With the month of genocide denial moratorium over, I can finally post about this. And with the 20th anniversary of Srebrenica just coming up, it seems particularly suitable.

Edward Herman, as you may know, is most well known for co-authoring Manufacturing Consent with Noam Chomsky. Somewhat less known is that he also denies both the Rwandan Genocide and Srebrenica Massacre happened.

I may do a post on Rwanda at some point, but for now I want to focus on and refute this article from 2010, written for the 15th Anniversary of Srebrenica. While it's mostly about the Fall of Yugoslavia, it also contains a lot of general polemicising by Herman to make his argument look thicker in terms of substance than it actually is: I'll pick this up if it's relevant, but if it's not or I just don't know enough about the topic, I'll leave it.

The regular annual focus of attention on this particular tragedy and violence calls for an explanation. After all, there is no such annual memorial in the West as regards the Sabra-Shatila killings of several thousand Palestinians on September 16-18, 1982, although these were killings of civilians, whereas the Bosnian Muslims killed at Srebrenica were almost exclusively military-aged men, mostly soldiers.

So apparently military-aged men cannot possibly be civilians? Anyone male between about 14 and 60 is fair game in war? Also, the VRS (Bosnian Serb Army) didn't make much of an effort to keep to this 'military age' standard; it's hard to get a certain age from exhumations, but several bodies could be identified as being 12 or 13 at the oldest. It's possible some could have been as young as 8. The other end is harder to tell, but range of estimates makes it very possible that some were in their seventies or eighties. Also, analysis of the bodies found the mass grave at Kozluk showed some of the victims to be amputees, who I think we can safely assume were probably not capable of being soldiers regardless of age.

Also, there's a more basic problem of numbers with such a claim. There were only around 6,000 ARBiH (Bosnian Army) soldiers in Srebrenica (though many of these were soldiers in name only, not having any training, weapons, or even uniforms in some cases). More than 3,000 of them survived the attempt to break through to Tuzla. Therefore, the number of soldiers killed in the massacre was still less than 3,000 at the most, making them necessarily a minority of the ~8,000 victims.

Also, just one month after the Srebrenica massacre the Croatian military invaded the Krajina area, killing several thousand, including several hundred women and children, and turned some 250,000 Serbs into refugees, the largest case of ethnic cleansing in the Balkan wars.

I'll start with the slightly more defensible figure - most estimates put the number of Serbs made refugees by Operation Storm at 150,000-200,000. 250,000 is a very high estimate, though close enough that I can't say for certain it's wrong, but it's still an example of Herman's abuse and bait-and-switch of figures.

Putting the number killed at "several thousand", by contrast, is nonsense. Even Serbian state TV put the number of Serb civilians killed in Storm at 1,192. ICTY put it at just 324.

He also neglects to mention that a similar number of non-Serbs were ethnically cleansed from the same area in 1991-93, which, while not justifying Storm, is a pretty important piece of context.

A European Parliament resolution of January 15, 2009, which institutionalized an annual "day of commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide," mentions the "deportations of thousands of women, children and elderly people" from Srebrenica, but nowhere does it officially condemn or call for the memorialization of the deportation of 250,000 Serbs from the Krajina.

He's playing bait and switch with the statistics here, portraying the number of refugees as the number deported, which of course is not the same thing. The ICTY judgement for leading Croatian generals involved in Storm puts the number of those actually deported (as opposed to fleeing out of fear of the fighting, or because the RSK told them to leave) at simply "more than 20,000".

Admittedly, 8,000 is a large number. But 250,000 Serb refugees is a larger number.

Yes, but 8,000 isn't a number of refugees, it's a number of deaths. And not just any deaths, but systematic killings. Really not the same thing.

Apart from its selectivity, there is also a question of the accuracy of that large number, 8,000. There has been a steady stream of inflated, sometimes ludicrously inflated, claims of target-inflicted deaths in the Yugoslav wars. From 1993 onward the implausible and unverified Bosnian Muslim claim of 200-300,000 victims was uncritically accepted and institutionalized in the Western mainstream media. It was undermined in 2003-2007 by a pair of studies sponsored by the ICTY itself and the Norwegian government, both of which found total deaths on all sides, including soldiers, to be on the order of 100,000.

The higher figures were being pushed by UN figures like Cherif Bassiouni more so than by the Bosnian Muslim government. In fact, by near the end of the war, Bosniak (Bosnian Muslims' preferred name for themselves) estimates from the Bosnian Institute for Public Health, and Bosniak academic Mustafa Imamovic were giving figures along the lines of 150,000 deaths.

Also, people get estimates of body counts wrong. Early estimates of the Holocaust death toll from people like Reitlinger and Hilberg are now widely considered too low. Nothing new, and too high figures being reported by the media are just as explainable, if not more so, by general sensationalism. For the record, the media have often reported high figures for the Operation Storm refugees as well (though not quite as high as Herman).

But the mainstream media used the word "genocide" 323 times in describing what happened to the Kosovo Muslims, versus 80 times for the Iraq sanctions, which involved 200 times as many civilian deaths, and they used it only 17 times for deaths in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which involved over a thousand times more deaths than in Kosovo.

I can't claim to know that much about any of these topics and the accuracy of Herman's figures, but I do know that intent and motive is a crucial part of genocide that Herman is omitting in this. Crucially, you have to be targeting a particular ethnic/religious group of people. Genocide is not simply killing a lot of people, and there are plenty of instances of huge killings that generally aren't referred to as genocide, such as the Rape of Nanking.

In fact, the 8,000 is now taken as possibly an underestimate -- the EU resolution of January 15, 2009 speaks of "more than 8,000" and this is commonplace. It will be recalled that the initial 9-11 estimate of deaths from the New York City Trade Center attack -- 6,886 -- fell subsequently to 2,749, a decline of 60 percent.

6,886 was the initial number reported missing after 9/11, not dead.

The figure for Muslim dead in Bosnia fell from some 250,000 in 1992-3 to fewer than 100,000 today, a fall of well over 60 percent.

These are estimates of total deaths, not just Muslims.

But Srebrenica's number stays the same -- not because it is based on evidence, but because it is so central and useful a political construct, and is repeated by members of the establishment with the assurance of true believers.

Yeah, all genocide deniers say something similar.

The 8,000 is sustained in part because the follow-up list of missing persons eventually assembled was done by means of an appeal to the Bosnian Muslim population to come forward with names of the missing. Again, by the continuing miracle, this list still approximates 8,000. But it was not collected on any kind of scientific basis, and it has been found that some of the names are of men who died before July 1995, quite a few seem to have voted in the 1996 election

Herman gives no source for such a claim, though I have heard the claim that a couple of thousand Srebrenica victims were listed as voting in local elections in early 1996. But what that actually tells us is the completely non-shocking revelation that Republika Srpska (the Serb breakaway state in Bosnia, now one half of Bosnia's double-entity system), just a few months after the end of the war, didn't have updated voter lists and anti-electoral fraud mechanisms. Dr Helge Brunborg analysed updated voting lists from 1997 and 1998 for ICTY, and found that the total number of listed Srebrenica missing appearing on those voting lists was nine - and as he pointed out, this could also just be voter fraud, or simply an administrative error.

and the number has never been sustained by forensic evidence. As late as 2001 the ICTY had only located some 2,100 bodies in the Srebrenica area, not many identified or shown to have been July 1995 Srebrenica victims.

I felt I had to put these astoundingly stupid four words in bold. Herman, writing an article on an event that happened just 15 years earlier, is quoting figures and research from 9 years earlier. Does it not occur to him that more research might have been done since then?

As a matter of fact, it has. I don't know exactly what the "exhumation count" was in 2010, when Herman is writing, but by 2012 it was between 6,500 and 7,000.

(cont. in comments below)