Bosnia, Serbia Unlikely to Copy Belgium’s Genocide Denial Law

Parliament in Belgium is expected to vote this month on a proposal to amend the country’s anti-racism law to make it illegal to deny genocides that have been recognised by the International Criminal Court or other UN tribunals.

The proposed legislation makes it an offence to “deny, minimise, justify or approve of genocides, crimes against humanity or war crimes recognised as such by an international tribunal”, according to The Brussels Times.

“The minimising of these horrific crimes can, under no circumstances, be allowed. So we are going to make negation of internationally recognised genocides illegal,” said Belgian Federal Justice Minister Koen Geens, The Bulletin reported.

This means that it would be illegal to deny the Srebrenica genocide, when around 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed in July 1995 by Bosnian Serb forces, and some 40,000 women, children and elderly people were expelled.

The Srebrenica massacres were classified as genocide by the UN-backed International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice.

The UN court in The Hague and domestic courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina have sentenced 46 people to around 700 years in prison – plus four life sentences – for genocide, crimes against humanity and other offences against Bosniaks from Srebrenica in 1995.

But even though the Bosnian state court has convicted people of genocide, it is unlikely that the country will follow Belgium’s example and criminalise its denial, experts believe.

In Serbia meanwhile, although the country has a law against genocide denial, the Srebrenica massacres are not officially regarded as genocide.

Karadzic verdict sparks calls for action

The most recent defendant to be convicted of genocide was former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in March this year.

This month, in the wake of the Karadzic verdict, 12 associations representing war victims in Bosnia and Herzegovina appealed to domestic and international institutions to support initiatives to stop the denial of genocide and crimes against humanity and the glorification of the perpetrators of such crimes.

Murat Tahirovic, president of the Association of Victims and Witnesses of Genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina, told BIRN the initiative was sent to over 1,000 recipients, including political parties and lawmakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina, every member of the European Parliament, US congressmen and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

“We have received some indications from members of the parliament of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina [one of the country’s two political entities] that a resolution was being prepared and would be put on the agenda of the [state-level] parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We also expect a reaction from EU parliamentarians soon,” Tahirovic said.

“We expect the denial of genocide to be finally stopped and those who deny it to understand that those verdicts were passed down by international courts, which were established by the United Nations, whose members include Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Russia, alongside many other countries,” he added.

The Law on Prohibition of Genocide Denial has been proposed in Bosnia and Herzegovina several times, but it has never received enough votes from Serb parliamentarians to be passed.

Ramiz Salkic, a representative of the country’s leading Bosniak party, the Party of Democratic Action, SDA, who is also vice-president of the country’s Serb-dominated Republika Srpska entity, argued that the law was necessary.

“We should show respect for victims and sanction those who deny genocide. I give my full support to the initiative,” Salkic said.

But the Republika Srpska authorities deny that the Srebrenica massacres constituted genocide. This month, a controversial commission on Srebrenica set up by Republika Srpska started work, which has attracted criticism over concerns that it will dispute the international courts’ verdicts.

Nenad Stevandic, the president of the Serb MPs’ club at the Bosnian state parliament’s House of Representatives, said the latest initiative to push through a law against genocide denial was likely to fail, as previous efforts have done.

He argued that singling out a crime against one ethnic group – “irrespective of its scale” – would be counter-productive as it would anger others and lead to a “settling of old scores”.

“I am for punishment of perpetrators of all crimes without political manipulations,” Stevandic said.

Meanwhile Bosnian Serb political leader Milorad Dodik, who currently heads the country’s state-level tripartite presidency, claimed on Saturday that the Srebrenica genocide was just a “fabricated myth”.

Serbia rejects international court judgments

In 2007, the International Court of Justice ruled that Serbia was not responsible for or complicit in the Srebrenica genocide, but that it had failed to stop the massacres, as it had close links with Bosnian Serb forces. The ruling also said that Serbia had failed to help the Hague Tribunal punish the perpetrators.

Serbian human rights activists have hailed the proposed Belgian law that would ban the denial of genocide and called on the authorities in Belgrade to follow suit.

Ivan Djuric, programme director of the Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Belgrade, said that “we in Serbia have to ask ourselves about our own responsibility to introduce that legal provision”.

In 2016, Serbia made the denial of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes punishable by sentences of six months to five years in prison.

But the ban only affects those crimes established by Serbian courts and the International Criminal Court – excluding the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice, which established that the Srebrenica massacres were genocide.

“Therefore in Serbia it’s not forbidden to deny or relativise the genocide in Srebrenica, but it’s punishable to deny the [1994] genocide in [Rwanda],” said Ivana Zanic, director of the Humanitarian Law Centre NGO’s legal programme.

The Serbian parliament passed a resolution condemning the Srebrenica massacres in 2010, but without defining them as genocide.

The initiative came from Serbia’s then-President Boris Tadic, and his Democratic Party-led majority adopted the declaration, which was immediately condemned by the Republika Srpska authorities.

The Youth Initiative for Human Rights argued that there should be another parliamentary declaration specifically recognising the Srebrenica genocide.

“The declaration on Srebrenica should be grounded in truth and facts, and consider the responsibility that the International Court of Justice ruling assigned us – that we didn’t prevent the genocide and then helped its perpetrators hide from justice,” Djuric said.

But the current, more nationalist-oriented Serbian administration led by President Aleksandar Vucic is unlikely to take heed of such arguments.

Vucic attended the Srebrenica anniversary commemoration in 2015, when he came under attack from mourners who were furious about his nationalist rhetoric during the Bosnian war, but refuses to accept that genocide was committed.

His government’s lobbying was credited with convincing Belgrade’s ally Russia to veto a UN Security Council resolution in 2015 that would have condemned the Srebrenica massacres as genocide.

Last year, Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic again denied that the mass killings of Bosniaks by Bosnian Serb forces were an act of genocide.

“No, I do not think that the terrible massacre at Srebrenica was genocide,” Brnabic told Deutsche Welle.

The president of the UN’s Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, Theodor Meron, criticised Brnabic for her comments when they met in Belgrade last November.

“It does not help the government of Serbia to challenge judgments of a major international criminal tribunal,” Meron warned the Serbian premier.

So far however, there is no indication that Belgrade’s official stance is likely to change.