Dunja Mijatovic and Ken Roth in the New York Times:
Friday is the 30th anniversary of the deadliest massacre in Europe since World War II, when Bosnian Serb forces under Gen. Ratko Mladic overran an area meant to be protected by the United Nations. Soon after, they proceeded to execute more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys.
The magnitude and audacity of the slaughter shocked the world and spurred international prosecutions, making it one of the rare times that a genocide has been prosecuted since the Holocaust. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia indicted and took into custody 161 people. Some 90 were convicted, including Mr. Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb political leader, both of them for crimes that included the genocide in Srebrenica.
The prosecutions played the important role of punishing and marginalizing these leaders, individualizing guilt in lieu of broad collective blame, reaffirming the rule of law and paying tribute to the victims.
But Srebrenica also illustrates the limits of the law, especially when societies fail to adequately acknowledge such atrocities and eliminate the hatred that led to them. That has lessons for other potential prosecutions for more recent and ongoing conflicts, from Gaza to eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
More here.
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