Radovan Karadzic and the Srebrenica Massacre

Srebrenica exhumation: Courtesy of the ICTY

Not all atrocities of the 1992 to 1995 war in Bosnia can be directly attributed to the political leaderships of the ethnic groups involved in the conflict. Some atrocities were directly ordered by political leaders, some were the indirect result of the hatred they stirred up and others came about as a reaction to previous atrocities committed by the other side.


Until now, though it is difficult to believe that an atrocity on the scale of the Srebrenica massacre could have happened without some direct political involvement, most accounts have not put it in the first category, attributing most of the blame for the events on the leader of the Bosnian Serb Army, Ratko Mladic, rather than the Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic. According to James Gow in 'The Serbian Project and its Adversaries' published in 2003: "Mladic's bloody determination in this situation [the Srebrenica massacre] almost certainly means that the Bosnian Serb political leader, Karadzic, was not involved and knew nothing about it."


But a new book by the historian Robert Donia, 'Radovan Karadzic: Architect of the Bosnian Genocide', published in 2014, argues that Radovan Karadzic "planned, ordered, monitored and sought to justify the Srebrenica genocide", a claim which the author acknowledges "varies from many previous journalistic and scholarly accounts of the event, which attribute the leadership and responsibility for the killings to General Mladic."


Dr. Donia notes that authors of previous accounts of events in Srebrenica in July 1995 did not have access to the documents accumulated by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia over the years, which he says demonstrate Karadzic's primary role in the atrocity. In March 1995, Karadzic signed "Directive No. 7", ordering the Bosnian Serb Army to "create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival or life for the inhabitants of Srebrenica and Zepa, a phrase which Donia argues "led to mass atrocities at Srebrenica." In a session of the Bosnian Serb Assembly in October 1995, Karadzic claimed responsibility for the operations in Srebrenica and the neighbouring enclave Zepa: "As the Supreme Commander, I stood behind the plan for Zepa and Srebrenica. I personally supervised the plan without the knowledge of the Main Staff, not hiding anything, but I happened to run into General Krstic and advised him to go straight into town and pronounce the fall of Srebrenica and later we will chase the Turks around the woods." Chasing "the Turks around the woods" was a reference, Dr. Donia argues, to the pursuit and killing of Bosnian men who formed a column seeking to escape from the besieged Srebrenica enclave to Bosnian Army held territory around Tuzla. The atrocities, whose victims mostly from eastern Bosnian municipalities other than Srebrenica, were committed in the service of "the Bosnian Serb utopian dream" in eastern Bosnia, identified elsewhere in the book as an ethnically pure Serb state.


In the chapter on the Srebrenica massacre and elsewhere, Dr. Donia has uncovered and compiled a mass of evidence that leaves one in little doubt that Karadzic helped to pave the way for atrocities at Srebrenica. But as far as I can see it falls short of demonstrating a direct link between Karadzic's orders and the actual Srebrenica massacre, which mainly took the form of thousands of men being captured then shot dead or killed with grenades. This may be why Donia blames Karadzic for the Srebrenica "genocide", which also covers the expulsion of women and children from the town, rather than the "massacre", a much more specific event.


Interestingly, one of the most damning fragments of evidence cited in the book to demonstrate the Bosnian Serb political leadership's commitment to an ethnically pure state reflects equally badly on the Bosnian Croat political leadership. In January 1992, before the war started in Bosnia, Nikola Koljevic, a Serb member of the Bosnian presidency, and his Croat counterpart Franjo Boras at a meeting in Zagreb discussed dividing Bosnian along ethnic lines. The transcript contains some blood-curdling proposals, such as reconstituting municipalities and initiating population transfers to create "homogenization of certain areas" as Koljevic describes it and Boras's idea of preventing Muslims from settling in Croat and Serb controlled territories by ensuring that building permits are locally controlled. Such attitudes helped pave the way for the atrocities that ensued during the war that started in Bosnia a few months after this discussion.


But I believe Dr. Donia goes too far in arguing that Koljevic and Boras "had agreed on the need for ethnically pure territories", a big jump even from Koljevic's proposal for "homogenization." His book helps to explain why events such as the Srebrenica massacre happened and why these were due to the attitudes and actions of leaders such as Radovan Karadzic, but there is still a need for further debate about the extent to which atrocities during the Bosnian war were due to the Bosnian Serb goal of an ethnically pure state.