Tempers have cooled down about the Srebrenica Resolution passed by the UN General Assembly in May last year. Time to voice some thoughts that will make no one happy.

“I condemn what happened in Srebrenica. All those thousands of people killed. But am I part of a genocidal people?”, a friend asked me when were sitting by the banks of Vrbas river in Banja Luka in Bosnia last May. This friend has made a name for himself standing up to the nationalist politicians running this Serb dominated part of Bosnia called Republika Srpska.

He has also on more than one occasion publicly condemned Aleksandar Vučić, Serbia’s president, who has close ties to the power holders in Republika Srpska, and who by that time had launched his personal crusade against the resolution on Srebrenica the UN General Assembly was scheduled to pass soon.

“Kralj Aleksandar (King Aleksander) is flying to New York to protect the Serb people from Srebrenica”, another friend had commented somewhat sarcastically.

My Banja Luka friend is a dedicated anti-nationalist, has politically engaged nationalist rhethorics, and is largely immune to propaganda spewed by the nationalist parties of the region.

Yet, even he seemed to believe the claim of the governments of Serbia and of Republika Srpska that the UN resolution was condemning Serbs as a genocidal people. That claim had been reiterated by local media outlets – most of whom have very close ties to the respective governments – over and over again.

The Resolution Refuses to Call Anyone Anything – Even Murder Murder

The resolution does not do that. If you don’t believe me, read for yourself. It does not call anyone genocidal. In its highly diplomatic and legalistic language, it altogether avoids naming anyone anything.

The closest thing Resolution A/78/L.67/Rev.1 „International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica” comes to even suggesting the genocide of Srebrenica had not just magically occurred but that it had been actual people who had killed 8.372 Bosnjak boys and men in July 1995 are those two sentences:

The General Assembly
(…)
Recalling also all judgments of the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, in particular eight that contain guilty verdicts for the crime of genocide against Bosnian Muslims committed at Srebrenica in 1995
(…)
3. Also condemns without reservation actions that glorify those convicted of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by international courts, including those responsible for the Srebrenica genocide;

About the fact that soldiers of the Army of Republika Srpska singled out, arrested or hunted down and killed at least 8.372 people, the paper has this to say:

“Noting that 2025 will mark the thirtieth anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica, in which at least 8,372 lives were lost, thousands were displaced and families and communities were devastated”.

Those lives, we learn, were merely “lost”. How generous to “note” that. The words “kill” or “murder” are not used a single time.

The paper also refrains from saying that those acts of glorification the resolution so meekly and noncommittally “condemns”, occur mainly in Serbia and in Republika Srpska. See this example.

The only concrete thing this paper does is “designate 11 July as the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica, to be observed annually.”  This designation does not obligate anyone to do anything. Neither do the even weaker measures the resolution “urges”, “requests”, and “invites”.

Both the weakness of the resolution’s language and that even this friend of mine had been so bombarded with Serb nationalist propaganda against it as to believe it show that there are fundamental problems with it.

Diplomatic Maneuvers in a Political Body

As does the press statement the United Nations released after the General Assembly had adopted the paper.

As does the reaction of another friend of mine who left his hometown Beograd 30 years ago to escape the ever growing nationalism back home and the corruption of the regime of Slobodan Milošević. He has no problems accepting that soldiers of the Army of Republika Srpska committed genocide in July 1995, and even less condemning the crimes. But even he has his reservations against the UN resolution. “Isn’t it remarkable how those governments who most strongly push a resolution like this have been responsible for numerous crimes on an even larger scale than this in the past decades?”

This clearly refers to the United States and the many military interventions its government ordered – few of them covered by international law or the UN Charta. While none of these invasions targeted any religious or ethnic groups for extermination, some of them left hundreds of thousands dead in the process.

Indeed, the US government had been one of several Western governments who had sponsored the resolution and had exerted (mild) diplomatic pressure on other governments to vote for the Srebrenica resolution in the UN General Assembly.

It was one of several diplomatic and thus ultimately political maneuvers surrounding this remarkably non-committal paper.

Unlikely Allies. Or: The Internationale of Right Wingers

Serbia’s government, and that of Republika Srpska, too tried to sway the representatives of UN member states to vote against the resolution or to at least abstain from the vote. They had found some unlikely seeming allies in this: Israeli right wingers, such as Ephraim Zuroff from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. The Center has little to do with the famous Nazi hunter except his name.

Zuroff has used Wiesenthal’s name to great effect in the past decades. To some extent he had successfully pressured governments to hunt down and try the last surviving Nazi perpetrators. But more importantly, he has instrumentalized the Holocaust to whitewash right wing politics in Israel, and open nationalism and revisionism in Serbia. Zuroff has several times publicly denied that Srebrenica was genocide – which has earned him the criticism of other Holocaust experts.

Over the past decade or so, the Serbian government has generously funded some of Zuroff’s projects.

On the day the General Assembly passed the resolution, Zuroff gave an interview to the outlet Kosovo Online which has strong Serb nationalist tendencies.

Even though most actual genocide experts and historians disagree with Zuroff over the question whether Srebrenica constituted genocide and even though this interview is clearly intended to bolster Serb nationalist positions, Zuroff raises one point where a skeptical observer must agree: The UN General Assembly is not a body qualified to determine what is genocide and what is not.

What Is or Is Not Genocide Should Be for Courts to Decide

The UN General Assembly is a political body. Its members represent the politics of their respective governments. This point becomes very transparent if one reads the statements various representatives made during the discussion. Few of their considerations to vote for or against the resolution or to abstain have anything to do with what happened in Srebrenica in July 1995 and how these events should be remembered.

Right though Zuroff may be on that point, he is so for the wrong reasons. This ultimately undermines his own position that Srebrenica did constitute a war crime but not genocide.

The only ones who are qualified to decide which war crime is genocide are courts and historians. International courts have called the mass killings of Srebrenica genocide on several occasions. Most of all, this happened in verdicts of the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) against those indicted for perpetrating it. In 2007, the International Court of Justice also ruled that the mass killings of Srebrenica had been genocide. See page 238 of the lengthy ruling.

This is something that was perhaps grudgingly but widely accepted by people in Serbia with the exception of hardcore nationalists. It was only that those hardcore nationalists were always strong enough to deter Serbian governments from publicly acknowledging this.

A few years ago, Serbian author and controversial politician Vuk Drašković told me in a conversation that in his eyes Srebrenica constituted genocide. International courts had ruled so, and Serbia had to accept this. “The verdicts in the Nuremberg trials show that the Holocaust was a fact”, Vuk’s reasoning went. “The world expected Germany to accept this, and it did.” Serbia should do the same he said. Perhaps he has changed his stance since then, but those were the points he made in 2017.

Justice After The World Had Long Forfotten

As with the Nuremberg trials, revisionists have tried to portrait the the verdicts of the ICTY and the ICJ as biased and as victors’ justice. Nationalists from former Yugoslavia used every case in which a defendant from one of the other groups was acquitted by the ICTY or received a lenient verdict by their understanding as irrefutable evidence that the court was biased against them.

The loudest and most frequent complaints came from Serb nationalists. In some individual cases such as the acquittal of Croatian politician and general Ante Gotovina, their criticism has held some water – but overall, the ICTY did a great job under difficult circumstances, and with hundreds of trials, there was bound to be some mistakes.

As was the original sentence against Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić to only 40 years in prison. On appeal, this was changed to a life sentence. Or the acquittal of Serb nationalist firebrand Vojslav Šešelj, which was largely the result of a hastily and poorly drafted indictment by Carla Del Ponte, otherwise a remarkable and thorough prosecutor.

The ICTY’s ultimate failure as an arbitrator of justice in the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia is no fault of its own. Having no law enforcement agencies of its own it had to rely on the governments of Yugoslavia’s successor states to arrest suspects, find witnesses, and to make sure that both were present during deliberations.

At best, UN led agents carried out some local investigations, in some cases UN peacekeeping troops arrested some suspects. Not just Serbia’s government stalled many of the investigations. This dragged out the entire proceedings, and most verdicts were delivered after the world had long forgotten the crimes the defendants had been indicted for.

The only ones who cared in the end were survivors and the relatives and friends of victims – and nationalist politicians.

As the Lord Chief Justice of England, Gordon Hewart, famously said in the case „Rex v. Sussex Justices” in 1924: “Justice must not only be done, but must also be seen to be done”. In this, ICTY was almost set up to fail. Through no fault of its own, and in spite of the hard, diligent and dedicated work of thousands of lawyers, clerks, translators and court reporters in their honest pursuit of justice.

This criticism should not detract from ICTY’s achievements. Identifying Srebrenica as genocide and arguing why it took that position, was one of them.

A Predictable Failure

The UN General Assembly as an inherently political body could not do that – and did not even try.

Instead, it was predictably turned into a political stage during the debates over Resolution A/78/L.67/Rev.1. A resolution whose intentions are as symbolic as they are unclear.

In other words: A weak paper debated in an inherently political institution provided Serb nationalists with a stage in which they could present themselves as heroic underdogs fighting against victors’ justice not only on their behalf but on that of all the supposedly or actually oppressed peoples of this world.

This was entirely predictable.

It appealed to many who strongly sympathize with the 8.372 victims of the Srebrenica genocide. Some apparently saw themselves driven to say they feared the debate and the resolution may destabilize the Balkans region and hinder reconciliation. This may have some merit – except that the same side that refuses to accept that Srebrenica constituted genocide is also the same side that does the most destabilizing in Bosnia, Montenegro and Kosovo.

To say: “Well, Srebrenica was genocide, but since saying so destabilizes the region…” is like rewarding the destabilizers. Or to call it by another name: It is appeasement.

To recognize this, one has to be more familiar with nationalist discourses and politics in the region than most members of the UN General Assembly are. So, many walked into the trap with best intentions – no doubt enticed by the faux anticolonialism that was the backdrop of the diplomatic strategy of the Serbian government. The not so subtle diplomatic pressure the US and other Western governments put on some member states did not help to counter that strategy.

Again, this was entirely predictable.

Just not, it seems, to the sponsors of the resolution. How their resolution and the debate over it had strengthened revisionist nationalist politics on the Balkans seems to have genuinely surprised them.

This, too, made it a very bad idea to have the General Assembly of the United Nations even discuss the Srebrenica Resolution. It should have never entered that body in the first place.

The Resolution Helps No One

It will not do anything to convince anybody not already convinced – or interested enough to even care – that Srebrenica was genocide, or even that in July 1995, soldiers of the Army of Republika Srpska were ordered to and did murder at least 8.372 boys and men simply because they were Muslims.

To be fair, laws that make denials of genocide punishable offences rarely achieve their aims. They only make sense in very narrow contexts, and in countries who planned and executed genocides or who were most affected by them. See the laws against Holocaust denial in Germany and Austria, and the denial of the genocide the Ottoman Empire committed against the Armenians in Armenia, which all rest on solid historical consensus.

Serbia, too, could use a law that bans the denial of Srebrenica as genocide. The political situation being as it is, not even a bill to that effect will be introduced to the Serbian National Assembly in the foreseeable future.

In places where that narrow context does not exist, those laws lose their purpose and are seen as irrelevant at best and as psychological colonial warfare at worst – such as France’s code against the denial of this genocide or another, or Germany’s law against denying the so called Holodomor – about which there is no scholarly consensus among historians. Ultimately, this is a disservice to the victims of genocides and war crimes.

The UN General Assembly’s Srebrenica Resolution clearly falls into the latter category – all the more so as it shies away from spelling out what happened in Srebrenica or to even clearly say what it wants.

That the resolution was warmly received by hundreds of thousands of Bosnian Muslims and gave them a sense that the world had recognized their suffering is perhaps a small consolation. But these emotions should not and can not outweigh the damage the resolution has caused. Most of all, ironically, to the people who welcomed it.

It was on their backs that that Serb nationalism scored its greatest victory in years.

Title photo: A graffiti glorifying Ratko Mladić, who order the genocide in Srebrenica, on Beograd’s central Džordža Vašingtona Street, taken in 2022.

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