Read Our Monthly Magazine
And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system
July 11 is an international day of commemoration for the thirtieth anniversary of the Srebrenica Genocide, the largest mass killing in Europe since 1945. In mid-July 1995, over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) men and boys were murdered by the VRS, the army of Republika Srpska (RS), the statelet which Bosnian-Serbian nationalists, in conjunction with the Serbian government, had carved out of Bosnia-Herzegovina during the previous three years.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations and most states have now recognised Srebrenica as a genocide.
The RS leader, Radovan Karadžić, and VRS commander Ratko Mladić, who oversaw the massacre, are both serving life terms for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, which include Srebrenica.
The Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević, who instigated the genocidal conquest of Bosnia in 1992 after a campaign in Croatia in 1991, was facing similar charges when he died in ICTY custody in 2006.
Reform UK Tells Prospective Candidates Who Failed Vetting to Reapply Under New ‘Common Sense’ Rules
Individuals previously blocked from standing for Nigel Farage’s party have been told to reapply under new rules prioritising “freedom of expression”
Recognition and Denial
The international recognition of the “Srebrenica Genocide” appears to contrast with the denial of Israel’s current genocide in Gaza. Yet Srebrenica was also comprehensively denied at the time and continues to be denied by Serbia.
Basic knowledge of the killings, the intention of Serbian leaders to execute so many people, and the extent of Western complicity, all had to be painstakingly exposed over many years. Karadžić and Mladić were on the run for a decade and a half before being caught in 2008 and 2011.
It was not only the international trials and the excavation of the victims’ bodies (which the perpetrators had tried to hide) which has largely overcome the denial. The determined campaigning of women survivors has also played a crucial role; although women from Srebrenica were raped and murdered in 1995, most were bussed out while their menfolk, columns of whom tried to flee the Serbian forces, were hunted down and slaughtered – some in methodical executions after being forced to dig their own graves. The Mothers of Srebrenica have been fighting for justice ever since.
Equally, the Serbian nationalists were not the only ones responsible for the Srebrenica killings. In 1993, when Serbians were already threatening to overrun the town, in which thousands of Bosnian refugees were sheltering, the UN had proclaimed a “safe area” around it.
In 1995, a Dutch battalion, commanded by a multinational UN force based in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, was supposed to protect this. Yet when the VRS threatened to conquer the area, the UN failed to deploy sufficient force to prevent it.
It was Dutch peacekeepers who effectively handed over most of the men to the Serbians – causing national shame which later led the Netherlands Supreme Court to hold the state partially responsible for the killings – but Western governments, NATO commanders in Sarajevo and UN officials in New York were also to blame.
Srebrenica and the Denial of the Bosnian Genocide
While it is the ‘Srebrenica Genocide’ that is internationally recognised, the killings were the culmination of what most experts, including those at an international conference in Sarajevo last week, consider to be a larger Bosnian Genocide.
From April 1992, the Yugoslav National Army and paramilitary gangs, both under the effective control of Milošević’s Serbia, conquered much of Bosnia and largely removed the non-Serb (Bosniak and Croat) populations from the areas they annexed, through massacres, terror, systematic rape and cruelty. Much of the violence took place in concentration camps, while Serbian troops shelled and sniped at civilians in multiethnic Sarajevo, where a market massacre in 1994, the site of which I visited this week, killed 143 people.
This campaign amounted to genocide because the Serbians clearly intended to destroy the non-Serb communities in Bosnia, but the Serbo-Croat euphemism ‘etnicko ciscenje’, translated into English as ‘ethnic cleansing’, was adopted internationally and often used to avoid describing the Serbian campaign as genocide.
This term fitted the narrative, developed by Western leaders and media, that the Bosnian war was an inter-ethnic conflict in which all sides were more or less to blame. Yet although Croatian forces also attempted to remove Bosniaks from the areas they controlled, and Bosnian forces also committed war crimes, the Serbians began the genocidal war and were responsible for the vast majority of the atrocities. Western leaders, like Britain’s John Major and his foreign secretary Douglas Hurd, often denied this reality.
The Bosnian government brought a genocide case against Serbian-controlled Yugoslavia to the International Court of Justice in 1993, two years before the Srebrenica killings. Yet judges in the ICTY, in various subsequent trials, were reluctant to rule that ‘ethnic cleansing’ was genocide, and when the ICJ case was finally decided in 2007 (with Serbia-Montenegro as defendant since Yugoslavia had been dissolved), the court ruled that only in the case of Srebrenica could genocide be proved.
Even if many genocidal acts during the years from 1992 – the systematic pattern of killing, violent expulsions, rape and torture – could have been committed with genocidal intent, they said, only at Srebrenica, with its large-scale mass killing, could such intent be fully proved.
With this twisted logic – converting killing from a means of genocide into a criterion of intent – the ICJ managed to simultaneously recognise the Srebrenica Genocide and deny the Bosnian Genocide. This could be understood as a largely political decision, giving Srebrenica recognition to the Bosnians, while absolving the Serbians and especially Serbia as a state – which the West wanted to draw into the orbit of the EU and NATO – of responsibility for a larger genocide.
The campaign in 1992-93 was clearly led by Serbia, but Srebrenica could be pigeonholed as a Bosnian-Serbian crime, for which Serbia itself had only secondary responsibility.
International complicity in the Bosnian Genocide centred on the failure of the UN, NATO, the European Community and Western states – despite continuous interventions, which began in Croatia 1991, even before violence began in Bosnia – to stop Serbian and other atrocities.
The failure to honour the commitment in the Genocide Convention to “prevent” genocide was, Samantha Power famously argued, actually a “success” for US policy, since non-engagement was the policy. Denying “genocide” and talking about “ancient hatreds” were parts of a strategy to minimise Western involvement.
Eventually in 1995, after the emboldened Serbians took NATO soldiers captive as well as massacring Bosniaks, NATO finally bombed their positions above Sarajevo from which they had terrorised the city for three years, and US President Bill Clinton, worried about his re-election, gave Bosnia and Croatia sufficient support to push back Serbian forces and bring Milošević to the table.
However, in the 1996 Dayton settlement, Serbian nationalists got to keep Republika Srpska, established through genocide, as an entity within a loose new Bosnian federation. Today, its leader Milorad Dodik, with the support of the authoritarian regime in Serbia and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, threatens a new secession.