The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

CHAPTER 6
The ICTY Calls It “Genocide”
Michael Mandel
On August 2, 2001, Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) ruled that the events at Srebrenica
in July 1995 constituted “genocide.” 1 For this and other crimes
they sentenced General Radovan Krstic, in charge of one of the corps
involved in the operation, to imprisonment for 46 years. On April 19,
2004, the ICTY Appeals Chamber reduced Krstic‘s conviction to one
of “aiding and abetting” and his sentence to 35 years imprisonment,
while re-affirming the legal characterization of Srebrenica as genocide. 2
But if the Krstic case stands for anything, it stands for the fact that
genocide did not occur at Srebrenica. And the Court’s conclusion that
it did can only be considered a legal form of propaganda, and another
contribution to the impression of the Tribunal as more a “political tool”
than a “juridical institution,” to paraphrase its most famous defendant. 3
The Tribunal’s claim that genocide occurred at Srebrenica was not
supported by the facts it found or by the law it cited. Even the Trial
Chamber’s conclusion that “Bosnian Serb forces executed several thousand
Bosnian Muslim men [with the] total number of victims…likely
to be within the range of 7,000 - 8,000 men” was not supported by its
explicit findings. 4 The number of bodies exhumed amounted to only
2,028, and the Chamber conceded that even a number of these had
died in combat, in fact going so far as to say that the evidence only “suggested”
that “the majority” of those killed had not been killed in combat:
“The results of the forensic investigations suggest that the majority
of bodies exhumed were not killed in combat; they were killed in mass
executions.” 5 The highest expert estimate before the court of those who
went missing after the takeover of the enclave, and had not yet been accounted
for was 7,475, and the Trial Chamber found that the evidence
as a whole only “strongly suggests that well in excess of 7,000 people went
missing following the take-over of Srebrenica.” The evidence was found
only to “support the proposition that the majority of missing people
were, in fact, executed and buried in the mass graves.” 6 A majority of a
maximum of 7,000 - 8000 would put the maximum executed closer to
4,000.
211