Posted on 06/03/2005 6:24:48 AM PDT by OESY
No recount ever happened as you guess it did and by 1995 the war was way over.
Nevertheless, revelations of ethnic cleansing, combined with the C.I.A. and United Nations predictions, created expectations. Images of a killing field lingered, personified in grim photographs of skeletal Muslim men in Serbian concentration camps. That backdrop made it easy for Haris Silajdzic, then Bosnia's Foreign Minister, to give the first big boost in the number of deaths. In December 1992, he told journalists that there were 128,444 dead on the Bosnian side (induding Croats and Serbs loyal to the Bosnian Government). He evidently got the figure by adding together the 17,466 confirmed dead and the 111,000 that the Bosnian Institute of Public Health had estimated to be missing. An able politician, Silajdzic understood the benefit of apparent slaughter. In the West, it meant political support; in the Islamic world, much-needed donations to lubricate the Bosnian war machine.
At first, such high numbers didn't take. But on June 28, 1993 -- as near as I can pin it down -- the Bosnian Deputy Minister of Information, Senada Kreso, told journalists that 200,000 had died. Knowing her from her service as my translator and guide around Sarajevo, I believe that this was an outburst of naive zeal. Nevertheless, the major newspapers and wire services quickly began using these numbers, unsourced and unsupported (Mea culpa: I used the figure of 200,000 dead in articles and speeches for a while in 1993.) An inert press simply never bothered to learn the origins of the numbers it reported.
Today, Silajdzic, now the Prime Minister, routinely talks about genocide and the "Bosnian holocaust" with nary an eyebrow raised in his audience. But there was no holocaust. For Bosnia, an area slightly larger than Tennessee, to have suffered more than 200,000 deaths would have meant roughly 200 deaths per day, every day, for the three-plus years of war. But the fighting rarely, if ever, reached that level. After the Serbs carved out the areas they wanted in 1992, fighting declined steadily, reaching a virtual stalemate by autumn 1993. Now on the front lines, combatants often shoot past each other, tacitly understanding that in a low-intensity war nobody wants to get hurt.
Outright warfare, therefore, has probably resulted in deaths measured in the tens of thousands, induding civilians. If there were huge numbers of other dead, they would be accounted for only by systematic killing in concentration camps or the complete, as- yet-undiscovered extermination of entire villages.
Neither the International Committee of the Red Cross nor Western governments have found evidence of systematic killing. Nobody, moreover, has found former detainees of concentration camps who witnessed systematic killing. Random killing took place in the camps, but not enough to account for tens of thousand of dead. And, apart from the few well-known massacres nobody sees signs of missing villages, either.
When the Muslim is waging jihad, yes (which is what the Crusade was trying to fight off).
I see it this way - the Rodney King video showed what? Police brutality? Maybe but it did not show the a prbational and drunken King leading the police on a high speed chase.
PS: This video was not introduced as evidence against Milosevic.
Thanks for some sanity.
There is no name given for this alleged woman, nor name of the claimed 16-year-old killed.
Could it be Wesley told Ratko what to do in Srebrenica...???
;););)
The ever so tolerant muzzies have burned down 80-100 orthodox churches in kosovo.
So in other words if one side commits atrocities it's ok for the other?
Half-baked invective and two-wrongs-make-it-ok are "sanity"?
No, nor do extrapolating 25000 total dead on all sides to a "massacre" of 100,000 innocent Bosnian Muslims.
This was a sectarian civil war that NATO interfered with. There's plenty of genocide and ethnic cleansing to go around.
Where else in the world is there a conflict involving Muslims and Christians where the genocide is not mostly Muslim?
So maybe you can understand the reluctance to swallow whole the "Bosnian Massacre" claims.
Six murders on tape do not prove genocide.
The "another team" is a Muslim trying to push the number higher. This article and his comments were damage control by the Muslims after news got out elsewhere that the number often cited between 200,000 - 300,000 had been cut in half. The Muslims never said anything until there were Norwegian reports, and the spokesman is still trying to spin the number higher. The true numbers hadn't been finalized as of late fall when that was written - they said everything would be complete at the end of spring. Now it is the end of spring. I wonder what the final numbers are.
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