Concept

Srebrenica massacre

Summary
The Srebrenica massacre (Масакр у Сребреници), also known as the Srebrenica genocide (Геноцид у Сребреници), was the July 1995 genocidal killing of more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys in and around the town of Srebrenica, during the Bosnian War. Minors not transported to safety by the UN met the grim fate: 600 minors, including babies, toddlers, children and teens, were also summarily executed and dumped into mass graves. The killings were perpetrated by units of the Bosnian Serb Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) under the command of Ratko Mladić. The Scorpions, a paramilitary unit from Serbia, who had been part of the Serbian Interior Ministry until 1991, also participated in the massacre. Prior to the massacre, United Nations (UN) had declared the besieged enclave of Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia, a "safe area" under UN protection. However, the UN failed both to demilitarize the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH) within Srebrenica and to force withdrawal of the VRS surrounding Srebrenica. UNPROFOR's 370 lightly armed Dutchbat soldiers were unable to prevent the town's capture and the subsequent massacre. A list of missing or killed people during the massacre compiled by the Bosnian Federal Commission of Missing Persons contains 8,372 names. , 6,838 genocide victims have been identified through DNA analysis of body parts recovered from mass graves; , 6,671 bodies have been buried at the Memorial Centre of Potočari, while another 236 have been buried elsewhere. Some Serbs have claimed that the massacre was retaliation for civilian casualties inflicted on Serbs by Bosniak soldiers from Srebrenica under command of Naser Orić. These 'revenge' claims have been rejected and condemned by the ICTY and UN as bad faith attempts to justify the genocide. In 2004, in a unanimous ruling on the case of Prosecutor v. Krstić, the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), located in The Hague, ruled that the massacre of the enclave's male inhabitants constituted genocide, a crime under international law.
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