Jun 28, 20216 min read

The Bosnia and Herzegovina Genocide - The Srebrenica Massacre

Europe’s worst massacre since the Second World War

Credit: Dado Ruvic

Introduction to the Issue

As July approaches, the Delegate Snapshots team has decided that it is time to shed some light on one of the most gruesome and atrocious events that have plagued Europe since the Second World War - the Bosnian Genocide. This term is commonly used to refer to the series of crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing campaigns organized by the Army of Republika Srpska during the Bosnian War (1992-1995). The most widely known mass murder campaign was the Srebrenica Massacre, which took place in July 1995.

A deep mark still scars Bosnia and Herzegovina to this day, bearing the sorrow and monstrosity of the genocide. We’ll take a look at the background and history of the issue, its aftermath and its implications to this day, 26 years later.

Background

By the time of the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was comprised of three major ethnic groups: the Muslim Bosniaks, representing 44% of the population, the Orthodox Serbs, making up 31%, and the Catholic Croats, 17%. As the process of dissolution of former Yugoslavia began, Bosnia and Herzegovina declared national sovereignty and held an independence referendum. As the results of the referendum overwhelmingly indicated the general will of the population to declare independence, the referendum was opposed by the representatives of Bosnian Serbs, which had previously boycotted the vote.

The referendum, nonetheless, led to the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina being recognised as a state by the European Community (6 April 1992) and the United Nations (22 May 1992).

Shortly after the declaration of independence, the forces of the Bosnian Serbs attacked the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The aim of the attack, which was supported by the Serbian government led by Slobodan Milošević and the Yugoslav People’s Army, was to unify the territory under Serbian control and to create an ethnically uniform Serb state, the Republika Srpska. In order to achieve this goal, the army of the Republika Srpska subjected the non-Serb populations under Serbian control to ethnic cleansing. A particular victim of these campaigns was the Bosniak population in the Eastern part of Bosnia.

Bosnian Serb forces began their conquests into Bosnia in 1992, targeting Srebrenica in a campaign to seize the eastern territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. As they aimed to annex the region to Serbia, they believed that it required the expulsion of the Bosniaks, who opposed the annexation. In 1995, the president of the self-declared autonomous Republika Srpska (Bosnian Serb Republic), Radovan Karadžić, formed a cordon of soldiers around Srebrenica, cutting off food and supplies of any kind from the town. Many Bosniak fighters fled the area as a result of the embargo. Karadžić’s directions were to “create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival or life for the inhabitants of Srebrenica”.

In late June, the Bosnian Serb army formally began the operation, code-named Krivaja 95, which resulted in the massacre of between 7,000 and 8,000 Bosniak boys and men.

The Srebrenica Massacre through the eyes of onlookers

“The horrors of the Serbian “ethnic cleansing” that spawned a network of camps and sprawling columns of refugees returned to haunt Bosnia and the rest of the world last night as thousands of the elderly, women and children were forced out of Srebrenica, bussed to within miles of the front line and made to trudge across the treacherous lines to seek sanctuary.”

( The Guardian. “Serbs bus refugees to front line: horror of ethnic cleansing returns”. by Ian Traynor. 13 July 1995)

“In tears and confusion, thousands of women, children and old men expelled from Srebrenica poured off buses yesterday at the decrepit air base in the town of Tuzla, northern Bosnia, accusing Serb rebels of murder and rape and the United Nations of indifference during the fall of the enclave.”

(The Guardian. ‘They lined us up and took the men away, but some people were shot. I saw a 13-year-old boy shot through the mouth’. by Julian Borger in Tuzla. 14 July 1995)

“The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said yesterday that at least 6,000 people are missing in eastern Bosnia. US officials believe up to 12,000 are unaccounted for, and say 2,700 may be buried in a mass grave near the village of Kasaba, a few miles north-west of Srebrenica.”

(The Guardian. “UN confirms Bosnian massacre”. by Ian Traynor, Julian Borger and Hella Pick. 12 August 1995)

Impact and Aftermath

The total number of victims who were slaughtered at Srebrenica was highly debated initially. However, under massive international pressure, the government of Republika Srpska issued a formal apology in 2004, acknowledging the “enormous crimes” in Srebrenica and the deaths of an approximate of 7,800 Bosniaks. Nonetheless, not all sources agree with that estimate, but it is generally accepted that at least 7,000 individuals were massacred. Some even argue that the death toll could have been as high as 8,000.

The process of identifying the victims and locating the mass graves was a particularly complicated task, made so by the Bosnian Serb forces’ efforts in the autumn of 1995 to hide the tracks of the massacre. The soldiers dug up mass graves and moved the exhumed bodies to isolated sites, which were later located by the United States intelligence experts, making use of satellite photographs. Figuring out how the killings occurred and how the bodies were spread out in the 80 mass grave sites took years of laborious work by Western scientists. By 2010, the International Commission on Missing Persons identified more than 6,400 individual victims using DNA samples.

“After nearly 20 years and a ten-year legal battle, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has upheld its guilty verdicts against five of the men involved, confirming sentences of between 18 years and life for what has been judged to be a crime against humanity involving genocide.”

(The Conversation. by Louis Monroy-Santander. January 30, 2015)

In 2001, the UN criminal tribunal convicted Radislav Krstić, a Bosnian Serb corps commander responsible for the Srebrenica area, of aiding and abetting genocide and murder. In 2003, a Bosnian Serb intelligence officer pled guilty to committing crimes against humanity.

In 2010, the tribunal convicted two chiefs of security for the Bosnian Serb military of genocide, sentencing them to life in prison; a third Bosnian Serb officer was given a 35-year sentence for abetting genocide.

Karadžić was found guilty of genocide, as well as nine other war crimes and crimes against humanity in March 2016. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison. Mladić was found guilty of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity and was sentenced to life in prison in November 2017 by The Hague.

On 16 July 2014, a Dutch court ruled that the Netherlands should be held liable for the killings of more than 300 Bosniaks at Srebrenica. The court’s decision marked the first time that a country had been held liable for the actions of its peacekeeping forces operating under a UN mandate. The same court ruled that the Netherlands was not liable for the other deaths in Srebrenica. The decision was upheld by The Hague Appeals Court on 27 June 2017. On 19 July 2019 the Dutch Supreme court ruled the Dutch state was liable for 10% for the 300 Bosnian men expelled from the compound.

The Srebrenica Massacre nowadays

So, how does the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys impact us nowadays?

The memory of Srebrenica is still difficult to handle, as Bosnia and Herzegovina tries to rebuild itself in the wake of the conflict. It has been particularly challenging for the different ethnic and religious groups living in the country.

The events not only emphasise the dire need for extensive efforts in fact-finding and especially truth-telling by the authorities, but also the need for commitment on a political level to acknowledge the atrocities committed during the war. The implications it has for the role of the justice and legal systems in the country are as far-reaching.

Conclusion

The massacre, which is though to have been the single worst episode of mass murder to take place in Europe since the Second World War, helped galvanize the West to press for a cease-fire to end the three years of warfare on Bosnia and Herzegovina’s territory.

However, it left unfathomable emotional scars on survivors and created chasmic, enduring obstacles to political reconciliation among the region’s ethnic groups. The pain of the massacre is still a wound that runs deep in the Bosnian society. It is to this day a grim memory of the hardships, the agony and the sorrow that the inhabitants of Bosnia and Herzegovina have had to suffer for their nation.