Srebrenica, surprise attacks, and the call for strengthening intelligence capacities

It is one of the conclusions in the research report by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD) on the failed UN peacekeeping mission in Srebrenica that a supposed disdain for intelligence collection during peacekeeping operations within the UN organisation and the Dutch government prevented the possibility for an adequate response to the attack on Srebrenica.Footnote ² This conclusion has been substantiated in a five hundred paged supplement to the official Dutch Srebrenica research report which was published in 2002Footnote ³ and in a book volume of the series Studies in Intelligence History published in 2003.Footnote ⁴ The author Cees Wiebes states that ‘since … none of those involved had prior knowledge of the assault, a “proper” response was ruled out right from the start. In this respect Srebrenica was an intelligence failure.’Footnote ⁵ According to the report, the attack on the enclave by Serb forces in July 1995 and the murder of ten thousand Bosnian Muslims came as a complete surprise to the soldiers of the Dutch battalion (Dutchbat) and to the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR).Footnote ⁶ At a conference on peacekeeping and intelligence Wiebes concluded that ‘a key lesson learned is that intelligence must be completely integrated into all aspects of the planning and execution of peacekeeping operation.’Footnote ⁷

The NIOD report on intelligence was hailed in the Guardian by Richard Aldrich as ‘one of the most sensational reports on western intelligence ever published’ and as a report which has ‘staggered’ officials by its findings and led to the resignation of the Dutch government.Footnote ⁸ Like Wiebes, Aldrich concludes that ‘the broader lessons of the intelligence report on Srebrenica are clear. Those who were able to deploy intelligence power, including the Americans and their enemies, the Bosnian Serbs, were both able to get their way. Conversely, the UN and the Dutch government were ‘deprived of the means and capacity for obtaining intelligence’ for the Srebrenica deployment, helping to explain why they ‘blundered in, and contributed to the terrible events there.’Footnote ⁹

Other reports on intelligence in the US and the United Kingdom leave us with a similar impression that an adequate intelligence supply could have saved the world from a lot of misery. Not only the attacks of the 11 September could have been prevented, but also, the war in Iraq would not have been fought on the assumption that it possessed weapons of mass destruction.Footnote ¹⁰ According to Pat Roberts, the chairman of the bipartisan US Senate Intelligence Committee, this misjudgement should not exclusively be attributed to the US intelligence services. He called it ‘a world-wide intelligence failure’.Footnote ¹¹

As a result of those reports, a Cold War-like consensus has emerged holding that improved intelligence capacities will reduce the risk of surprise attacks and thus would make our world more predictable. Preventing war and especially terrorist surprise attacks have become a matter that seems too important to leave to politicians. Instead technology and intelligence should do the job. Moreover, the call for more and better intelligence is not only an issue when national security is at stake, but for UN peacekeeping missions as well.Footnote ¹²

The NIOD report on Srebrenica recognises that ‘intelligence failures are seldom caused by a lack of information. The cause more often lies in its processing and interpretation.’Footnote ¹³ However, for many analysts this acknowledgement leads them to conclude that strengthening the intelligence organisations and a better cooperation of the (inter)national intelligence services could solve those problems. Within the US, the UK, the UN, and in the Netherlands this view has resulted in a reform of those institutions including provisions for a greater financial and political independence. I will demonstrate, however, by a close reading of the NIOD research on intelligence and the predictability of the fall of the Srebrenica enclave that other more fundamental problems in relation to ideas of how the near future can be known are at stake. I will argue that in this case the conceptualisation of uncertain (near) futures closes off some important questions of responsibility for the political and military choices that were made before, during and even after the failed mission. I take the NIOD report and the fall of the UN ‘safe area’ as a case study, because it exemplifies a more general problem in the use of intelligence reports to master uncertain futures (and sometimes traumatic pasts). Moreover, some parallels can be identified in the legal reasoning of the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague (ICTY) as well. The NIOD report is used by both the prosecution and the defence at the ICTY.

Surprise attack and/or genocide?

The NIOD researchers have reconstructed the events in Srebrenica as an ‘organised mass murder’ that was triggered by the ‘surprise’ of the outbreak of Muslim men from the enclave combined with an eagerness for revenge and a wish for ‘ethnic cleansing’.Footnote ¹⁴ They situate the mass murder in Srebrenica as the result of a contingency within the Bosnian war. It is concluded that ‘with hindsight there are no indications that the increased activity of the Bosnian Serb Army (VRS) in East Bosnia at the beginning of July 1995 was aimed at anything more than a reduction of the safe area Srebrenica and an interception of the main road to Žepa. The plan of campaign was drawn up on 2 July. The attack commenced on 6 July. It was so successful and so little resistance was offered that it was decided late in the evening of 9 July to press on and to see whether it was possible to take over the entire enclave.’Footnote ¹⁵ Similarly, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) concluded in its judgement on the crimes in Srebrenica that the VRS changed their military objective from ‘reducing the enclave to the urban area … to taking over Srebrenica town and the enclave as a whole’ on 9 or 10 July.Footnote ¹⁶ In this judgement – that also draws upon the rulings by the ICTY – the idea of a surprise attack is reconciled with the crime of genocide. This framing of the events carries great weight for judgements on predictability and responsibility for the events, especially since the crime of genocide depends on the issue of planning and intent and also includes a responsibility of prevention for the international community. It thus also carries great weight for the responsibility of the Dutch/UN peacekeeping operation and other relative outsiders of the international community since the level of uncertainty and thus unpredictability is related to the possibilities of an adequate response.

I will start my analysis of the framing of the violence in Srebrenica by scrutinising the NIOD research on intelligence and foreknowledge of the fall of the UN ‘Safe Area’ and then connect its epistemology to the argumentation in the rulings of the ICTY and the ICJ.

Objectifying intelligence

According to NIOD researcher Wiebes, intelligence is ‘a product that is manufactured in a (sometimes complicated) production process.’Footnote ¹⁷ With Jennifer Sims he defines intelligence as ‘information that is gathered, organised and analysed for players or decision-makers.’ Only when there is an ‘intelligence needs plan’ drawn up by the ‘consumers’ (the military and/or policymakers) and a specific production process by intelligence agencies, ‘information’ can become ‘intelligence’. With Gregory Copley, Wiebes emphasises that ‘intelligence is only intelligence when it is in the hands of the consumer.’Footnote ¹⁸ In this concept of intelligence, information is objectified as something that can be found and manufactured. This allows Wiebes to speak about intelligence on Bosnia that was, for example, delivered ‘in little chunks’ by the British foreign intelligence service, and – according to an unidentified British intelligence official – ‘incidentally, this intelligence was not of the highest quality; on a score of 1 to 5 this official would value the material at 2 or 3, or in other words: “Not really good stuff.”’Footnote ¹⁹

Carol Medlicott has noted that there are similarities between old forms of geography exploration and theories of intelligence. The idea of ‘intelligence collection’ resembles historical practises of geography as the collection of artefacts and specimens that could be brought back, categorised, and displayed. A distant reality is being explored, objectified, and systematised by experts.Footnote ²⁰ However, as Medlicott states, ‘the geographic community is actively critiquing this mode of knowing; but the intelligence community is not.’Footnote ²¹ There is an interesting comparison to be made between texts produced through geographical exploration from the late sixteenth century through the end of the Enlightenment and Wiebes's text. These texts have in common that they make a largely unknown world visible for an educated Western audience.Footnote ²² Moreover, as Dorinda Outram states, ‘the essence of the explorer's claim was to be trusted as an eyewitness to a world that few or no others had seen.’Footnote ²³

With Foucault, however, we can understand that these traditional representations are necessarily tied to systems of social control.Footnote ²⁴ Analysis (observation, classification, systematisation, and the implicated hierarchies and norms) is a tool of discipline and therefore a political technology. Especially because intelligence is treated as a special category of knowledge closely related to secrecy, it leaves hardly any space for critical judgements, nor to alternative reconstructions of the research cases. In this respect, it is worth noting that the specific research conditions at the NIOD research centre (re)produced some similarity between the status of the NIOD researcher and that of a special agent. Bas Blokker reported in a Dutch newspaper:

To be sure, it is not my main aim to judge the quality of intelligence research ‘products’ as good or bad in itself, but I do argue that the role of both the researcher and the intelligence agents should not be seen as being just pure means in the processing of information.

Classifying intelligence

At first glance, Wiebes's report seems to comprise contradictory findings. On the one hand he states that it was clear ‘that the abandonment of the enclaves had been the subject of discussion in diplomatic circles for some time, because it was generally acknowledged that they were not viable’Footnote ²⁶ and

On the other hand, Wiebes states that ‘no one expected that the enclave would be taken.’Footnote ²⁸ This contradiction can exist because of his specific classification of collected intelligence, which turns out to be decisive for the outcome of the report. He distinguishes several types of intelligence differentiated by collection, technology, or aims. Two of those classifications are important for this analysis: ‘strategic intelligence’ and ‘tactical intelligence’. Wiebes gives the following definition of ‘strategic intelligence’:

According to Wiebes – who further ignores the ‘national interest’ aspect in his definition of strategic intelligence that might contradict the aims of UN peacekeeping – this information is needed during peacekeeping operations to assist in understanding the political and military situation between the warring parties. Wiebes does not give a definition of ‘tactical intelligence’. Instead he describes its aims:

He says that ‘a distinction must be drawn between “strategic” and “tactical” prior knowledge. Strategic prior knowledge relates to the patterns of expectation extending over a long period. This knowledge existed in plenty, because the Bosnian Serbs had often declared that they would one day take over the enclaves.’ However, he adds, ‘an attack on the enclave was not expected’.Footnote ³¹ For this expectation we would have needed tactical prior knowledge, which is ‘the core of intelligence work’ and is ‘formed by tactical indications, such as troop concentrations, tanks, trucks and new trenches.’ If these tactical indications were not noted, then the attack on Srebrenica should be regarded as an ‘intelligence failure’.Footnote ³² As stated in the introduction of this article, Wiebes indeed concludes that no such knowledge was available and in that respect ‘Srebrenica was an intelligence failure.’Footnote ³³ This is the reason that he can describe the fall of Srebrenica as a surprise attack.Footnote ³⁴ This conclusion implicates that Dutchbat did not know what was happening when the enclave was attacked, neither did they have an idea of what was happening to the fifteen thousand men (and a few women) who fled the enclave.

Tactical foreknowledge as an instable category

The conclusion that there would have been no tactical foreknowledge of the attack on Srebrenica is being disputed by other sources. Wiebes mentions the fact that members of the Bosnian army (ABiH) state that they did give several warnings of a coming attack. However, he does not think that the ABiH is a reliable source, because the army was not equipped with enough personnel to make ‘near-real time intelligence’ possible. This means that it could have tapped the communication of the Bosnian Serbs, but it was not able to interpret the information in time. Wiebes states that a general of the ABiH

The way Wiebes puts this is cynical in relation to the events that followed, and also because of his conclusion that even if the ABiH had warned against a coming attack the information would have been dismissed because of a supposed ‘Cry Wolf mechanism’. The explanation of this ‘mechanism’ is that the ABiH had given false alarms so often that they were no longer believed by the UN troops.Footnote ³⁶

Dutchbat soldier Schuurman, told the Dutch news magazine Vrij Nederland a different story. He said that the situation in Srebrenica deteriorated in March 1995 and

Schuurman informed his leaders about what he saw outside the enclave. ‘At the end of June, the Muslims already said the Serbs were going to attack. They had seen heavy artillery. Behind the hills we heard tanks driving. Trees were cut down, foxholes were being digged. We thought, “this is going wrong.”’Footnote ³⁸

The denial of the presence of any foreknowledge is also heavily disputed by the investigative journalists of the Dutch VPRO radio programme Argos.Footnote ³⁹ According to them the German former General Manfred Eisele, who had a high ranked position at the UN Department of Peace Keeping Operation in 1995, said that he had received reports that contained evidence of preparations by Serbian forces for an attack on Srebrenica. This evidence contained aerial photos that displayed reinforcements of the troops, the building of new bunkers and the construction of corridors in the woods by trees that had recently been cut down. Eisele also confirmed that options had been discussed in the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations to counter a coming attack.Footnote ⁴⁰ Moreover, journalist Andreas Zumach has demanded a rectification from the NIOD because Wiebes has dismissed the publications of this German journalist in which he states that he received intercepts of two US intelligence officers, which contained talks between Mladic and Belgrade. The US intelligence officers had told Zumach that it was known by mid-June that Serbian forces planned to attack Srebrenica.Footnote ⁴¹ In a recent BBC television documentary, Joris Voorhoeve, the minister of defence at the time that Dutchbat was deployed in Srebrenica, stated: ‘I know from intelligence sources that there were already Serb decisions to take the three Eastern enclaves among which was Srebrenica. Those decisions were taken probably in May and June – two months before.’ He further alleges that the international community knew the attack was coming: ‘Two security council members had knowledge that the attack was coming. I'm not saying they had knowledge the attack would be followed by mass murder. In any case they did not do anything with this knowledge.’Footnote ⁴²

However, my argument here is not so much to point at the probable factual inaccuracies of the report. Instead, I want to point at a more profound conceptual problem that is produced by Wiebes's strategic/tactical classification of foreknowledge. The category of ‘tactical prior knowledge’ is narrowed down to such an extent that in fact any judgement of the situation and possible preparation for contingencies becomes pure speculation. Contextual knowledge is dismissed as strategic knowledge, which Wiebes defines as only relevant to ‘the objectives of grand strategy’. According to Wiebes, the outcome of strategic knowledge can not be considered to be ‘hard intelligence’ where the military should act upon.Footnote ⁴³ However, as we can see in Wiebes's description of tactical knowledge, knowing the intentions of all parties is also part of this ‘hard intelligence’. Thus intentions are assumed to be closely tied to the other hard intelligence facts like (locations of ceasefire lines, trenches, minefields, checkpoints, etc.) and not to other, perhaps more political schemes of interpretation. Although Wiebes states that ‘it is the job of intelligence in a peacekeeping environment to penetrate the subterfuge of the various actors in order to comprehend their true intentions’, he modifies the possibility of gathering hard intelligence on intentions.Footnote ⁴⁴ He quotes Clausewitz saying, ‘War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty’ and he approves of Max Metselaar who suggests that we could not know what Mladic was up to, because he changed his plans constantly and often at the last moment.Footnote ⁴⁵ ‘Obviously, what an aggressor does not yet know himself can hardly be expected to be determined by one's own intelligence sources. Even the enemy's military and political elite itself is often, until the last moment, not completely certain about many of these elements.’Footnote ⁴⁶ The question here is, whether the ‘fog of war’ is created by the instability of Mladic (and others from the political and military elite) or by Wiebes's own narrow definition of tactical foreknowledge that disqualifies contextual knowledge as irrelevant for military action and thus destabilises any expectation of what could happen.

The politics of ‘hard knowledge’ and the (ir)relevance of political expressions

The crimes committed by Serb forces do fit in a pattern of violence in what was openly called the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Bosnia. The media and others have reported widely about this. Wiebes's perspective on the violence diverts attention from the fact that as early as March 1993 Srebrenica's existence was completely at the mercy of Serb forces that were strangling the enclave. At the time, a UN mission reported to the Security Council that the short range perspectives for Srebrenica were that the town was practically under siege with Serb forces controlling access to it and that inhuman conditions prevailed in the enclave with potentially catastrophic consequences.Footnote ⁴⁷ It reported that Srebrenica had become the ‘equivalent of an open jail’, and that the refusal of Serb forces to allow medical assistance together with the cutting of the water supply and electricity had put into effect ‘a slow-motion process of genocide.’Footnote ⁴⁸ Even though Resolution 819 had declared the city a safe area, the UN mission reported that the actual situation did not correspond to either the spirit or the intent of the resolution.Footnote ⁴⁹ As noted in the Security Council report of 1993, the ‘deliberate interdiction by Bosnian Serb paramilitary units of humanitarian assistance convoys’ constituted according to Resolution 819 ‘a serious violation of international humanitarian law.’Footnote ⁵⁰ Moreover, the commission reported about a ‘pattern of hostilities by Bosnian Serb paramilitary units against towns and villages in Eastern Bosnia’ and ‘continued deliberate armed attacks and shelling of the innocent civilian population.’Footnote ⁵¹

Several other examples of the planning for the violence in Srebrenica has been brought before ICTY and ICJ by the prosecution. The ICJ notes in its judgement that

The ICJ decided that this report was not significant, as ‘the Court observes that the object stated in the report, like the 1992 Strategic Objectives, does not envisage the destruction of the Muslims in Srebrenica, but rather their departure. The Chamber did not give the report any particular significance.’Footnote ⁵³

In March 1995, Radovan Karadžić, the president of Republica Srpska, issued a directive to the Bosnian Serb Army concerning the long-term strategy for the Srebrenica enclave. In this directive, known as Directive 7, it was specified that the Bosnian Serb Army was to:

Strangling the enclave was also part of the plan:

On 31 March, Directive 7.1 was signed by the Bosnian Serb Army commander Ratko Mladić in which he ordered active combat operations around the enclave.Footnote ⁵⁶ By mid 1995, the humanitarian situation of the Bosniacs in the enclave was catastrophic, just as it was envisaged in the decree.Footnote ⁵⁷

To be sure, the Genocide Convention specifies that genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical or religious group, as such:

1. a. Killing members of a group;

2. b. Causing seriously bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

3. c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

4. d. Imposing measures intended to prevent birth within the group;

5. e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Especially point c seems an adequate description of Karadžić's plan before the enclave was overrun. Nevertheless, the Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY ) considered Directive 7 (and Directive 7.1) insufficiently clear to establish that those who issued those directives had genocidal intent, concluding instead that the genocidal plan crystallised at a later stage.Footnote ⁵⁸

Both the ICTY and the ICJ have judged that (only) the events after the fall of the enclave (the mass executions and other killings committed from 13 July onwards) can be considered to be genocide. The ICJ judgement explains that ‘the acts of genocide need not be premeditated and the intent may become the goal later in an operation.’Footnote ⁵⁹

According to Edina Bećirević ‘most Hague investigators and prosecutors do not see genocide as a social and political process, but rather as a one-off military action.’Footnote ⁶⁰ This seems to be the case in Wiebes's report as well. Bećirević points at the inflammatory remarks that Karadžić made during the initial phase of the conflict. In October 1991 he spoke at the Bosnian-Herzegovinan Parliament, which had been debating a referendum on the independence from Yugoslavia. Karadžić gave the following warning, which was broadcast on television: ‘Do not think you will not lead Bosnia and Herzegovina into hell and the Muslim people into possible annihilation, as the Muslim people cannot defend themselves in case of war here.’Footnote ⁶¹ Bećirević also points at Krajisnik who presided over a parliament whose members used genocidal rhetoric in their normal day-to-day speech.Footnote ⁶²

The Bosnian American fiction writer Aleksandar Hemon has called Karadžić ‘genocide's epic hero’. He describes how Karadžić (a former poet and psychiatrist) attuned his performances to the heroism of the grand epic poetry of Serbhood. In this tradition Petar Petrovic Njegos's poem ‘The Mountain Wreath’ (‘Gorski vijenac’) stands out as ‘the foundational text of Serbian cultural nationalism.’Footnote ⁶³ In the lines of this poem – which is according to Hemon, familiar to nearly every Serbian child and adult – the central figure, Montenegrin Bishop Vladika Danilo ‘recognises that the total, ruthless extermination of the Muslims is the only way: “Let there be endless struggle,” he says. “Let there be what cannot be.” He will lead his people through the hell of murder and onward to honour and salvation: “On the grave flowers will grow/ For a distant future generation.”’Footnote ⁶⁴

However, these political expressions and images and their bearing on the political future of Bosnia do not fit in the framing of ‘relevant facts’ for the foreseeability of the violence in Srebrenica by the ICTY and the ICJ, nor does it in the framing of Wiebes. In Wiebes's perspective the conceptual categorisation of tactical/strategical intelligence does the job by excluding earlier political expressions as non-tactical knowledge. Instead the ‘tactical’ knowledge that would be relevant to what could happen is only acknowledged in terms of ‘hard knowledge’ which is framed in a very narrow scope of time and place. In this way, not only very few phenomena become relevant facts, but, perhaps more importantly, the narrow framing destabilises their meaning. They become ‘uncertain’ and open for many interpretations as they are no longer connected to the social and political schemes of interpretation that might have produced those ‘relevant facts’ in the first place. This politics of ‘hard knowledge’, as I would like to call it, makes it impossible to see whether the massive violence against the Muslims happened as a response to Muslim actions or as a prerequisite.

The isolation of facts that are supposed to be part of a rather (military) technical chain of events in which one action is supposed to cause the next, tends to overlook the logic and power of concepts that govern the actions of individual actors and that (military) politics is also a process of sense making instead of causal decision-making.Footnote ⁶⁵ The emphasis on technical causal relations denies the dependence of relevant facts on the schemes of interpretation that make them into relevant facts or not. The logic of action is not so much determined by the facts that one encounters but a result of the disciplining power of concepts that determine what is normal, logical, and therefore meaningful action. If it has become normal to consider human beings in terms of ethnic groups that pose a threat to each others existence, than it becomes a meaningful action to try to eliminate the other group. If not, it is a completely senseless action. And even if the elimination of the other group can be positioned in history after direct ‘provocations’ of the members of the other group took place, the elimination can not be unproblematically explained in terms of causal relations. The concepts and logic that govern human action – if not spelled out in administrations and direct written orders – can only be recognised when one looks at the broader social and political spectrum and in the context of patterns formed by other actions.

This is not to argue however, that histories fully determine human action. It is just to point at the fact that the meaning of human action and events is depending on those histories. It is also a proposal ‘to develop a political consciousness of the historically inflected construction of contemporary political life and to discern or fashion openings or possibilities there’ as Wendy Brown calls for.Footnote ⁶⁶

The social and juridical understanding of intent

Moral responsibility for futures to come can not be equalled to juridical responsibility. In this respect it is important to point at the schism between the social understanding and the juridical understanding of genocide as Larissa Van den Herik has established.Footnote ⁶⁷ As Van den Herik notes, the purposes of the 1948 Genocide Convention are twofold, namely to prevent and to punish genocide.Footnote ⁶⁸ Whereas the political debates are mostly directed to the question of the prevention of this crime, the legal debates on genocide are mostly related at the punishment of those who committed genocide. As it is a fundamental principle in law that the accused is not being considered to be guilty unless his or her guilt is proven ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ the genocide convention is interpreted very narrowly.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, for political decision-making related to the prevention of mass murder or genocide, a narrow juridical interpretation of what is going on, is not appropriate in the midst of a pattern of gross violence against humanity that is so overtly present.

Nevertheless, the narrowness of the legal debate on genocide and intent seems to have found an even narrower interpretation in the official historical reconstructions of the Dutch failed UN peacekeeping mission in Srebrenica (1993–5) by the Netherlands Institute of War Documentation. Although the report is very rich in its historical details, references to the logic of the politics and patterns of violence in terms of (threat of) genocide are most times avoided. Instead, the idea of predictability of the fall of the enclave and the subsequent mass killing is represented in the rather technical discourse of military tactics and intelligence studies.

At the same time, the ICTY has further narrowed down the scope of the crime of genocide since the initial indictment of 1995. Moreover, the military-technical discourse appears to dominate the court proceedings as well. The ICTY restructured the initial Karadžić indictment by dividing a general count of genocide on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina into two specific counts, limiting the allegation of genocide to distinct time periods and locations; one count relating to the period between 31 March 1992 and 31 December 1992, charges the crime of genocide in eight municipalities representing the locations in which according to the prosecution the ‘most extreme manifestations’ of the intent to partially destroy the Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats as such took place.Footnote ⁷⁰ Although, the prosecution argued that it ‘intends to prove these allegations by relying, in part, on the cumulative effect of the evidence supporting the individual crime sites and incidents, and the resulting patterns of criminal conduct that emerge from these incidents’, it was not allowed to bring evidence for more locations.Footnote ⁷¹ The second separate count charges Karadžić for genocide in Srebrenica and relates to the period between 6 July 1995 and 1 November 1995.Footnote ⁷² The prosecution has stated that the revision into two separate counts for genocide would make Karadžić's case more effective.Footnote ⁷³

Florence Hartmann, a former spokeswoman of the ICTY, has remarked that the narrowing down of the scope of the crimes in Srebrenica has turned the events into a ‘last minute genocide’ to indicate the irony of treating the crime of genocide as a local affair.Footnote ⁷⁴ At the 14th anniversary of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, the Prime Minster of Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik, belittled the events in Srebrenica by stating – without any of Hartmann's irony – that it was a ‘local genocide committed by a small number of soldiers and army officers.’Footnote ⁷⁵ Edina Bećirević notes that Dodik was able to make his remark based ‘on rulings by the International Court of Justice and the Hague tribunal, both of which define the events of July 1995 in Srebrenica as genocide. They describe other crimes committed by Serb forces as ethnic cleansing, similar in scope but lacking ‘genocidal intent’. She also points at the fact that the ICTY approach conflicts with an earlier judgement by a German court that sentenced Bosnian Serb paramilitary leader Nikola Jorgic for genocide committed in the city of Doboj in 1992. The sentence was upheld by the European Court of Human Rights.Footnote ⁷⁶

The narrowing down of the crimes that would constitute genocide does leave more and more crimes to the rather new legal category of ethnic cleansing, which is a form of forced deportation. According to John Quigley, the categorisation of the violence as either ethnic cleansing or as genocide is controversial:

Ethnic cleansing and genocide are thus increasingly considered to be different forms of violence and no parts of the same logic. Numbers of deaths and the concentration of killing in time play an important role in the assessments.Footnote ⁷⁸ As a result of this juridical classification, it might be more difficult to recognise any forewarnings of genocide.