A Voice For the Voiceless

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Guilty of Genocide

On August 2, 2001, General Radislav Krstic became the first person convicted of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). 

Guilty as Charged: Radislav Krstic, on trial for genocide at the Hague tribunal Photo credit: BBC After the August 2001 judgment, both Krstic and the Prosecution filed appeals arguing, respectively, that 46 years was too long and too short. On October 21, 2002 the ICTY unsealed three more indictments pertaining to Srebrenica, against three former Bosnian Serb officers, Drago Nikolic, Vujadin Popovic and Ljubisa Beara. Nicolic has been arrested, while Beara and Popovic remain at large. (More information)

Krstic was Deputy Commander of the Drina Corps, a unit connected to the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS). After hearing some 120 witnesses over 98 days and viewing nearly 1,000 exhibits, judges at the Tribunal declared they were “convinced beyond any reasonable doubt that a crime of genocide was committed in Srebrenica” and that General Krstic was guilty. He was sentenced to 46 years in prison.

According to testimony, Radovan Karadzic ordered the VRS to seize the town of Srebrenica on July 9, 1995. The order was conveyed personally to General Krstic. On July 11th General Mladic, along with Krstic and other VRS officers, walked triumphantly into the conquered town.

That night, Mladic, together with Krstic, held the first of several meetings with a representative of the Dutch contingent and the local Muslim population. It began with Mladic contemptuously tossing the Srebrenica signpost on the table. He said that the Muslims should be collected in one place and that they would all be bussed out of the enclave -- only adding at the end of the meeting that the men would be separated in order to identify any possible war criminals.

It was Krstic who organized the buses that carried the women, children and elderly out of Srebrenica in the two days that followed. Krstic gave a filmed interview to a Serbian journalist at the time, indifferent to the scenes of Muslim men and boys who were being separated from their families in the background.

The men were instructed to climb onto trucks and leave their possessions and identity papers behind. According to several witnesses, including some of those who boarded the trucks, some of the men were taken to a white house a few meters away from the UN base on the evening of July 13. Some were beaten. Others were taken behind the house and shot dead. The slaughter had begun.

The tribunal Prosecutor charged General Krstic with: genocide (or complicity therein); persecution by means of murder, cruel treatment, acts of terror, destruction of personal property and forced transfer; extermination, as well as other crimes. The judges accepted the definition of genocide provided in the 1948 Genocide Convention, which defines the crime as any acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Among the acts of genocide are killing members of the group and causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.

For the most part, Krstic did not deny the facts presented by the Prosecutor but he did dispute the charges laid against him. First, he rejected the claim that the executions qualified as acts of genocide. Despite the scale of the murders, he pointed out that women, children and old people were transferred and not killed. On at least one occasion, a group of Bosnian Muslim men were allowed to pass safely into Muslim-controlled territory. Finally, although the Serb forces appeared to have the intent to destroy all the Bosnian Muslim men of fighting age, Krstic’s defense team argued that this could not be interpreted as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a group” as such. The judges disagreed. They concluded that the Serb forces must have realized the impact that such killing would have on the group’s survival.

Krstic also maintained that he knew nothing of the Srebrenica executions until later in 1995, when another Drina officer informed him of the events. He said he had never been present during any of the executions, because he had been responding to an order by General Mladic on July 13 to prepare for an attack on Zepa. This was confirmed by several witnesses, including Drazen Erdemovic, a VRS foot soldier who pulled the trigger on some one hundred Bosnian Muslim men and was himself charged and convicted by the ICTY. No one placed Krstic at any execution.

The court concluded, however, that this was of little consequence. First, the Drina Corps, of which Krstic was officially in command, had authority over the entire area in which the crimes took place. Indeed, at the start of the executions, Mladic promoted him to Commander of the Drina Corps. As such, he must have been kept informed of developments in the area on a regular basis.

Moreover, it was clear from his presence at meetings and public demonstrations that Krstic at the time was closely tied with Mladic, if not his right hand man. Krstic had ordered the buses and organized the men to be separated. When he received a call for additional Drina soldiers and heavy equipment to be sent to the Srebrenica enclave to deal with 3,500 “packages,” he must have known exactly what was meant by “packages.” Indeed, he had even been overheard as expressing his displeasure.

Krstic, in his defense, claimed he had on several occasions warned Mladic and others in the high chain of command to take proper care of the civilian men. But the judges found nothing to confirm this. Instead they found Krstic guilty of the forced transfer of the people of Srebrenica; the murder of thousands of Bosnian Muslims between July 10 and 19,1995; and “having agreed to the plan to conduct mass executions of all the men of fighting age.”

“You are therefore guilty of genocide, General Krstic.”

• Read the prosecution's case against Krstic