Tape questions

In my last post, I asked a few questions relating to the videotape that was shown at the Milošević trial last week. Some of them have now been answered by Nataša Kandić, the human rights lawyer who brought the tape to light, in an interview with Senad Hadžifejzović of Bosnian TV Hayat during his news show Saturday night. (Additional information can be found in an article in today's Observer by Tim Judah and Daniel Sunter that explains the trajectory of the tape from its production all the way to the courtroom and TV.) Kandić said Del Ponte's reference to "additional tapes" that would be shown at The Hague was in fact to additional footage on the same tape, which runs to around two hours. One bit shows Legija and the Scorpion guy discussing executions near Cazin, where they were "fighting" on the side of renegade Muslim warlord Fikret Abdić. (Their talk about the "delivery of packages" leaves little to the imagination.) One important bit of information Kandić gave was that the prisoners from Srebrenica were brought all the way to Trnovo, where some sort of military operation -- probably diversionary -- was taking place, in order for them to appear as casualties of fighting rather than execution. (I'm not sure to what extent this would apply to other prisoners who were brought for execution to other locations around Srebrenica.)

What becomes clear from all this is that the Scorpions seem to have been a highly effective killing machine -- while I'm weary of comparisons with the Holocaust, they do appear as some sort of roaming Einsatzgruppe that would go wherever their services were needed.