Srebrenica Massacre - Opposition To The Description "genocide"

Opposition To The Description "genocide"

The ICTY's finding of genocide, as confirmed by the ICJ, has been disputed on a variety of grounds, evidential and theoretical. The number of the dead has been questioned as has the nature of their deaths. It has been alleged that considerably fewer than 8,000 were killed and/or that most of those killed died in battle rather than by execution. It has also been claimed that the interpretation of "genocide" is refuted by the survival of the women and children.

Sonja Biserko, president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, and Edina Bečirević, the Faculty of Criminalistics, Criminology and Security Studies of the University of Sarajevo have pointed to a culture of denial of the Srebrenica genocide in Serbian society, taking many forms and present in particular in political discourse, the media, the law and the educational system.

Serbian critics have seen the discrepancy between a figure of over 8,000 victims and the number of bodies found and identified as casting doubt on the "Western explanation" of the events; there were long delays in locating mass graves in the area and identifying the bodies in them.

In March 2005, Miloš Milovanović, a former commander of the Serb paramilitary unit Serbian Guard who represents the Serbian Democratic Party in the Srebrenica Municipal Assembly said that "The massacre is a lie; It is propaganda to paint a bad picture of the Serbian people. The Muslims are lying; they are manipulating the numbers; they are exaggerating what happened."

Serbian scepticism of events at Srebrenica has also been encouraged by Serbian state media.

The individuals and groups who have challenged the account of events at Srebrenica accepted by the ICTY include:

• Tomislav Nikolić, President of Serbia, stated on 2 June 2012 that "there was no genocide in Srebrenica. In Srebrenica, grave war crimes were committed by some Serbs who should be found, prosecuted and punished. It is very difficult to indict someone and prove before a court that an event qualifies as genocide."

• Milorad Dodik, President of Republika Srpska, stated in an interview with the Belgrade newspaper Večernje Novosti in April 2010 that "we cannot and will never accept qualifying that event as a genocide". Dodik disowned the 2004 Republika Srpska report acknowledging the scale of the killing and apologising to the relatives of the victims, alleging that the report had been adopted because of pressure from the international community. Without substantiating the figure, he claimed that the number of victims was 3,500 rather than the 7,000 accepted by the report, alleging that 500 listed victims were alive and over 250 people buried in the Potocari memorial centre died elsewhere. In July 2010, on the 15th anniversary of the massacre, Dodik declared that he did not regard the killings at Srebrenica as genocide, and maintained that "If a genocide happened then it was committed against Serb people of this region where women, children and the elderly were killed en masse" (referring to eastern Bosnia). In December 2010, Dodik condemned the Peace Implementation Council, an international community of 55 countries, for referring to the Srebrenica massacre as genocide.
• Gregory Copley, President of the International Strategic Studies Association (ISSA) and ISSA’s Balkan & Eastern Mediterranean Policy Council and one of the founding directors of Australia's grand strategy research organisation Future Directions International (FDI) described the 2004 Republika Srpska report as "a fraudulent document accepting the official version of events in Srebrenica" which US Ambassador Donald Hays, Deputy High Representative of Bosnia-Herzegovina, had used the power of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) governing Bosnia to force Bosnian Serb elected officials to sign.
• Srebrenica Research Group The Srebrenica Research Group, led by Edward S. Herman of the University of Pennsylvania, describes itself as a self-financed group of journalists and academic researchers who have reviewed the evidence relating to the capture of Srebrenica and compared the facts with the public portrayal of events. Members of the Group include journalist and publicist Jonathan Rooper, journalist George Szamuely, the writer and film-director George Bogdanich, Michael Mandel, Professor of International Law at York University in Toronto, the commentator on media coverage of conflict Dr. Philip Hammond of London South Bank University, the researcher and archivist Tim Fenton, the foreign policy writer David Peterson and Dr Milan Bulajic, former head of the Yugoslav State Commission on War Crimes. Advisors and collaborators include Phillip Corwin, former UN Civilian Affairs Coordinator in Bosnia, Carlos Martins Branco, Deputy Director of the UN monitoring organisation in Bosnia, UNMO, Diana Johnstone, author of Fool's Crusade: Yugoslavia NATO and Western Delusions, Professor Vera Vratusa, the researcher George Pumphrey, the author Milivoje Ivanisevic, the military forensic specialist Dr. Zoran Stankovic, and the forensic archeologist Dr. Srboljub Zivanovic.
• Phillip Corwin, former UN Civilian Affairs Coordinator in Bosnia, advisor and contributor to the work of the Srebrenica Research Group and contributor to the ISSA Special Report, stated "What happened in Srebrenica was not a single large massacre of Muslims by Serbs, but rather a series of very bloody attacks and counterattacks over a three year period."
• Diana Johnstone, author of Fool's Crusade: Yugoslavia NATO and Western Delusions and adviser and contributor to the work of the Srebrenica Research Group and the Srebrenica Historical Project. argued in an article "Srebrenica Revisited" published by CounterPunch, an American newsletter, that initial estimates of the number of victims may have been exaggerated. She claimed that pointing to uncertainty about the number of victims did not constitute denial of the massacre as such nor show lack of respect for the victims.
• Living Marxism – the British academic David Campbell has written of the now defunct British magazine that "LM’s intentions are clear from the way they have sought to publicise accounts of contemporary atrocities which suggest they were certainly not genocidal, and perhaps did not even occur."
• Lewis MacKenzie, former commander of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in Bosnia, was continuing to challenge the description of genocide in 2009 on the grounds firstly that the number of men and boys killed had been exaggerated by a factor of 4 and secondly that transfer of the women and children by bus contradicted the notion of genocide – the women would have been killed first if there had been an intent to destroy the group. Writing in the Journal of Military and Strategic Studies (Vol. 12, Issue 1, Fall 2009), MacKenzie expressed his opinion without reference to the detailed arguments published by the ICTY Trial and Appeal Chambers in the Krstic case judgements published several years earlier and confirmed by the ICJ since.
• La Nation, a bi-monthly Swiss newspaper, published a series of articles claiming that 2,000 soldiers were killed in the "pseudo-massacre" in Srebrenica. The Society for Threatened Peoples and Swiss Association Against Impunity filed a joint suit against La Nation for genocide denial. Swiss law prohibits genocide denial.