Srebrenica Genocide Denial Under Auspices of Serbian Army and Ministry of Defence
For Thursday, April 10, the promotion has been scheduled, on the premises of the Serbian Army Centre, of the book “The Srebrenica Fraud”, authored by Ratko Škrbić, who denies the Srebrenica genocide and the facts established in the judgments of the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the judgment of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina vs. Serbia.The Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) has demanded that the Minister of Defence, Nebojša Rodić, and the Chief of the General Staff, Ljubiša Diković, prevent the aforementioned assembly from gathering on the premises of a state institution, thus not only showing respect for the victims of the most serious crime committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia in the wars waged during the nineteen-nineties, but also demonstrating that the Republic of Serbia respects its international obligations.
It was stated in the announcement of the book promotion that Colonel Ratko Škrbić is a “renowned expert in military techniques and, besides having experience on the front lines as a member of the Republic of Srpska Army, has held a class on strategy at the Military Academy. As a defence witness before the ICTY in the Srebrenica cases of Miletić and Tolimir, the author had access to the Prosecution’s invaluable and voluminous material relating to the events in Srebrenica in July 1995. “
However, the testimony of Ratko Škrbić as an expert defence witness in the case of Tolimir was not accepted. Namely, in his testimony given before the ICTY, Škrbić claimed that he drew the conclusion, on the basis of the “monitoring of the movement of the Bosniak population during the war”, that the number of 7,000 killed could not be correct and that “anyone who has basic mathematical knowledge” would be able to come to the same conclusion. The Trial Chamber, however, concluded that, apart from military training, he had no additional education and that he “apparently lacks expertise in the very matter he is trying to prove”. The Chamber also challenged his methodology as non-existent and contradictory, his sources as unclear, and the report as non-structured with “only two footnotes”. The Chamber finally concluded that the testimony of Ratko Škrbić apparently did not meet the minimum standards of reliability […] “due to the serious shortcomings in the methodology used by the witness, who lacks the relevant expertise, together with his questionable motives”.
During the cross-examination, Škrbić agreed that, during the writing of his book “Srebrenica – Genocide Over Truth”, in which he also denies the commission of the genocide, he did not consider key evidence, such as the DNA analyses conducted at the time of the writing of the book, which established that over 5,000 bodies of Bosnian Muslims were related to Srebrenica, the intercepted conversation in which General Beara complains to General Krstić that he had “3,500 parcels left” which needed to be “distributed”, or the combat report made by Colonel Vinko Pandurević, which stated that 3,000 prisoners had been brought to the area of responsibility of the Zvornik Brigade and that there was no one who could keep guard over them.
