Prosecuting Genocide

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0:44A note before we start. This episode includes descriptions of violence.

0:54Nuremberg, 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.

1:54Working behind the scenes is an advisor to Justice Jackson named Raphael Lemkin.

2:05Lemkin was a Polish-Jewish lawyer at the U.S. War Department who'd fled Poland in 1939, soon after the Nazis invaded, 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 word genos, meaning tribe or race, and the Latin kida, meaning killing. The term does not necessarily signify mass killings, although it may mean that.

2:55More 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 in 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.

3:39Lemkin 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.

4:10So 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 precedents, 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.

4:57After nearly a year, the judges delivered their verdict. Today, 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 Hitlers. 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.

5:45And 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,

6:16Intent 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.

6:59The disease of criminality, if left unchecked, is contagious.

7:13The word genocide is everywhere now. In headlines, in 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 commission 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.

8:06The world took a long time to realize that genocide had occurred in the Bosnian town of Sribnitsa. 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 one big concentration camp. Many of those executed were buried in mass graves. And we were held at gunpoint by the Serbs.

8:53The UN, he says, they did absolutely nothing to protect us. The more time passes, 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 Randa Abdel 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.

9:44This is Brian Gwynn from Cincinnati, Ohio, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR. Part 1. The Witness.

10:00Coming 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 nearly 40 years by a single communist ruler.

10:39By 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 order. 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.

11:23If the country of Yugoslavia broke up into separate, independent nations, the Serbs risked 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. Eva Fukosic. 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.

11:59and 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 like a thing, you know. In many ways, violence makes you take sides. Rumors 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 fervent nationalism.

12:45Milosevic has talked in the past about a greater Serbia. And they were talking about any place a Serb is buried is Serbia. They can't take our grace. That's laying claim to a huge amount of territory 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.

13:25In 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 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.

14:11Isn'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.

14:34The 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 seized 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.

15:18When 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 trainload of people had been taken at gunpoint or tank point, put on buses, and then put on the state railways and taken to Hungary.

16:08And what was interesting was that the state was using all the instruments at its command, including transportation, to carry out a policy of what 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 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.

16:51And 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 corralling them or forcing them to do something or maybe killing them. So Roy starts hitting up his contacts. I made some phone calls into Banyalucco. At this point in 1992, the Bosnian Serbs controlled Banjaluka, 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.

17:38In 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. I called on the police. I called on the Serb-led 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 a question of definition.

18:17But 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. 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 Bosnian Muslims who were being killed in the greatest numbers.

19:01So 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 monitored each conversation. Army interviewers asked most of the questions.

19:45Then 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, Andre 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.

20:23They 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 Omarska, which is also in the area of Banyaluka. But about halfway there, he got a phone call saying that they couldn't guarantee my safety.

21:13But this led me to believe that something really terrible was happening, that what I saw at Manjasa was small potatoes compared to what must be going on in Omaarska 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 nonprofits helped him find dozens of people to interview. and the details confirmed his suspicions. More than 1 ,000 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.

21:57In 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.

22:40Around 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.

23:22Many 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, they 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 Pulitzer Prize.

24:03I 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.

24:38Roy published his book, A Witness to Genocide, in 1993. It included many of the photos that he and his 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 thunderclap effect on public opinion and actually on governments. But nobody ever did anything about it. U.N. peacekeepers were sent in to protect aid deliveries. Washington called for an emergency session of the U.N.

25:17Human 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 that nobody does anything about it. The same year Roy published his book, two different U.N. 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.

25:58And 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.