“Mr. Karadzic you are charged with one count of genocide UNDER ARTICLE 4 OF THE STATUTE OF THE INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNAL; with one count of complicity in genocide UNDER ARTICLE 4 OF THE STATUTE; with five counts of crimes against humanity UNDER ARTICLE 5 OF THE STATUTE and with four counts of war crimes UNDER ARTICLES 2 AND 3 OF THE STATUTE.”
The “Indictment” against Radovan Karadzic as read to him July 31, 2008 by Judge Alphons Orie.
The statutes of the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) established by colonial powers to lend a legal aura to their military/political conquest of Bosnia Herzegovina and Serbia, do not constitute laws by which anyone is bound to abide. They constitute – at best – a trap for the gullible, to make it seem that people are being brought to “justice” for violating universal standards and laws, to be tried and punished under the laws and standards that they supposedly violated.
It takes a great deal of disinterest in the health of due process and rule of law to accept tribunals at face value that judge not according to the crime but according to the supposed criminal – regardless of whether there is evidence that a crime has been committed.
The worst indication is that this ICTY in The Hague has flagrantly violated every elementary rule of democratic court procedure and fair play, particularly that of “in dubio pro reo” (“in doubt on behalf of the (alleged) culprit” or said more simply, “the presumption of innocence until proof – beyond a reasonable doubt – of guilt.”)
Created by the UN Security Council, without authorization and in violation of the UN Charter, it is falsely claimed that the ICTY is under the auspices of the United Nations. If this were the case it would seem that the tribunal would be upholding – if anything – the international conventions of the United Nations. But since these conventions do not lend well to the purposes of colonial powers’ domination over their (prospected) subjects – not to mention the difficulties that this would entail, such as having to be impartial, having to abide by rules of impartial judicial standards in handling evidence, protection of the rights of the accused and most important, again the presumption of innocence – the ICTY seeks refuge in a slight-of-semantics trick, a trick only few jurists seem to have discovered.
The most important trick of semantics is that the ICTY copied – verbatim – into Art. 4 of its statutes, the text – but not the context – of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It was the internationally agreed context of terminology, that gives the Convention its international legal character, whereas Art. 4 in the ICTY’s statutes is binding only to the Tribunal itself.
This is particularly evident in the case against the Bosnian Serb general Radislav Krstic, whose verdict was handed down August 2, 2001.
Gen. Krstic was among the forces that entered Srebrenica on July 11, 1995. But his troops continued to take also Zepa, another Muslim enclave. Gen. Krstic was therefore not even present in Srebrenica at the time of the alleged summary executions of up to 8,000 Muslim men and adolescents. Still he was found “guilty” of genocide.
In the Krstic “trial” the ICTY did not base its final judgement on the Genocide Convention but on its interpretation of Art. 4 of its own statutes. The thought alone that a “court” would sit in judgement, not over possible violations of laws governing society, but over the statutes governing its conduct – which is the function of statutes – is already a clear indication of the arbitrary nature of the proceedings and the verdicts.
The sector of the Krstic verdict dealing with the genocide indictment are the paragraphs 539 – 599.
The first point to note is that they admit that Krstic is not being indicted in accordance with the Genocide Convention, but in accordance with Article 4 of the ICTY statutes.
- General Krstic is principally charged with genocide and, in the alternative, with complicity in genocide in relation to the mass executions of the Bosnian Muslim men in Srebrenica between 11 July and 1 November 1995.
- Article 4(2) of the Statute defines genocide as: (…)
They then benevolently explain that they will also – subordinate to their Art. 4 – consult the UN Genocide Convention, taking into “account the object and purpose of the Convention in addition to the ordinary meaning of the terms in its provisions. As a supplementary means of interpretation, the Trial Chamber also consulted the preparatory work and the circumstances which gave rise to the Convention.” Among the “ordinary meaning of the terms” are also the uninformed prejudices of the day. Does this not mean that they are “consulting” but not applying international law? What they are doing has little to do with the Genocide Convention, since it is only being “taken into account.”
(The trick is that the “object and purpose” and the “preparatory work and circumstances which gave rise to the Convention” are the defining aspects of the internationally recognized legal term “genocide.” The ICTY writes that “the Convention has been viewed as codifying a norm of international law long recognized and which case-law would soon elevate to the level of a peremptory norm of general international law (jus cogens ).”
So why not simply adhere to the convention in its historical context? It is exactly the historical context of the meaning of genocide that the ICTY seeks to circumvent by blaming the Serbs for “genocide” to justify the colonization of the Balkan states.
Is Article 4 of the ICTY Statutes supposed to replace the original Convention in international standards, making the term “genocide” an arbitrarily defined concept – in other words, no concept at all? Under their Article 4, which is free from the history of the Convention, they can read into the term “genocide” anything that they find politically/ideologically feasible for their purposes.
- The Trial Chamber must interpret Article 4 of the Statute taking into account the state of customary international law at the time the events in Srebrenica took place. Several sources have been considered in this respect. The Trial Chamber first referred to the codification work undertaken by international bodies. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (hereinafter “the Convention”), adopted on 9 December 1948, whose provisions Article 4 adopts verbatim, constitutes the main reference source in this respect. Although the Convention was adopted during the same period that the term “genocide” itself was coined, the Convention has been viewed as codifying a norm of international law long recognised and which case-law would soon elevate to the level of a peremptory norm of general international law (jus cogens ). The Trial Chamber has interpreted the Convention pursuant to the general rules of interpretation of treaties laid down in Articles 31 and 32 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. (…)
The following passages concerning the definition of what constitutes a defined group protected under the terms of the Genocide Convention – and the conclusion of the tribunal – are indicative of how the tribunal is out to MAKE/REVISE international law rather than apply and uphold it:
- However, the Genocide Convention does not protect all types of human groups. Its application is confined to national, ethnical, racial or religious groups.
[Only men of Srebrenica of military age would not apply under any of these categories. The ICTY then proceeds to explain all that does not apply under the Genocide Convention and other applicable pieces of international law, to then declare that these are immaterial because under their Article 4 they can define whatever they please, as they please.]
- National, ethnical, racial or religious group are not clearly defined in the Convention or elsewhere. In contrast, the preparatory work on the Convention and the work conducted by international bodies in relation to the protection of minorities show that the concepts of protected groups and national minorities partially overlap and are on occasion synonymous. European instruments on human rights use the term “national minorities”, while universal instruments more commonly make reference to “ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities”; the two expressions appear to embrace the same goals. In a study conducted for the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities in 1979, F. Capotorti commented that “the Sub-Commission [on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities] decided, in 1950, to replace the word ‘racial’ by the word ‘ethnic’ in all references to minority groups described by their ethnic origin”. The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination defines racial discrimination as “any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin”. The preparatory work on the Genocide Convention also reflects that the term “ethnical ” was added at a later stage in order to better define the type of groups protected by the Convention and ensure that the term “national” would not be understood as encompassing purely political groups.
- The preparatory work of the Convention shows that setting out such a list was designed more to describe a single phenomenon, roughly corresponding to what was recognised, before the second wor[l]d war, as “national minorities”, rather than to refer to several distinct prototypes of human groups. To attempt to differentiate each of the named groups on the basis of scientifically objective criteria would thus be inconsistent with the object and purpose of the Convention.
[To try to lend credibility to their scheme, ICTY then incestuously refers back to its own “tribunal definitions” saying, in effect, we don’t need the law, we make our own as we go along. We are in charge of this court.]
- A group’s cultural, religious, ethnical or national characteristics must be identified within the socio-historic context which it inhabits. As in the Nikolic and Jelisic cases, the Chamber identifies the relevant group by using as a criterion the stigmatisation of the group, notably by the perpetrators of the crime, on the basis of its perceived national, ethnical, racial or religious characteristics.
- Whereas the indictment in this case defined the targeted group as the Bosnian Muslims, the Prosecution appeared to use an alternative definition in its pre-trial brief by pleading the intention to eliminate the “Bosnian Muslim population of Srebrenica ” through mass killing and deportation. In its final trial brief, the Prosecution chose to define the group as the Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica, while it referred to the Bosnian Muslims of Eastern Bosnia in its final arguments. The Defence argued in its final brief that the Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica did not form a specific national, ethnical, racial or religious group. In particular, it contended that “one cannot create an artificial ‘group’ by limiting its scope to a geographical area”. According to the Defence, the Bosnian Muslims constitute the only group that fits the definition of a group protected by the Convention.
(…)
- The Chamber concludes that the protected group, within the meaning of Article 4 of the Statute, must be defined, in the present case, as the Bosnian Muslims. The Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica or the Bosnian Muslims of Eastern Bosnia constitute a part of the protected group under Article 4.
In this definition the ICTY appears to accept the definition of the Genocide Convention, concluding that the Muslims of Srebrenica, as such, do not constitute a subject protected under international law.
Article 4 of the ICTY statutes seems not to go far enough for the prosecution, who pleads for its “broad interpretation”:
- The Prosecution urges a broad interpretation of Article 4’s requirement of an intent to destroy all or part of the group. It contends that the acts have been committed with the requisite intent if “[the accused] consciously desired [his] acts to result in the destruction, in whole or in part, of the group, as such; or he knew his acts were destroying, in whole or in part, the group, as such; or he knew that the likely consequence of his acts would be to destroy, in whole or in part, the group, as such”. The Prosecution is of the opinion that, in this case, General Krstic and others “consciously desired their acts to lead to the destruction of part of the Bosnian Muslim people as a […] group”.
- Conversely, the Defence claims that the perpetrator of genocide must “have the specific intent to destroy the […] group” and concludes that “the dolus specialis constitutes a higher form of premeditation”.
The judges then make it clear that under their statute’s article 4 the specific intent to murder – physically kill – a definable population group can be a spontaneous decision, somewhat like “the appetite comes with eating” type of decision. And again, this is “confirmed” through an incestuous reference to previous judgements of the tribunal.
- Article 4 of the Statute does not require that the genocidal acts be premeditated over a long period. It is conceivable that, although the intention at the outset of an operation was not the destruction of a group, it may become the goal at some later point during the implementation of the operation. For instance, an armed force could decide to destroy a protected group during a military operation whose primary objective was totally unrelated to the fate of the group. The [tribunal’s] Appeals Chamber, in a recent decision, indicated that the existence of a plan was not a legal ingredient of the crime of genocide but could be of evidential assistance to prove the intent of the authors of the criminal act(s). Evidence presented in this case has shown that the killings were planned: the number and nature of the forces involved, the standardised coded language used by the units in communicating information about the killings, the scale of the executions, the invariability of the killing methods applied, indicate that a decision was made to kill all the Bosnian Muslim military aged men.
But the ICTY has never established that there was a premeditation or a plan to commit genocide – a sine qua non for the crime – so an intent has to be believed, the judges are “confident”:
- The Trial Chamber is unable to determine the precise date on which the decision to kill all the military aged men was taken. Hence, it cannot find that the killings committed in Potocari on 12 and 13 July 1995 formed part of the plan to kill all the military aged men. Nevertheless, the Trial Chamber is confident that the mass executions and other killings committed from 13 July onwards were part of this plan.
The next question is whether only the men of military age of Srebrenica qualify to represent the “in part” of the genocide definition.
- Since in this case primarily the Bosnian Muslim men of military age were killed, a second issue is whether this group of victims represented a sufficient part of the Bosnian Muslim group so that the intent to destroy them qualifies as an “intent to destroy the group in whole or in part” under Article 4 of the Statute.
- Invoking the work of the ILC [UN International Law Commission] and the [ICTY’s] Jelisic Judgement, the Prosecution interprets the expression “in whole or in part” to mean a “substantial” part in quantitative or qualitative terms. However, the Prosecution states that “it is not necessary to consider the global population of the group. The intent to destroy a multitude of persons because of their membership in a particular group constitutes genocide even if these persons constitute only part of a group either within a country or within a region or within a single community”. (…)
- The Defence contends that the term “in part” refers to the scale of the crimes actually committed, as opposed to the intent, which would have to extend to destroying the group as such, i.e. in its entirety. The Defence relies for this interpretation on the intention of the drafters of the Convention, which it contends was confirmed by the subsequent commentary of Raphael Lemkin in 1950 before the American Congress during the debates on the Convention’s ratification and by the implementing legislation proposed by the United States during the Nixon and Carter administrations. That is, any destruction, even if only partial, must have been carried out with the intent to destroy the entire group, as such.
- The Trial Chamber does not agree. Admittedly, by adding the term “in part”, some of the Convention’s drafters may have intended that actual destruction of a mere part of a human group could be characterised as genocide, only as long as it was carried out with the intent to destroy the group as such. The debates on this point during the preparatory work are unclear, however, and a plain reading of the Convention contradicts this interpretation. Under the Convention, the term ”in whole or in part” refers to the intent, as opposed to the actual destruction, and it would run contrary to the rules of interpretation to alter the ordinary meaning of the terms used in the Convention by recourse to the preparatory work which lacks clarity on the issue. The Trial Chamber concludes that any act committed with the intent to destroy a part of a group, as such, constitutes an act of genocide within the meaning of the Convention.
By simply sweeping aside the intentions of Raphael Lemkin, the man, who coined the word genocide, and the argumentation of state to get the convention ratified, the judges of the ICTY simply impose their stunted interpretation of the “ordinary meaning of the terms used” and declare that the preparatory work has no relevance. This removes the convention from its historical and its internationally binding character and vulgarizes it to the mere “ordinary meanings” of the words.
Would the ICTY’s definition not mean that any conventional battlefield situation could qualify as genocide – for both sides of the conflict – since both sides are mutually engaged in an “act committed with the intent to destroy a part of [the other] group, as such?”
The tribunal then seeks to broaden the definition to raise ethnic cleansing – removing a targeted group from a particular territorial realm – to become a form of genocide.
(…) 592. The Prosecution first argues that “causing at least 7,475 deaths of mainly Bosnian Muslim men in Srebrenica, the destruction of this part of the group, which numbered in total approximately 38,000 to 42,000 prior to the fall”, constitutes a substantial part of the group not only because it targeted a numerically high number of victims, but also because the victims represented a significant part of the group. It Was common knowledge that the Bosnian Muslims of Eastern Bosnia constituted a patriarchal society in which men had more education, training and provided material support to their family. The Prosecution claims that the VRS troops were fully cognisant that by killing all the military aged men, they would profoundly disrupt the bedrock social and cultural foundations of the group. The Prosecution adds that the mass executions of the military aged men must be viewed in the context of what occurred to the remainder of the Srebrenica group. The offensive against the safe area aimed to ethnically cleanse the Bosnian Muslims and progressively culminated in the murder of the Bosnian Muslim men as well as the evacuation of the women, children and elderly. In the Prosecution’s view, the end result was purposeful, as shown by the longstanding plan of Republika Sprska to eliminate the Bosnian Muslims from the area. Specifically, Radovan Karadzic, in Directive 7 of 7 March 1995, ordered the Drina Corps to “[…] create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival or life for the inhabitants of Srebrenica and Zepa”. General Krstic and his superiors also manifested genocidal intent by using inflammatory rhetoric and racist statements that presented the VRS as defending the Serbian people from a threat of genocide posed by “Ustasha-Muslim hords”. According to the Prosecution, “by killing the leaders and defenders of the group and deporting the remainder of it, the VRS and General Krstic had assured that the Bosnian Muslim community of Srebrenica and its surrounds would not return to Srebrenica nor would it reconstitute itself in that region or indeed, anywhere else”. The Prosecution points us to the terrible impact the events of 11-16 July had upon the Bosnian Muslim community of Srebrenica : “what remains of the Srebrenica community survives in many cases only in the biological sense, nothing more. It’s a community in despair; it’s a community clinging to memories; it’s a community that is lacking leadership; it’s a community that’s a shadow of what it once was”. The Prosecution concludes that “the defendant’s crimes have not only resulted in the death of thousands men and boys, but have destroyed the Srebrenica Muslim community”.
The first question for this assumption, is what is the evidence that “at least 7,475 deaths” were caused by the VRS in Srebrenica? At the time of the verdict in 2001, “tribunal investigators ha[d] exhumed 2,028 bodies from “mass graves” in the region. An additional 2,500 bodies ha[d] been located” (Simons, Marlise, “Genocide Verdict for Ex-General” International Herald Tribune, Aug. 3, 2001), meaning that neither the identity, nor the time and circumstance of death are known, and yet the ICTY counts them to the victims of Srebrenica. Even if one gives the tribunal the benefit of the doubt, this would bring the total in the “evidence” to 4,528 bodies. For most of the exhumed bodies neither the identities, nor the time and circumstance of death are known. Yet throughout the “trial” there was always reference to 7,000 – 8,000 killed in Srebrenica or even “at least 7,475″ dead, without evidence. Because the gravediggers were only interested in locating graves and bodies, it made no difference if the dead were Muslims or Serbs, if they died before Srebrenica, or if they had died as a result of combat or of other causes. The ICTY, after six years of grave digging, had still not furnished evidence that a crime where 7,000 – 8,000 Muslim men were executed in Srebrenica had been committed. On what evidence was the original indictment based?
Secondly, The prosecution obliquely admits that there was no genocide. “what remains of the Srebrenica community survives in many cases only in the biological sense, nothing more.” Genocide means the killing (cide) of a species (genus). That the community still “biologically” exists is proof that they were displaced, but not killed.
- The Defence argues in rejoinder that, “although the desire to condemn the acts of the Bosnian Serb Army at Srebrenica in the most pejorative terms is understandably strong”, these acts do not fall under the legal definition of genocide because it was not proven that they were committed with the intent to destroy the group as an entity. First, the killing of up to 7,500 members of a group, the Bosnian Muslims, that numbers about 1,4 million people, does not evidence an intent to destroy a “substantial” part of the group. To the Defence, the 7,500 dead are not even substantial when compared to the 40,000 Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica. The Defence also points to the fact that the VRS forces did not kill the women, children and elderly gathered at Potocari but transported them safely to Kladanj, as opposed to all other genocides in modern history, which have indiscriminately targeted men, women and children. The Defence counters the Prosecution’s submission that the murder of all the military aged men would constitute a selective genocide, as the VRS knew that their death would inevitably result in the destruction of the Muslim community of Srebrenica as such. According to the Defence, had the VRS actually intended to destroy the Bosnian Muslim community of Srebrenica, it would have killed all the women and children, who were powerless and already under its control, rather than undertaking the time and manpower consuming task of searching out and eliminating the men of the column. The Defence rejects the notion that the transfer of the women, children and elderly can be viewed cynically as a public relations cover-up for the planned execution of the men. First, it says the decision to transfer the women, children and elderly was taken on 11 July, i.e. before the VRS decided to kill all the military aged men. Further, the Defence points out, by the time the evacuation started, the world community was already aware of, and outraged by, the humanitarian crisis caused by the VRS in Srebrenica, and the VRS was not concerned with covering up its true intentions. The Defence also argues that the VRS would have killed the Bosnian Muslims in Zepa, a neighbouring enclave, as well, if its intent was to kill the Bosnian Muslims as a group. Furthermore, the Defence claims that none of the military expert witnesses “could attribute the killings to any overall plan to destroy the Bosnian Muslims as a group”. To the Defence, a true genocide is almost invariably preceded by propaganda that calls for killings of the targeted group and nothing similar occurred in the present case. Inflammatory public statements made by one group against another – short of calling for killings – are common practice in any war and cannot be taken as evidence of genocidal intent. The Defence argues that, despite the unprecedented access to confidential material obtained by the Prosecution, none of the documents submitted, not even the intercepted conversations of VRS Army officers involved in the Srebrenica campaign, show an intent to destroy the Bosnian Muslims as a group. The Defence contends that the facts instead prove that the VRS forces intended to kill solely all potential fighters in order to eliminate any future military threat. The wounded men were spared. More significantly, 3,000 members of the column were let through after a general truce was concluded between the warring parties. The Defence concludes that the killings were committed by a small group of individuals within a short period of time as a retaliation for failure to meet General Mladic’s demand of surrender to the VRS of the BiH Army units in the Srebrenica area. The Defence recognises that “the consequences of the killings of 7,500 people on those who survived are undoubtedly terrible”. However, it argues that these consequences would remain the same, regardless of the intent underlying the killings and thus “do not contribute to deciding and determining what the true intent of the killing was”. The Defence concludes that “there is no proof and evidence upon which this Trial Chamber could conclude beyond all reasonable doubt that the killings were carried out with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Bosnian Muslims as an ethnic group”.
It is strange that the defense does not question if mass executions had taken place, as the prosecution claims, and if so how many. (To learn the origin of the often cited quantity of 8,000, see here.)
Aside from the unproven assumption that the crime actually was committed, the defense seems to have argued their case well, pointing out the facts, correcting the speculations. The defense stuck to the facts. To no avail:
- The Trial Chamber concludes from the evidence that the VRS forces sought to eliminate all of the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica as a community. Within a period of no more than seven days, as many as 7,000- 8,000 men of military age were systematically massacred while the remainder of the Bosnian Muslim population present at Srebrenica, some 25,000 people, were forcibly transferred to Kladanj. The Trial Chamber previously described how the VRS attempted to kill all the Bosnian Muslim men of military age, regardless of their civilian or military status; wounded men were spared only because of the presence of UNPROFOR and the portion of the column that managed to get through to government-held territory owed its survival to the fact that the VRS lacked the military resources to capture them.
(…)
- Finally, there is a strong indication of the intent to destroy the group as such in the concealment of the bodies in mass graves, which were later dug up, the bodies mutilated and reburied in other mass graves located in even more remote areas, thereby preventing any decent burial in accord with religious and ethnic customs and causing terrible distress to the mourning survivors, many of whom have been unable to come to a closure until the death of their men is finally verified.
- The Chamber concludes that the intent to kill all the Bosnian Muslim men of military age in Srebrenica constitutes an intent to destroy in part the Bosnian Muslim group within the meaning of Article 4 and therefore must be qualified as a genocide.
- The Trial Chamber has thus concluded that the Prosecution has proven beyond all reasonable doubt that genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war were perpetrated against the Bosnian Muslims, at Srebrenica, in July 1995. (…)
In other words, “The Trial Chamber concludes from evidence” (that that body has been incapable to produce) that “the intent to kill all the Bosnian Muslim men of military age in Srebrenica constitutes an intent to destroy in part the Bosnian Muslim group within the meaning of Article 4 and therefore must be qualified as a genocide.”
The Krstic verdict on such bogus “evidence” created the precedent for also charging Slobodan Milosevic with “genocide” under article 4 of the statutes of the tribunal in The Hague.
* * *
It should have been clear much earlier that the ICTY had nothing to do with administering justice. The indictments were issued immediately following the takeover of Srebrenica – before anyone could have known any details of the takeover in the town. Ever since, the tribunal has been searching for “evidence” to substantiate that the crimes that Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic were charged with had actually taken place. An excerpt from the study mentioned above:
“Three years [after the fall of Srebrenica], in 1998, the effort to find evidence was still underway, as yet more areas in the vicinity of Srebrenica were being dug up in search of the “mass graves” presumed to contain the remains of the victims of the “Srebrenica massacre.” As with previous years’ excavations, representatives of the UN Security Council’s ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia held its press conference at the beginning of the dig.
“Information from this press conference, as reported in the New York Times, provokes questions about the basis of the juridical work of this ad hoc tribunal. Mike O’Connor, reporting on the beginning of a dig in the village of Kamenica, in the spring of 1998, writes that “Exhumations in 1996 [the first year of digging] recovered 460 bodies, (…) 7,500 others were still missing from the town of Srebrenica. Finding the others has been the goal of war-crimes investigators for more than two years.” Anonymous investigators (investigators for the Tribunal spoke to the reporter “on condition of anonymity“) say that what they hope to find “will bolster the cases against [the] 2 Bosnian Serb leaders” Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Radko Mladic, indicted for genocide by the tribunal.1)
“Two months later, the NYTimes reported that the total number missing was 7,300, that 1,000 bodies had been found, but that “only about 15 bodies have been identified.2) Other reports have given similar, though slightly inconsistent, figures.3) This inconsistency is based on the different sources of the figures given. Whereas O’Connor sticks to the quasi-official (because least partisan) figures given by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the author of the second Times article, David Rohde, relies on figures from the “survivors” of Srebrenica, meaning Muslim (usually government) sources. That the Muslim authorities have every reason to exaggerate the number of victims on their side of the conflict is without question and therefore to be taken with more than a grain of salt. Already throughout the course of the war their estimations of the numbers of dead, – widely reported in the press without verification – have had to be revised downward.4) For this paper, the Red Cross figures will be taken.
“But if finding the other 7,000 has been the goal of war crimes investigators for more than two years, the question should be raised: on what did the Tribunal base its charges of “genocide” if they did not even have the proof that the massacre for which the two Serb leaders are charged ever occurred? If they now – three years later – are still trying to scrape together enough bodies to make their indictment plausible, on what was their indictment based? O’Connor writes that they now have to try to “prov[e] that the soil around the bodies came from the original mass graves,”5) Does this mean that what they had considered to be “the original mass graves” were either empty or sheltered too few bodies to justify their charges”? (See: Pumphrey, George, “‘The Srebrenica Massacre‘: A Hoax?” )
* * *
This successful ruse of pretending to pass judgement under the terms of the International Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, while in fact judging from Article 4 of the ICTY statutes, a nebulous document with a similar wording, has aroused little interest. It will now be played out to the end in the Radovan Karadzic case. As Judge Orie clearly states above, Dr. Karadzic will not be tried under the terms of the International Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, as is popularly believed and maintained by the media, but rather under the statutes of this ad hoc kangaroo court.
The standards of court procedure applied by the ICTY threatens to corrupt judicial standards around the world. It has made the practice of partisan ethnic discrimination a high profile norm at the international level. Chauvinism in the courtroom has become more acceptable.
The International Criminal Court has now handed down an indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. As with the ICTY indictments of Radovan Karadzic, and Ratko Mladic during the Bosnian civil war and against Slobodan Milosevic during NATO’s aggression against his country, the purpose is clearly to apply international pressure to the victim – excluding him from any subsequent negotiations, because to leave his country, he risks being kidnapped (“arrested”) and taken to a “judicial body” that makes laws rather than applying them. As with the Serb defendants the verdict will have been decided long before the trial opened.
The acceptance of the ICTY’s (non-)definition of genocide by the UN International Court of Justice (Bosnia vs. Serbia and Montenegro) has now granted it the status of international law. The International Herald Tribune wrote at the time of the Bosnia vs Serbia verdict: “[the World Court] stayed close to the findings of the UN Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which has found two Bosnian Serb officers guilty of genocide in the case of the Srebrenica massacre and it repeatedly cited tribunal evidence, calling its methods rigorous.” (Simons, Marlise, “World Court absolves Serbia of genocide charge” IHT, February 26, 2007)
Those with the military might to set up and control “tribunals” to judge their adversaries, seek to annul the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, a precious asset of the post World War II period, to use the accusation of “genocide” to justify their “humanitarian” military aggressions against nations defending their sovereignty.
Endnotes:
1) O’Connor, Mike; Mass Graves in Bosnia Bolster War-Crimes Cases; IHT (NYT-Services), 14.5.98
2) Rohde, David; “In Bosnian Town Where Thousands Died, Ethnic Hate Overwhelms Small Kindnesses” New York Times, July 25, 1998.
3) As noted below, early reports used the figures 10,000 and then 8,000. The Washington Post gives 12,000 as the original number of missing.
4) “News organizations and specialists, after three years of war, talk of 200,000-250,000. The Bosnian government in April 1995 lowered its previous estimate to just over 145,000, about 3 per cent of the pre‑war population.”(my emphasis. gp) David Owen, Balkan Odyssey, Harcourt Brace, 1995, pg. 80;
5) ibid
About the author:
George Pumphrey, born in Washington D.C. in 1946, holds both French and US citizenship. He is an independent researcher and author as well as a long-time anti-racist and anti-war activist. He currently lives in Berlin, Germany. He has written various articles on the subject of Srebrenica, among them, “Six Sources of the Srebrenica Legend“. With his wife, he co-authored the book, “Ghettos und Gefängnisse: Rassismus und Menschenrechte in den USA” Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne, West Germany (1982)