SREBRENICA DEAD DID NOT VOTE IN ELECTIONS

Contrary to the allegations of genocide deniers, those killed in the Srebrenica massacre DID NOT vote in the 1996 municipal elections in Srebrenica

Some of the most despicable genocide denial claims have been tirelessly circulated by Milivoje Ivanisevic (and his followers). This discredited pseudo-researcher and Serbian ultra-nationalist has, for example, claimed that "3,016 persons from the list of missing" voted in the 1996 Srebrenica elections.

In fact, none of the Srebrenica genocide victims voted in the 1996 elections

In the 1996 elections, which were held shortly after the 1995 genocide, local authorities simply used the list containing the names of all registered pre-war Srebrenica citizens. This does not mean that "dead people voted." According to Helge Brunborg, the Hague Tribunals' expert, at least 7,475 Bosniaks perished in the Srebrenica genocide. Under cross-examination in Blagojevic case, Brunborg (who speaks English as his Second Language) explained that by 1997, there were no missing people registered to vote:

If you would look at Table 1 on page 7 in the 2000 report, you will see that there were 5 -- on the ICRC list and PHR list were 5.712. On the ICRC list only 1.586. That makes 7.298, which is 101 less than the ICRC number that you quoted, 7.399. In addition, we had access to information that the ICRC did not have at that time, I believe, which is the voters' list, 1997 and 1998, which were used to check that missing people were -- that there were no survivors who registered to vote. And we also checked difficult cases where the data were incomplete with the 1991 census.... The only thing is the information from ICRC, that 6 persons were found to be alive. So we subtracted that number. (Court Transcript)

Furthermore, Brunborg explained:

"People who are missing and believed to be dead should not be able to vote. So when we had this complete list of people who were registered to vote in 1997 and 1998, we wanted to make a comparison to see if there were, in fact, people believed to be missing who were registered to vote. So we did a very careful comparison, and we found nine names that we believe are unique and that are appearing on both lists of missing persons and the list of voters. So there is an error somewhere. Either these are not really missing persons, they are survivors, or somebody misused their identities because they knew they were dead, so they misused their identities, perhaps to get extra -- additional political influence, to vote twice. Or third, there is a mix-up due to data problems and so on. But the conclusion is that the number was very small. Nine, that is less than -- that is about one-tenth of a per cent. To be on the safe side, we subtracted these names, although it is not certain that these are survivors.... We asked the ICRC whether they knew about people who had survived, who they later learned to be survivors and not dead on the list of missing persons since January 1997. And they told us there were six persons out of 7.000, but they would not reveal their identities to us. So to be on the safe side, we subtracted another six persons from the total number. We could not delete those from the list that was also submitted to the court, because we didn't know their identities. In this way we ended up with 7,475." (Court Transcript)

Asked "how reliable do you think this number of 7.475 missing persons is it?", Helge Brunborg responded: "We think that the number is very reliable as a minimum estimate... the number could easily be higher because there were records that we excluded to be on the safe side."

Latest DNA results support the higher figure of Srebrenica victims

As of July 2009, the DNA results of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) support an estimate of 8,100 Srebrenica genocide victims. So far, the identities of 6,186 genocide victims have been revealed by the DNA analysis. (Source: ICMP)