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The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

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Securing Verdicts: <strong>The</strong> Misuse of Witness Testimony at <strong>The</strong> Hague<br />

Serbian Constitution made no claim to jurisdiction over neighboring<br />

Serb-populated territories; Milosevic signed on to every single international<br />

peace plan put forward during the 1990s; Milosevic supported<br />

the withdrawal of Yugoslav armed forces from Croatia and Bosnia, and<br />

he did nothing to protect the Krajina Serbs in Bosnia from the massive<br />

ethnic cleansing they suffered in August 1995. All of these actions were<br />

incompatible with support for a single unified Serbian state.<br />

In fact, during Milosevic’s trial, Seselj made it very clear what the<br />

concept of Greater Serbia means: “<strong>The</strong> concept of Greater Serbia implies<br />

a unified Serbian state including all Serbian lands where Serbs are<br />

a majority population. However, it is opposed to century-long Vatican,<br />

Austrian and other attempts to reduce the Serbian people only to members<br />

of the Orthodox Christian religion because the Serbian people in<br />

its ethnic being includes Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim Serbs<br />

equally....And what is defined as a Serbian land, where Serbian language<br />

is spoken....An overwhelming majority of today’s Croats are Serb<br />

Catholics, Catholic Serbs. All Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina and<br />

the area of Raska are Muslim Serbs.” 28 Milosevic, as Seselj pointed out,<br />

not only did not support such a concept, he actively opposed it.<br />

<strong>The</strong> trial judges’ June 2004 dismissal of the acquittal motion had<br />

been explicit about “the accused’s advocacy of and support for the concept<br />

of a Greater Serbia” (emphasis added), and its open abandonment<br />

by the prosecution should have been the death knell of the case. But it<br />

wasn’t—this was a political trial, not a real judicial proceeding.<br />

Lurid Tales of Genocidal Plans<br />

In constructing its <strong>Srebrenica</strong> narrative, the ICTY simply ignored evidence<br />

that pointed the wrong way, such as written orders issued by the<br />

Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic that unambiguously forbade<br />

executions, or indeed any war crimes. 29 In keeping with its purposes, the<br />

ICTY encouraged witnesses to come forward with lurid tales of genocidal<br />

plans, orders to carry out ethnic cleansing and secret plots to destroy<br />

evidence and to bury and rebury bodies. Many of these stories<br />

came from the mouths of witnesses who claimed to have overheard conversations<br />

to which only they can attest. Thus, Miroslav Deronjic, the<br />

civilian commissioner of <strong>Srebrenica</strong> and another key <strong>Srebrenica</strong> witness,<br />

claims that Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic told him during<br />

167

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