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The Srebrenica massacre is considered the most serious crime against humanity in Europe since the end of the Second World War. Around 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were murdered in the massacres near the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica in the former Yugoslavia. Based on the findings of the UN courts in The Hague, there is no doubt that the murders were systematically planned and that an ethnic group was to be annihilated, i.e. that it was genocide according to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Resolution 266 260 A (III) 1948 ).
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and the social, political and economic upheavals in the former member states of the alliance, the multi-ethnic state of Yugoslavia also began to disintegrate at the beginning of the 1990s. After 1991, seven sovereign states were formed on its territory: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Macedonia.
Already during the 1980s, against the backdrop of increasing economic problems in the entire Eastern Bloc, signs of disintegration of the federal system in Yugoslavia had come to light. An infrastructural and economic development gap as well as clear differences in the distribution of wealth between the constituent republics had already existed since the founding of the first Yugoslav state in 1918. This divide widened further with the establishment of the socialist market economy from the mid-1960s and was essentially between the comparatively well-developed north, primarily between Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia on the one hand and Serbia with Montenegro and Kosovo on the other.
In the 1980s, the increasingly apparent structural problems in Yugoslavia grew into a political system crisis, against the backdrop of which the economically stronger northern republics increasingly sought to secede. These were less and less willing to make transfer payments to the southern states, especially Serbia, which at this time was primarily focussing on strengthening the federal level for economic reasons.
Until the death of Josip Broz Tito (*1892) on 4 May 1980, leader of communist partisans against the German and Italian occupiers during the Second World War and President of Yugoslavia since 1953, these growing tensions could still be kept largely under control. Tito, who had led Yugoslavia on a special path with the model of a socialist market economy and non-alignment, was the central figure of integration in the multi-ethnic state.
With increasing distance from the partisan struggle before 1945, the political legitimising power of the liberation struggle dwindled noticeably in the face of pressing economic problems, while the political system at federal level proved to be resistant to reform and cumbersome. With the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991, the status of non-alignment finally became meaningless. The relative prosperity and freedoms that the Yugoslav system had granted its citizens in comparison to the states of the former Eastern Bloc lost their significance in the face of rising unemployment, increasing distributional struggles between the six republics, growing insecurity and a lack of direction. On the eve of the Yugoslavian wars, the severe crisis of the political-economic system was at the centre of intra-Yugoslavian tensions, while nationalist, ethnic and religious factors were initially of little importance. However, fear of the future and widespread insecurity created the conditions for ethnic-nationalist, polarising propaganda and the instrumentalisation of scientifically untenable historical images and myths.
As a result, economic tensions between the constituent states began to escalate, fuelled by a large number of referendums on the independence of the constituent states, in which ethnicity became the sole voting criterion. The 1990 elections further accelerated the process of state disintegration. In all republics, with the exception of Serbia, conservative-bourgeois parties seeking independence for the respective constituent state won. In Serbia, the communist party held its ground, although it had undergone a fundamental shift towards strongly nationalist positions.
At the same time, the „Croatian Democratic Community“ (HDZ) under Franjo Tuđman (1922-1999) contributed massively to the insecurity of the Serbian minority in Croatia through its election campaign, in which symbols of the fascist Croatian Ustasha state during the Second World War were increasingly displayed. After its victory, the HDZ government also amended the Croatian constitution, which downgraded the Serbian population from a second nation with equal rights to a minority and restricted their rights. In everyday life, professional discrimination and police arbitrariness followed, while anti-Serb agitation and relativisation of the crimes of the Ustasha regime during the Second World War further inflamed the atmosphere.
As early as 1986, the Serbian Academy of Sciences published a memorandum alleging discrimination against Serbian citizens in Yugoslavia, speaking for the first time of genocide against the Serbian nation and calling for the restoration of the national and cultural integrity of the Serbian people. Initially consistently rejected by Yugoslav and Serbian politicians, the positions of the memorandum were taken up by Slobodan Milošević (1941-2006 The Hague), head of state of the Serbian republic from 14 December 1987, and subsequently instrumentalised. From 1988, state-organised rallies were staged in several Serbian cities, at which the supposed „Serbian will of the people“ was articulated with increasing aggression. Instead of working towards calming the situation, Serbian and Croatian politicians promoted nationalist emotions to secure their respective positions of power.
The Serbian population was most affected by the threat of the division of Yugoslavia. According to a 1981 census, only around sixty per cent of the Serbs resident in Yugoslavia lived in the Serbian republic, forty per cent were distributed among the other republics, while ninety per cent of the Slovenes and 75 per cent of the Croats were resident in their respective republics. The Bosnian Muslims, who made up almost forty per cent of the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1981, had to fear for the integrity of the republic if the federal state were to be divided up. At the same time, Serbian policy under President Milošević propagated with increasing aggression the creation of a Greater Serbia including all areas in which members of the Serbian ethnic group lived.
Negotiations on a possible reorganisation of Yugoslavia broke down in the course of 1990 due to the opposing positions of the leading political forces of the constituent republics, after politicians seeking reconciliation were marginalised in an increasingly nationalistically heated atmosphere.
The declarations of independence by Slovenia and Croatia on 25 June 1991 were the prelude to a military conflict in the course of which up to 100,000 people were killed and around two million displaced by 1995. All negotiation initiatives by the European Union (EU) were unsuccessful. This included the international Yugoslavia conference in September 1991, which was accompanied by many hopes and after which the government of the Federal Republic of Germany decided on its own to recognise Slovenia and Croatia under international law. The other EU states were hesitant to follow the decision of the red-green federal German government, and the step towards recognition was seen by many as exacerbating the conflict. Others regarded it as belated. What is certain is that the armed conflict was not triggered by the sanctioning of the division of Yugoslavia under international law. It is also a fact that Serbian President Slobodan Milošević, supported by the resources of the former Yugoslavian army, tried to enforce the goal of creating a Greater Serbia by force of arms both before and after recognition. In doing so, it relied on a division of labour between the remaining Yugoslav army and paramilitary units, which recruited their fighters from the Serbian minority population in the seceded former republics. Ethnic cleansing was a central element of the warfare. Between August and December 1991 alone, around 80,000 Muslims and Croats were expelled from Serb-controlled areas of Croatia. In November, Serbian units captured and largely destroyed the eastern Croatian town of Vukovar, where genocidal acts took place for the first time.
In 1992, the theatre of war shifted to Bosnia. The scale of the fighting was soon to eclipse that of previous battles. Although there had been no signs of a threat to the Serbs living in Bosnia at the outbreak of the war, the Serbian strategy of inciting a frightened population to revolt and then supporting the insurgents with units of the former Yugoslav army and paramilitary gangs became a cruel reality in Bosnia. From April 1992, the Bosnian Serbs laid siege to Sarajevo, and in May a Republika Srpska was proclaimed on Bosnian territory, with Radovan Karadžić (*1945) elected as its president. Although the remaining Yugoslav army officially withdrew from Bosnian territory, it left behind an extensive arsenal of weapons and most of the military equipment for the Bosnian Serb fighters. From then on, these militiamen formed the military arm of the „Serbian Republic“ under the command of Ratko Mladić (*1942). Due to their military superiority, they controlled two thirds of Bosnian territory from 1992. They expelled members of other population groups from these areas. It was not until 1995, after massive war crimes committed by Bosnian Serb nationalists under the decisive responsibility of their political leader Radovan Karadžić, the military leadership under Ratko Mladić with the support of the Serbian Republic under President Slobodan Milošević, that the military situation was reversed, not least due to the intervention of NATO. When the Serb-occupied territories were recaptured, there were again numerous acts of revenge and war crimes committed by members of the Croatian and Bosnian armies.
In this situation, the US diplomat and negotiator Richard Holbrooke (1941-2010) succeeded in brokering a ceasefire in October 1995. On this basis, the parties to the conflict negotiated a partition plan in Dayton (Ohio, USA). The Dayton Agreement was signed in Paris on 14 December 1995, in which the parties to the conflict undertook to allow the return of refugees, displaced persons and deportees.
The concept of ‚ethnic cleansing‘ runs like a common thread through numerous accounts of the post-Yugoslav wars between 1992 and 1995. All warring parties attempted to marginalise and expel other ethnic groups in the course of the military conflicts, albeit with varying degrees of severity.
From the perspective of international law, the term ‚ethnic cleansing‘ covers all measures that serve to remove a national, ethnic or religious population group from a certain area, including historical and cultural evidence that reflects the identity of this group and is a reminder of its previous presence. The aim is to create an ethno-national or religiously homogenous (‚cleansed‘) territory. The spectrum of actions ranges from stigmatisation, social exclusion, threats, intimidation, disenfranchisement and the destruction of economic and cultural foundations to mass rape, deportation and genocide, whereby the corresponding taboos are usually broken in stages. Genocide is a separate category under international law.
Ethnic cleansing always has specific preconditions. Mass violence does not occur, it does not happen as an expression of a spontaneous, alleged will of the people, rather it is politically generated. Its preconditions include the definition of an enemy and its dehumanisation, the demand for the congruence of ethnicity, nation and territory, the evocation of fears and threat scenarios, as well as the staging and propagandistic instrumentalisation of violent incidents. The escalation of violence is then often subject to a momentum of its own.[1] The purges and genocides in the former Yugoslavia also followed this pattern. The key players here were Slobodan Milošević and his helpers, who set an avalanche of violence in motion from the mid-1980s as a result of the political shift towards nationalism. They used nationalistically distorted images of the past, which mostly drew on war memories from the Second World War or had their origins in the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. Distorted realities and victim myths were created, supposed claims were substantiated, threat scenarios were created, the fears of a deeply insecure population were fuelled and channelled into a collective paranoia. Inadequate reappraisal of the past and a lack of education facilitated the creation and instrumentalisation of historically false images of history.
The murder of over 8,000 Bosnian Muslims after the Serbian conquest of the UN protection zone Srebrenica was by no means the only genocidal crime committed during the post-Yugoslav wars. However, it became synonymous with genocide during the post-Yugoslav wars, not least due to the high number of victims and the fact that it was committed in a UN protection zone and received extensive international media attention.
After the civil war spread to Bosnia-Herzegovina, numerous Bosnian Muslims fled to Srebrenica, a small town in the state. When Bosnian Serb units took the town under the leadership of their military commander Ratko Mladić on 11 July 1995, there were around 42,000 civilians there, including around 35,000 refugees. The area had been declared a UN security zone in which around 350 Dutch UN soldiers were to provide protection. They had nothing to oppose the Bosnian-Serbian troops militarily, they were inadequately equipped and the UN mandate was not sufficient to guarantee security by force of arms. Several thousand refugees tried to escape on foot into Bosnian Muslim-controlled territory. The vast majority of the refugees sought shelter at the UN base in the village of Potočari, six kilometres away. On the evening of 11 July, around 25,000 people, including many women and children, crowded there in catastrophic hygienic conditions.
After the Serbian units had also taken Potočari, the soldiers under Mladićs‘ command began to separate men and women. The blue helmet soldiers did not intervene. Around 8,000 Bosniaks were murdered. They were buried in various places to remove the traces of the mass murder.
On 25 May 1993, UN Resolution 827 established the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ( ICTY) in The Hague in accordance with Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter. Its jurisdiction extended to crimes committed in the post-Yugoslav wars from 1991 onwards. The last criminal proceedings were concluded on 29 November 2017. In the 24 years of its existence, over 4,500 witnesses have been heard by the tribunal, more than a thousand of them on the Srebrenica massacres alone. Former Serbian President Slobodan Milošević died in March 2006 before a judgement could be passed on his co-responsibility for the genocide. Radovan Karadžić, former President of the Bosnian Serbs, was sentenced to forty years in prison by the Hague Tribunal on 24 March 2016 for war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity, while Ratko Mladić was sentenced to life imprisonment on 22 November 2017.
In the trial opened against him in 2012, Mladić had to answer to eleven counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the massacre of Srebrenica with more than 8,000 deaths, the siege of Sarajevo that lasted more than a thousand days and the taking of UN soldiers hostage. The judges of the UN tribunal considered it proven that Mladić’s position was decisive for the realisation of a „joint criminal enterprise“ aimed at removing all non-Serbs from Republika Srpska.
By the time the court was dissolved on 31 December 2017, a total of 161 people had been indicted and 84 convicted. Although war crimes were prosecuted regardless of the ethnicity of the accused, the vast majority of cases heard by the tribunal concerned crimes committed by Serbs and Bosnian Serbs.
The ICTY was the first international court established by the United Nations to prosecute war crimes after the Nuremberg Trials and the Tokyo Trials after the Second World War. In the 24 years of its existence, the Tribunal has created a standard, a normative basis of international law for the resolution of military conflicts and for dealing with war crimes and crimes against humanity. In this context, it has also sent out the signal that military and political leaders who are responsible for mass crimes must expect to be brought before an international court.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, established in 1994, was also a so-calledad hoc court , a tribunal set up exclusively to punish clearly defined crimes committed in a specific conflict. After the official cessation of the work of the two tribunals, the International Criminal Court ( ICC) took over the prosecution of human rights violations, genocide, humanitarian and war crimes and violations of the Geneva Conventions.
Following the conclusion of the ICTY’s activities, a so-called residual mechanism was set up to transfer any further proceedings to national jurisdiction in an orderly manner. The International Criminal Court ICC had already been cooperating with local courts since 2003 and contributing to the establishment of a post-war justice system. Although the possibilities of enforceability of human rights at international level must be further improved, the two ad hoc tribunals set milestones on the way to a reliable international criminal jurisdiction in the field of international law. Overall, the International Criminal Court has made a significant contribution to ending impunity for crimes and to establishing the truth.
International jurisdiction can accompany, but not replace, national social debate about the past. The events of Srebrenica therefore continue to be the subject of political controversy and instrumentalisation. For example, the government of the Serbian republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina still refuses to recognise the Sebrenica massacre as genocide. Great Britain had introduced a resolution to this effect in the UN Security Council. In the vote on the UN resolution in April 2015, Russia was the only country to veto it in the UN Security Council, meaning it was rejected. No Serbian politician, regardless of party affiliation, has ever used the term genocide.
A memorial cemetery was inaugurated in Potočari in 2003. Several thousand victims of the massacre are buried there. In 2015, on the 20th anniversary of the crime, the Serbian Prime Minister, Aleksandar Vučić (*1970), also took part in the memorial ceremony in Srebrenica. Vučić, a radical nationalist during the war who had threatened in the Serbian parliament at the time that one hundred Muslims would die for every dead Serb, has been President of Serbia since 2017, but although he reached out for reconciliation, the wounds are far too deep. There are still many hurdles to overcome before reconciliation between the different ethnic groups is possible; a process of historical confrontation, which requires recognition of the genocide and a willingness to engage in open dialogue, is only just beginning.
[1] Cf. Jacques Sémelin, Säubern und Vernichten. The politics of massacres and genocides. Hamburg 2007 with further reading on the general problem of „ethnic cleansing“.
Christian Braun, The Difficulties of Dealing with Mass Violence. Transitional justice in the divided societies of Srebrenica and Vukovar. Wiesbaden 2016.
Monika Beckmann-Petey, The Federalism of Yugoslavia. Munich 1990.
Marie-Janine Calic, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Causes – Conflict Structures – International Attempts at a Solution. Frankfurt am Main 1995.
Richard Caplan, Europe and the Recognition of New States in Yugoslavia. Cambridge 2005.
Cathie Carmichael, Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans. Nationalism and the destruction of tradition . London-New York 2002.
Germinal Civikov, The Milošević Trial: Report of an Observer . Vienna 2006.
Jasna Dragovic-Soso, „Saviours of the Nation“. Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism. London 2002.
Raphael Draschtak, Endgame 1995: The USA ends the Balkan War. Vienna 2005.
Bette S. Denich, „Dismembering Yugoslavia: Nationalist Ideologies and the Symbolic Revival of Genocide,“ in: American Ethnologist 21 (1994), pp. 367 – 390.
Matthias Fink, Srebrenica, Chronology of a Genocide or: What Happened to Mirnes Osmanović? Hamburg 2015.
Tom Gallagher, Milosevic, „Serbia and the West during the Yugoslav Wars, 1991-1995,“ in: Andrew Hammond (ed.), The Balkans and the West. Constructing the European Other. Aldershot 2004.
James Gow, Triumph of the Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War. London 1997.
Hannes Grandits, Christian Promitzer, „‚Former Comrades‘ at War: Historical Perspectives on ‚Ethnic Cleansing‘ in Croatia,“ in: Joel M. Halpern, David A. Kideckel (eds.), Neighbours at War. Antropological Perspectives on Yugoslav Ethnicity, Culture and History . University Park, PA 2000, pp. 125ff.
Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy. A Theory of Ethnic Cleansing. Hamburg 2007.
Daniela Mehler, Serbische Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung: Normwandel und Deutungskämpfe im Umgang mit Kriegsverbrechen (1991-2012). Bielefeld 2015.
NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (ed.), De val van Srebrenica: luchtsteun en voorkennis in nieuw perspectief. Amsterdam 2016.
Anthony R. Oberschall, „The manipulation of ethnicity: from ethnic cooperation to violence and war in Yugoslavia,“ in: Ethnic and Racial Studies , 23 (2000), pp. 882-1001.
David Rohde, Endgame, The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica. Europe’s Worst Massacre since World War II. New York 1997.
Holm Sundhausen, Yugoslavia and its Successor States. An Unusual History of the Ordinary. Vienna 2014.
Andrew B. Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation. Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia. Stanford 1998
Stevan Weine, When History is a Nightmare. Lives and Memories of Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina. New Brunswick 1999.
Susan L. Woodward, Socialist Unemployment. The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945 – 1990. Princeton, N.J. 1995.
http://www.bpb.de/politik/hintergrund-aktuell/209414/das-massaker-von-srebrenica (A summary of the most important facts about the Srebrenica massacre)
http://www.bpb.de/apuz/256927/mythos-tito (On the importance of Tito for the development of Yugoslavia)
http://www.bpb.de/apuz/256927/mythos-tito (On the state dissolution of Yugoslavia)
http://www.jura.uni-koeln.de/sites/strafrecht_kress/Home/Interview_Srebrenica2.pdf (on the UN mission in the former Yugoslavia)
http://www.bpb.de/apuz/256925/erinnerungen-an-ein-untergegangenes-land (on the development after the wars)
http://www.icty.org/ (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia)
https://www.icc-cpi.int/ (International Criminal Court)