RADIO INTERVIEW WITH BRIAN MASSE, MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT FOR WINDSOR WEST

With next month marking the 15th anniversary of the Srebrenica Genocide, a Canadian Member of Parliament Brian Masse is courageously lobbying Ottawa to join the international community in recognizing the worst mass killing on European soil since World War II as genocide.

We are proud to have Brian Masse representing the riding of Windsor West as a member of the New Democratic Party. He is trully a remarkable politician and a man of honor and integrity.

Thank you Brian.

Brian Masse (MP) interview / Length 26:32 min
(Guest: the former UN war crimes prosecutor at The Hague, McGill University international law professor Payam Akhavan)
Radio Canada International
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Jewish Holocaust survivor who presided over the genocide trial in Krstic case, Judge Theodor Meron, stated the following in his historic speech at the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial in Potocari:

"By seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the forty thousand Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general. They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity. The Bosnian Serb forces were aware, when they embarked on this genocidal venture, that the harm they caused would continue to plague the Bosnian Muslims. The Appeals Chamber states unequivocally that the law condemns, in appropriate terms, the deep and lasting injury inflicted, and calls the massacre at Srebrenica by its proper name: genocide. Those responsible will bear this stigma, and it will serve as a warning to those who may in future contemplate the commission of such a heinous act. Those who drafted, on the heels of the Second World War and the Holocaust, the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of genocide, were animated by the desire to ensure that the horror of a state-organized deliberate and massive murder of a group of people purely because of their identity will never recur in the history of humankind."

On Thursday, 10 June 2010, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) sentenced 7 Serbs for the Srebrenica crimes; three of them (Vujadin Popovic, Ljubisa Beara, Drago Nikolic) were found guilty on Srebrenica genocide charges. According to the Judgement Summary:

"The Trial Chamber found that a widespread and systematic attack against a civilian population commenced with the issuance of a Supreme Command Directive in March 1995 by former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic in which he set out the criminal plan for an attack against protected UN safe areas aimed at forcing the Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica and Zepa to leave the enclaves. It tasked the Drina Corps of the VRS to create 'an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival or life for the inhabitants of Srebrenica and Žepa'."

Furhermore, the Trial Chamber found:

"The scale and nature of the murder operation, with the staggering number of killings, the systematic and organised manner in which it was carried out, the targeting and relentless pursuit of the victims, and the plain intention—apparent from the evidence—to eliminate every Bosnian Muslim male who was captured or surrendered proves beyond reasonable doubt that this was genocide."

How it all started?

In April 1992 (more than three years before the Srebrenica massacre), Serb forces -- with logistical and military help from Serbia -- began a widespread campaign of brutal "ethnic cleansing" of the Bosniak [Bosnian Muslim] population of Eastern Bosnia. Thousands of Bosniak refugees flocked to Srebrenica. They were forced to live in the besieged enclave with little or no means of survival and under brutal Serb attacks. Many starved to death. 

Serb Army stationed around Srebrenica never demilitarized, even though they were required to do so under the 1993 demilitarization agreement. In 1992 alone, approximately 100,000 Bosniaks had been expelled from their homes and at least 11,391 Bosniaks were killed by Serb forces in eastern Bosnia (source: Research & Documentation Centre in Sarajevo), while hundreds of Bosnian Muslim villages were destroyed around Srebrenica.

Serb forces stationed around Srebrenica constantly attacked neighbouring Bosniak villages and Srebrenica itself. They also bombarded Srebrenica from air with Serbian airplanes.

In July 1995 the Bosnian Serb army staged a brutal takeover of Srebrenica and its surrounding area, where they proceeded to perpetrate genocide. Bosnian Serb soldiers -- with military and logistical help from Serbia -- separated families, committed brutal rapes of many women and girls, and then forcibly expelled at least 20,000, while summarily executing 8,372 Bosniak men and teenage boys. Srebrenica genocide is remembered the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.

[WATCH Srebrenica testimonies from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]

DNA results of the International Commission on Missing Persons support an estimate of 8,100 Srebrenica genocide victims. As of today, the identities of more than 6,500 genocide victims have been revealed by the DNA analysis.