Srebrenica Massacre - Analyses

Analyses

Theodor Meron, the presiding judge of the Appeals Chamber, stated:

By seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the 40,000 Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general. They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity.

In February 2007 the International Court of Justice (ICJ) concurred with the ICTY judgement, stating:

The Court concludes that the acts committed at Srebrenica falling within Article II (a) and (b) of the Convention were committed with the specific intent to destroy in part the group of the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina as such; and accordingly that these were acts of genocide, committed by members of the VRS in and around Srebrenica from about 13 July 1995.

According to the UK-based Bosnian Institute:

To say that genocide took place 'only' in Srebrenica in July 1995 flies in the face of earlier judicial rulings. Four international judgments in the especially well-argued cases of Nikola Jorgic, Novislav Djajic, Djuradj Kusljic, and Maksim Sokolovic clearly confirm that genocide took place in several municipalities outside of Srebrenica in 1992. All four trials were conducted in Germany — at the request of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) — to ease the caseload of ongoing trials at The Hague. All the relevant appeals have long been exhausted, so that judgments in these cases are final and binding.