Defining genocide

last updated 8 January 2015

The Hague

A U.N. appeals court affirmed this week that the Bosnian Serbs’ massacre of nearly 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in 1995 was genocide. The ruling means that the term applies even if the geographic area involved is limited and the killing restricted to a small percentage of a population—as long as the intention was to wipe out an ethnic group in that area. The five tribunal judges unanimously agreed that the Bosnian massacre was intended to frighten all Muslims into leaving the country. Srebrenica had been declared a “safe haven” for Muslims and was ostensibly protected by U.N. troops. But the peacekeepers stood by when Serbian paramilitaries rounded up all the males in the town and marched them away to be executed. Genocide is the most serious of all crimes under international law, and carries the stiffest penalties.