Canadian law professor and expert in genocide studies William Schabas articulated his dilemma after the Krstić judgment was pronounced in 2001. After pointing out the Trial Chamber’s apparent willingness in the Krstić case to “accept the Prosecutor’s contention that the intent in killing the men and boys of military age was to eliminate the [Srebrenica] community as a whole” [See Krstić Trial Judgment, par. 594]. Schabas observed that “this seems a rather enormous deduction to make on the basis that men and boys of military age were massacred.” He then asks:
“Can there not be other plausible explanations for the destruction of 7,000 men and boys in Srebrenica? Could they not have been targeted precisely because they were of military age, and thus actual or potential combatants? Would someone truly bent upon the physical destruction of a group, and cold-blooded enough to murder more than 7,000 defenseless men and boys, go to the trouble of organizing transport so that women, children, and the elderly could be evacuated? It is certainly striking that another Trial Chamber, in Sikirica, dismissed the ‘significant part’ argument after noting that the common denominator of the victims was that they were men of military age and nothing more, as if this were insufficient.”
The article was published by Prof. William A. Schabas under the title “Was Genocide Committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina? First Judgments of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,” in the Fordham Journal of International Law, Vol. 25, No. 23, 2001-2002.
- Judge Jean-Claude Antonetti’s partially dissenting opinion in the Tolimir case (2015)
- GLOGOVA mass grave forensic situation