An open letter from the Vice President of the World Jewish Congress, Menachem Rosensaft

Text translated from English by Samir Kulaglić

The misleading report escalates the campaign to deny the genocide in Srebrenica
The self-proclaimed "Independent" international commission, appointed at the initiative of the Bosnian Serb separatist leader who denies the genocide, and led by an Israeli academic with a history of publishing pro-Serb works and public comments with many exaggerations, issued its "Final Report" last week on "the suffering of all peoples in the region Srebrenica in the period 1992-1995".

As the son of two survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, who were deeply committed to passing on evidence to future generations of the atrocities committed against European Jews during the Holocaust, I am particularly appalled by the report's shameful manipulation of the truth. It is a document that deserves to be consigned to the dustbin of history and is an example of demonstrating the moral failings of individuals - the proverbial "useful idiots" who got involved in denying and twisting the facts about the genocide.

The report is a disgrace to science and a glove in the face of the facts established by international law. In addition to being a legal and factual monster, he blatantly ignores one judgment after another of the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The Commission heavily supports its report with an isolated opinion from the trial in one of the earlier ICTY cases. It also presents the writings of the largely discredited deniers of the Srebrenica genocide as a holy book, without taking into account the writings of historians and legal experts who came to diametrically different conclusions.
On more than 1,000 pages, this report unilaterally rejects or ignores the findings of a number of international courts, including not only the ICTY, but also the International Court of Justice in The Hague, that the slaughter of around 8,000 Bosniaks - ie. of Bosnian Muslim men and boys in and around Srebrenica in July 1995 by Bosnian Serb paramilitary units and the simultaneous forced deportation of more than 25,000 Bosniak women, children and elderly men constitutes genocide.

The mentioned paramilitary forces were in the service of the ultra-nationalist Bosnian Serbs who in 1991-1992 refused to be part of the newly founded Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and instead established the separatist Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, known as the Republic of Serbia. The Serb-dominated Republika Srpska later became one of the two entities that make up the multi-ethnic state of Bosnia and Herzegovina in accordance with the 1995 Dayton Agreement, a peace agreement that ended the brutal armed conflict in Bosnia, but which also maintained and strengthened ethnic divisions.

The report also repeatedly mentions Bosniaks as aggressors and Bosnian Serbs as victims in the rewriting of history, reminiscent of Third Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and his justification of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany.

The report represents a desperate continuation of a quarter-century of efforts by nationalists among Bosnian Serbs and their supporters to convince the world that what happened in Srebrenica was not genocide. Those efforts range from trying to dispute the number of people killed to accusing the victims of the massacre, claiming it was a reaction to Bosniak provocations. At the 2018 session, the Assembly of the Republic of Srpska rejected the report from 2004, which was adopted by the previous Government of the Republic of Srpska when it acknowledged the massacre in Srebrenica.

The cynical choice of the president of the commission

Particularly cynical in the current genocide denial campaign was the appointment of Israeli academic Gideon Greif as chairman of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry, presumably to lend an aura of pseudoscience to one whose apparent intent was yet another denial or at least a "whitewash" of widespread violations of international law - among them and the horrific crimes against humanity and genocide – committed by Bosnian Serb paramilitary forces and their leaders during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Greif has been popular among Serbian nationalists for a long time, and his appointment to head this commission in 2019 was not surprising. For years, Greif has presented data with an exaggerated number of Serbian victims during the Second World War in Jasenovac, a complex of five concentration camps that is often called the "Auschwitz of the Balkans". Jasenovac was the most notorious of the network of camps run by the fascist Ustasha movement in the Independent State of Croatia, an autonomous Nazi puppet state founded in 1941. According to the American Holocaust Memorial Museum, somewhere between 77,000 and 99,000 Serbs, Jews, Roma and Croatian opponents of the Ustasha regime were brutally murdered in Jasenovac. In the Jasenovac Memorial Area, the names of 83,145 victims who died there were identified. And yet, Greif repeatedly increased the number of Jasenovac victims, to the astonishment of responsible historians. In 2019 alone, he claimed that it was a number of "at least 800,000" and "at least 700,000" - as if the actual data on Ustasha crimes were not already bad enough.

In the case of this latest report on the genocide in Srebrenica (hereafter the Greif report), the members of the commission claim that they "distanced themselves from all positions and policies of any official institution in order to maintain their strict neutrality and independence" (p. 18). Other members of the commission were, among others, a professor of political science at the University of Vienna; Professor of Political Science at Rikkyo University School of Social Sciences in Tokyo; licensed clinical psychologist, who is an associate professor of law at the University of New Hampshire – Durham; an officer of the Ministry of Interior of the Republic of Nigeria with the rank of General; and a German lawyer “with a special interest in international litigation as well as international humanitarian law cases” (Greif Report, p. 1105). However, their product is essentially nothing more than the elaborate vomit of the decades-long denial of the genocide in Srebrenica by the Republika Srpska and Serbian nationalist politicians, pseudo-academics and others.

The report concludes "after a thorough investigation (...) that neither an individual crime of genocide nor genocide in general took place in Srebrenica" and that "there are no indications that there was a specific intent to commit genocide." Furthermore, no significant part of the protected group of Muslims in Bosnia was destroyed" (Graif's report, p. 86).
A parallel commission led by Professor Rafael Izraeli issued a previous report in October 2020 "on the suffering of Serbs in Sarajevo between 1991 and 1995". It was designed in a similar way to absolve the leadership of the Republika Srpska and the armed forces of responsibility for the carnage committed in the capital of Bosnia. It was generally concluded (on p. 1004) that "the Bosnian nationalist myth about the intended Serbian genocide against the Bosnian Muslims has been definitively dispelled".

The two commissions were established at the initiative of Milorad Dodik, former prime minister, then president of the Republic of Serbia, and now a Serbian member of the three-member Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The commissions were formally appointed by the decisions of the Government of the Republic of Serbia (04/1-012-2-345/19 and 04/1-012-2-346/19) dated February 7, 2019.

Twisted logic

To break down the series of striking arguments from the Greif report, point by point, might give too much credibility – and try the patience of the readers of this article. However, some elements in particular illustrate this twisted logic.
First, the introductory information seems to be good. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was created after the First World War in the Balkan region after the dissolution of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Between 1945 and 1980, independent communist and former anti-fascist partisan leader Josip Broz Tito largely kept internal tensions in Yugoslavia under control, although they were partly driven by ethnic rivalries. However, in the first ten years of Tito's death, Serbian nationalist President Slobodan Milošević launched activities on Serbian domination of the country, effectively breaking up the tangled and sensitive power that had been maintained since the end of World War II.

As I wrote earlier in Just Security magazine, during the brutal war in Bosnia in 1992-1995. the paramilitary forces of the then breakaway counter-state of the Republika Srpska, with the support of the neighboring Government of Serbia, launched a campaign to expel non-Serbs from parts of Bosnia that were mostly inhabited by Serbs. It should be mentioned that war crimes were common in this tragic conflict and that they were not committed only by Bosnian Serbs.

In 1993, the UN Security Council declared the city in eastern Bosnia "Srebrenica and its surroundings a safe zone, which should be spared from all armed attacks or hostilities." In a few days, starting on July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces under the command of General Ratko Mladić killed about 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, aged 12 to 77, from Srebrenica and forcibly expelled about 25,000 Bosniak women, children and the elderly from Srebrenica enclave.
Beginning with the conviction of Radislav Krstic in July 2001, the ICTY found six Bosnian Serbs, including Mladic and former Republika Srpska president Radovan Karadzic, guilty of genocide in connection with the Srebrenica killings. The International Court of Justice also found in 2007 that "the acts committed in Srebrenica (...) were committed with the specific intent to partially destroy the group of Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina as such; and consequently that these are acts of genocide".

True, the Greif report includes the age-old rationalization of racially, ethnically or religiously motivated victim-blaming of disappearances perpetrated by Serbian perpetrators, and, to a large extent, the report disparages as illegitimate and politically biased not only ICTY trials but almost all war crimes trials since the International Military Tribunal at "Nuremberg" (the report irritatingly continues to call it "Nuremberg" incorrectly - see Greif Report, pp. 712, 713, 719, 724, 725).

The chapter entitled "Legal Conclusions on Srebrenica" begins with the assertion that the ICTY "failed to prove that the murders were committed with the specific intent to destroy a significant part of the protected group of all Muslims in Bosnia" (Id., p. 55). The report then accepts that:

It found that where a conviction for genocide rests on an intent to destroy a protected group “in part,” the part must be a substantial part of that group. The goal of the Convention on the Prevention of Genocide is to prevent the intentional destruction of entire human groups, and the targeted portion must be significant enough to have an impact on the group as a whole. (Id., p. 58)

Selective quotes

Among the authorities selectively cited for this claim is the highly respected Nehemiah Robinson and his work The Convention on the Prevention of Genocide: A Commentary. Greif's report cites Robinson three times for the proposition that “the perpetrator of genocide must have the intent to destroy a substantial number of individuals constituting the target group” (Id., pp. 59, 86, 1035).
The report takes note of, but strongly rejects, the finding of the Appeals Chamber of the ICTY in the Krstić case "because the majority of the Muslim population of the region sought refuge in the Srebrenica enclave until 1995, the elimination of that enclave would achieve the goal of cleansing the entire region of the Muslim population" (Id., page 65).

Applying tortured sophistry, including an artificial and legally unfounded attempt to determine whether Srebrenica Bosniaks constituted a "significant" or "substantial" part of Bosnia's Bosniak population as a whole, the Greif report then concludes: "It is clear that the Appeals Chamber's definition of a significant group in the Krstić verdict and subsequent verdicts, it does not indicate that a real genocide took place in Srebrenica." (Id., p. 66) The report continues with this futile effort to prove the conclusory claim that:

genocide as such could not happen in Bosnia. As the crime of genocide by its very nature requires the intent to destroy at least a significant part of a certain group, genocide as such can only occur if a significant part of a certain group is physically destroyed. This destruction must be established as an objective fact. (Id., p. 85)

What is not mentioned in Greif's report is that Robinson, the director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs of the World Jewish Congress, where I work, is recognized to this day as one of the leading authorities on the Convention on the Prevention of Genocide, and in the commentary itself he wrote what is quoted in this report that:

The intention to destroy a large number of persons of the same group because of their belonging to this group must be classified as genocide even if those persons form only part of the group either within a country or within a region or within a single community, provided that the number is significant. (...) It is up to the courts to decide in each individual case whether that number is significantly large. (Nehemiah Robinson, The Convention for the Prevention of Genocide: A Commentary, New York: Institute of Jewish Affairs, World Jewish Congress, 1960, p. 63, emphasis added.)

In other words, Robinson, an authority cited several times in the Greif report, stated unequivocally that regardless of whether the number of victims was "large enough" it was up to the courts to decide whether it was genocide. Regardless of the fact that Grajf's report turns a blind eye to the decisions that followed the verdict in the Krstić case, they are actually decisive both in terms of significance and in terms of whether genocide took place in Srebrenica. In the interest of at least some measure of brevity, I will highlight only two of these ICTY judgments here.

Judgments of the ICTY
In the Prosecutor v. Zdravko Tolimir case (April 8, 2015, IT-05-88/2-A), for example, the ICTY Appeals Chamber decisively and unequivocally concluded that "the murder of at least 5,749 Bosnian Muslim men from Srebrenica" constituted an act of genocide, committed with the requisite genocidal intent (190). The Appeals Chamber in the Tolimir case also confirmed the Trial Chamber's finding that (a) the infliction of grievous bodily or mental harm on these Muslim men and boys prior to their execution constituted a separate act of genocide; and (b) that "the suffering of women, children and the elderly, forcibly relocated from Srebrenica, constituted a serious mental injury according to Article 4 of the Statute of the ICTY" (195) - that is, another of the acts that constitute genocide according to the ICTY Charter and the Convention on preventing genocide.
The ICTY Trial Chamber convicted Ratko Mladić of genocide, considering that Bosnian Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina represent a protected group within the meaning of the ICTY Statute. (Prosecutor v. Ratko Mladić, ICTY, Judgment, Trial Chamber, 22 November 2017, IT-09-92-T, 3442, 3538.) Among the grounds for Mladić's conviction were findings that Republika Srpska units terrorized and abused Bosnian the Muslims of Srebrenica (Id, 3541); "that these acts represented cruel, that is, inhuman treatment (Ibid)"; and that "the suffering that the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica suffered in the period before they were killed was intense, long-lasting and serious. Many spent their last moments in a state of despair” (Id., 3543). The trial panel concluded:

that thousands of Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica were subjected to severe physical or mental suffering that included: death threats or treatment that led to death or suicide; knowledge, in many cases, of impending death because of the horrible way they were treated before they were killed; and long-term physical and psychological injuries. The harm inflicted by the perpetrators on the victims preceded the suffering that was inherently part of the act of killing. The Trial Chamber therefore concludes that the severe physical or mental injuries suffered by thousands of Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica contributed to the destruction of the targeted group as a consequence of the actions of the physical perpetrators. (Id., 3544)

The Mladić Trial Chamber also explained why the Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica met the threshold of significance for a finding of genocide, despite the fact that they "made up less than two percent of the Bosnian Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a whole" (Id., 3541). The Trial Chamber made it clear “that in determining the significance of a group, the numerical size of the share in absolute amounts is one of many factors” (Id. 3550). Among other factors to consider are “the numerical size of the portion in relation to the total size of the group; the prominence of a part of the group in the wider whole and whether it is symbolic for the entire group or is essential for its survival; area of activity and control of the offender; and the potential reach of the perpetrator" (Ibid.).

In determining significance, the Trial Chamber in the Mladić case took into account the combined impact of the killing of thousands of Bosnian Muslim men, the destruction of political or religious monuments and homes, and the forced relocation of Bosnian Muslim women, children and the elderly. The physical perpetrators of these acts committed them knowing that it would be a demonstration of the final fate that awaited Bosnian Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This demonstrative effect would be a consequence of the symbolic impact of the killing of Bosnian Muslims in the declared safe area, the destruction of a number of religious buildings and homes of Bosnian Muslims in the region, and the forced relocation of all or most of the remaining Bosnian Muslim population. (Id., 3553)

Highlighting a dissenting opinion, ignoring the majority of the court
It would have been one thing if Grajf's report had dealt with the substance of the judgments of Tolimir and Mladić, as well as others (Karadžić; Popović, Beara et al.), in which both the Trial and Appeals Chambers of the ICTY explained in detail why the crimes committed in Srebrenica really constituted genocide. But the authors of the report absolutely ignore them, choosing instead to paste their collective dissenting opinion onto the court's ruling. The report devotes most of its six pages (Greif's report, pp. 624-629) to Judge Prisca Matimba Njamba's dissenting opinion in the Tolimir case, in which she argued that she would have acquitted the accused. This is, of course, a completely academic discussion in pseudo-intellectual futility, because it makes no sense to announce the merits of a dissenting opinion without considering the facts and legal arguments of the majority, or the second-instance verdict that supported the Trial Chamber's conclusion on genocide.

This is akin to pretending to discuss California v. Texas, the US Supreme Court's most recent decision on the Affordable Care Act, by referring exclusively to the dissenting opinion of Justice Samuel Alito and thoroughly ignoring the majority opinion of Justice Stephen Brayer joined by six of his colleagues , including council president John Roberts. Or even worse, to discuss a dissenting opinion of a lower federal court, in which the majority opinion was upheld by the Supreme Court, without a single judge giving credence to the atypical dissenter. Or, for that matter, Plessy v. Ferguson, which is accepted as judicial authority for the constitutionality of racial segregation laws, while ignoring the intervening decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

If my student at Columbia Law School or Cornell Law School were to make this type of argument in a term paper in my genocide law course, he would not receive a passing grade.

Greif's report makes considerable and unbearable efforts to reject as "victor's justice" and "retributive justice" not only the ICTY but also the International Military Tribunals in Nuremberg and Tokyo, as well as the very foundations on which they were formed. According to one of the stranger parts of the report, retributive justice is “designed to compensate suffering with proportionate suffering, although proportionality can be very difficult to measure (…) It is intended to collect in kind or lex talionis [sic]. Ironically, in the case of Bosnia and the ICTY, retributive justice pitted ethnic groups against each other, which actually exacerbated ethnic hatred” (Id., p. 680). It is hard to imagine any purpose for including this argument other than undermining the legitimacy of the ICTY and its judgments, a goal popular in Banja Luka, the capital of Republika Srpska, and among Serbian nationalists in Belgrade, neighboring Serbia. But they are unlikely to find strength elsewhere.

Blaming the victims
Another distasteful aspect of the Greif report is the apparent determination of its authors to hold Bosniaks responsible for the actions of Bosnian Serbs, essentially blaming the victims. A large part of the report is devoted to the genocide committed by the Croatian Ustasha movement against Serbs and Jews in the Independent State of Croatia during World War II, as well as lengthy reports on alleged Bosniak aggressive actions in early 1991. Especially according to this allegation, Bosnian Serbs killed Bosniaks in Srebrenica not as part of genocide but (take your pick) as retaliation or to prevent future military actions by said Bosniaks.

Blaming Bosniaks for the atrocities committed against them is reminiscent of Joseph Goebbels and how he justified Nazi anti-Jewish policies. Accusing Albert Einstein and the German Jewish writers Emil Ludwig and Leon Feuchtwanger of waging a "campaign of atrocities" against Germany, Goebbels declared in April 1933 that "the German nation was ready to leave the Jewish question alone if Judaism would leave the German nation alone." .
Eight and a half years later, in November 1941, in the early stages of the Holocaust, Goebbels wrote in the weekly newspaper Das Reich:

If the international finances of Judea succeeded in pushing the world into war once more, the result would not be the Bolshevization of the world and thus the victory of the Jews, but the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe. (...) Every Jew is our enemy in this historical struggle, regardless of whether he vegetates in a Polish ghetto or continues his parasitic existence in Berlin or Hamburg or speaks eulogies in New York or Washington. All Jews by birth and race are part of the international conspiracy against National Socialist Germany. (...) We must win this war. If we lose him, these seemingly harmless Jewish boys would suddenly become rabid wolves. They would attack our women and children to take revenge. (...) There is no retreat in our fight against the Jews - even if we wanted to, but we won't. The Jews must be removed from the German community, because they threaten our national unity.

This is exactly the kind of obscene argument we see in the Greif report as a subliminal justification for what happened in Srebrenica: Bosniaks brought on their own genocide (which the report denies was genocide) - don't blame Mladic, don't blame Karadzic, don't blame the soldiers of the Republika Srpska who shot thousands of unarmed men and boys. At the very root, instead, blame the Bosniaks.

Adding insult to injury is that one has to dig through the Greif report because the report relies on sworn deniers of the Srebrenica genocide. Allegedly, the members of the commission went out of their scope by supporting their arguments with quotes from individuals who built their careers in the nationalist and ideologically fenced area of the Republika Srpska.

To give just one example: The Greif Report quotes Andy Wilcoxon and his claim that "the number of prisoners executed by the Bosnian Serbs is about 3,900, which is less than half of the reported 8,000" (The Greif Report, p. 671). Back in 2011, Wilcoxon wrote that "the evidence supporting the ICTY's conclusions about genocidal intent is weak or non-existent." Just a moment, there's more. The authors of the report somehow failed to mention that Wilcoxon called the ICTY "the brainchild of the CIA and the MFA of the United States of America." According to Wilcoxon, “The United States used the Tribunal to promote its interests in the Balkans. (...) The judgment of the ICTY has the same problem of credibility and conflict of interest as the study on the consequences of smoking on health, published by an institution that receives funding from tobacco companies". Yet Gideon Greif and the rest of the committee either overlooked this particular section or failed to fully inform their readers of Wilcoxon's views.

Greif's report is now a permanent component of the Republika Srpska government's brazen refusal to acknowledge the atrocities committed in its name. It is interesting that on July 23, the Associated Press reported that Valentin Incko, the highest international official in Bosnia under the Dayton Agreement in his capacity as the head of the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, imposed amendments to the "Criminal Code of BiH, introducing prison sentences of up to five years for denial of genocide and glorification of war criminals, including naming streets or public institutions after them".

And finally, the grace of Greif's report is that it was drafted so desperately badly that it will only reach other deniers of the genocide in Srebrenica, which could finally be the only positive feature of this report.

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