An interesting study

I remember the frenetic comparisons to the Holocaust when the US went in to Bosnia. I remember the somber predictions that hundreds of thousands of people were buried in mass graves. I remember looking and looking and looking for those graves...and them finding none week after week. Turns out, as pointed out by Jr. Woodchuckette, there were a couple. I went back and used some interesting key words to find them.
The most fascinating thing I found was the changes. One of the early reports on the mass graves they found in regard to the most notorious incidents was the 33,000 people they were going to find at Srebrenica. By the time they got to the indictment it was "over 7000" ( http://www.un.org/icty/indictment/english/mla-ai021010e.htm paragraph 15).
This says something very interesting about me. As the frenzied screams of hundreds of thousands dying receded into nothing, a single place losing between 5000 and 7500 people, depending on whose numbers you believe, becomes something that is forgotten and thought of as unimportant.
This also says something about viewing the media that I know but sometimes forget. I am sure someone has written a book on it and it has a fancy name. For convenience sake I will refer to it as the Tilgath-Pileser principle.
That principle references a king from the 10th or 11th century BC who in his Stela made some claims that...well, to be blunt, modern scholars question. They claim he exaggerated his claims in order to make himself look better. When he says he battled an "army of the Ammonites" they claim the Ammonites had less than 100 people and his account might mean he killed 3 people gathering firewood. In other words, grossly inflated claims lead to a questioning of the entire claims made by him. When he says he conquered "all the land to the river Tiber" they infer he means a small creek that flows from it and is 100 miles closer to his city than the inference drawn...so while his words are LITERALLY true, the INFERENCE drawn from the claims is, in his case, deliberately misleading.
So when the claims going in inferred that every step would be on the burial ground of thousands of people (and even today estimates range from less than 500 to over 200,000....and that is not a misprint, they range that far according to some of the websites I found) in Bosnia and day after day it turned out they didn't, my attention turned elsewhere and I missed out on this one that was found. Shame on me for that and for allowing myself to fall prey to the false expectations by media usage of the Tilgath-Pileser principle.
For your entertainment and edification (?) here are a few of the more useful sites I found:


http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/berserk/graves_65.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/876084.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1423551.stmhttp://www.un.org/icty/indictment/english/mla-ai021010e.htmurope/1423551.stm
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/4B775448-39AA-41C7-A01A-E6164D3D16F9.htm
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/1998/1209/bosnia.html
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/07/23/bosnia.grave/index.html
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/journalism/nelson/rohde/p-11162.html
http://www.gendercide.org/case_bosnia.html
http://www.balkan-archive.org.yu/politics/war_crimes/srebrenica/linda.html
http://www.skeptictank.org/hs/manydead.htm