Throughline - Prosecuting Genocide

Episode Date: October 30, 2025

The word "genocide" can seem like it’s everywhere right now: So it can be easy to forget that, fundamentally, it's a legal term that dates to World War II — and wasn’t used in court for half a century afterwards. Today on the show, the story of what happened during the Bosnian War in the 1990s and the work that went into building the legal case to prove genocide.To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy, working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. Learn more at RWJF.org. Hey, everybody. It's runned. I just want to start the show off by saying how much we enjoy the comments some of you have been leaving on Spotify and Apple podcasts, especially for our recent series on immigration, which included an episode on the history of the U.S. Mexico. border wall. Joel Elias Saunders said, this has to be the most in-depth and informative podcast out there. Thank you for the excellent reporting and varied points of view and experience. Thanks, Joel.

And thank you all for listening. If you have a minute, leave us a review and a rating on Spotify or Apple. It helps people find the show and often gives us something to think about. All right, now onto the show. A note before we start. This episode includes descriptions of violence. Nuremberg, Germany, November 1945, just a few months after the official end of World War II. A group of judges from allied countries file into a courtroom, most wearing black robes.

To their right, Nazi officers, some in uniform, others in suits, sit on wooden benches in the defendant's dock. The charges against them, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace. Opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The Chief American Prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, makes the opening statement. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish.

have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored. Working behind the scenes is an advisor to Justice Jackson named Raphael Lempkin. Lemkin was a Polish Jewish lawyer at the U.S. War Department who'd fled Poland in 1939, soon after the Nazis invivision. leaving behind nearly all of his family. And he'd written to Justice Jackson after he was appointed chief prosecutor

because Lemkin believed that the Nazis should be tried for a crime that up until then didn't have a name. It is for this reason that I took the liberty of inventing the word genocide. He'd coined the term just a year earlier. The term is from the Greek. Greek word genos, meaning tribe or race, and the Latin, Qaeda, meaning killing.

The term does not necessarily signify mass killings, although it may mean that. More often, it refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups, so that these groups wither and die, like plants that have suffered a blight. The idea had been brewing in Lemkin's mind for years, even before the Holocaust. The crime of the Reich and wantonly and deliberately wiping out whole peoples is not utterly new in the world. It is only new in the civilized world as we have come to think of it. As a university student in the 1920s, Lemkin had become fixated on studying past massacres around the world,

including the 1915 massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Lemkin had asked one of his professors, So it's a crime to strike down one man, but not a crime for that man to have struck down one million men? His professor responded that under international law, there was no such crime. There was such a thing as war crimes, but nothing about the intentional destruction

of a particular group of people. Lemkin made it his mission to change that. So back to 1945, The United States will at this time present to the tribunal with its permission a documentary film on concentration camps. The Nuremberg trials are underway. The Buchenwald camp is termed an extermination factory. Bodies stacked one upon the other were found outside the crematory.

Lemkin had worked really hard to persuade Justice Jackson to bring charges of genocide against the Nazi leaders. But there were no established legal precedence, and Lemkin knew it was an uphill battle, even as he learned during the trial that 49 of his family members, including his parents, had been killed in the Holocaust. After nearly a year, the judges delivered their verdict.

Day of the day, for 10 months, the same routine has been observed. But now, the atmosphere grows tense. The allied judges shared with the president of the court the reading of the fateful words of the Nuremberg judgment. 19 of the 22 Nazi leaders were found guilty. None on charges of genocide. Frustrated, Lemkin wrote, The Allies decided a case in Nuremberg against a past Hitler,

but refused to envisage future Hitler's. And over the next few years, he lobbied leaders from around the world constantly, writing letters, making phone calls, organizing meetings, trying to convince the newly formed United Nations to codify the crime of genocide into law. And on December 9th, 1948, Convention is adopted by this assembly by unanimous vote.

He succeeded. The UN adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which classified genocide as a crime under international law and defined it as, Quote, acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, intent being the key word here. Those acts can include killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction in whole or in part,

imposing measures intended to prevent births, and forcibly transferring children. of the group to another group. The practices of genocide anywhere affect the vital interests of all civilized people. Its consequences can neither be isolated nor localized. Tolerating genocide is an admission of the principle that one national group has the right to attack another

because of its supposed racial superiority. The disease of criminality, if left unchecked, is contagious. The word genocide is everywhere now in headlines and reports by human rights organizations and on social media describing conflicts around the world. It has come to embody the ultimate evil humans can inflict on their fellow humans. And it can be easy to forget that fundamentally it's a legal term.

In September, an independent UN community concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Israel has rejected the report and its findings. So what does it take to make an accusation like that and to prove it? In order to establish Israel's, quote, genocidal intent, the commission cited the very first time the genocide convention

was put to the test after the Holocaust, the case of Bosnia versus Serbia. The world took a long time to realize that genocide had occurred in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. It took years of trials, hundreds of hours of testimonies, and countless documents to investigate whether genocide had taken place in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995, and to determine who was to blame. By the time genocide was declared, the lives had already been lost, the homes long since destroyed, the children traumatized. In a field of tears, their memories of terror and death come pouring out. It was really a one big concentration camp. Many of those executed were buried in mass grave.

And we were held at gunpoint by the Serbs. The UN, he says, they did absolutely nothing to protect us. The more time passes, you know, you start losing hope. What is a genocide? How do you know when it's happening? and how do you prove that later in a court? What does it mean to get justice? I'm Randabd al-Fattah.

I'm Ramtin-Arablui. On this episode of ThruLine, we're taking a close look at what happened in Bosnia and in the courtrooms afterwards to examine how this first case for genocide was built and what the official finding meant for the perpetrators, the victims, and the world. Hey, so I'm a recent subscriber and a huge fan already to become one of my favorite history podcasts.

This is Brian Gwynn from Cincinnati, Ohio, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR. This message comes from Wise, the app for using money around the globe. When you manage your money with Wise, you'll always get the mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Join millions of customers and visit Wise. Come. T's and Cs apply. Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy, working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. Learn more at RWJF.org.

Part 1. The Witness Coming apart at the seams is a phrase being used to describe the current situation in Yugoslavia. Almost everyone in Yugoslavia agrees that the country is on the verge of collapse. In the early 1990s, the southeastern European country of Yugoslavia started breaking up. Ethnic and political differences have increased dramatically. Many people believe the differences are now so great that the best solution might be for the various Yugoslav nations to go their separate ways. Yugoslavia had been made up of six different republics, divided along ethnic lines, and held together for nearer. nearly 40 years by a single communist ruler.

By the time he died in 1980, Yugoslavia's economy was in shambles, and some of the republics wanted their independence. As the first major conflict since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet Central Power, Yugoslavia is the first test of President George Bush's new world border. But it may be the harbinger of a new world disorder. Radical nationalists emerged as powerful voices throughout the republics

and the loudest came from parts of the Serbian community. The Serbs were Orthodox Christians and made up the largest ethnic group in Yugoslavia. They held a lot of the country's political and military power. If the country of Yugoslavia broke up into separate independent nations, the Serbs risk losing that power. There was a saying at the time, why would I be a minority in your country when you can be a minority in mine? This is Dr. I'm an assistant professor of international history at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Eva also grew up in the Yugoslav Republic of Croatia, which, like the other republics, was ethnically diverse.

It was a peaceful country. I went to school, went to the cinema, went to play violin, had a very regular middle-class life, you know, in a very sort of regular environment. and all of a sudden you hear people talking about war. And all of a sudden you hear people talking about sort of ethnic groups that I didn't even know was it like a thing, you know? In many ways, violence makes you take sides. Rhewers were circulating this morning that tanks were moving from Serbia to Croatia, the two rival republics that have a long history of ethnic strife. The first wars broke out in 1991, in Slovenia and Croatia,

which had both voted for their independence. One of the clues that something terrible was happening was the rhetoric of leading politicians. Serbia's hard-line communist leader, Slobodan Milosevic, who rose to power four years ago on a wave of fervid nationalism. Milosevic has talked in the past about a greater Serbia. And they were talking about any place that Serb is buried in Serbia.

They can't take our grace. That's laying claim to a huge amount of terrorism. that is not theirs. The situation is certainly getting very, very dangerous. A loud boom shattered the air right in front of me this afternoon. Everybody is furious. Flashes of light in the dark sky. Full of rage.

And the sound of explosions in the distance. In Yugoslavia, this is the way a civil war could begin. A few months into the war, I went to Bosnia. Everybody said that the war was going to be in Bosnia. In 1991, American journalist Roy Gutman. was reporting in the region for the newspaper Newsday. I went to the town of Banja Luka, which is a predominantly Serb town in northern Bosnia, and sat down with the mayor.

And he took out a map, and he showed me that how the Serb-led army was going to create a corridor across Bosnia. Within Yugoslavia, the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina bordered the Republic of Serbia. The Bosnian population was mostly Muslim, Serb, and Croat. Just under a third were Serbs. But the mayor's map showed that Serbs wanted to claim up to two-thirds of Bosnian land.

This is a case where I couldn't believe my eyes. Isn't this map a recipe for total war? In 1992, Bosnia Herzegovina voted for independence. Bosnian Serbs protested the vote. They had already declared their own state, which they said would be part of a quote, greater Serbia. The place is divided desperately at this moment.

I was in Sarajevo. It was the day that began with a bang. The day after the independence vote, Bosnian Serbs ceased control of all the roads leading into the capital city of Sarajevo. Ethnic lines were drawn just hours after the volatile republic held a referendum on secession from Yugoslavia. The Serb artillery started firing and snipers started firing. Ethnic Serbs fired on a group of demonstrators in Sarajevo.

At least five people were killed in clashes over the weekend. The Bosnians didn't have the military to defend themselves. Remember, Serbs had a lot of control over the military in Yugoslavia. When the country started to break up, Bosnian Serbs held on to the weapons. The Serbs, if they wanted to do something, could practically write their own ticket. Roy watched the Serbs captured territory throughout the republics, and while much of the international media covered the siege of Sarajevo, Roy found... The real action was taking place somewhere else.

In the smaller towns and villages, where Bosnian Muslims lived. In July of 1992, Roy started writing stories suggesting that Serbian state officials were targeting those Bosnian Muslims. I discovered a whole train load. of people had been taken at gunpoint or tank point, put on buses, and then put on the state railways and taken to Hungary. And what was interesting was that the state was using all the instruments at its command, including transportation, to carry out a policy of what it was called ethnic cleansing. You hear the term ethnic cleansing used a lot today. But at the time,

it was a newer concept that was actually popularized by international media during the the Bosnian War. There were also some reports that Serbian leaders used the term themselves when talking about their plans for Greater Serbia. What was ethnic planting? Well, it was mass deportations. We knew that. Carried out really by the state against whole villages, against whole populations, indiscriminately. And I learned from that experience that the state was the major actor. This is an organized thing. I wanted to, from that point on, find parallel examples of where the state was operating against civilians

in a very organized way and corraling them or forcing them to do something or maybe killing them. So Roy starts hitting up his contacts. I made some phone calls into Banja Luka. At this point in 1992, the Bosnian Serbs controlled Banja Luka, the second largest city in Bosnia.

It was the city where the mayor had shown Roy the map of land the Serbs wanted to capture before the war. And now Roy found himself on a call with a Muslim political leader there who told him, Please come, in the name of God, please come. Terrible things are happening here. Now, you don't get that kind of a message very often, you know, by making a phone call to somebody you don't even know. And I headed on the first buses to Banja Luka.

And when he got there, Roy started interviewing people. I did everything in a very routine way. It called on the police. I called on the Serb-Lid military. I called on the political parties of the Muslims and Croats. And I learned that there was a whole series of camps that had been set up. They were described as concentration camps. And of course, that's the question of definition.

But they said that people were being killed in them. So Roy found a colonel with the Bosnian Serb military who would speak with him. So I asked the innocent question. And I said, other people are talking about a whole network of camps that have been set up. Is this true? Maybe it's just invention. He responded that the Muslims had set up camps all over the place and were detaining Serbs. And this was actually true.

Bosnian Muslims had set up their own camps. And during the war, all ethnic groups were killing and being killed. But Bosnian Serbs had the most power. and it was Basian Muslims who were being killed in the greatest numbers. So Roy, following his leads, said, I have the names of a couple of places here, and I just wonder if there's a possibility to visit them. And I did it in complete naivete in appearance,

but as a matter of fact, I knew damn well that some terrible things were happening there. And they actually arranged to take me the next day to one of the camps. Roy gets on another bus and heads to a town about 15 miles away. The Army turned down Newsday's request for a tour, offering instead interviews with eight hand-picked prisoners and a camp doctor. Armed guards monitor each conversation. Army interviewers asked most of the questions. Then the eight men were marched away.

None of the prisoners interviewed under those conditions criticized the camp's regime, but former prisoners interviewed away from the camp, described it as a place where beatings. were routine. The smartest thing I ever did there was I brought along a photographer, Andrew Kaiser. I really had to have photographs to back up what I was writing. While Roy was there, he and his photographer witnessed another scene.

Up on the hillside were huge sheds where men were being held. You could see men lined up, bowing their heads down, and then having their heads shaved like sheep. They left with photos. They just changed. everything. They conveyed a whole degradation, you know, humiliation with the hands of thugs. Roy hadn't seen any violence at this detention center, but he'd heard about another one, a camp in a town called Omarska. I asked my escort, Major Militinovich, if he could take me to

Omarska. This is not a request I made. with great hopes. And to my surprise, he agreed. And the next day, we got into his van and started heading to O'Marska, which is also in the area of Manyaluca. But about halfway there, he got a phone call saying that they couldn't guarantee my safety. But this led me to believe that something really terrible was happening, that what I saw at Mnetsia was small potatoes compared to what must be going on in O'Marska

if they couldn't take me there. I became obsessed by it. Roy knew this was a problem. It's hard to write a story about a place you can't go. So he went to Zagreb in Croatia, where he knew refugees were living, and non-profits helped him find dozens of people to interview. And the details confirmed his suspicions.

More than a thousand Muslim and Croat prisoners were held in metal cages without sanitation, adequate food, exercise, or access to the outside world according to a former prisoner. In stories published in August of 1992, Roy wrote about the metal cages where prisoners were held, the people who died trying to escape. All were shot after falling 60 feet to the ground.

One source told him that every few days, Serbian guards would execute prisoners in groups of 10 to 15. They said, They would take them to a nearby lake. You'd hear a volley of rifles, and they'd never come back. I happened to, in the course of two or three months there, come upon enough examples of state action in places I didn't expect it, that it added up to a pattern where ethnic cleansing is really a vast understatement. Around the time Roy started publishing his stories. Other people had already started calling the violence in Bosnia a genocide. But the media wasn't using the word. Even as more and more details,

emerged. Mosques are being blown up. Four more mosques were reduced to rubble. Churches, blown up. 46% of the churches in his diocese have been destroyed. Historical heritage, blown up. We saw that almost every building was damaged in some way. And there are, within just months, municipalities that are just missing 30,000 people. They're gone.

Local officials say that as many as 70,000 people are holed up in the town and the surrounding area. Many of them are refugees. So within a couple of months, we just see this organized effort to claim territory and expel, to make sure that in five or ten years you can just say, oh, these people there were never around. At this point, it had become clear to Roy that this is what an ethnic cleansing looked like. But he also started to suspect it was something bigger. As a reporter, you don't have time to step back and think of what is the big picture I'm drawing here. But that picture would come into focus the next year, in 1993, when he was able to step back. And after Roy's stories on the war, won a poll surprise. I was sitting down for lunch

with my editor, and I said to him, you know, I'm trying to figure out what this all adds up to. And I think I know what it adds up to. I think it adds up to genocide. It's the pieces of the puzzle that I've assembled here, without any design, but just by virtue of the fact that they're out there and they're in multiple examples, and I'm able to demonstrate it and detail it to the last degree, that makes me think that this is a genocide. And I'm willing to state that I'm the witness. Roy published his book, A Witness to Genocide, in 1993. It included many of the photos that he and photographer had taken during his reporting. He would be among the first Western journalists

to call the violence that unfolded a genocide. Later that year, he testified in front of the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs. When I did my stories about the camps, it had a real thunder-clap effect on public opinion and actually on governments, but nobody ever did anything about it. UN peacekeepers were sent in to protect aid deliveries. Washington called for an emergency. session of the UN Human Rights Commission.

Journalists flooded the region, but concrete action on the ground didn't happen. So there's a real hypocrisy in international life that you could have these massive crimes that everybody knows should not be going on and that are way away from anything lawful and then nobody does anything about it. The same year, Roy published his book, Two Different UN Courts began investigating crimes in the Bosnian War. One was a war crimes tribunal that would prosecute individuals. The other one was the International Court of Justice, whose job was to settle disputes among countries or governments.

And it's in the ICJ that Bosnia-Herzegovina would file the very first genocide claim since the court was created at the end of World War II. In 1993, both courts would begin their work, but it would take years to see any results. When this case comes in 1993 in front of the International Court of Justice, on the ground, does anything stop? No. Coming up, the evidence for genocide becomes undeniable. Hey, this is Travis Davenport from San Diego, California.

You're listening to Thurline on NPR. Part 2. Srebrenica Srebrenica itself is an enclave that is in the eastern portion in Bosnia, very, very close to the Syrbrian border. It's about three hours drive east from Sarajevo. Very rural area, lots of farmland. It's hilly, it's green. There are small little villages around. Everybody knows everybody.

In April 1993. The area of Srebrenica was actually declared a United Nations safe zone. The zone included Srebrenica town and the surrounding area. So this is where people were supposed to flood into to escape the ongoing besiegment from the war that was ongoing. This is Sima Jilani. She's a pediatrician and humanitarian aid. worker who has spent time in Bosnia recording survivor testimonies. So that's what they did, is that Bosnian Muslims fled into, by the thousands.

There's about 40,000 people in this area. And this is Dr. Eva Fukasic. She's a professor of international history at Ucrec University in the Netherlands, who grew up in nearby Croatia. The community swole so much. It was even unable to handle that amount of people. These are tiny towns. There wasn't enough food, clothing, or housing.

Many people slept in stairwells, in cars, or on the street. And the river that ran through Srebrenica, the only water source, got polluted with sewage. But what the safe zone did have was protection. It's been guarded by UN peacekeeping forces, which were largely of the Dutch battalion. These peacekeeping forces were lightly armed, and there were no more than 600 of them in Srebrenica at a time. They provided some aid, but they weren't there to fight. At that point, the international community was officially neutral. But starting in March 1995, things would get worse.

Fast. When the Bosnian Serb leader, Radavon Karadj, handed down a directive. By planned and well-thought-out combat operations, create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival or life for the inhabitants of Srebrenica and Jepa. The war was entering its fourth year and Bosnian Serb leaders wanted to put an end to it.

Basically, they're sort of getting as much territory as they can. Their goal was to build an independent Serbian state, and they wanted it to be linked. with Serbia proper. In order to do this, the Bosnian Serb army would have to annex Srebrenica and expel the Bosnian Muslims

who live there. So on July 6, 1995, at 3 in the morning, the Bosnian Serb army attacked the outskirts of Srebrenica, the UN safe zone. The Bosnian Serb army enters the space of the safe area

which they were not supposed to enter. The army advanced towards the town. The footage you're hearing was taken in Srebrenica a few days later on July 10th and 11th. In the video, people are milling around the streets and some men dressed in army fatigues are shooting off mortars. The man holding the camera was Ibro Zahirovich. He was in his 20s at the time, and throughout the war, he filmed a lot.

It wasn't common to have this kind of documentary video at the time. Remember, people didn't have smartphones. And this particular video would later become evidence in the UN investigation of genocide during the Bosnian War. In the video, you can see streams of people carrying their belongings on their backs. Crowds were clustered outside of UN buildings in Srebbenicha, shouting. But the UN wasn't going to help them. The UN has neither the capacity nor the equipment nor the food or the water or the mandate to protect.

the civilians in any sort of armed way. And they didn't. The Dutch ended up ceding control of that area, handing over essentially the keys to the Serbs, the Serb militia, paramilishas. By the afternoon of July 11th, Bosnian Serb forces had taken over Srebrenica. Ratko Mladic,

the general in command of the Bosnian Serb army, stood in Srebrenica and claimed victory. He said the town was a gift to the Serbian people. Men from teenage age to high age feel afraid that if they fall into the hands of the Bosnia and Serb army or police that they're going to get executed. So they make their way into the forests. That day, 15,000 people, mostly Bosnian Muslim men and older boys, set out on foot. Ebro Zahirovich, camera in hand, was one of them. You're hearing the footage he took of what became known as the column,

a long line of people trying to walk to safety. 60 miles of walking in the summer through landmines and also through forestry can wreak havoc on people who are already malnourished, starved, deprived of nutrients. Bosnian servants. forces shot at the column as they walked. They used stolen UN uniforms and equipment to pose as peacekeepers to coax the men out from hiding. Over the following days, thousands of men from the column were executed and buried in mass graves. Not everyone tried to escape in the column, though. By the morning of July 12, 30,000 Bosnian Muslims had gone to seek protection at the UN compound

in the next town over. These are women, children, young boys, old men. This is footage from the Bosnian Serb TV station. It was incredibly crowded, and there was not enough food, water, medicine, or bathrooms. Women were dying, giving birth. People were living on top of one another. And by that afternoon, Bosnian Serb forces had also arrived. Rotko Mladic, the Bosnian Served General, was there that day

and spoke to the Bosnian Muslims seeking refuge. In the video, Ratko Mladic can be heard saying, anyone who wants to leave will be transported. Be they old or young. Don't be afraid and don't rush. Let the women and children go first. Please don't panic. Nobody will harm you.

But that same day, the Bosnian Serb army began to separate the women, children, and elderly from the men and boys. The women, children, and elderly were taking on buses to Bosnian Muslim-held territory. As for the men and boys... Bosnia and Serb army and police take them to kind of culture halls and high school sports gyms. They were detained, many without food and water, and crammed in so tightly some couldn't even sit down. Over the next several days, Bosnian Serb forces orchestrated mass killings of these men and boys. We know almost hour by hour where people were and which buses took them to which execution site and who was shooting and which truck was where. Over 8,000 men and boys were summarily executed, shot, killed.

Just imagine this youngest boy I had those little hands of his. How could they be dead? Many of their bodies were dumped into mass graves and buried. What happens then in the next couple of days and weeks is the women that managed to reach government-held territory are asking, where is my husband? Where is my brother? They're realizing there's thousands of people missing. NPR's Andy Bowers is in Tuzlap, and he says that yesterday some of the men from Shrebernitsa began a arriving in Tuesday.

Some of them are telling the UN terrible stories about massacres by the Bosnian Serbs. I lost my son, brother, husband, 30 from my close family alone. I can never tell everything. We just wanted to find out where the bones, the remains of our father's brothers, sons are, to find out the truth. reports from Srebrenica broke internationally as early as July 16th before all the killing was even over. Bosnian Serb officials denied that a massacre had taken place.

I'm asking you if these new reports are true or false. They are completely false. There is not a single case that has been proved of any massacres committed against Muslim civilians in Srebrenica during the current part of fighting. But the UN War Crimes Tribunal, which had already started to look into the conflict in Bosnia, would soon broaden his investigation to include Srebrenica. Meanwhile, the Bosnian Serb army mounted a cover-up operation. A soldier would later testify that in September and October of 1995,

he and others used tractors and backhose to dig up mass graves and re- bury bodies in secondary locations to try and hide the evidence. In the wake of Srebonycha and the outrage that followed, the international community, including the U.S., faced increasing pressure to act. Not long after the massacre, NATO began airstrikes against the Bosnian Serb army. This international pressure and show of force led to U.S.-sponsored peace talks. In December 1995, the Dayton Accords were signed, ending the war in Bosnia. an estimated 100,000 people had died.

Prosecutors for the UN War Crimes Tribunal had been hard at work at this point, building war crime and genocide cases against members of the Bosnian Serb army, as well as Bosnian Serb political leaders. Bosnia was also presenting evidence to the UN's International Court of Justice, alleging that the government of the former Yugoslavia should be held responsible for genocide, not just individual military leaders. These cases involve the Srebrenica massacre alongside violence committed in other villages and towns.

How do you even go about finding thousands of victims and establishing who they were and what happened to them? Historically, if you get killed and you get dumped in a mass grave, you are never found. Nobody finds you. Nobody identifies you. Nobody gives your bones to your family. Nobody knows what happens to you.

This is how it was for centuries. And all of a sudden, we have this effort to dig up mass graves, find bones, put names to bones through DNA analysis, and give the bones back to family members for dignified burial. Coming up, the quest for justice. Hi, my name's Alyssa. I'm in Madison, Wisconsin, and I actually work in public radio. And so it's like this one. Just keep me really engaged and inspired. So you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Part 3. Agreeing to Evil. After the Srebrenica massacre in July of 1995,

the UN War Crimes Tribunal started charging individual people with all kinds of crimes committed during the Bosnian War, including the first charges of genocide. The United Nations War Crimes Tribunal today indicted the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Rodivin Karadzic. We completely deny that kind of atrocities. And the commander, the Bosnian Serb army, Rotkom-Lodditch, on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

They can't even leave this area because there are international arrest warrants for them. The first charges for the Srebrenica massacre itself were brought in November of 1994. And the evidence documented in court, including media reports and videos taken by civilians, as well as the perpetrators, was extreme. Confronted with evidence of the executions, the attacks on the U.N. safe zone, and on the column of people trying to escape. A judge at the time said, quote, these are truly scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history. And scenes like that played out over the many individual trials the tribunal held. The international criminal criminal for the former Yugoslavia is now incision. The courtroom itself is interesting.

Kind of glass aquarium. A thick bulletproof glass surrounding it. The criminal court collected a ton of evidence, testimonies. The prosecution called two citizens of Srebrenica. I saw those women screaming, moaning, crying, tearing their hair off. Expert reports. Here on slide number 25, you can see photos of just some of the victims. DNA analysis, military reports, 5,000 witnesses were testifying.

Zitha, Ramo. After half an hour, every one of them was thrown in the holes. I would say this is probably the most investigated international crime in history. In the end, the UN Tribunal charged 161 people with all kinds of. of crimes. A majority of them were Serb, military, and political leaders. But there were also some cases brought against Bosnian Muslims, against Croats, against others for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Each case moved through the tribunal at its own pace. And then in 2001, the International War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague has handed down its first verdict of

genocide. It was the first time a court would officially recognize what had happened in Srebrenica six years earlier as genocide. The court sentenced the Bosnian Serb general Radislav Kirstitch to 46 years in prison for his part in the 1995 massacre at the Bosnian Muslim enclave of Shrebrenica. Kirstich was a deputy commander in the Bosnian Serb army. The court said, even though he may not have personally killed anyone, that he knew about the executions, the violence, the plan carried out in Srebrenica. Reber Nietzsche. He was found guilty of genocide.

Judge Almiro Rodriguez pronounced the toughest sentence yet handed down by the tribunal. In July 1995, General Custitch, you have adhered individually or mal. Individually, you agreed to evil. This was a huge deal to many people, but this was just one guy. What about everyone else, or the Serbian government as a whole? Were they guilty of genocide?

It would be years later in 2007 that the International Court of Justice, a completely separate UN court that ruled on disputes between countries, made its ruling. And in a shock to many, the ICJ said Serbia as a state was not guilty of committing genocide, though they also found that the state was guilty. of failing to prevent genocide, which is required under the genocide convention. The ICJ ordered Serbia to transfer any people accused of genocide to the UN War Crimes Tribunal,

where they could be prosecuted individually. To this day, we have no straightforward finding of the ICJ that any state is guilty of committing genocide. Even after the genocide convictions, mass graves were still being. excavated all around Bosnia and still being used as evidence in ongoing trials. In 2009, a couple of years after the ICJ's ruling, Sima Jelani volunteered at the International Commission on Missing Persons. Her job was to help identify remains of people buried in mass graves. Families looked for anything

they could help to identify their loved ones, like fragments of bones or old watches and rings. I recall one particular woman recognized a lighter, and it was her lover's lighter, and she goes, that's it. He's really gone now. I know that, and she told me this story of how they met in a bar, and she asked for a light, for her cigarette, and he took the cigarette, and he put it between his fingers, and he laid his fingers on her lips. And it's all down to what a lighter, that's now blood-soaked, that's all she has. So for me, what does the word genocide matter to her? I can still hear steps of my sons walking through the house. NPR covered the trials as they unfolded over the years and spoke to many survivors. Some spoke of trauma.

I can still feel their presence in the house. They always used to call me mommy, and on one occasion I actually heard somebody calling me, and I went to the window, but there was nobody. Others were angry that the UN, the U.S., and the international community largely stood by during the worst of the violence. It's difficult even to imagine what people can do to other people and what kind of animals they have to be to do this to somebody else.

Shame on them. Really shame on them. I don't think that international community has learned it. its lesson, it still has a dirty conscience, and it didn't do enough to clear its conscience. The UN Tribunal lasted more than two decades. In the end, 93 people were sentenced out of the 161 people charged. The final judgment came in 2017 when Ratko Mladic, the main leader in the Srebrenica massacre, was found guilty of genocide. He is currently serving a life sentence in the Hague in the Netherlands. But for many people,

the courts took too long to call a genocide a genocide. And that's part of the limitations of it being a legal term. It takes a ton of evidence and often a ton of time to prove. It's dependent on whether anyone

brings a case, the court it's presented in, what kinds of pictures or videos or proof exists that can show the intent of the crime. According to the courts, Srebrenica was the only place genocide happened during the war in Bosnia. There are whole communities in Bosnia-Herzegovina and elsewhere around the world

that feel cheated because what their community went through wasn't labeled, confirmed as a case of genocide. And that's true today in places where genocide is still being litigated, like the conflicts in Darfur, Ukraine, or Gaza, where in September of this year, a UN commission pointed to the Bosnia case when it concluded that Israel was committing genocide in the Gaza Strip. The month before the U.N. ruling, in August 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars had declared that Israel's actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide. The starvation, the destruction of civilian property, the inability for people to leave, the no medicine, no hospitals, no schools, the statements of high-level Israeli officials. videos that are coming out of humiliation.

So I think in many ways, the expert community at this stage is pretty much an agreement that if this is not genocide, then I don't know what the hell genocide looks like. South Africa has already filed a genocide claim against Israel in the ICJ, but it most likely won't be decided for years. Israel has denied all the charges. This is the first time that we see a close Western ally. being accused of such a thing. What does it mean if we, as their biggest ally

and their biggest arm supplier, will use this word? International law depends on states. It is just as strong or just as weak as the states that support him. Now this is a moment where we either protect the system and make it better, you know, and advance it to another stage where it's more equal, it's more universal, it's more respected, or we watch it, something that we spent decades building, even sometimes self-servingly,

go down the drain, you know, because if the genocide convention, the Geneva conventions, these basic protections that are about the bare minimum of protection, If that collapses, then we have nothing. That's it for this week's show. I'm Rand Abed Fattah. I'm Ramtin Arablui, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me and me and Lawrence Wu.

Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg, Casey Minor, Christina Kim, Devin Katayama, Irene Noguchi. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. Thanks to the BBC and member station KBIA in Missouri for some of the archival radio reports you heard in this episode. Thank you also to Chris Hoff, Johannes Durgey, Laura Schwartz, Nadia Lansy, Nick Spicer, Beth Donovan, and Tommy Evans.

This episode was mixed by Gia. Jimmy Kili. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes... Navid Marvi, show Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on this show, please write us at Thuline at NPR.org. And make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app.

That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening. Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. Learn more at RWJF.org.