You are currently browsing the tag archive for the 'Srebrenica' tag.
After two years of hearings, Bosnia’s national court this afternoon passed its first verdict involving charges of genocide, and its first verdict pertaining to crimes committed during the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. Hilmo Vučinić, the presiding judge and only Bosnian national on the three judge panel, ruled that seven members of the Army of the Republika Srpska [VRS] and the Republika Srpska Special Military Police [RSMUP] are guilty of committing the gravest crime punishable under international law: genocide.
In July 1995, Milenko Trifunović, Brane Džinić, Aleksandar Radovanović, Slobodan Jakovljević, Branislav Medan, and Petar Mitrović, as members of the Second Šekovići Police Detachment of the RSMUP commanded by Miloš Stupar, participated in the capture, detention and extermination of over 1,000 Bosniak men and boys escaping the VRS attack on the UN Srebrenica safe area.
On July 12 the Šekovići Detachment was deployed along a road leading from the town of Bratunac to Srebrenica. There, the detachment attacked a column of Bosniaks fleeing Srebrenica, forcing a large number to surrender by shelling and later deception. 1,000 of these captured were taken to a meadow, guarded by the Šekovići Detachment, and on July 13, bused and marched down the road and detained in a warehouse at the Kravica Farming Cooperative.
That evening Trifunović and Radovanović began systematically shooting the prisoners with machine guns while Džinić tossed hand grenades into the warehouse, one after another. The warehouse was divided into two large rooms. After the men killed everyone in the east room, they moved to the west room. Jakovljević, Medan, and Mitrović stood guard at the rear of the warehouse while the 1,000 prisoners were killed. Two people survived the massacre, hiding under the piles of dead bodies. Both served as witnesses in this trial.
The warehouse at the Kravica Farming Cooperative, where 1,000 Bosniaks were killed in July, 1995
Three of the sentenced were given 42 years in prison, two years over the prescribed 40 year sentence for genocide. Vučinić cited aggravating circumstances such as “the particularly cruel and vicious manner” in which the sentenced killed the prisoners, “a behavior that a human mind cannot comprehend”. Stupar was given 40 years for “the crime of omission”. As commander of the Šekovići Detachment, Stupar was “the point of contact between high command and the forces on the ground” and thus was fully aware of not only the order to kill the 1,000 Bosnian prisoners but also of its place in Karadžić and Mladić’s plan to “permanently expunge” Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica. Jakovljević and Medan were given 40 years, while Petar Mitrović was given 38, his psychological disorders (most likely PTSD) after the war suggesting to the court that “he suffered some kind of remorse for his acts”.
To convict someone of genocide, the prosecution must prove mens rea, the intent to commit genocide. This, the proof that common police and soldiers had the motive to commit genocide and were not simply following orders or acting out of passion, was probably the largest challenge facing the prosecution. The verdict indicated intent on two levels. Vučinić ruled that “the context of the conflict around Srebrenica was indisputable”. Genocidal intent is, or should be, clear to anyone involved in systematic military actions taken against a civilian population of a specific ethnic group. Furthermore, Vučinić said, the exhumation and reburial of bodies and the washing and obscuring of execution sites suggested that those involved in actions around Srebrenica were aware of the criminality of their actions. The second, specific mens rea of the seven sentenced men was pronounced decisively by the verdict: “the exceptional perseverance demonstrated in the commission of crimes of such a massive scale” required “knowledge of their participation in the permanent expunging of Bosniaks from Srebrenica”.
In the gallery of the courtroom, observers were carefully segregated during the reading of the verdict. Relations of the accused sat on the left side of the aisle, while press, the Mothers of Srebrenica, the OSCE, and other visitors sat on the right. Both sides would look down the rows at each other during the reading. As the sentences were read gasps and cries went up from our left. After the verdict was read we filed out. The relations to the accused stood silently in the lobby outside the courtroom while the Mothers of Srebrenica went in outside of the court to be interviewed by waiting TV crews.
Eight days after the architect of the Srebrenica massacre was arrested, seven of its perpetrators are given the maximum sentence for their crime in a landmark ruling. Good week for what many call a failed system.
Mourners at Srebrenica
On Friday, July 11th, I traveled with two colleagues from BIRN to the town of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia. We joined 40,000 other people, among them local and national politicians, American and European diplomats, and religious dignitaries, at a large field outside the town to bury the remains of the 307 Bosniak men and boys found over the last year in mass graves in the eastern Bosnian entity of Republika Srpska (RS). The 307 new tabuti were to join 3,200 others already in the ground at Potočari memorial center, the final resting place of victims of the worst act of genocide in Europe since WWII.
Srebrenica has become symbolic not only of the gross brutality of the Bosnian war, but also of the dear price of the international community’s blundering inability to guarantee the basic humanitarian tenets of their mission. By late June, 1995 over 50,000 Bosniak refugees had gathered in the UN administered town of Srebrenica, surrounded on all sides by the Bosnian Serb Army (VRS) carrying out their campaign of ethnic cleansing. Noting the rapid advance of the VRS towards Srebrenica, the UN quickly declared the town a “safe area”, the first to be created in UN history, and dispatched 400 DUTCHBAT troops to protect the town. A combination of incomplete orders from above, lopsided numbers, and simple confusion rendered the safe area a farce. Out from under the UN’s nose, the VRS in broad daylight separated the men and boys of military age from the refugees, bused them to locations outside of town and shot them to death. Seeing what was happening, the remaining refugees formed a column to march through the surrounding VRS territory to the Bosnian held city of Tuzla, 55 kilometers away. On this “Road to Salvation” the refugees were attacked by the VRS, the column broke apart and a terrifying manhunt began for the disbanded and disoriented Bosniaks. Some made it to Tuzla; many were killed by the VRS.
Thirteen years later, it is estimated that over 8,000 Bosniak civilians from the Srebrenica safe area were killed between July 11th and 22nd, 1995. Each year, new bodies are exhumed and buried on July 11th across the road from the DUTCHBAT headquarters in the Potočari memorial center.
A journalist photographs the names of victims
It is a massive ceremony, attended by every major diplomat and politician, except those from the Republika Srpska. This entity of the Bosnia and Herzegovinan state, ethnically Serb since the war and the district in which Srebrenica lies, only formally recognized the genocide of Srebrenica in 2004. On the road through the RS from Sarajevo to Srebrenica, Serbian flags flew in towns, the Latin names on road signs were covered with spray-paint, leaving only the Cyrillic names (Serbia uses a Cyrillic alphabet, while Croatia and BiH use a Latin one), and the sign welcoming motorists to the town of Vlasenica was graffitied to read “Welcome to Serbian Vlasenica”. In the evening we drove to the town of Bratunac, five minutes down the road from Potočari. Bratunac is an ethnically Serb town, and not a single resident went to the funeral at Potočari that day. My colleagues interviewed two young Bosnian Serbs at the Omladinski Centar, a youth center in Bratunac down the street from an elementary school where over 100 Bosniaks were held and shot by the VRS during the massacre. The two young men said they would have liked to go to Potočari, but feared reprisals from their neighbors.
As we drove back to Sarajevo that night we passed people waving Serbian flags, holding out the three fingered nationalist salute, and burning fires to celebrate St. Petra, the patron saint of Serbia. The bizarre mix of symbolism, both that afternoon at Potočari where the Bosnian flag (a neutral symbol crafted by the international community to only slightly resemble the historical flag of Bosnia) waved over NATO troops, Japanese diplomats, imams, orthodox priests, and the Women in Black (an NGO with a chapter in Belgrade advocating solidarity and reconciliation), and what we saw later along the road through the RS underscored the ambivalent nature of the largest open wound in post-war BiH. As we passed through Vlasenica, a sign read a proverb from the region: “It is hard for god, when we are like this”.
Mourners pass tabuti towards open graves
The experience at Srebrenica is, I believe, representative of a large part of the post-war situation in BiH. Many ordinary citizens have ambiguous feelings towards the events of the war, but the national discourse lies locked in an impasse, unable to find a way out through its own localized ideas of the nation, nostalgia for the brotherhood of Yugoslavia, and the internationalism imported from the West after the war.
A separate piece about the trip I wrote for BIRN can be read here.
