The Hague: Hague decision a miscarriage of justice - U.N. Genocide Convention disregarded

Hatidza Mehmedovic (GfbV/STP), who had lost all her relatives in Srebrenica, is appalled at the court decision.

Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker / Society for Threatened Peoples calls

"A scandalous miscarriage of justice" was how Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker (GfbV) / Society for Threatened peoples (STP) described the decision of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague to recognise only the Srebrenica massacre as constituting genocide and to acquit the Belgrade regime of responsibility for crimes committed throughout the whole of Bosnia. "In refusing to recognise the organised nature of the crimes that were committed throughout Bosnia as a whole the Court has chosen to disregard the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide", declared GfbV/STP General Secretary Tilman Zülch. "Because those crimes were committed by Serbian forces with the same intent to destroy the Bosnian Muslims, in whole or in part, as a national religious group."

Zülch recalled the suffering of victims held in at least 100 Serbian concentration and internment camps where approximately 30,000 refugees were killed, the systematic rape of least 30,000 women, some held captive in rape camps for months on end, the organised detention and murder of members of the intellectual and political elites, nearly four years of continuous siege, starvation and bombardment endured by 500,000 Bosnians in the so-called "U.N. safe areas", the expulsion and displacement of approximately 2.5 million Bosnians, and the planned destruction of hundreds of villages and urban communities, 1,300 mosques and 500 Catholic churches.

According to the human rights campaigner all these crimes had been proven to have been carried out under Belgrade's control with the involvement of the Serbian Ministry of the Interior, the Intelligence Service and arms suppliers and the deployment of paramilitary groups and Bosnian Serb military forces. With the help of the Serbian Army and the Serbian authorities the two principal war criminals, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, have managed to remain in hiding up until today.

GfbV / STP had been demonstrating outside the Court in The Hague with women from Srebrenica and other Bosnian survivors calling for a just verdict. They were stunned by the ICJ's decision. They considered they had been treated with contempt and ignored. Some of the women broke down in tears.