Times of London yesterday commented on Srebrenica massacre. Excerpts:
Thousands of relatives of those murdered in the worst European atrocity since World War II gathered yesterday to remember them, in Srebrenica. The death toll from the massacres in what was meant to be a UN-protected safe haven for Bosnian Muslims in July, 1995, is 8,372. But bodies are still being unearthed. Names are still being added to the list of the dead. The men who ordered the killings, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, remain at large. For 13 years they have been protected not by vast deserts or impenetrable mountains, but by people who refuse to accept the overwhelming evidence that they are war criminals.
Guilt for war crimes does not expire. The most recent suspect is Omar Bashir, the Sudanese president, who is expected to be charged next week by the International Criminal Court with crimes against humanity and genocide for atrocities committed in Darfur. At the other end of the spectrum, Aribert Heim’s responsibility for his butchery of fellow humans at the Mauthausen concentration camp is not diminished by his age, now 94. Messrs Ratko and Mladic have reason to believe they can defy civilization in the same way, without even fleeing to the Andes. The UN-administered International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) is supposed to complete its trials by the end of this year and its appeals by 2010. Its chief prosecutor has given warning that these deadlines will be missed. In principle, this could mean more time to hunt Europe’s most-wanted men. In practice, the most likely outcome is bickering at the UN. Worse, Russia is calling for the tribunal to be wound up. Like Serbia’s nationalists, it considers the ICTY biased. This week Moscow claimed that the recently overturned conviction of Naser Oric, a Bosnian Muslim commander jailed for failing to prevent the killing of Serbs, proved the point.
It did nothing of the sort. There is no dispute that atrocities were committed by all sides in the Bosnian war.
