Prosecuting Genocide

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Speaker 4 A note before we start. This episode includes descriptions of violence.

Speaker 5 Attention!

Speaker 5 Tribunal!

Speaker 2 Nuremberg, Germany, November 1945, just a few months after the official end of World War II. A group of judges from allied countries file into a courtroom.
most wearing black robes.

Speaker 2 To their right, Nazi officers, some in uniform, others in suits, sit on wooden benches in the defendants' dock. The charges against them, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace.

Speaker 5 Opening the first trial in history

Speaker 5 for crimes against the peace of the world

Speaker 5 imposes a grave responsibility.

Speaker 2 The Chief American Prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, makes the opening statement.

Speaker 5 The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish

Speaker 5 have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating

Speaker 5 that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored.

Speaker 2 Working behind the scenes is an advisor to Justice Jackson named Rafael Lemkin.

Speaker 2 Lemkin was a Polish-Jewish lawyer at the U.S. War Department who'd fled Poland in 1939, soon after the Nazis invaded,

Speaker 2 leaving behind nearly all of his family.

Speaker 2 And he'd written to Justice Jackson after he was appointed chief prosecutor because Lemkin believed that the Nazis should be tried for a crime that up until then didn't have a name.

Speaker 8 It is for this reason that I took the liberty of inventing the word genocide.

Speaker 2 He'd coined the term just a year earlier.

Speaker 8 The term is from the Greek word genos, meaning tribe or race, and the Latin kida, meaning killing. The term does not necessarily signify mass killings, although it may mean that.

Speaker 8 More often, it refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups, so that these groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight.

Speaker 2 The idea had been brewing in Lemkin's mind for years, even before the Holocaust.

Speaker 8 The crime of the Reich in wantonly and deliberately wiping out whole peoples is not utterly new in the world. It is only new in the civilized world, as we have come to think of it.

Speaker 2 As a university student in the 1920s, Lemkin had become fixated on studying past massacres around the world, including the 1915 massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.

Speaker 2 Lemkin had asked one of his professors, so it's a crime to strike down one man, but not a crime for that man to have struck down one million men?

Speaker 2 His professor responded that under international law, there was no such crime. There was such a thing as war crimes, but nothing about the intentional destruction of a particular group of people.

Speaker 2 Lemkin made it his mission to change that.

Speaker 4 So, back to 1945.

Speaker 11 The United States will at this time present to the tribunal with its permission

Speaker 11 a documentary film on concentration camps.

Speaker 4 The Nuremberg trials are underway.

Speaker 12 The Buchenwald camp is termed an extermination factory. Bodies stacked one upon the other were found outside the crematory.

Speaker 4 Lemkin had worked really hard to persuade Justice Jackson to bring charges of genocide against the Nazi leaders.

Speaker 4 But there were no established legal precedents, and Lemkin knew it was an uphill battle, even as he learned during the trial that 49 of his family members, including his parents, had been killed in the Holocaust.

Speaker 4 After nearly a year, the judges delivered their verdict.

Speaker 13 The Allied judges shared with the president of the court the reading of the fateful words of the Nuremberg judgment.

Speaker 4 19 of the 22 Nazi leaders were found guilty, none on charges of genocide.

Speaker 8 Frustrated, Lemkin wrote, The Allies decided a case in Nuremberg against a past Hitler, but refused to envisage future Hitlers.

Speaker 4 And over the next few years, he lobbied leaders from around the world constantly, writing letters, making phone calls, organizing meetings, trying to convince the newly formed United Nations to codify the crime of genocide into law.

Speaker 5 And on December 9th, 1948, Convention is adopted by this assembly by unanimous vote.

Speaker 4 He succeeded.

Speaker 4 The UN adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which classified genocide as a crime under international law and defined it as, quote, acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.

Speaker 4 Intent being the key word here.

Speaker 4 Those acts can include killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Speaker 8 The practices of genocide anywhere affect the vital interests of all civilized people. Its consequences can neither be isolated nor localized.

Speaker 8 Tolerating genocide is an admission of the principle that one national group has the right to attack another because of its supposed racial superiority.

Speaker 8 The disease of criminality, if left unchecked, is contagious.

Speaker 2 The word genocide is everywhere now, in headlines, in reports by human rights organizations, and on social media describing conflicts around the world.

Speaker 2 It has come to embody the ultimate evil humans can inflict on their fellow humans. And it can be easy to forget that fundamentally, it's a legal term.

Speaker 2 In September, an independent UN commission concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Israel has rejected the report and its findings.

Speaker 2 So what does it take to make an accusation like that and to prove it?

Speaker 2 In order to establish Israel's, quote, genocidal intent, the Commission cited the very first time the Genocide Convention was put to the test after the Holocaust, the case of Bosnia versus Serbia.

Speaker 14 The world took a long time to realize that genocide had occurred in the Bosnian town of Sribonica.

Speaker 2 It took years of trials, hundreds of hours of testimonies, and countless documents to investigate whether genocide had taken place in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995, and to determine who was to blame.

Speaker 2 By the time genocide was declared, the lives had already been lost, the homes long since destroyed, the children traumatized.

Speaker 16 In a field of tears, their memories of terror and death come pouring out.

Speaker 17 It was

Speaker 18 really one big concentration camp.

Speaker 10 Many of those executed were buried in mass graves.

Speaker 18 We were held at gunpoint by the Serbs.

Speaker 16 The UN, he says, they did absolutely nothing to protect us.

Speaker 18 The more time passes, you know, you're starting losing hope.

Speaker 2 What is a genocide? How do you know when it's happening? And how do you prove that later in a court? What does it mean to get justice?

Speaker 2 I'm Randabil Fattah.

Speaker 4 I'm Ramtin Arabloui.

Speaker 4 On this episode of Through Line, we're taking a close look at what happened in Bosnia and in the courtrooms afterwards to examine how this first case for genocide was built and what the official finding meant for the perpetrators, the victims, and the world.

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Speaker 3 Part 1.

Speaker 23 The witness.

Speaker 9 Coming apart at the seams is a phrase being used to describe the current situation in Yugoslavia.

Speaker 24 Almost everyone in Yugoslavia agrees that the country is on the verge of collapse.

Speaker 2 In the early 1990s, the southeastern European country of Yugoslavia started breaking up.

Speaker 9 Ethnic and political differences have increased dramatically.

Speaker 24 Many people believe the differences are now so great that the best solution might be for the various Yugoslav nations to go their separate ways.

Speaker 2 Yugoslavia had been made up of six different republics divided along ethnic lines and held together for nearly 40 years by a single communist ruler.

Speaker 2 By the time he died in 1980, Yugoslavia's economy was in shambles, and some of the republics wanted their independence.

Speaker 25 As the first major conflict since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet central power, Yugoslavia is the first test of President George Bush's new world order.

Speaker 25 But it may be the harbinger of a new world disorder.

Speaker 2 Radical nationalists emerged as powerful voices throughout the republics, and the loudest came from parts of the Serbian community.

Speaker 2 The Serbs were Orthodox Christians and made up the largest ethnic group in Yugoslavia. They held a lot of the country's political and military power.

Speaker 2 If the country of Yugoslavia broke up into separate independent nations, the Serbs risked losing that power.

Speaker 26 There was a saying at the time, why would I be a minority in your country when you can be a minority in mine?

Speaker 2 This is Dr. Eva Fukosic.

Speaker 26 I'm an assistant professor of international history at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Speaker 2 Eva also grew up in the Yugoslav Republic of Croatia, which, like the other republics, was ethnically diverse.

Speaker 26 It was a peaceful country. I went to school, went to the cinema, went to play violin, had a very regular middle-class life, you know, in a very sort of regular environment.

Speaker 26 And all of a sudden, you hear people talking about war. And all of a sudden, you hear people talking about sort of ethnic groups that I didn't even know was it like a thing, you know.

Speaker 26 In many ways, violence makes you take sides.

Speaker 28 Rumors were circulating this morning that tanks were moving from Serbia to Croatia, the two rival republics that have a long history of ethnic strife.

Speaker 2 The first wars broke out in 1991 in Slovenia and Croatia, which had both voted for their independence.

Speaker 29 One of the clues that something terrible was happening was the rhetoric of leading politicians.

Speaker 2 Serbia's hard-line communist leader, Slobodan Milosevic, who rose to power four years ago on a wave of fervent nationalism.

Speaker 15 Milosevic has talked in the past about a greater Serbia.

Speaker 29 And they were talking about any place a Serb is buried is Serbia.

Speaker 12 They can't take our grace.

Speaker 29 That's laying claim to a huge amount of territory that is not theirs.

Speaker 27 The situation is certainly getting very, very dangerous.

Speaker 28 A loud boom shattered the air right in front of me this afternoon.

Speaker 17 Everybody is furious.

Speaker 30 Flashes of light in the dark sky

Speaker 28 and the sound of explosions in the distance.

Speaker 7 In Yugoslavia, this is the way a civil war could begin.

Speaker 29 A few months into the the war, I went to Bosnia. Everybody said that the war was going to be in Bosnia.

Speaker 2 In 1991, American journalist Roy Gutmann was reporting in the region for the newspaper Newsday.

Speaker 29 I went to the town of Banjaluka, which is a predominantly Serb town in northern Bosnia, and sat down with the mayor.

Speaker 29 And he took out a map and he showed me that how the Serb-led army was going to create a corridor across Bosnia.

Speaker 2 Within Yugoslavia, the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina bordered the Republic of Serbia. The Bosnian population was mostly Muslim, Serb, and Croat.
Just under a third were Serbs.

Speaker 2 But the mayor's map showed that Serbs wanted to claim up to two-thirds of Bosnian land.

Speaker 29 This is a case where I couldn't believe my eyes. Isn't this map a recipe for total war?

Speaker 2 In 1992, Bosnia-Herzegovina voted for independence. Bosnian Serbs protested the vote.
They had already declared their own state, which they said would be part of a, quote, greater Serbia.

Speaker 2 The place is divided desperately at this moment.

Speaker 29 I was in Sarajevo. It was the day that began with a bang.

Speaker 2 The day after the independence vote, Bosnian Serbs seized control of all the roads leading into the capital city of Sarajevo.

Speaker 2 Ethnic lines were drawn just hours after the volatile republic held a referendum on secession from Yugoslavia.

Speaker 29 The Serb artillery started firing and snipers started firing.

Speaker 15 Ethnic Serbs fired on a group of demonstrators in Sarajevo.

Speaker 2 At least five people were killed in clashes over the weekend.

Speaker 29 The Bosnians didn't have the military to defend themselves.

Speaker 2 Remember, Serbs had a lot of control over the military in Yugoslavia. When the country started to break up, Bosnian Serbs held on to the weapons.

Speaker 29 The Serbs, if they wanted to do something, could practically write their own ticket.

Speaker 2 Roy watched the Serbs captured territory throughout the republics.

Speaker 2 And while much of the international media covered the siege of Sarajevo, Roy found the real action was taking place somewhere else in the smaller towns and villages where Bosnian Muslims lived.

Speaker 2 In July of 1992, Roy started writing stories suggesting that Serbian state officials were targeting those Bosnian Muslims.

Speaker 29 I discovered a whole train load of people had been taken at gunpoint or tank point,

Speaker 29 put on buses, and then put on the state railways and taken to Hungary.

Speaker 29 And what was interesting was that the state was using all the instruments at its command, including transportation, to carry out a policy of what was called ethnic cleansing.

Speaker 2 You hear the term ethnic cleansing cleansing used a lot today, but at the time, it was a newer concept that was actually popularized by international media during the Bosnian war.

Speaker 2 There were also some reports that Serbian leaders used the term themselves when talking about their plans for Greater Serbia.

Speaker 29 What was ethnic cleansing? Well, it was mass deportations. We knew that, carried out really by the state against whole villages, against whole populations, indiscriminately.

Speaker 29 And I learned from that experience that the state was the major actor. This is an organized thing.

Speaker 29 I wanted to, from that point on, find parallel examples of where the state was operating against civilians in a very organized way and corralling them or forcing them to do something or maybe killing them.

Speaker 2 Soroj starts hitting up his contacts.

Speaker 29 I made some phone calls into Banjaluko.

Speaker 2 At this point in 1992, 1992, the Bosnian Serbs controlled Banjaluka, the second largest city in Bosnia.

Speaker 2 It was the city where the mayor had shown Roy the map of land the Serbs wanted to capture before the war.

Speaker 2 And now Roy found himself on a call with a Muslim political leader there who told him, please come, in the name of God, please come.

Speaker 29 Terrible things are happening here.

Speaker 29 Now, you don't get that kind of a message very often, you know, by making a phone call to somebody you don't even know. And I I headed on the first buses to Banjaluka.

Speaker 2 And when he got there, Roy started interviewing people.

Speaker 29 I did everything in a very routine way. I called on the police, I called on the Serb-led military, I called on the political parties of the Muslims and Croats.

Speaker 29 And I learned that there was a whole series of camps that had been set up. They were described as concentration camps, and of course, that's a question of definition.

Speaker 29 But they said that people were being killed in them.

Speaker 2 So Roy found a colonel with the Bosnian Serb military who would speak with him.

Speaker 29 So I asked the innocent question.

Speaker 29 I said, other people are talking about a whole network of camps that have been set up. Is this true?

Speaker 29 Maybe it's just invention. He responded that the Muslims had set up camps all over the place and were detaining Serbs.

Speaker 2 And this was actually true. Bosnian Muslims had set up their own camps.
And during the war, all ethnic groups were killing and being killed. But Bosnian Serbs had the most power.

Speaker 2 And it was Bosnian Muslims who were being killed in the greatest numbers.

Speaker 29 So Roy, following his leads, said, I have the names of a couple of places here, and I just wonder if there's a possibility to visit them. And I did it in

Speaker 29 complete naivete in appearance,

Speaker 29 but as a matter of fact,

Speaker 29 I knew damn well that some terrible things were happening there.

Speaker 29 And they actually arranged to take me the next day to one of the camps.

Speaker 2 Roy gets on another bus and heads to a town about 15 miles away. The Army turned down Newsday's request for a tour, offering instead interviews with eight hand-picked prisoners and a camp doctor.

Speaker 2 Armed guards monitored each conversation. Army interviewers asked most of the questions.
Then the eight men were marched away.

Speaker 25 None of the prisoners interviewed under those conditions criticized the camp's regime, but former prisoners interviewed away from the camp described it as a place where beatings were routine.

Speaker 29 The smartest thing I ever did there was I brought along a photographer, Andrei Kaiser.

Speaker 29 I really had to have photographs to back up what I was writing.

Speaker 2 While Roy was there, he and his photographer witnessed another scene.

Speaker 29 Up on the hillside were huge sheds where men were being held. You could see men lined up, bowing their heads down, and then having their heads shaved like sheep.

Speaker 2 They left with photos.

Speaker 29 They just changed everything. They conveyed a whole degradation,

Speaker 29 you know, humiliation with the hands of thugs.

Speaker 2 Roy hadn't seen any violence at this detention center, but he'd heard about another one, a camp in a town called Omarska.

Speaker 29 I asked my escort, Major Militinovich, if he could

Speaker 29 take me to Omarska.

Speaker 29 This is not a request I made

Speaker 29 with great hopes. And to my surprise, he agreed.
And the next day, we got into his van and started heading to Omarska, which is also in the area of Manjaluka.

Speaker 29 But about halfway there, he got a phone call saying that they couldn't guarantee my safety.

Speaker 29 But this led me to believe that something really terrible was happening, that what I saw at Manjetza was small potatoes compared to

Speaker 29 what must be going on at Omarska if they couldn't take me there. I became obsessed by it.

Speaker 2 Roy knew this was a problem. It's hard to write a story about a place you can't go.

Speaker 2 So he went to Zagreb in Croatia, where he knew refugees were living, and nonprofits helped him find dozens of people to interview. And the details confirmed his suspicions.

Speaker 25 More than a thousand Muslim and Croat prisoners were held in metal cages without sanitation, adequate food, exercise, or access to the outside world, according to a former prisoner.

Speaker 2 In stories published in August of 1992, Roy wrote about the metal cages where prisoners were held, the people who died trying to escape. All were shot after falling 60 feet to the ground.

Speaker 2 One source told him that every few days, Serbian guards would execute prisoners in groups of 10 to 15. They said, They would take them to a nearby lake.

Speaker 2 You'd hear a volley of rifles and they'd never come back.

Speaker 29 I happened to, in the course of two or three months there, come upon enough examples of state action in places I didn't expect it that it added up to a pattern where ethnic cleansing is really a vast understatement.

Speaker 2 Around the time Roy started publishing his stories, other people had already started calling the violence in Bosnia a genocide.

Speaker 2 But the media wasn't using the word, even as more and more details emerged.

Speaker 26 Mosques are being blown up. Four more mosques were reduced to rubble.
Churches blown up.

Speaker 12 46% of the churches in his diocese have been destroyed.

Speaker 26 Historical heritage blown up.

Speaker 30 We saw that almost every building was damaged in some way.

Speaker 26 And there are, within just months, municipalities that are just missing 30,000 people.

Speaker 3 They're gone.

Speaker 30 Local officials say that as many as 70,000 people are hulled up in the town and the the surrounding area. Many of them are refugees.

Speaker 26 So within a couple of months, we just see this organized effort to claim territory and expel, to make sure that in five or ten years, you can just say, oh, these people that were never around.

Speaker 2 At this point, it had become clear to Roy that this is what an ethnic cleansing looked like. But he also started to suspect it was something bigger.

Speaker 29 As a reporter, you don't have time to step back and think of what is the big picture I'm drawing here.

Speaker 2 But that picture would come into focus the next year, in 1993, when he was able to step back. And after Royce's stories on the war, won a Pulitzer Prize.

Speaker 29 I was sitting down for lunch with my editor and I said to him, you know, I'm trying to figure out what this all adds up to. And I think I know what it adds up to.
I think it added up to genocide.

Speaker 29 It's the pieces of the puzzle that I've assembled here

Speaker 29 without any design, but just by virtue of the fact that they're out there and they're in multiple examples and I'm able to demonstrate it and detail it to the last degree, that makes me think that this is a genocide.

Speaker 29 And I'm willing to state that I'm the witness.

Speaker 2 Roy published his book, A Witness to Genocide, in 1993. It included many of the photos that he and his photographer had taken during his reporting.

Speaker 2 He would be among the first Western journalists to call the violence that unfolded a genocide. Later that year, he testified in front of the U.S.
House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Speaker 29 When I did my stories about the camps, it had a real thunderclap effect on public opinion and actually on governments, but nobody ever did anything about it.

Speaker 2 UN peacekeepers were sent in to protect aid deliveries. Washington called for an emergency session of the UN Human Rights Commission.

Speaker 2 Journalists flooded the region, but concrete action on the ground didn't happen.

Speaker 29 So there's a real hypocrisy in international life that you could have these massive crimes that everybody knows should not be going on and that are way away from anything lawful and that nobody does anything about it.

Speaker 2 The same year, Roy published his book, two different UN courts began investigating crimes in the Bosnian War. One was a war crimes tribunal that would prosecute individuals.

Speaker 2 The other one was the International Court of Justice, whose job was to settle disputes among countries or governments.

Speaker 2 And it's in the ICJ that Bosnia-Herzegovina would file the very first genocide claim since the court was created at the end of World War II.

Speaker 2 In 1993, both courts would begin their work, but it would take years to see any results.

Speaker 2 When this case comes in 1993 in front of the International Court of Justice,

Speaker 2 on the ground, does anything stop?

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 2 Coming up, the evidence for genocide becomes undeniable.

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Speaker 9 Part 2.

Speaker 31 Srebernica.

Speaker 32 Srebernica itself is an enclave that is in the eastern portion in Bosnia, very, very close to the Serbian border.

Speaker 26 It's about three hours' drive east from Sarajevo.

Speaker 32 Very rural area, lots of farmland.

Speaker 26 It's hilly, it's green.

Speaker 32 There are small little villages around.

Speaker 32 Everybody knows everybody.

Speaker 32 In April 1993, the area of Srebrenica was actually declared a United Nations safe zone.

Speaker 4 The zone included Srebonica town and the surrounding area.

Speaker 32 So this is where people were supposed to flood into to escape the ongoing besiegement from the war that was ongoing.

Speaker 4 This is Sima Jelani. She's a pediatrician and humanitarian aid worker who has spent time in Bosnia recording survivor testimonies.

Speaker 32 So that's what they did is that Bosnian Muslims fled into by the thousands.

Speaker 26 There's about 40,000 people in this area.

Speaker 4 And this is Dr. Eva Fukasic.
She's a professor of international history at Ukrek University in the Netherlands who grew up in nearby Croatia.

Speaker 32 The community swole so much that it was even unable to handle that amount of people. These are tiny towns.

Speaker 4 There wasn't enough food, clothing, or housing. Many people slept in stairwells, in cars, or on the street.
And the river that ran through Srebonica, the only water source, got polluted with sewage.

Speaker 4 But what the safe zone did have was protection.

Speaker 32 It's been guarded by UN peacekeeping forces, which were largely of the Dutch battalion.

Speaker 4 These peacekeeping forces were lightly armed, and there were no more than 600 of them in Srebonica at a time. They provided some aid, but they weren't there to fight.

Speaker 4 At that point, the international community was officially neutral. But starting in March 1995, things would get worse.

Speaker 3 Fast.

Speaker 4 When the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadic, handed down a directive.

Speaker 31 By planned and well-thought-out combat operations, create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival or life for the inhabitants of Srebernica and Zepa.

Speaker 4 The war was entering its fourth year and Bosnian Serb leaders wanted to put an end to it.

Speaker 26 Basically they're sort of, you know, getting as much territory as they can.

Speaker 4 Their goal was to build an independent Serbian state and they wanted it to be linked with Serbia proper.

Speaker 4 In order to do this, the Bosnian Serb army would have to annex Srebrenica and expel the Bosnian Muslims who live there.

Speaker 4 So on July 6th, 1995, at 3 in the morning, the Bosnian Serb army attacked the outskirts of Srebanica, the UN safe zone.

Speaker 26 The Bosnian Serb army enters this space of the safe area which they were not supposed to enter.

Speaker 4 The army advanced towards the town.

Speaker 4 The footage you're hearing was taken in Srebanica a few days later on July 10th and 11th.

Speaker 4 In the video, people are milling around the streets and some men dressed in army fatigues are shooting off mortars. The man holding the camera was Ibro Zahirovich.

Speaker 4 He was in his 20s at the time and throughout the war, he filmed a lot.

Speaker 4 It wasn't common to have this kind of documentary video at the time. Remember, people didn't have smartphones.

Speaker 4 And this particular video would later become evidence in the UN investigation of genocide during the Bosnian war. In the video, you can see streams of people carrying their belongings on their backs.

Speaker 4 Crowds were clustered outside of UN buildings in Srebrenica, shouting, but the UN wasn't going to help them.

Speaker 26 The UN has neither the capacity, nor the equipment, nor the food, or the water, or the mandate to protect the civilians in any sort of armed way.

Speaker 4 And they didn't.

Speaker 32 The Dutch ended up ceding control of that area, handing over essentially the keys to the Serbs, the Serb militia, paramilitias.

Speaker 4 By the afternoon of July 11th, Bosnian Serb forces had taken over Srebonica.

Speaker 4 Ratko Mlodic, the general in command of the Bosnian Serb army, stood in Srebonica and claimed victory.

Speaker 4 He said the town was a gift to the Serbian people.

Speaker 26 Men

Speaker 26 from teenage age to

Speaker 26 high age feel afraid afraid that if they fall into the hands of the Bosnian Serb army or police that they're going to get executed

Speaker 26 So they make their way into the forests

Speaker 4 That day 15,000 people mostly Bosnian Muslim men and older boys set out on foot Ibro Zahirovich camera in hand was one of them

Speaker 4 You're hearing the footage he took of what became known as the column a long line of people trying to walk to safety.

Speaker 32 60 miles of walking in the summer through landmines and also through forestry can wreak havoc on a people who are already malnourished, starved, deprived of nutrients.

Speaker 4 Bosnian Serb forces shot at the column as they walked. They used stolen UN uniforms and equipment to pose as peacekeepers to coax the men out from hiding.

Speaker 4 Over the following days, thousands of men from the column were executed and buried in mass graves. Not everyone tried to escape in the column, though.

Speaker 4 By the morning of July 12th, 30,000 Bosnian Muslims had gone to seek protection at the UN compound in the next town over.

Speaker 26 These are women, children, young boys, old men.

Speaker 4 This is footage from the Bosnian Serb TV station. It was incredibly crowded and there was not enough food, water, medicine, or bathrooms.

Speaker 32 Women were dying, giving birth. People were living on top of one another.

Speaker 4 And by that afternoon, Bosnian Serb forces had also arrived. Rotkom Ladic, the Bosnian Serb general, was there that day and spoke to the Bosnian Muslims seeking refuge.

Speaker 4 In the video, Rotko Mlodic can be heard saying, Anyone who wants to leave will be transported, be they old or young. Don't be afraid and don't rush.
Let the women and children go first.

Speaker 4 Please don't panic. Nobody will harm you.

Speaker 4 But that same day, the Bosnian Serb army began to separate the women, children, and elderly from the men and boys.

Speaker 4 The women, children, and elderly were taken on buses to Bosnian Muslim-held territory.

Speaker 26 As for the men and boys, Bosnia Serb army and police take them to kind of culture halls and high school sports gyms.

Speaker 4 They were detained, many without food and water, and crammed in so tightly some couldn't even sit down.

Speaker 4 Over the next several days, Bosnian Serb forces orchestrated mass killings of these men and boys.

Speaker 26 We know almost hour by hour where people were and which buses took them to which execution site and who was shooting and which truck was where.

Speaker 32 Over 8,000 men and boys were summarily executed, shot, killed.

Speaker 33 Just imagine this youngest boy I had, those little hands of his.

Speaker 2 How could they be dead?

Speaker 4 Many of their bodies were dumped into mass graves and buried.

Speaker 26 What happens then in the next couple of days and weeks is the women that manage to reach reach government health territory are asking, Where is my husband?

Speaker 26 Where is my brother?

Speaker 26 They're realizing there's thousands of people missing.

Speaker 10 NPR's Andy Bowers is in Tuzla, and he says that yesterday, some of the men from Srebrenica began arriving in Tuzla.

Speaker 25 Some of them are telling the UN terrible stories about massacres by the Bosnian Serbs.

Speaker 34 I lost my son,

Speaker 4 brother, husband,

Speaker 34 30 from my close family alone.

Speaker 34 I can never tell everything.

Speaker 34 We just want to find out where the bones, the remains of our father's, brothers, sons are. To find out the truth.

Speaker 4 Reports from Srebenica broke internationally as early as July 16th, before all the killing was even over. Bosnian Serb officials denied that a massacre had taken place.

Speaker 10 I'm asking you if these new reports are true or false.

Speaker 27 They are completely false. There is not a single case that has been proved of any massacres committed against Muslim civilians in Srebrenica during the current part of fighting.

Speaker 4 But the UN War Crimes Tribunal, which had already started to look into the conflict in Bosnia, would soon broaden its investigation to include Srebrenica.

Speaker 4 Meanwhile, the Bosnian Serb army mounted a cover-up operation.

Speaker 4 A soldier would later testify that in September and October of 1995, he and others used tractors and backhoes to dig up mass graves and rebury bodies in secondary locations to try and hide the evidence.

Speaker 4 In the wake of Srebonica and the outrage that followed, the international community, including the US, faced increasing pressure to act.

Speaker 4 Not long after the massacre, NATO began airstrikes against the Bosnian Serb army. This international pressure and show of force led to US-sponsored peace talks.

Speaker 4 In December 1995, the Dayton Accords were signed, ending the war in Bosnia. An estimated 100,000 people had died.

Speaker 4 Prosecutors for the UN War Crimes Tribunal had been hard at work at this point, building war crime and genocide cases against members of the Bosnian Serb army, as well as Bosnian Serb political leaders.

Speaker 4 Bosnia was also presenting evidence to the UN's International Court of Justice, alleging that the government of the former Yugoslavia should be held responsible for genocide, not just individual military leaders.

Speaker 4 These cases involved the Srebonica massacre alongside violence committed in other villages and towns.

Speaker 26 How do you even go about finding thousands of victims and establishing who they were and what happened to them?

Speaker 26 Historically, if you get killed and you get dumped in a mass grave, you are never found.

Speaker 26 Nobody finds you, nobody identifies you, nobody gives your bones to your family, nobody knows what happens to you. This is how it was for centuries.

Speaker 26 And all of a sudden, we have this effort to dig up mass graves, find bones, put names to bones through DNA analysis, and give the bones back to family members for dignified burial.

Speaker 4 Coming up, the quest for justice.

Speaker 35 Hi, my name's Alyssa. I'm in Madison, Wisconsin, and I actually work in public radio.
And shows like this one just keep me really engaged and inspired.

Speaker 35 So you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

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Speaker 2 Part 3.

Speaker 23 Agreeing to evil.

Speaker 2 After the Srebrenica massacre in July of 1995, the UN War Crimes Tribunal started charging individual people with all kinds of crimes committed during the Bosnian war, including the first charges of genocide.

Speaker 15 The United Nations War Crimes Tribunal today indicted the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karajic.

Speaker 27 We completely deny that kind of atrocities.

Speaker 15 And the commander of the Bosnian Serb army, Rodkom Lodic, on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Speaker 19 They can't even leave this area because there are international arrest warrants for them.

Speaker 2 The first charges for the Srebrenica massacre itself were brought in November of 1995, and the evidence documented in court, including media reports and videos taken by civilians, as well as the perpetrators, was extreme.

Speaker 2 Confronted with evidence of the executions, the attacks on the UN safe zone, and on the column of people trying to escape, a judge at the time said, quote, these are truly scenes from hell.

Speaker 2 written on the darkest pages of human history. And scenes like that played out over over the many individual trials the tribunal held.

Speaker 36 The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia is now in session.

Speaker 7 The courtroom itself is interesting. It's kind of glass aquarium.

Speaker 17 Thick bulletproof glass surrounding it.

Speaker 26 The criminal court collected a ton of evidence, testimonies.

Speaker 37 The prosecution called two citizens of Srebonica.

Speaker 38 I saw those women screaming, moaning, crying, tearing their hair off.

Speaker 26 Expert reports.

Speaker 2 Here on slide number 25, you can see photos of just some of the victims.

Speaker 26 DNA analysis, military reports. 5,000 witnesses were testifying.

Speaker 40 After half an hour, every one of them was thrown in the holes.

Speaker 26 I would say this is probably the most investigated international crime in history.

Speaker 2 In the end, the UN tribunal charged 161 people with all kinds of crimes. A majority of them were Serb military and political leaders.

Speaker 2 But there were also some cases brought against Bosnian Muslims, against Croats, against others for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Each case moved through the tribunal at its own pace.

Speaker 10 And then in 2001, the International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague has handed down its first verdict of genocide.

Speaker 2 It was the first time a court would officially recognize what had happened in Srebrenica six years earlier as genocide.

Speaker 10 The court sentenced the Bosnian Serb general Radislav Krstic to 46 years in prison for his part in the 1995 massacre at the Bosnian Muslim Enclave of Srebrenica.

Speaker 2 Krstic was a deputy commander in the Bosnian Serb army.

Speaker 2 The court said, even though he may not have personally killed anyone, that he knew about the executions, the violence, the plan carried out in Srebrenica.

Speaker 2 He was found guilty of genocide.

Speaker 37 Judge Almiro Rodriguez pronounced the toughest sentence yet handed down by the tribunal.

Speaker 4 In July 1995, General Kerstica, General Kirstic,

Speaker 4 individual,

Speaker 16 you agreed to evil.

Speaker 2 This was a huge deal to many people. But this was just one guy.
What about everyone else? Or the Serbian government as as a whole? Were they guilty of genocide?

Speaker 2 It would be years later, in 2007, that the International Court of Justice, a completely separate UN court that ruled on disputes between countries, made its ruling.

Speaker 2 And in a shock to many, the ICJ said Serbia as a state was not guilty of committing genocide, though they also found that the state was guilty of failing to prevent genocide, which is required under the Genocide Convention.

Speaker 2 The ICJ ordered Serbia to transfer any people accused of genocide to the UN War Crimes Tribunal, where they could be prosecuted individually.

Speaker 26 To this day, we have no straightforward finding of the ICJ that any state is guilty of committing genocide.

Speaker 4 Even after the genocide convictions, Mass graves were still being excavated all around Bosnia and still being used as evidence in ongoing trials.

Speaker 4 In 2009, a couple of years after the ICJ's ruling, Sima Jelani volunteered at the International Commission on Missing Persons. Her job was to help identify remains of people buried in mass graves.

Speaker 4 Families looked for anything they could help to identify their loved ones, like fragments of bones. or old watches and rings.

Speaker 32 I recall one particular woman recognized a lighter and it was her lover's lighter. And she goes, That's it.
He's really gone now. I know that.
And she told me this story of how they met in a bar, and

Speaker 32 she asked for a light for her cigarette. And he took a cigarette and he put it between his fingers and he laid his fingers on her lips.
And it's all down to what, a lighter that's now blood-soaked?

Speaker 6 That's all she has.

Speaker 32 So, for me, what does the word genocide matter to her?

Speaker 39 I can still hear steps of my sons walking through the house.

Speaker 4 NPR covered the trials as they unfolded over the years and spoke to many survivors. Some spoke of trauma.

Speaker 39 I can still feel their presence in the house. They always used to call me mommy.
And on one occasion, I actually heard somebody calling me mommy, and I went to the window, but there was nobody.

Speaker 4 Others were angry that the UN, the US and the international community largely stood by during the worst of the violence.

Speaker 41 It's difficult even to imagine what people can do to other people and what kind of animals they have to be to

Speaker 41 do this to somebody else.

Speaker 27 Shame on them.

Speaker 4 Really shame on them.

Speaker 41 I don't think that the international community has learned its lesson. It still has a dirty conscience and it didn't do enough to clear its conscience.

Speaker 4 The UN tribunal lasted more than two decades. In the end, 93 people were sentenced out of the 161 people charged.

Speaker 4 The final judgment came in 2017 when Rotko Mlodic, the main leader in the Srebonica massacre, was found guilty of genocide. He is currently serving a life sentence in The Hague in the Netherlands.

Speaker 2 But for many people, the courts took too long to call a genocide a genocide. And that's part of the limitations of it being a legal term.
It takes a ton of evidence and often a ton of time to prove.

Speaker 2 It's dependent on whether anyone brings a case, the court it's presented in, what kinds of pictures or videos or proof exists that can show the intent of the crime.

Speaker 2 According to the courts, Srebrenica was the only place genocide happened during the war in Bosnia.

Speaker 26 There are whole communities in in Bosnia and Herzegovina and elsewhere around the world that feel cheated

Speaker 26 because what their community went through wasn't labeled, confirmed as a case of genocide.

Speaker 2 And that's true today in places where genocide is still being litigated, like the conflicts in Darfur, Ukraine, or Gaza.

Speaker 2 where in September of this year, a UN commission pointed to the Bosnia case when it concluded that Israel was committing genocide in the Gaza Strip.

Speaker 2 The month before the UN ruling, in August 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars had declared that Israel's actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.

Speaker 26 The starvation, the destruction of civilian property, the inability of people to leave, the no medicine, no hospitals, no schools, the statements of high-level Israeli officials, videos that are coming out of humiliation.

Speaker 2 So I think in many ways, the expert community at this stage is pretty much in agreement that if this is is not genocide then i don't know what the hell genocide looks like south africa has already filed a genocide claim against israel and the icj but it most likely won't be decided for years israel has denied all the charges this is the first time

Speaker 26 that we see a close western ally

Speaker 3 being

Speaker 26 accused of such a thing. What does it mean if we, as their biggest ally and their biggest arms supplier, will use this word?

Speaker 26 International law depends on states. It is just as strong or just as weak as the states that support him.

Speaker 26 Now, this is a moment where we either protect the system and make it better, you know, and advance it to another stage where it's more equal, it's more universal, it's more respected.

Speaker 26 Or we watch it, something that we spent decades building, even sometimes self-servingly, go down the drain, you know, because if the Genocide Convention, the Geneva Conventions, these basic protections that are about the bare minimum of protections, if that collapses, then we have nothing.

Speaker 2 That's it for this week's show. I'm Randabdir Fattah.

Speaker 4 I'm Ramteen Arabloui, and you've been listening to Through Line from NPR.

Speaker 2 This episode was produced by me, and me, and Lawrence Wu, Julie Kane, Anya Steinberg, Casey Minor, Christina Kim, Devin Katayama, Irene Naguchi.

Speaker 4 Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.

Speaker 2 Thanks to the BBC and member station KBIA in Missouri for some of the archival radio reports you heard in this episode.

Speaker 4 Thank you also to Chris Hoff, Johannes Durge, Laura Schwartz, Nadia Lancey, Nick Spicer, Beth Donovan, and Tommy Evans. This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keely.

Speaker 2 Music for this episode was composed by Ramteen and his band Drop Electric, which includes Naveed Marvy, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani.

Speaker 4 And finally, if if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline at mpr.org and make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the MPR app.

Speaker 4 That way, you'll never miss an episode.

Speaker 2 Thanks for listening.

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