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CONTACT: Gregory Copley, 703-548-1070

"Official" Story of Srebrenica Casualty Number is Challenged by Experts

WASHINGTON, DC, September 18, 2003:
On the eve of the dedication of a monument to Muslims killed at Srebrenica,
in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 1995, a group which includes a former UN official,
intelligence experts, and journalists, released a statement challenging the
official alleged casualty number of 7,000 victims as "vastly inflated and
unsupported by evidence.".

They asserted that one-sided interventionist policies permitted al-Qaieda
forces and radical Islamists backed by the Iranian clerical government to
take root during the Bosnian war, which clouding the future of the region.
As well, they agreed that the "memorialization" of false numbers in the
monument actually appeared to be intended to perpetuate regional ethnic
hatred and distrust and to deliberately punish one of the victim groups in
the Bosnian civil war..

Former US President Bill Clinton is expected to attend and legitimize the
dedication of the monument at Srebrenica, which was constructed with using
one million in dollars of US Embassy funds at the request of High
Representative Paddy Ashdown. But former BBC journalist Jonathan Rooper,
who has researched the events in Srebrenica since 1995, says that the region
was a graveyard for Serbs as well as Muslims and that a monument to inflated
casualties on one side "serves neither truth nor the goal of
reconciliation.".

Phillip Corwin, former UN Civilian Affairs Coordinator in Bosnia during the
1990s, said: "What happened in Srebrenica was not a single large massacre of
Muslims by Serbs, but rather a series of very bloody attacks and
counterattacks over a three year period which reached a crescendo in July of
1995,." says Phillip Corwin former UN Civilian Affairs Coordinator in
Bosnia andMr Corwin is author of Dubious Mandate, an account of about his
experiences during the conflict. andHe points out that Srebrenica, which was
designated a safe zone, it was never demilitarized as it was claimed to be,
and that Muslim paramilitary leader Nasir Oric, who controlled Srebrenica,
launched repeated attacks on surrounding Serb villages.

He noted: "I was the United Nations's chief political officer in Bosnia the
day that Srebrenica fell. Coincidentally, it was the same day that the
Bosnian Government tried to assassinate me as I drove over Mount Igman on
the way to Sarajevo."

Intelligence expert expert and strategist Gregory Copley, President of the
International Strategic Studies Association and the ISSA's Balkan & Eastern
Mediterranean Policy Council, accusesd the US Ambassador David Donald Hays,
who serves as Ddeputy High Representative of Bosnia-Herzegovina, of using
the power of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) governing Bosnia
"to force Bosnian Serb elected officials to sign a fraudulent document
accepting the official version of events in Srebrenica. The leaders of the
Serbian RepublicRepublica Srpska [the predominantly Serbian province of
Bosnia-Herzegovina] invited the office of the High Representative to join
their investigation of the events in Srebrenica. Instead they were told they
were told to sign a statement drafted by OHR endorsing casualty figures they
publicly disagreed with."

Copley added: "It is significant in that the former US Clinton
Administration fought this war unquestioningly supporting only the Croat and
Muslim factions and disregarding the historic alliance of the Serbian
peoples with the US. Then, after the war, the Clinton Administration failed
to follow US tradition in helping to heal the wounds of war, but, rather,
perpetuated ethnic divisions and hatreds. This differs from the US role in
all other wars."

"Unfortunately, all of the policies and officials put in place in the region
by the Clinton Administration remain. The current Bush Administration has
neglected the Balkans and has, instead, allowed the Clinton policies to
continue, which has meant that divisive politics continue. This, then,
requires the ongoing commitment of US peacekeeping forces in both Bosnia and
in the Kosovo province of Serbia."

Copley added that, according to intelligence obtained from Islamist sources,
that the monument is was likely intended to become a shrine for radical
Islamists in Europe and site for annual pilgrimages.

He added: "Deputy High Representative Donald Hays forced the Republica
Srpska Government to issue a statement which accepted the radical Islamists'
version of the Srebrenica affair, despite the fact that the Office of High
Representative does not have any investigative capability of its own to make
a valid assumption on the matter. As well, the International Criminal
Tribunal on Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague - no friend of the Serbs - has
itself not completed its investigation of Srebrenica, and nor has the office
of the Government of Republica Srpska which has been working with the ICTY."

"Amb. Hays and OHR chief Paddy Ashdown forced the Republica Srpska statement
merely to ensure that the opening of the 'shrine' - to be attended by
Clinton - would vindicate Clinton Administration policies of support for the
radical Islamists."

Yossef Bodansky, who has written several books on the war in Yugoslavia and
also serves as Chief of Staff of the Subcomittee on Terrorism and
Unconventional WarfareResearch Director of ISSA, calls the 7,000 figure
"disinformation" and notes that "all independent forensic evidence points to
Muslim casualties in the hundreds, possibly the low hundreds. Continued
emphasis on such allegedly high numbers of Muslim deaths at Srebrenica also
obfuscates the Muslim murders in that city, earlier, of Serb civilians."
Bodansky also wrote extensively on the link between Osama bin Laden and the
Bosnian Islamists in numerous articles and special reports and three books,
including Offensive in the Balkans: the Potential for a Wider War as a
Result of Foreign Intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1995), Some Call it
Peace: Waiting for War in the Balkans (1996), and Bin Laden: The Man Who
Declared War on America (1999).

Rooper says that at least one thousand1,000 Serbs, mostly civilians, were
killed by forces led by Oric who did not bother to hide his crimes, even
showing videotapes of slaughtered Serbs to Western journalists.

Meanwhile a group of academic experts and journalists from the United
States, Canada,
Germany, France, Serbia, and the United Kingdom has been organized by
Professor Edward S. Herman of the University of Pennsylvania to examine the
evidence regarding events at Srebrenica in July 1995 and earlier, how the
media reported these events, and the political role of claims about
Srebrenica. It is expected that a report from this group will be available
in June 2004.

Rooper points out that the 40,000 inhabitants the UN used in July of 1995
before the capture of Srebrenica roughly matches the number of former
residents accounted for in the aftermath. A commander of the Muslim-
dominated Army of BiH (Bosnia-Herzegovina) later confirmed to parliament in
Sarajevo that 5,000 BiH troops escaped largely intact to Tuzla while the UN
registered some 35,632 civilian survivors.

While the capture of Srebrenica was reported in July 1995, as it unfolded,
an international outcry only took place a month later, after Madeleine
Albright, then US representative to the UN, held up a photo which she said
provided evidence that thousands of Muslim victims had been buried at field
near Nova Kasaba, 19 kilometers from Srebrenica. Excavations which took
place following the war, however, yielded 33 bodies at Nova Kasaba. Two
years after the event, a total of 400 bodies had been found at 20 sites near
Srebrenica, an area which had seen bloody fighting over a three year period.

Instead of acknowledging that there was no support for the original figures,
Rooper says a various means were used to prop up the official story.

--Spokesmen for the Clinton Administration suggested that Serbs might have
moved the bodies to other locations. Rooper points out that excavating,
transporting and reburying 7,000 bodies was "not only beyond the
capabilities of the thinly stretched, petrol-starved Bosnian Serb Army, but
would have been easily detected under intense surveillance from satellites
and geostationary drones.

--By 1998, thousands of bodies excavated from all across Bosnia were stored
at the Tuzla airport. Despite state of the art DNA testing, only 200 bodies
have been linked to Srebrenica.

--Around three thousand3,000 names on a list of Srebrenica victims compiled
by the Red Cross matched voters in the Bosnian election in 1996. "I pointed
out to the OSCE that there had either been massive election fraud or almost
half the people on the ICRC missing list were still alive," says Rooper.
"The OSCE finally responded that the voting lists had been locked away in
warehouses and it would not be possible for them to investigate."

The inflated Srebrenica statistics are part of a larger picture that
intelligence experts such as Bodansky and Copley find troubling. They say US
policy makers have been slow to recognize that Bosnia is viewed as a
strategic base for operations in Europe by al-Qaieda and the HeizboAllah.
In 1993, when the Clinton Aadministration was strongly backing the Muslim
President of Bosnia, Alija Izetbegovic, Osama Bin Ladin was regular visitor
to his office, according to Renate Flottau of the German weekly, Der
Spiegel. The Bosnian daily, Dani, reported that the Vienna Embassy of BiH
issued a passport to Bin Ladin in 1993.

As special report by Copley, issued Tuedsay, September 16. 2003. noteds that
BiH Bosnia-Herzegovina Ambassador Huso Zivalj, who issued the passport to
Bin -Ladin, later served as Bosnian Ambassador to the United Nations in
September 11. "It is becoming increasingly clear that the movement of
Zivalj to the New York post just before (and his departure just after) the
September 11,2001 attacks was not coincidental."

"To refer to US Bosnia policy as a success story is to disregard substantial
evidence to the contrary., iInstead of misplaced symbolism in Srebrenica, US
policy makers need to take a hard look at assumptions that which have guided
our US actions in the region," says Copley said.

Ends

Re: [A-List] Fw: Srebrenica Casualty Number is Challenged by Experts