew
to 250,000 fatalities by 1994, and has been peddled ever since without
serious challenge.
In reality, after an initial bout of heavy fighting (summer-fall 1992), from
1993 to mid-1995 there was a period of relative calm on most fronts in
Bosnia, interrupted by brief outbursts in isolated localities (Gorazde,
Bihac). Stories of mass murder and grand-scale atrocities, such as
"Srebrenica," have never been independently substantiated. On the basis of
different sources (ICRC, British military intelligence etc), my conclusion
back in 1996 was that "the war in Bosnia is unlikely to have resulted in
more than 70,000 deaths. Including Croatia/Krajina, the Yugoslav wars of
1991-95 have killed up to, but not more than, 100,000 people."
Over the past nine years I've had no reason to make any radical alteration
to this overall assessment. Even if Mr. Tokaca's current figure of 80,000
"verified" names of individual victims is accurate, after almost a decade I
stand corrected by 14 percent. President Clinton et al were wrong by more
than 300 percent. If the lie of the "Bosnian genocide" is eventually
unmasked in the coming year or two, by the same token we can expect the lie
of the "Kosovo genocide" to follow suit not too long thereafter (and if you
need a reminder of what a whopper that was, you can find it here). The truth
will out eventually, even if the political consequences of the lie—such as
dozens of destroyed Christian shrines, and hundreds of thousands of
Christians expelled or murdered by Muslims—are irreversible. The truth
exists; it is the lie that needs inventing.
Srpska Informativna Mreza
sim@antic.org
http://www.antic.org/
