That Someone Guilty Be Punished - International Center for ...

2. Srebrenica
Understandably, many Bosniaks (and others) consider Serb leaders’ and other Bosnian Serbs’
treatment of the genocide in Srebrenica as a key indicator of how far Serbs have traveled on the
road to acknowledgement. As we chronicle in this section, recent years have seen significant
progress in this regard, yet many Serbs remain unwilling to acknowledge that Bosnian Serb
forces committed genocide in Srebrenica and to express remorse for their actions.
Given the staggering scale of the slaughter and the systematically discriminatory fashion
in which at least 7,000 executions were organized, it would be impossible to deny the
nature of the crime or to blame it on aberrant actors. Yet when Serbian authorities published
an analysis of wartime atrocities in September 2002, the resulting document was a study
in distancing, distortion, and denial. Issued more than a year after an ICTY Trial Chamber
had ruled that the July 1995 massacre in Srebrenica was a genocide, 606 the report stunned
Federation authorities and citizens, as well as the international community. Time magazine
summarized reactions to the report and its key findings this way:
Authorities in the Federation Entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the international
community have severely condemned a report released by authorities in the
Republika Srpska claiming the July 1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica
never happened. Though it is widely accepted that between 7,000 and 8,000 Bosniak
men and boys were massacred by Bosnian Serb forces when they took control
of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia between 11 and 15 July 1995, the report offers
a completely different story, blaming deaths on “exhaustion,” among other things.
The report—conducted in early September by the Republika Srpska’s Government
Bureau for Relations with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
(ICTY)—claims that no more than 2,000 were killed, and that all were armed soldiers
of the Bosnian Army and not civilians. Of those 2,000, the new study says that 1,600
were killed in battle or while attempting escape, and 100 died simply because they were
“exhausted.” The study also claims that it is possible that fewer than 200 members of
the Bosnian Army were killed by members of the Bosnian Serb Army in acts of revenge
or because they were not aware of the particulars of the Geneva Convention on prisoners
of war. 607
International organizations working in Bosnia were dismayed. The International Commission
on Missing Persons (ICMP) issued a statement noting that the RS report’s treatment
of missing persons “contains what ICMP believes to be serious inaccuracies” and placing these
in a broader context: “Manipulation of the issue of the missing for political purposes, including
the manipulation of numbers of missing, has been an ongoing practice within Bosnia and
94 TRUTH AND ACKNOWLEDGMENT