PRESIDENT
PRÉSIDENT
The Hague, 23 June 2004
CT/P.I.S./860-e
ADDRESS BY ICTY PRESIDENT THEODOR MERON, AT POTOCARI MEMORIAL CEMETERY
Please find below the full text of the statement made by Judge Theodor Meron, President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, at Potocari Memorial Cemetery on 23 June 2004.
(Our comments have been added in bold)
It is with honour and humility that I stand today at the Potocari Memorial Cemetery. This place is a daily reminder of the horrors that visited the town of Srebrenica during the war in Bosnia and Hercegovina.
The crimes committed there have been well documented and have been recognized – and roundly and appropriately condemned – by the United Nations, the international community in general, and by the people of the region of former Yugoslavia. These crimes have also been described in detail and consigned to infamy in the decisions rendered by the court over which I preside, the International Criminal Tribunal of the Former Yugoslavia. [The Potocari Memorial Cemetery was created to sustain a version of events that was based solely on the propaganda issued to western media by the Bosnian Muslim government. The ICTY made no attempt to carry out a professional, impartial criminal investigation. Nor did the US-run ICMP. They relied on a facade of ‘evidence’. Falsification reached its peak when Paddy Ashdown, UN High Representative in Bosnia erected 11,000 gravestones in the Memorial Cemetery to create an image that Srebrenica was the equivalent of a World War 1 battlefield.]
I have had a special wish to visit the Potocari Memorial Cemetery because earlier this year I had the privilege of sitting as the Presiding Judge in the appeal which, for the first time, judicially recognized the crimes committed against the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995 as genocide. In that case, named Prosecutor versus Radislav Krstic, the Appeals Chamber of our Tribunal convicted one of the leaders of the Bosnian Serb assault on Srebrenica, General Radislav Krstic, for aiding and abetting genocide. The Appeals Chamber also found that some members of the Main Staff of the Bosnian Serb Army harboured genocidal intent against the Bosnian Muslim people who sought safety in the enclave of Srebrenica, and that these officials acted upon that intent to carry out a deliberate and massive massacre of the Muslims in Srebrenica. [It has been known for some years that Srebrenica fell to a small Bosnian Serb Force of some 200 men without a shot being fired. This was because the 4,000+ 28th division of the Bosnian Muslim Army (ABiH) had abandoned their defensive positions overnight and set off on foot for Muslim lines more than 30 miles away. As the years go by it seems more and more likely that this was a deliberate move to fake a massacre that would bring the US officially into the Bosnian war on the Muslim / Croatian side – which was exactly what happened. The conviction of General Krstic was simply ridiculous. For two weeks immediately before Srebrenica fell to the Bosnian Serbs Krstic had been receiving major treatment for further complications that had developed relating to very serious wounds he had received some two years earlier. He reported back for duty on the day the Bosnian Serbs took Srebrenica. In view of his convalescent state, he was immediately sent to Zepa to prepare for its recapture. He was not involved in any work at Srebrenica.]
The judgment which the Appeals Chamber has pronounced will be of importance not only in acknowledging the crime committed in Srebrenica for what it is, but also in developing and enhancing the international criminal laws understanding of genocide. By discussing and elaborating the legal requirement of genocide, and by explaining how they applied it in the circumstances of Srebrenica, the Appeals Chamber has facilitated therecognition and, I hope, the prevention of this horrible crime.[To enable it to convict Serbian defendants of genocide, the ICTY had ignored the strict instructions of the UN Security Council to enforce only ‘existing humanitarian law’ to write itself a new Statute which allowed it to create new law on an industrial scale. In particular, the new crime of ‘Joint Criminal Enterprise’,which even ICTY staff referred to as ‘Just Convict Everyone’, enabled any vague allegation to be translated into a conviction. Genocide is a horrible crime and should be punished. Faking a genocide is just as horrible.]
Many victims of this crime lie here, in this cemetery. In honour of their memory, I would like to read a brief passage from the judgment in Krstic, the passage which discusses the gravity and the horrific nature ofthe crime of genocide, and states unhesitantly that its perpetrators will unfailingly face justice. [No doubt those who create new law that enables the conviction of innocent people will in due course unfailingly face justice.]
“Among the grievous crimes this Tribunal has the duty to punish, the crime of genocide is singled out forspecial condemnation and opprobrium. The crime is horrific in its scope; its perpetrators identify entire human groups for extinction. Those who devise and implement genocide seek to deprive humanity of the manifold richness its nationalities, races, ethnicities and religions provide. This is a crime against all of humankind, its harm being felt not only by the group targeted for destruction, but by all of humanity. [Unfortunately the ICTY, in each and every one of its genocide convictions, it failed to produce even a coherent and consistent account of the genocide they claimed, let alone the factual evidence to support their charges. Our analysis of the dissenting judgement ( ) of the lead judge in the final appeal of Ratko Mladic reveals the full extent of the ICTY’s failings.]
The gravity of genocide is reflected in the stringent requirements which must be satisfied before this conviction is imposed. These requirements the demanding proof of specific intent and the showing that the group was targeted for destruction in its entirety or in substantial part guard against a danger that convictions for this crime will be imposed lightly. Where these requirements are satisfied, however, the law must not shy away from referring to the crime committed by its proper name. By seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the forty thousand Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general. They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity. The Bosnian Serb forces were aware, when they embarked on this genocidal venture, that the harm they caused would continue to plague the Bosnian Muslims. The Appeals Chamber states unequivocally that the law condemns, in appropriate terms, the deep and lasting injury inflicted, and calls the massacre at Srebrenica by its proper name: genocide. Those responsible will bear this stigma, and it will serve as a warning to those who may in future contemplate the commission of such a heinous act.” [The UN recorded 35,600 survivors of Srebrenica in camps safely behind Muslim lines at Tuzla by the end of July 1995. UN officials also saw some 3-5,000 ABiH safely in the Bosnian Muslim controlled Sapna Finger. In addition, 700 Srebrenica survivors were recorded safe at Zepa when it fell to the Bosnian Serbs in late July, while further survivors numbering about 1,000 fled into Serbia. Since 3,000 of the official casualties supposedly identified by the ICMP and buried at Potocari apparently voted in Bosnian elections in 1996, it is very difficult to see how a genocide of 8,000 people could emerge from this arithmetic.]
Those who drafted, on the heels of the Second World War and the Holocaust, the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of genocide, were animated by the desire to ensure that the horror. of a state-organized deliberate and massive murder of a group of people purely because of their identity will never recur in the history of humankind. The authors of the Convention hoped that by encapsulating the crime of genocide, by declaring unambiguously that it will not go unpunished, and by requiring the international community to do the utmost to prevent it, they will forestall forever attempts to annihilate any national, ethnic or religious group in the world.
As the graves in this cemetery testify, the struggle to make the world free of genocide is not easy and is not one of uninterrupted victories. But I would like to think that by recognizing the crimes committed here as genocide, and by condemning them with the utmost force at our command, we have helped to make the hope of those who drafted the Genocide Convention into an expectation and perhaps even a reality. As I stand here today, I can do little better than to repeat the solemn warning sounded by the Appeals Chamber of our Tribunal that those who commit this inhumane crime will not escape justice before the courts of law and the court of history.[The bombast of the two paragraphs above attempts to brush aside the facts that the ICTY was created illegally by the UN, which immediately renounced all responsibility for its creation; that it then passed by default into the control of the US which, despite feigning impartiality, had been secretly supporting Croatia and Muslim Bosnia with arms and training since the end of the 1980s; that the US also set up and controlled the ICMP, which gathered all the ICTY’s primary forensic and DNA ‘evidence’ which was merely reported in ICTY trials as established fact and has never been allowed to see the light of day.]
Finally, I take this opportunity to call, once again, for the authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina to meet their obligations under international law to cooperate fully with the ICTY. It is simply unacceptable that the authorities in the Republika Srpska have yet to arrest and transfer any individual on their territory who has been indicted by the Tribunal. This situation cannot be allowed to continue and I would like to see a dramatic change in the Republika Srpska’s level of compliance with its legal obligations. It is high time that the RS break with its tradition of non-cooperation and obstruction of the Rule of Law.
[Republika Srpska saw the ICTY for what it was: the worst kind of kangaroo court which, far from raising the bar of international law, had returned international justice to levels not seen since the Middle Ages.]
In this regard, I take note of the findings in the Republika Srpska Srebrenica Commission’s preliminary report, which I see as a step in the right direction. It indicates a new readiness to come to terms with painful events of the past and to constrain revisionist tendencies. However, the process is far from complete. [A reference to the fact that the unelected high representative for BiH, Paddy Ashdown, in his usual dictatorial manner, rejected the original thorough and measured report written by Republika Srpska and had it replaced with one written by a Bosnian Muslim.]
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