World
Seven men were arrested on Wednesday by Serbian police for their participation in the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. (A warrant has been issued for an eighth perpetrator as well.) The arrests represent a major shift in Belgrade’s policy toward reconciliation with Sarajevo over ethnic cleansing during the Yugoslav civil wars from 1992-5. It is the first time that a domestic Serbian arrest has been made in connection to war crimes.
The Srebrenica massacre is the sole internationally recognized genocide to have taken place on European soil since the Holocaust. When the ethnically and religiously diverse Bosnia attempted to declare independence amid the decline of Yugoslavia, Croatian and Serbian factions - backed by their respective states - helped stage an uprising to partition Bosnia. To scrub the Serbian-claimed region of Bosnia of its large Muslim population, the Serbs launched an ethnic cleansing campaign. In three years of conflict, around 100,000 people were killed, over 80% of them Bosnian Muslims.
Besides being an infamous moment of ethnically fueled barbarism, Srebrenica is also viewed by many as an enduring symbol of the toothlessness of the United Nations. The region was established as a U.N.-held area in 1993, but it quickly became clear that the international forces were not there to put up much of a fight. (One Dutch member of the force told the New York Times Magazine that the U.N. troops were issued guns containing only 20 bullets, which they were instructed not to shoot.) As a result, Serb partisans were able to bulldoze the multinational military presence and take over Srebrenica. After years of U.N. “protection,” the area had become swamped with thousands of displaced refugees from conflict-torn areas. The men and boys among them were executed by Serbian troops, in an attempt to suppress insurrection.
Even as international efforts to document, memorialize and obtain justice for these crimes have been considerable, there has been minimal participation in Belgrade. Some of the chief architects of the crimes against humanity in Bosnia have been brought to the Hague, but Wednesday’s arrests by Serbian officials themselves are an unprecedented shift.
In fact, experts say this is the first time Belgrade has readily acknowledged its own culpability in the horrors in Bosnia at all. Serbia has been frequently criticized over the past 20 years for its failure to officially condone reconciliation efforts between Bosnia, Serbia and the republic of Srpska, the Serb-leaning body that forms part of the government in Sarajevo, where most of the violence took place. Srpska politicians have frequently denied any genocide against Bosnian Muslims, saying that atrocities were evenly distributed on both sides. In early 2014, a Srpska court even ruled that one small town must remove its memorial to genocide victims, in light of a lack of evidence that any genocide occurred.
In this context, the Serbian arrests are a big step. But it remains to be seen whether they are emblematic of an earnest cultural shift, or merely a token performance by Belgrade to ingratiate itself with the E.U. to improve its prospects for future membership. If Serbia really wants reconciliation, eight warrants and a few fall guys at the Hague won’t be nearly enough.
