Pod Insights Throughline Prosecuting Genocide About this episode The word "genocide" can seem like it’s everywhere right now: So it can be easy to forget that, fundamentally, it's a legal term that dates to World War II — and wasn’t used in court for half a century afterwards. Today on the show, the story of what happened during the Bosnian War in the 1990s and the work that went into building the legal case to prove genocide.
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Transcript 7,730 words · 40 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:17 Rund Abdelfatah? Hey, everybody. It's Rand. I just want to start the show off by saying how much we enjoy the comments some of you have been leaving on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, especially for our recent series on immigration, which included an episode on the history of the U.S.-Mexico border wall. Joel Elias Saunders said, "This has to be the most in-depth and informative podcast out there. Thank you for the excellent reporting and varied points of view and experience." Thanks, Joel, and thank you all for listening. If you have a minute, leave us a review and a rating on Spotify or Apple. It helps people find the show and often gives us something to think about. All right, now, on to the show.
1:02 Speaker 02 A note before we start. This episode includes descriptions of violence.
1:08 Speaker 03 Attention, all people.
1:12 Rund Abdelfatah? 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. To their right, Nazi officers, some in uniform, others in suits, sit on wooden benches in the defendant's dock. The charges against them: war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace.
1:41 Speaker 04 Opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility.
1:52 Rund Abdelfatah? The chief American prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, makes the opening statement.
1:58 Speaker 04 The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored.
2:13 Rund Abdelfatah? Working behind the scenes is an adviser to Justice Jackson named Raphael Lemkin.
2:23 Rund Abdelfatah? Lemkin was a Polish Jewish lawyer at the US War Department, who'd fled Poland in 1939, soon after the Nazis invaded, leaving behind nearly all of his family. 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.
2:49 Speaker 05 It is for this reason that I took the liberty of inventing the word genocide.
2:57 Rund Abdelfatah? He'd coined the term just a year earlier.
3:00 Speaker 05 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. 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.
3:27 Rund Abdelfatah? The idea had been brewing in Lemkin's mind for years, even before the Holocaust.
3:32 Speaker 05 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.
3:44 Rund Abdelfatah? 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. 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 1 million men?" 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. Lemkin made it his mission to change that.
4:28 Speaker 02 So back to 1945.
4:31 Speaker 06 The United States will at this time present to the tribunal with its permission a documentary film on concentration camps.
4:43 Speaker 02 The Nuremberg Trials are underway.
4:46 Speaker 06 The Buchenwald camp is termed an extermination factory. Bodies stacked one upon the other were found outside the crematorium.
4:53 Speaker 02 Lemkin had worked really hard to persuade Justice Jackson to bring charges of genocide against the Nazi leaders. 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. After nearly a year, the judges delivered their verdict.
5:19 Speaker 07 For 10 months, the same routine has been observed. But now, the atmosphere grows tense. The Allied judges shared with the president of the court the reading of the fateful words of the Nuremberg judgment.
5:31 Speaker 02 19 of the 22 Nazi leaders were found guilty, none on charges of genocide. Frustrated, Lemkin wrote:
5:40 Speaker 05 The Allies decided a case in Nuremberg against a past Hitler, but refused to envisage future Hitlers.
5:47 Speaker 02 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. And on December 9, 1948...
6:06 Speaker 06 Convention is adopted by this assembly by unanimous vote.
6:10 Speaker 02 He succeeded.
6:14 Speaker 02 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," intent being the key word here. 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.
6:58 Speaker 05 The practices of genocide anywhere affect the vital interests of all civilized people. Its consequences can neither be isolated nor localized. Tolerating genocide is an admission of the principle that one national group has the right to attack another because of its supposed racial superiority. The disease of criminality, if left unchecked, is contagious.
7:32 Rund Abdelfatah? The word genocide is everywhere now, in headlines and reports by human rights organizations and on social media describing conflicts around the world. 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. In September, an independent UN commission concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Israel has rejected the report and its findings. So what does it take to make an accusation like that and to prove it? In order to establish Israel's, quote, "genocidal intent," the commission cited the very first
8:16 Rund Abdelfatah? time the genocide convention was put to the test after the Holocaust, the case of Bosnia versus Serbia.
8:24 Speaker 08 The world took a long time to realize that genocide had occurred in the Bosnian town of Shrebrenica.
8:31 Rund Abdelfatah? 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. By the time genocide was declared, the lives had already been lost, the homes long since destroyed, the children traumatized.
8:54 Speaker 09 In a field of tears, their memories of terror and death come pouring out.
9:00 Speaker 10 It was really a one big concentration camp. Many of those executed were buried in mass graves. And they were held at gunpoint by the Serbs.
9:11 Speaker 09 The UN, he says, they did absolutely nothing to protect us.
9:15 Speaker 07 The more time passes, you know, you start losing hope.
9:20 Rund Abdelfatah? 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?
9:32 Rund Abdelfatah? I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.
9:34 Speaker 02 I'm Ramtin Arablouei. On this episode of Throughline, 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.
9:55 Speaker 11 Hey, so I'm a recent subscriber and a huge fan already. It's become one of my favorite history podcasts. This is Brian Gwynne from Cincinnati, Ohio, and you're listening to Throughline on NPR.
10:10 Speaker 00 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from ProLon. With their five-day fasting-mimicking diet, a clinically-developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Learn more at prolonlife.com/NPR.
10:28 Speaker 12 This message comes from Live Right, publisher of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback. Support for this podcast and the following message come from the Southern Environmental Law Center. No one voted for a dirty air. No one voted for polluted water. That's why S E L C is fighting back to defend the healthy environment everyone depends on, just as they've done for 40 years. Because clean air, clean water,
11:12 Speaker 12 and a healthy climate aren't political, they're fundamental. Learn more at S E L C dot org.
11:20 Rund Abdelfatah? Part one, The Witness.
11:26 Speaker 13 Coming apart at the seams is a phrase being used to describe the current situation in Yugoslavia.
11:31 Speaker 14 Almost everyone in Yugoslavia agrees that the country is on the verge of collapse.
11:36 Rund Abdelfatah? In the early 1990s, the southeastern European country of Yugoslavia started breaking up.
11:42 Speaker 13 Ethnic and political differences have increased dramatically.
11:46 Speaker 14 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.
11:55 Rund Abdelfatah? 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. By the time he died in 1980, Yugoslavia's economy was in shambles, and some of the republics wanted their independence.
12:14 Speaker 15 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. But it may be the harbinger of a new world disorder.
12:30 Rund Abdelfatah? Radical nationalists emerged as powerful voices throughout the republics, and the loudest came from parts of the Serbian community. 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. If the country of Yugoslavia broke up into separate, independent nations, the Serbs risked losing that power.
12:56 Speaker 16 There was a saying at the time, "Why would I be a minority in your country when you can be a minority in mine?"
13:02 Rund Abdelfatah? This is Dr. Eva Fukosic.
13:04 Speaker 16 I'm an assistant professor of international history at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
13:09 Rund Abdelfatah? Eva also grew up in the Yugoslav Republic of Croatia, which, like the other republics, was ethnically diverse.
13:16 Speaker 16 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. 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 like a thing, you know?
13:37 Speaker 16 In many ways, violence makes you take sides.
13:40 Speaker 17 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.
13:50 Rund Abdelfatah? The first wars broke out in 1991 in Slovenia and Croatia, which had both voted for their independence.
13:58 Speaker 15 One of the clues that something terrible was happening was the rhetoric of leading politicians.
14:04 Speaker 18 Serbia's hard-line communist leader, Slobodan Milosevic,
14:07 Speaker 17 who rose to power four years ago on a wave of fervent nationalism.
14:11 Speaker 19 Milosevic has talked in the past about a greater Serbia.
14:14 Speaker 15 And they were talking about any place a Serb is buried is Serbia.
14:18 Speaker 20 They can't take our grace.
14:22 Speaker 15 That's laying claim to a huge amount of territory that is not theirs.
14:26 Speaker 17 The situation is certainly getting very, very dangerous. A loud boom shattered the air right in front of me this afternoon. Everybody is furious. Flashes of light in the dark sky. Full of rage. And the sound of explosions in the distance.
14:39 Speaker 19 In Yugoslavia, this is the way a civil war could begin.
14:45 Speaker 15 A few months into the war, I went to Bosnia. Everybody said that the war was going to be in Bosnia.
14:51 Rund Abdelfatah? In 1991, American journalist Roy Gutman was reporting in the region for the newspaper Newsday.
14:58 Speaker 15 I went to the town of Banja Luka, which is a predominantly Serb town in northern Bosnia, and sat down with the mayor. And he took out a map, and he showed me that how the Serb-led army was going to create a corridor across Bosnia.
15:15 Rund Abdelfatah? 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. But the mayor's map showed that Serbs wanted to claim up to 2/3 of Bosnian land.
15:35 Speaker 15 This is a case where I couldn't believe my eyes. Isn't this map a recipe for total war?
15:42 Rund Abdelfatah? 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."
16:00 Speaker 21 The place is divided desperately at this moment.
16:04 Speaker 15 I was in Sarajevo. It was the day that began with a bang.
16:09 Rund Abdelfatah? The day after the independence vote, Bosnian Serbs seized control of all the roads leading into the capital city of Sarajevo.
16:17 Speaker 22 Ethnic lines were drawn just hours after the Volital Republic held a referendum on secession from Yugoslavia.
16:24 Speaker 15 The Serb artillery started firing, and snipers started firing.
16:28 Speaker 19 Ethnic Serbs fired on a group of demonstrators in Sarajevo.
16:31 Speaker 22 At least five people were killed in clashes over the weekend.
16:34 Speaker 15 The Bosnians didn't have the military to defend themselves.
16:39 Rund Abdelfatah? 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.
16:49 Speaker 15 The Serbs, if they wanted to do something, could practically write their own ticket.
16:54 Rund Abdelfatah? Roy watched the Serbs capture territory throughout the republics. And while much of the international media covered the siege of Sarajevo, Roy found...
17:03 Speaker 15 The real action was taking place somewhere else.
17:06 Rund Abdelfatah? In the smaller towns and villages where Bosnian Muslims lived.
17:13 Rund Abdelfatah? In July of 1992, Roy started writing stories suggesting that Serbian state officials were targeting those Bosnian Muslims.
17:22 Speaker 15 I discovered a whole trainload of people had been taken at gunpoint or tank point, put on buses, and then put on the state railways and taken to Hungary. 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.
17:44 Rund Abdelfatah? You hear the term ethnic 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. There were also some reports that Serbian leaders used the term themselves when talking about their plans for Greater Serbia.
18:05 Speaker 15 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. And I learned from that experience that the state was the major actor. This is an organized thing.
18:25 Speaker 15 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.
18:40 Rund Abdelfatah? So Roy starts hitting up his contacts.
18:42 Speaker 15 I made some phone calls into Banja Luka.
18:45 Rund Abdelfatah? At this point in 1992, the Bosnian Serbs controlled Banja Luka, the second-largest city in Bosnia. It was the city where the mayor had shown Roy the map of land the Serbs wanted to capture before the war. And now Roy found himself on a call with a Muslim political leader there who told him...
19:03 Speaker 15 Please come, in the name of God, please come. Terrible things are happening here.
19:10 Speaker 15 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 headed on the first buses to Banja Luka.
19:20 Rund Abdelfatah? And when he got there, Roy started interviewing people.
19:24 Speaker 15 I did everything in a very routine way. I called on the police, I called on the Serb military, I called on the political parties of the Muslims and Croats. 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. But they said that people were being killed in them.
19:47 Rund Abdelfatah? So Roy found a colonel with the Bosnian Serb military who would speak with him.
19:51 Speaker 15 So I asked the innocent question. I said, "Other people are talking about a whole network of camps that have been set up. Is this true? Maybe it's just invention." He responded that the Muslims had set up camps all over the place and were detaining Serbs.
20:10 Rund Abdelfatah? 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. And it was Bosnian Muslims who were being killed in the greatest numbers. So Roy, following his leads, said...
20:30 Speaker 15 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 complete naivety and appearance. But as a matter of fact, I knew damn well that some terrible things were happening there. And they actually arranged to take me the next day to one of the camps.
20:52 Rund Abdelfatah? Roy gets on another bus and heads to a town about 15 miles away.
20:57 Speaker 15 The Army turned down Newsday's request for a tour, offering instead interviews with eight handpicked prisoners and a camp doctor. Armed guards monitor each conversation. Army interviewers asked most of the questions.
21:11 Rund Abdelfatah? Then the eight men were marched away.
21:13 Speaker 15 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. The smartest thing I ever did there was I brought along a photographer, Andrei Kaiser. I really had to have photographs to back up what I was writing.
21:34 Rund Abdelfatah? While Roy was there, he and his photographer witnessed another scene.
21:39 Speaker 15 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.
21:49 Rund Abdelfatah? They left with photos.
21:51 Speaker 15 They just changed everything. They conveyed a whole degradation, humiliation with the hands of thugs.
22:02 Rund Abdelfatah? Roy hadn't seen any violence at this detention center, but he'd heard about another one, a camp in a town called Omarska.
22:11 Speaker 15 I asked my escort, Major Milutinovic, if he could take me to Omarska. This is not a request I made 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 Manja Luka. But about halfway there, he got a phone call saying that they couldn't guarantee my safety. But this led me to believe that something really terrible was happening, that what I thought Manja was small potatoes compared to what must be going on in Omarska if they couldn't take me there. I became obsessed by it.
22:54 Rund Abdelfatah? Roy knew this was a problem. It's hard to write a story about a place you can't go. 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.
23:12 Speaker 15 More than 1,000 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.
23:23 Rund Abdelfatah? In stories published in August of 1992, Roy wrote about the metal cages where prisoners were held, the people who died trying to escape.
23:32 Speaker 15 All were shot after falling 60 feet to the ground.
23:35 Rund Abdelfatah? One source told him that every few days, Serbian guards would execute prisoners in groups of 10 to 15. They said-
23:43 Speaker 15 They would take them to a nearby lake. You'd hear a volley of rifles, and they'd never come back. 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.
24:06 Rund Abdelfatah? Around the time Roy started publishing his stories, other people had already started calling the violence in Bosnia a genocide. But the media wasn't using the word, even as more and more details emerged.
24:19 Speaker 16 Mosques are being blown up.
24:21 Speaker 17 Four more mosques were reduced to rubble.
24:23 Speaker 16 Churches blown up.
24:25 Speaker 17 Forty-six percent of the churches in his diocese have been destroyed.
24:28 Speaker 16 Historical heritage blown up.
24:30 Speaker 23 We saw that almost every building was damaged in some way.
24:34 Speaker 16 And there are, within just months, municipalities that are just missing 30,000 people. They're gone.
24:42 Speaker 23 Local officials say that as many as 70,000 people are hauled up in the town and the surrounding area. Many of them are refugees.
24:49 Speaker 16 So within a couple of months, we just see this organized effort to claim territory and expel, to make sure that in five or 10 years, you can just say, oh, these people that were never around.
25:01 Rund Abdelfatah? 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.
25:10 Speaker 15 As a reporter, you don't have time to step back and think of what is the big picture I'm drawing here.
25:17 Rund Abdelfatah? But that picture would come into focus the next year, in 1993, when he was able to step back. And after Roy's stories on the war, won a Pulitzer Prize.
25:29 Speaker 15 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 adds up to genocide. It's the pieces of the puzzle that I've assembled here without any design, but just by virtue of the fact that they're out there and there are 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. And I'm willing to state that I'm the witness.
26:04 Rund Abdelfatah? 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. 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 US House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
26:25 Speaker 15 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.
26:35 Rund Abdelfatah? UN peacekeepers were sent in to protect aid deliveries. Washington called for an emergency session of the UN Human Rights Commission. Journalists flooded the region, but concrete action on the ground didn't happen.
26:49 Speaker 15 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 then nobody does anything about it.
27:04 Rund Abdelfatah? 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. The other one was the International Court of Justice, whose job was to settle disputes among countries or governments. 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. In 1993, both courts would begin their work, but it would take years to see any results. When this case comes in 1993 in front of the International Court of Justice, on
27:48 Rund Abdelfatah? the ground, does anything stop? No. Coming up, the evidence for genocide becomes undeniable.
28:06 Speaker 24 Hey, this is Travis Davenport from San Diego, California. You're listening to Throughline on NPR.
28:14 Speaker 12 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
28:18 Speaker 00 This message comes from ProLon with their five-day fasting-mimicking diet, a clinically-developed nutrition program with the goal of promoting fat loss while protecting lean body mass. Learn more at prolonlife.com/NPR.
28:32 Speaker 12 This message comes from Live Right, publisher of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback. Support for this podcast and the following message come from the Southern Environmental Law Center. No one voted for a dirty air. No one voted for polluted water. That's why SELC is fighting back to defend the healthy environment everyone depends on, just as they've done for 40 years.
29:13 Speaker 12 Because clean air, clean water, and a healthy climate aren't political, they're fundamental. Learn more at SELC.org.
29:23 Speaker 25 Part two, Srebrenica.
29:32 Speaker 26 Srebrenica itself is an enclave that is in the eastern portion in Bosnia, very, very close to the Serbian border. It's about three hours' drive east from Sarajevo. Very rural area, lots of farmland. It's hilly, it's green. There are small, little villages around. Everybody knows everybody.
29:54 Speaker 02 In April 1993.
29:56 Speaker 26 The area of Srebrenica was actually declared a United Nations Safe Zone.
30:01 Speaker 02 The zone included Srebrenica town and the surrounding area.
30:06 Speaker 26 So this is where people were supposed to flood into to escape the ongoing besiegement from the war that was ongoing.
30:13 Speaker 02 This is Sima Gilani. She's a pediatrician and humanitarian aid worker who has spent time in Bosnia recording survivor testimonies.
30:23 Speaker 26 So that's what they did, is that Bosnian Muslims fled into, by the thousands.
30:28 Speaker 16 There's about 40,000 people in this area.
30:32 Speaker 02 And this is Dr. Eva Fukasic. She's a professor of international history at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who grew up in nearby Croatia.
30:41 Speaker 26 The community swole so much, they were even unable to handle that amount of people. These are tiny towns.
30:48 Speaker 02 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 Srabenica, the only water source, got polluted with sewage. But what the safe zone did have was protection.
31:10 Speaker 26 It's been guarded by UN peacekeeping forces, which were largely of the Dutch battalion.
31:16 Speaker 02 These peacekeeping forces were lightly armed, and there were no more than 600 of them in Srabenica at a time. They provided some aid, but they weren't there to fight. At that point, the international community was officially neutral. But starting in March 1995, things would get worse, fast, when the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Keradž handed down a directive.
31:44 Speaker 25 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 Srabenica and Jepa.
31:57 Speaker 02 The war was entering its fourth year, and Bosnian Serb leaders wanted to put an end to it.
32:03 Speaker 16 Basically, they're sort of, you know, getting as much territory as they can.
32:07 Speaker 02 Their goal was to build an independent Serbian state, and they wanted it to be linked with Serbia proper. In order to do this, the Bosnian Serb army would have to annex Srabenica and expel the Bosnian Muslims who lived there. So on July 6, 1995, at 3:00 in the morning, the Bosnian Serb army attacked the outskirts of Srabenica, the UN's safe zone.
32:33 Speaker 16 The Bosnian Serb army enters this space of the safe area, which they were not supposed to enter.
32:40 Speaker 02 The army advanced towards the town.
32:46 Speaker 02 The footage you're hearing was taken in Srebrenica a few days later, on July 10th and 11th. 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 Zahirovic. He was in his twenties at the time, and throughout the war, he filmed a lot. It wasn't common to have this kind of documentary video at the time. Remember, people didn't have smartphones, 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. Crowds were clustered outside of UN buildings in Srebrenica,
33:30 Speaker 02 shouting, but the UN wasn't gonna help them.
33:33 Speaker 16 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.
33:45 Speaker 02 And they didn't.
33:46 Speaker 26 The Dutch ended up ceding control of that area, handing over essentially the keys to the Serbs, the Serb militia, paramilitias.
33:55 Speaker 02 By the afternoon of July 11th, Bosnian Serb forces had taken over Srebrenica.
34:04 Speaker 02 Ratko Mlodic, the general in command of the Bosnian Serb army, stood in Srebrenica and claimed victory.
34:14 Speaker 02 He said the town was a gift to the Serbian people.
34:17 Speaker 16 Men from teenage age to, you know, high, uh, uh, high age feel afraid that if they fall into the hands of the Bosnian Serb army or police, that they're going to get executed.
34:30 Speaker 16 So they make their way into the forests.
34:34 Speaker 02 That day, 15,000 people, mostly Bosnian Muslim men and older boys, set out on foot. Ibro Zahirovic, camera in hand, was one of them.
34:50 Speaker 02 You're hearing the footage he took of what became known as the column, a long line of people trying to walk to safety.
34:58 Speaker 26 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.
35:11 Speaker 02 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. 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. By the morning of July 12th, 30,000 Bosnian Muslims had gone to seek protection at the UN compound in the next town over.
35:45 Speaker 16 These are women, children, young boys, all the men.
35:52 Speaker 02 This is footage from the Bosnian Serb TV station. It was incredibly crowded and there was not enough food, water, medicine, or bathrooms.
36:01 Speaker 26 Women were dying, giving birth. People were living on top of one another.
36:07 Speaker 02 And by that afternoon, Bosnian Serb forces had also arrived. Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general, was there that day and spoke to the Bosnian Muslims seeking refuge.
36:22 Speaker 02 In the video, Ratko Mladic 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. Please don't panic. Nobody will harm you."
36:41 Speaker 02 But that same day, the Bosnian Serb army began to separate the women, children, and elderly from the men and boys. The women, children, and elderly were taken on buses to Bosnian Muslim-held territory. As for the men and boys...
36:55 Speaker 16 Bosnian Serb army and police take them to kind of cultural halls and, and high school sports gyms.
37:04 Speaker 02 They were detained, many without food and water, and crammed in so tightly some couldn't even sit down. Over the next several days, Bosnian Serb forces orchestrated mass killings of these men and boys.
37:18 Speaker 16 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.
37:27 Speaker 26 Over 8,000 men and boys were similarly executed, shot, killed.
37:34 Speaker 27 Just imagine, this youngest boy I had, those little hands of his.
37:41 Speaker 27 How could they be dead?
37:43 Speaker 02 Many of their bodies were dumped into mass graves and buried.
37:50 Speaker 16 What happens then in the next couple of days and weeks is the women that managed to reach government-held territory are asking, where is my husband? Where is my brother?
38:02 Speaker 16 They're realizing there's thousands of people missing.
38:05 Speaker 28 NPR'S Andy Bowers is in Tuzla, and he says that yesterday, some of the men from Shrebrnica began arriving in Tuzla.
38:12 Speaker 29 Some of them are telling the UN terrible stories about massacres by the Bosnian Serbs.
38:22 Speaker 30 I lost my son, brother, husband. Thirty from my close family alone. I can never tell everything. We just want to find out where the bones, the remains of our fathers, brothers, sons are, to find out the truth.
38:38 Speaker 02 Reports from Srebrenica broke internationally as early as July 16th, before all the killing was even over. Bosnian Serb officials denied that a massacre had taken place.
38:51 Speaker 31 I'm asking you if these new reports are true or false.
38:54 Speaker 32 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.
39:06 Speaker 02 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. Meanwhile, the Bosnian Serb army mounted a cover-up operation. 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 re-bury bodies in secondary locations to try and hide the evidence.
39:38 Speaker 02 In the wake of Srebrenica and the outrage that followed, the international community, including the US, faced increasing pressure to act. 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. In December 1995, the Dayton Accords were signed, ending the war in Bosnia. An estimated 100,000 people had died.
40:10 Speaker 02 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. 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. These cases involved the Srebrenica massacre alongside violence committed in other villages and towns.
40:44 Speaker 16 How do you even go about finding thousands of victims and establishing who they were and what happened to them? Historically, if you get killed and you get dumped in a mass grave, you are never found. 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.
41:05 Speaker 16 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.
41:19 Speaker 02 Coming up, the quest for justice.
41:26 Speaker 33 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. So you're listening to Throughline from NPR.
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42:52 Speaker 25 Part three, agreeing to evil.
42:56 Rund Abdelfatah? 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.
43:13 Speaker 19 The United Nations War Crimes Tribunal today indicted the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Keradžić. We completely deny that kind of atrocities. And the commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, Radom Lotić, on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.
43:28 Speaker 17 They can't even leave this area because there are international arrest warrants for them.
43:33 Rund Abdelfatah? 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. 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, written on the darkest pages of human history." And scenes like that played out over the many individual trials the tribunal held.
44:12 Speaker 34 The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslav is now in session.
44:16 Speaker 29 The courtroom itself is interesting. Kind of glass aquarium. Thick bulletproof glass surrounding it.
44:21 Speaker 16 The criminal court collected a ton of evidence, testimonies. The prosecution called two citizens of Srebrenica. I saw those women screaming, moaning, crying, tearing their hair off. Expert reports.
44:34 Speaker 35 Here on slide number 25, you can see photos of just some of the victims.
44:39 Speaker 16 DNA analysis, military reports. 5,000 witnesses were testifying.
44:46 Speaker 36 After half an hour, every one of them was thrown in the holes.
44:53 Speaker 16 I would say this is probably the most investigated international crime in history.
44:59 Rund Abdelfatah? In the end, the UN tribunal charged 161 people with all kinds of crimes. A majority of them were Serb military and political leaders. 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. And then, in 2001...
45:25 Speaker 28 The International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague has handed down its first verdict of genocide.
45:31 Rund Abdelfatah? It was the first time a court would officially recognize what had happened in Srebrenica six years earlier as genocide.
45:39 Speaker 28 The court sentenced the Bosnian Serb general Radislav Kürstic to 46 years in prison for his part in the 1995 massacre at the Bosnian Muslim enclave of Srebrenica.
45:50 Rund Abdelfatah? Kürstic was a deputy commander in the Bosnian Serb army. 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. He was found guilty of genocide.
46:08 Speaker 37 Judge Almiro Rodriguez pronounced the toughest sentence yet handed down by the tribunal.
46:18 Speaker 38 In July 1995, General Kürstic...
46:25 Speaker 38 Individually, you agreed to evil.
46:29 Rund Abdelfatah? This was a huge deal to many people. But this was just one guy. What about everyone else? Or the Serbian government as a whole? Were they guilty of genocide? 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 a ruling. 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.
47:10 Rund Abdelfatah? The ICJ ordered Serbia to transfer any people accused of genocide to the UN War Crimes Tribunal, where they could be prosecuted individually.
47:20 Speaker 16 To this day, we have no straightforward finding of the ICJ that any state is guilty of committing genocide.
47:30 Speaker 02 Even after the genocide convictions, mass graves were still being excavated all around Bosnia and still being used as evidence in ongoing trials. 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. Families looked for anything they could help to identify their loved ones, like fragments of bones or old watches and rings.
48:03 Speaker 26 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 she asked for a light for her cigarette. And he took the 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? That's all she has? So for me, what does the word genocide matter to her?
48:43 Speaker 39 I can still hear steps of my sons walking through the house.
48:48 Speaker 02 NPR covered the trials as they unfolded over the years and spoke to many survivors. Some spoke of trauma.
48:56 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.
49:06 Speaker 02 Others were angry that the UN, the US, and the international community largely stood by during the worst of the violence.
49:16 Speaker 20 It's difficult even to imagine what people can do to other people and what kind of animals they have to be to do this to somebody else.
49:25 Speaker 36 Shame on them. Really shame on them.
49:30 Speaker 20 I don't think the international community has learned its lesson. It still has a dirty conscience, and it didn't do enough to clear its conscience.
49:39 Speaker 02 The UN tribunal lasted more than two decades. In the end, 93 people were sentenced out of the 161 people charged. The final judgment came in 2017 when Ratko Mladic, the main leader in the Srebrenica massacre, was found guilty of genocide. He is currently serving a life sentence in The Hague in the Netherlands.
50:03 Rund Abdelfatah? 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. 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. According to the courts, Srebrenica was the only place genocide happened during the war in Bosnia.
50:35 Speaker 16 There are whole communities in Bosnia Herzegovina and elsewhere around the world that feel cheated because what their community went through wasn't labeled confirmed as a case of genocide.
50:49 Rund Abdelfatah? And that's true today in places where genocide is still being litigated, like the conflicts in Darfur, Ukraine, or Gaza, 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. 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.
51:19 Speaker 16 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. So I think in many ways, the expert community at this stage is pretty much in agreement that if this is not genocide, then I don't know what the hell genocide looks like.
51:41 Rund Abdelfatah? South Africa has already filed the genocide claim against Israel in the ICJ, but it most likely won't be decided for years. Israel has denied all the charges.
51:53 Speaker 16 This is the first time that we see a close Western ally.
52:00 Speaker 16 Being accused of such a thing. What does it mean if we, as their biggest ally and their biggest arms supplier, will use this word?
52:18 Speaker 16 International law depends on states. It is just as strong or just as weak as the states that support him.
52:29 Speaker 16 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. 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.
53:12 Rund Abdelfatah? That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.
53:16 Speaker 02 I'm Ramtin Arablouei. And you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.
53:20 Rund Abdelfatah? This episode was produced by me.
53:22 Speaker 02 And me, and? Lawrence Wu.
53:24 Rund Abdelfatah? Julie Kane.
53:26 Speaker 25 Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Christina Kim.
53:29 Speaker 05 Devon Cattiyama.
53:30 Speaker 25 Irene Noguchi.
53:32 Speaker 02 Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.
53:35 Rund Abdelfatah? Thanks to the BBC and member station KBIA in Missouri for some of the archival radio reports you heard in this episode.
53:43 Speaker 02 Thank you also to Chris Hoff, Johannes Dergi, Laura Schwartz, Nadia Lancy, Nick Spicer, Beth Donovan, and Tommy Evans. This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keely.
53:57 Rund Abdelfatah? Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes?
54:02 Speaker 02 Naveed Marvi.
54:03 Speaker 24 Sho Fujiwara.
54:05 Speaker 00 Anya Mizani.
54:07 Speaker 02 And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on this show, please write us at [email protected] . And make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode.
54:21 Rund Abdelfatah? Thanks for listening.
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