Donate SIGN UP

Srebrenica - The Russian Veto

Avatar Image
agchristie | 20:30 Tue 14th Jul 2015 | News
44 Answers
Further to Mikey's recent post on the attack on the Serbian PM at the weekend, what do you think about the Russian ambassador's comments that to acknowledge the massacre as 'genocide' would be 'counter-productive' and lead to 'greater tension'? Comments from Russia indicated the draft resolution did not reflect the wider scenario.

What are the arguments against the term 'genocide' being applied in this instance?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-33445772
Gravatar

Answers

21 to 40 of 44rss feed

First Previous 1 2 3 Next Last

Best Answer

No best answer has yet been selected by agchristie. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.

For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.
Question Author
In Gromit's opener, the court at the Hague have prosecuted for genocide already so, is there a legal definition rather than the several dictionaries??
Apologies Agchristie,

Serbia and Coatia were indeed taken to the international Court in the Hague for Genocide - but they were cleared.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/04/world/europe/croatia-and-serbia-cleared-of-genocide-by-hague-court.html

Slobodan Miloševic was charge with Crimes against humanity.

That confirms my opinion that it was a massacre and not genocide.
Question Author
Thanks Gromit, so it appears the Russians have a fairly good case to veto....

Vicious circle then as many commentators suggest that not acknowledging 'genocide' is a barrier to reconciliation....
ag, you asked for Legal definition of Genocide

http://uk.gov.krd/genocide/pages/page.aspx?lngnr=12&pnr=41

http://www.genocidewatch.org/genocide/whatisit.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11108059

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Lemkin#Postwar

... add the factors, compensation, politics, finger-pointing, time scale, and justification to pre-emptive action and you may see how selective use is practiced.
The point really is why have the Russians not called it genocide, not what we think: obviously Srebrenica on its own does not constitute the entire wiping out of a people, but there was an avowed policy of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and it is hard to see how Srebrenica did not constitute a part of that.
Why have the Russians not called it genocide? The reasons plainly have nothing to do with the actual meaning of the word. They simply don't want to fall out with the Serbs who have never faced up to what happened in Bosnia in terms of their desire to wipe out not only Bosniaks of course but Croats also.
The scale of the numbers is irelevant: they did not succeed in wiping out the other races but neither did Hitler succeed in wiping out the Jews nor Turkey the Armenians. Even some Circassians survived genocide at the hands of the er Russians.
Intention is the key. And the political expediency of wishing to deny that intention
The Russians are right. Had the intention been genocide women and children would have been killed too. This was massacre.
ichkeria (08:21) I would give you BA, if it was in my power to do so !
Aha!
BA is up to agatha but Svejk definitely deserves the Godwin award :-)
The Russians vetoed it because they were asked to by the Serbian Government.
Serbia does not have a vote at the United Nations, so it asked its ally, Russia to vote against it.

What is the reason they want to ungrade it from a massacre to genocide after 20 years? The reasongiven, that reconsiliation cannot happen until the upgrade is obviously NOT the reason.
Honoured as I am to be nominated, I think you'll find you brought Hitler into it first, ichi.
I think you mean UN Security Council
As I say, you can debate the merits or otherwise of calling this massacre genocide, but often a country's stance on something says more about it than the issue itself
Perhaps the Russians feel that they are particular experts in the field and don't wish to see anyone else muscling in on their territory :-)
Honoured as I am Svejk I think you'll find we are both wrong. It was Tora after all :-)
Who is the 'fascist' in the picture anyway and how does he come into it?
And, anyway, it's an important part of the story. 'Your' Muslim friends didn't take much persuading to don the Nazi uniform in order to murder their Serbian(and Jewish) neighbours. As I've already said it's a complicated situation. You and mikey seem to be taking a rather blinkered view of things.
I apologise Svejk.
Of course the Bosniaks were busy donning nazi uniforms and slaughtering their neighbours when the Bosnian Serb army arrived
I think you can do better than that
If we start dredging up the as you say complicated and bloody history of the past to justify more recent crimes then we become complicit in them I'm afraid
And that sums up Serbia and Russia for me. The Russians do it because they have nothing else to cling onto: the fact that their sorry and brutal empire defeated the 'fascists' and the Serbs continually bang on about the Croats siding with the nazis, justifying that for the most unspeakable crimes of their own
The ‘Godwin Award’ is a cowardly concept disguised as a smart response to rescue a failing argument. It’s simply a ploy to silence the often logical opposition.
Thanks Gromit.
Not entirely sure how this gentleman's activities are relevant to Srebrenica but I can see the nazi link
This was already Judged at the International Court of Justice in the Hague in February and the ruling was that it wasn't genocide.

// The highest court of the United Nations ruled on Tuesday that neither Croatia nor Serbia committed genocide against each other’s peoples when they waged war during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

The two separate rulings were the result of civil lawsuits that both countries had filed at the court, the International Court of Justice at The Hague. Each claimed the other had violated the Genocide Convention. Croatia, moreover, demanded extensive reparations for war damages.

Peter Tomka, the presiding judge from Slovakia who read out the verdicts, spoke of the killings of civilians and the widespread destruction committed by the forces from both sides. But he said the large-scale operations to displace people in the two countries did not meet the criteria for genocide. //

The attempts to ignore this ruling are politically motivated.

21 to 40 of 44rss feed

First Previous 1 2 3 Next Last

Do you know the answer?

Srebrenica - The Russian Veto

Answer Question >>

Related Questions

Sorry, we can't find any related questions. Try using the search bar at the top of the page to search for some keywords, or choose a topic and submit your own question.