NEWS: Serbs Up For Crimes Against Humanity

POLITICS: Serbs Up For Crimes Against Humanity

It has been years since the end of the last war in the Baltics, where NATO forces, with Clinton's backing, finally intervened to stop a genocide that had been going on for years in Europe's backyard. The key figure in the genocide, Slobodan Milosevic, was tried and convicted, and much to everyone's relief, died in prison earlier this year. But Milosevic did not act alone, and now it's time for his accomplices to face the music.

This particular trial is focusing on the events that occurred in Srebrenica, an area that had been declared a "UN Safe Haven" to stop Bosnian Serbs from massacring the Muslims living there. The Serbs did it anyway, and are believed to have killed over eight thousand civilians in one of the worst modern examples of ethnic cleansing to have affected Europe since the second world war. It's not likely that they'll have many rallying to their cause, as the evidence against them is overwhelming, and they acted in direct defiance of a UN mandate that Serbian forces stay out of the area. Maybe some convictions in these trials will allow people in the region to gain some closure in a dark chapter of their history.

Should that not read "the Balkans" and not "the Baltics". Unless there's been some massive ethnic cleansing in Estonia recently that I haven't heard about

What's with all the animosity towards Serbs, and not the Bosnians or Croats? There were atrocities committed by all sides, just like in every war, but it seems the west has turned the Serbs into the new Nazis while everyone else gets a blind eye. And we seem to be tossing around the word "genocide" rather liberally nowadays. It's funny how history is written.

The obvious reason would be because the Serbs defied a direct UN mandate, moved troops into a UN "Safe Haven," kidnapped 30 Dutch soldiers, threatened to kill them, lied and said they were only targetting a few terrorists, and then massacred 8,000 civilians. That shit tends to piss people off and attract attention.

The Srebrenica Massacre was an act of genocide. No quotation marks are needed around the term. The UN General Assembly adopted a Covention of the Prevention of and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) in 1948. Article 2 defines "genocide" as:

"In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

http://www.un.org/Depts/dpa/prev_genocide/convention.htm

Given that the acts in question meet the clearly outlined and published criteria for a genocide, they are acts of genocide. Whether the word "genocide" is thrown around liberally is rather irrelevant when the acts in question correctly match those described in the fucking definition.