Mass Killings and Images of Genocide in Bosnia, 1941–5 and 1992–5

Abstract

Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter, Bosnia) was the site of the first crimes in Europe after World War II to be pronounced judicially as genocide, the massacre of thousands of Bosniak (ethnic Muslim)1 males by the forces of the Bosnian Serb Army, in July 1995.2 This massacre came near the end of the 1992-5 conflict in which approximately 100,000 people were killed.3 All reasonable analyses show that the majority of the victims in the Bosnian conflict were Muslims, with Serb casualties the next largest in number; in a scientific paper, an employee of the Demographic Unit of the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) provided figures that indicate that about 50 per cent of a total of 102,000 dead were Muslims and 30 per cent Serbs.4 However, while Serb casualties were overwhelmingly among military personnel, Muslim casualties were evenly split between military and civilian, so that the great majority of civilian casualties were Muslims. As discussed in detail below, publicizing the victimization of Muslims by Serbs was a primary public relations strategy of the Bosnian government and those who supported it, who invoked the term ‘genocide’ early on in the war, using imagery that drew parallels between the events in Bosnia in the 1990s and the Holocaust, a point discussed below. The 1990s genocide in Bosnia has become a cause célèbre internationally, as seen in the passage of Written Declaration no. 366 by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on 22 June 2005, and the international commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre in July 2005.