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  That is exactly how the sponsors of the "Srebrenica Remembrance Day" -- submitted to the Canadian House of Commons last month -- want it to be:
  Whereas the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, located in The Hague, unanimously decided in the case of Prosecutor v. Krstić that the Srebrenica Massacre was genocide [...]
  The trouble is that the event known to the bill's sponsors as the "Srebernica genocide" was no such thing. The contention that as many as 8,000 Muslims were killed has no basis in available evidence; it is not an "estimate" but a political construct. The magnitude of casualties at Srebrenica and the context of events have been routinely misrepresented in official reports by the pro-Muslim governments, quasi-non-governmental institutions, and the media. <?xml:namespace prefix = o />
  The Facts -- During the Bosnian war between May 1992 and July 1995, several thousand Muslim men lost their lives in Srebrenica and its surroundings. Most of them died in July of 1995 when the enclave fell unexpectedly to the Bosnian Serb Army and the Muslim garrison attempted a breakthrough. Some escaped to the Muslim-held town of Tuzla, 38 miles to the north. Many were killed while fighting their way through; and many others were taken prisoner and executed by the Bosnian Serb army.
  The exact numbers remain unknown, disputed, and misrepresented. With 8,000 executed and thousands killed in the fighting, there should have been huge gravesites and satellite evidence of both executions, burials, and any body removals. The UN searches in the Srebrenica vicinity, breathlessly frantic at times, produced two thousand bodies. They included those of soldiers killed in action -- both Muslim and Serb -- both before and during July 1995.
  The Numbers Game -- In the documents of the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague (ICTY) there is no conclusive breakdown of casualties. That a war crime did take place, that hundreds of Muslim prisoners were killed, is undeniable. The number of its victims remains forensically and demographically unverified, however. According to the former BBC reporter Jonathan Rooper, "from the outset the numbers were used and abused" for political purposes. Over the years it has been held to be highly significant that original ballpark estimates for the number who might have been massacred at Srebrenica corresponded closely to the 'missing' list of 7,300 compiled by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Rooper says. But the early estimates were based on nothing more than the simple combination of an estimated 3,000 men last seen at the UN base at Potocari and an estimated 5,000 people reported 'to have left the enclave before it fell':
  The last census results for Srebrenica, from 1991, counted 37,211 inhabitants in Srebrenica and the surrounding villages, of which 27,118 were Muslims (72.8 percent) and 9,381 Serbs (25.2 percent). Displaced persons from Srebrenica registered with the World Health Organization and Bosnian government in early August 1995 totaled 35,632. With 3,000 Muslim men who reached Tuzla "without their families being informed" we come to the figure of over 38,000 survivors. The Hague Tribunal's own estimates of the total population of the Srebrenica enclave before July 1995 -- notably that made by Judge Patricia Wald -- give 40,000 as the maximum figure. The numbers don't add up.
  Cui bono? -- On 11 July, 1995, the Muslim garrison was ordered to evacuate the town which the Serbs entered unopposed. Local Deputy Director of UN Monitors, Carlos Martins Branco, wrote in 2004 ("Was Srebrenica a Hoax?") that Muslim forces did not even try to take advantage of their heavy artillery because "military resistance would jeopardize the image of 'victim,' which had been so carefully constructed, and which the Muslims considered vital to maintain."
  The G-Word -- The term "genocide" is even more contentious than the exact circumstances of Srebrenica's fall. Local chief of UN Monitors, Carlos Martins Branco, noted that if there had been a premeditated plan of genocide,
  instead of attacking in only one direction, from the south to the north -- which left the hypothesis to escape to the north and west, the Serbs would have established a siege in order to ensure that no one escaped. The UN observation posts to the north of the enclave were never disturbed and remained in activity after the end of the military operations. There are obviously mass graves in the outskirts of Srebrenica as in the rest of ex-Yugoslavia where combat has occurred, but there are no grounds for the campaign which was mounted, nor the numbers advanced by CNN. The mass graves are filled by a limited number of corpses from both sides, the consequence of heated battle and combat and not the result of a premeditated plan of genocide, as occurred against the Serbian populations in Krajina, in the Summer of 1995, when the Croatian army implemented the mass murder of all Serbians found there.
  Yet it was on the basis of this definition that in August 2001, the Tribunal found Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic guilty of "complicity in genocide." Even if the unproven figure of "8,000" is assumed, it affected less than one-half of one percent of Bosnia's Muslim population in a locality covering one percent of its territory. On such form, the term "genocide" loses all meaning and becomes a propaganda tool rather than a legal and historical concept. On that form, America's NATO ally Turkey -- a major regional player in today's Balkans -- certainly committed genocide in northern Cyprus in 1974. On that form, no military conflict ever can be genocide-free.
  Because of the manner in which international criminal law is currently formulated, the threshold of proof required to secure a conviction for genocide is actually lower than it is for crimes against humanity. To secure a conviction for crimes against humanity the ICTY prosecution must prove that the acts were "widespread or systematic." No such condition applies for genocide. Moreover, as British analyst John Laughland points out, crimes against humanity can be committed only against civilians, whereas genocide -- as redefined in the case of Srebrenica -- can include the killing of military personnel as well. In other words, spontaneous or disparate acts involving the killing of military personnel can be classified as "genocide." This creates ample room for propagandistic abuse of the term.
  Srebrenica as a Postmodernist Totem -- Laughland contends that the myth of the "Srebrenica Genocide" is essential to a program of international interventionism, based on weak legal reasoning and disregard for due process, of which the Serbs happen to be the guinea-pigs. In his view, Srebrenica has been raised to the status it now enjoys because its fall represented a defeat not only for the Bosnian Muslims but also for the "international community" and its policy of global interventionism:
  Srebrenica was important -- at least for the supporters of interventionism -- because the UN was there, not just because it was a Muslim enclave. The United Nations as an institution, it must be remembered, had embarked in the 1990s on an aggressive policy of military, political and judicial interventionism in both Iraq and Yugoslavia. It continued to apply the highly intrusive sanctions regime against Iraq throughout the decade and into the 21st century, and of course was happy to become the administrator of Kosovo after 1999. Its own credibility, and that of the states which dictated its policies, was destroyed when the enclave fell.
  The activists of judicial and military supra-nationalism, Laughland points out, were therefore determined to make the genocide charge stick somewhere. "Genocide" offers them two key legal advantages in pursuit of the goal of creating a new international system no longer based on state sovereignty. The first is the low threshold of proof mentioned above. The second legal advantage of genocide -- from the point of view of the project of creating a system of supranational coercive criminal law -- is that genocide, unlike crimes against humanity, is the subject of a binding international treaty, the 1948 Genocide Convention.
  The importance of the existence of a treaty, as opposed to the existence of a norm in mere "customary international law" -- i.e. whatever judges or even academics say they think the law is -- was illustrated with the landmark ruling in the British House of Lords against General Pinochet, issued on 24 March, 1999, (the day the bombs started raining down on Yugoslavia). Activists for universal jurisdiction ratione materiae were very excited by this ruling because it seemed to confirm that even heads of state could be put on trial when certain kinds of crimes were alleged against them. ... Srebrenica, then, is an existential issue, not as much for Republika Srpska as for those activists who seek to consolidate once and for all that outcome which the former ICTY Prosecutor, Louise Arbour, said she had achieved in 1999: 'We have passed from an era of cooperation between states to an era in which states can be constrained.'
  The 'Srebrenica massacre' is part of a dominant culture discourse that goes like this: We people in the advanced democracies have reached a new moral plateau, from which we are both able and have a duty both to judge others and to impose our 'values' when necessary. The others, on a lower moral plateau, must be watched carefully, because unlike us, they may commit 'genocide.' It is remarkable how 'genocide' has become fashionable, with more and more 'genocide experts' in universities, as if studying genocide made sense as a separate academic discipline… The subliminal message in the official Srebrenica discourse is that because 'we' let that happen, 'we' mustn't let 'it' happen again, ergo, the United States should preventively bomb potential perpetrators of 'genocide'.
  But Why? -- Questioning the received elite class narrative on "Srebrenica" is a good and necessary endeavor. The accepted Srebrenica story, influenced by war propaganda and uncritical media reports, is neither historically correct nor morally satisfying. The relentless Western campaign against the Serbs and in favor of their Muslim foes -- which is what "Srebrenica" is really all about -- is detrimental to the survival of our culture and civilization. It seeks to give further credence to the myth of Muslim blameless victimhood, Serb viciousness, and Western indifference, and therefore weaken our resolve in the global struggle euphemistically known as "war on terrorism." The former is a crime; the latter, a mistake.