Srebrenica Massacre

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Srebrenica Massacre

Cartoon

By: Joe Sacco

Date: June 2005

Source: Joe Sacco, Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–1995. Seattle, Fantagraphics, 2005

About the Artist: Joe Sacco is a Maltese-born cartoonist and journalist who combines eyewitness reportage with comic strip storytelling. He has spent time in Israel and the occupied territories from which his award-winning book Palestine emerged in 1993. Sacco was one of few journalists to cover the Bosnian War from Gorazde—which, although designated a safe area, was in fact extremely dangerous. Safe Area Gorazde is the book resulting from this stay and the cartoon below is extracted from it. Sacco was invited to cover the Bosnian War Crimes Trials for Details magazine in 1998 and his next project was a book about the south Gaza Strip.

INTRODUCTION

Srebrenica was a small town in the east of Bosnia which had been declared a United Nations Safe Area in 1993. But in 1995, it was to become the scene of the worst massacre of the Bosnian War. In fact, conditions had been deteriorating in the area for many months while thousands of civilians took refuge against earlier Serb attacks in north-eastern Bosnia. By early July 1995, food and fuel were running out and the population was under the protection of just six hundred lightly armed Dutch soldiers. When Serb forces began to shell the town, Bosnian Muslims requested the return of their weapons but the peacekeepers refused and called for support from United Nations Headquarters in Sarajevo, but help was delayed.

On July 11, Dutch fighter planes dropped bombs on Serb positions; the Serbs responded with a threat to kill Dutch hostages and bomb the Bosnian refugees. Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic entered the town later that day and met with the Dutch commander, demanding the Bosnian Muslims hand over any weapons. The next day, buses took women and children away while the Serbs separated out the men, supposedly for interrogation about war crimes.

The next few days saw a wave of killings of unarmed Bosnian Muslims in various locations in the area. Meanwhile, the peacekeepers handed over five thousand Muslims who had been sheltering nearby in return for the release of Dutch hostages. The first reports of the massacre came from survivors who had fled through the mountains to safety in Muslim-held territories. Evidence that emerged in years to follow suggested that more than seven thousand Muslim men had been killed at the hands of Serb forces in Srebrenica. Depicting such a grim event in a cartoon is a particularly effective way of creating impact—and builds on the long tradition of using this form of expression to make a political point.

PRIMARY SOURCE

SREBRENICA MASSACRE

See primary source image.

SIGNIFICANCE

The Srebrenica Massacre is the worst event of its kind in Europe since the Holocaust of World War II. It was certainly the most dire event of the Bosnian War and has been designated as genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which was set up by the United Nations Security Council to investigate war crimes arising from the conflict that devastated the region during the 1990s.

The war crime concept is relatively new. Before World War II, the atrocities of war were generally accepted as being part of the nature of conflict. But the Holocaust and the mistreatment of prisoners of war and civilians by the Japanese made the Allies determined that someone should be held to account for the suffering they had caused. The Nuremberg Trials of 1945 and 1946 led to the execution of twelve Nazi leaders for war crimes. Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention gives a broad definition of a war crime which includes wilful killing, torture, unlawful deportation, hostage taking and deliberate destruction of property. In fact the definition of a war crime is continually evolving; rape was a particularly common occurrence in the Yugoslav conflict and was declared a war crime by the ICTY in 2001.

Rape in a war context is an example of a crime against humanity, defined as a crime committed in armed conflict but directed towards a civilian population. Genocide is the most serious example of a crime against humanity and is defined as acts (usually murder) targeted toward the destruction of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. This applies in the case of the Srebrenica Massacre as most of the victims were Muslims.

The ICTY was the first war crimes trial to bring a Head of State, the former Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, to account. However, Milosevic died before his trial could be completed. Mladic and the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadẑic have been indicted for their part in the Srebrenica Massacre and the Tribunal wants them handed over as soon as possible. Both are thought to be alive and in hiding in remote areas of Bosnia or Serbia and Montenegro, protected by dedicated followers. The EU has warned Serbia that they will block their entry to EU membership unless Mladic, at least, is handed over soon.