"2. Prison and rape camps
2.1. In August 1992, ITN broadcast a report on the Omarska and Trnopolje camps, which included the arresting image of a highly emaciated man, Fikret Alic, standing at the front of a crowd of men behind a barbed wire fence. The commentary did not describe Trnopolje as a concentration camp, but throughout the world the ITN report was seen as confirmation of earlier stories (Newsday 19 July 1992; 2 August 1992) about Serb concentration camps by the American journalist, Roy Gutman. Gutman later admitted that he had made his claims on the basis of hearsay information. In addition, WTN - which distributed the ITN pictures worldwide - described Trnopolje as a concentration camp in the information despatched with the pictures.
2.2. In 1997, Thomas Deichmann’s article in a publication called Living Marxism claimed that the ITN report on Trnopolje had seriously misrepresented the nature of the camp. According to the article, the ITN rushes, which had been leaked to him, showed that the camp was not fully surrounded by a fence, let alone by barbed-wire, and that the “prisoners” were free to leave if they chose to do so. ITN has sued LM, but the case has yet to come to court. Extracts from the rushes are now available on an Internet site for all to see. (Deichmann’s article had previously appeared in several European publications - only in the UK has legal action prevented open discussion of the issues raised.)
2.3. Pero Curguz, a regional Red Cross manager stationed at Trnopolje during the operation of the centre, was interviewed by British journalists in August 1992. He told them that many of the people there had come to the camp of their own free will for protection. He said also that during the entire time of the operation of the camp, no barbed-wire fence had been erected.
2.4. Even if Trnopolje is discounted, serious allegations remain about a number of other Serb camps, notably Omarska. It seems likely that conditions in these camps were generally poor and that some atrocities took place. But an ICRC report published in August 1992 gave details of camps run by all sides; the Serbs did not have proportionately more than the others. Tadeusz Mazoviecki, UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights, said in his 1994 report that “...As of December 31, 1993, there were 5,500 detainees on the active register. According to reliable estimates around 40% of detainees are held by Bosnian Croat authorities, 25% by the Government (Muslim) and 13% by the Bosnian Serbs and the remainder by the forces of the so-called ‘autonomous’ province of western Bosnia”. There is little evidence to suggest that one side’s camps were better than another’s. But with the media highlighting Bosnian Serb-run camps and largely ignoring the others, non-Serb camps existed for periods of several years whereas the Bosnian-Serb camps had been closed down. It is also worth noting that ITN was invited, under challenge, to go to the camps by Radovan Karadzic; the Croats and Muslims did not extend similar facilities. Claims that substantial numbers of people were held in camps (Muslims imprisoned 117,000; Serbs imprisoned 40,000) and killed (Muslims 12,000+; Serbs 6,000) have never been substantiated and look like little more than crude propaganda.
2.5. One of the most influential pieces of evidence put forward to substantiate the argument that the Serbs had committed far more atrocities than the other sides was a CIA report, leaked to Roger Cohen of The New York Times in 1994, which claimed that 90% of all atrocities committed in the early stages of the war were committed by Serbs. The newspaper did not give details of the methods used to determine the ethnicity of perpetrator and victim; nor did it reveal how many atrocities were involved; nor did it specify the period covered by the report. It has been deduced that much of the information in the report was based on satellite data - but even the best satellite photographs would show no distinction between Serbs, Croats and Muslims, groups that cannot generally be distinguished from one another in terms of
appearance face-to-face, let alone from overhead satellite photographs able to determine individual items only if larger than six inches in diameter.
2.6. In the late autumn of 1992 the world was horrified by reports that the Serbs had set up a chain of rape camps in Bosnia, and that more than 50,000 Bosnian women had been raped. This was compounded by a communique issued at the EC summit in Edinburgh in December 1992, by a UN resolution, and by Lawrence Eagleburger’s naming of “war criminals”. Governments expressed grave concern and aid agencies sprang into action. But no such camps were found by those who bothered to look. Ann Leslie of The Daily Mail could find only a single possible rape victim, despite spending two weeks searching in the relevant area. Marie Stopes staff, sent to support rape victims, found themselves unneeded and ended up giving advice on family planning - and even on sewing. International agencies now say privately that they have no evidence whatsoever to support the rape camp allegations.
2.7. The story was, however, lent credibility by the EC Investigating team, headed by Dame Anne Warburton. After returning from a fact-finding tour in January 1993 she gave an interview to The Times which avoided all detail but appeared to give general endorsement to the claims. On 4 January The Independent reported that “systematic rape camps” “had been well-authenticated by Dame Anne Warburton”, who estimated 20,000 cases of rape. In fact, a dissenting member of the investigation team, Simone Veil (a former French Minister and President of the European Parliament) revealed that the estimate was based on interviews with only four victims, two women and two men. An inquiry by the UN Commission on Human Rights soon presented a more moderate estimate: in its report published on 10 February 1993, the Commission refrained from giving an official total, but mentioned a figure of 2,400 victims, based on 119 documented cases. The report concluded that Muslims, Croats and Serbs had been raped, with Muslims making up the largest number of victims.
2.8. The EC’s Committee on Women’s Rights held hearings on the Warburton findings on 17 and 18 February 1993. It concluded by rejecting the Warburton estimate of 20,000 Muslim rapes because of the lack of documented evidence and testimony. The Annex to the UN Commission of Experts’ Report also dismisses the Warburton figure - though, curiously, the Commission’s Final Report found it credible.
2.9. The Bosnian government was able to provide the UN Commission of Experts with data on 126 cases of rape.
2.10. Along with the credibility given to the story by Western politicians came a blizzard of media coverage. In early January pictures of “rape babies”, a few months old, were published. Not even the impossibility of the arithmetic could detract from that story (the war at that point had been under way for some seven to eight months). British Minister Tim Yeo announced that special dispensation would be made for the adoption in the UK of such Bosnian children, but the offer was never taken up. In addition, absurd arguments were put into the mouths of Bosnian Serbs, and then passed on without criticism - for example, that Bosnian Serbs were making Muslim women pregnant so that there would be more “ethnically-pure” Serb babies. The fact that the ‘mothers’ were Muslim seemed to escape attention.
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Can I remove a game from "My games" once defeated?
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