BOSNIAN WAR DEAD MYTH DEBUNKED

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.