Original subtitles

Let me start with the deniers, the revisionists.

The denial or distortion of history is an

intentional assault on truth.

Understanding the past is crucial to how people understand themselves, their

society, and how to achieve their common goals.

In July 1995, forces of the army of Republika Srpska, the VRS, invaded

the town of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In a few horrific days, more than 8 ,000 Bosnian Muslim boys and men were taken

to places of detention, abused, tortured, and then executed.

As their bodies fell into mass graves, the machinery of denial of those crimes

was set into motion.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, commonly referred

to as the ICTY, investigated, prosecuted, and passed judgment on those

crimes.

The first events that we look at Eastern Bosnia and Srebrenica really start

in May of 1992 when Karadzic and

his Bosnian Serb government proclaims that

they want to be separate from the other ethnic groups.

We see the ethnic cleansing beginning with the beginning of the war. By

1992, there's a struggle over eastern Bosnia, a military struggle.

And we see Mladic's what's called Directive 4, which is an order to

defeat the Bosnian Muslim forces of Naser Oric.

And in the same order, he says, and remove the civilian population.

When it comes to the events before the fall of Srebrenica, due to the fighting

between the Muslims and the Bosnian Serbs, many people had fled

to Srebrenica, to the area of Srebrenica.

And due to the...

The UN decided in 1993 to declare the area a safe

area.

That's where we are in early 1995, and with Directive 7, Karadzic and Mladic,

write down that they want to make life unbearable for the Muslims in Srebrenica

so that they cannot survive there, which was a way of saying, just keep the

pressure on them, eventually make it so they'll have to leave.

They were using a strategy of war crimes, as I would put it, committing

atrocities deliberately, murdering, raping, forcibly evicting people, simply

be able to get that control of the territory.

Following the directive, the enclave of Srebrenica was attacked on 6 July

1995.

The Serb forces...

entered the enclave, which resulted in the Bosnian Muslim population

fleeing from Srebrenica town to Potocari, where they were

seeking refuge at the UN compound.

While they were fleeing there, they were also shelled by the Serb forces, and

eventually there were between 25 ,000 to 30 ,000 people

in the Potocari compound.

If I say it was a normal situation, it wasn't a normal situation.

Suddenly I see thousands of people running through the street and saying

Srebrenica is falling.

We lived on the 9th floor upstairs and I, in such fear, thinking that at

that moment Srebrenica was falling, I enter that group of people and I run.

I didn't have time to go... I had time, but I didn't know I had time to go and

see my parents and brothers, but I enter that mass of people.

Believe me, that narrow street, that thousands of people go, that some rush

across others, there are even cows and horses.

One situation where it is impossible to describe it in words, that I said to

myself, well, man, well, this, this...

On the

11th

of July, the town of Srebrenica did fall to Bosnian Serb forces.

Thousands of civilians rushed to nearby Potocari in terror.

The people in Potocari were exposed to horrific

conditions because there was hardly any food and water. The people got more and

more afraid of what would happen next.

Those people were taken away the whole night.

They were with the Serbian soldiers.

In my opinion, some of them were dressed in the uniform of the UNPROFOR and

with the lights.

They came to the mass of people, where they saw the men, they simply took them,

took them away and never came back.

That night, it was...

One big chaos.

And every family, when those men were taken away, they heard screams.

His family, children, women, whoever they already had.

And from the direction of those houses where those men were taken away, I

wouldn't know exactly what was going on there, but only some screams were

heard.

It was like watching some horror movies.

But it was so scary.

From that atmosphere, from those screams, from that

scream, I was freezing to death.

No one could sleep, no one knew what to do.

While the Muslim population was seeking refuge in Porto Cari, there were three

meetings that took place at the famous Hotel Fontana.

During meetings with the local Muslim community, General Mladic delivered a

chilling ultimatum.

After the last meeting at the Hotel Fontana, buses

arrived to take the people out of Potocari.

What happened was that the VRS separated the men from the women.

The women and children and elderly left in the buses and the men were taken away

to Bratunac first, where they had to stay in buses overnight.

When the men were being taken to the buses, for one, they were not allowed

to go back and pick their belongings.

So they were being put in the buses.

without their belongings, without the items that they were forced to leave out

there.

So they were taken to all the buses, one by one, like they are prisoners of

war.

One by one, one following each other, with no space in between, and soldiers

everywhere. And in between the buses, there are soldiers to ensure that one

not cross.

So they were all taken in.

was one of the saddest moments that I ever had in that area, in that you could

see men, real men, crying, asking us, you Umprofor,

why are you letting these people take us?

Why are you letting them go with us?

Why do you want us to be killed by these people?

And we could ask them, you know,

What do you think they are going to do to you? And they say, really, these

people are going to kill us.

Why did they, in the first place, separate us from our families?

Why are they taking us in buses? Do you know where these buses are going to?

And it's true. We really did not know.

Thousands of men were actually arrested or held in schools and

other locations, in Bratunats.

taken to Zvonik, where they were also detained in several locations, before

being transported to execution sites on the 13th of July.

Can you describe to the judges how the people from Bratnac acted

toward the victims from Srebrenica?

At the same

time a column of men tried to flee

the enclave to Muslim -held territory.

My father, my brother, my father -in -law and other male children.

We started as if nothing had happened. We came to some unknown

terrain, to some forest, and they noticed us and started shooting at us

artillery. Someone told us, as if nothing had happened, to go back.

It was 11 o 'clock in the evening.

It was already dark.

Thousands of people were gathering, men and children, a small number of women,

horses, cows, cattle.

It was a total chaos.

We probably expected a double intervention, but I didn't understand

going on at that moment.

There was a shooting.

They started shooting from all sides.

My father -in -law said it was better to stay in the middle of the column.

When they started shooting, they ran away, but I could not find them anymore.

And that is the last moment I have never seen my father, my twin brother or my

father -in -law.

forces did prevent them from getting there by also calling them to come down

and surrender, saying nothing would happen to them.

Eventually, when men did surrender, they were taken to execution sites and also

other detention sites.

On 13 July 1995, the planned killing operations began.

Thousands of unarmed Bosnian Muslim boys and men were executed in the nearby

Bratunac and Zvornik areas, in the Tseska Valley, on the banks of the Yadar

River, in Nova Kasaba, the Kravica Warehouse, Ora Ovets, Branevo

Farm, and other locations.

Tell us what the telegram said.

Where was the telegram sent from, just to be very clear?

or someone else who was in the Zvornicka

Brigade.

I also took and read that telegram.

At that time, we were stuck, that is, simply stuck.

Buses would go to the detention sites and then the men were blindfolded, were

taken to sometimes fields where...

They had to line up, and sometimes when they would arrive at these execution

sites, there were already excavators who would then dig the graves for

the executed men.

Brano told us to stand in line.

We stood in line.

In front of us, we were ordered to turn to the ground.

When those people turned to the ground, we shot at those people. We were ordered

to shoot at people.

As soon as the truck started, Rafale started shooting at us from the ground.

So this one fell on me behind my back, and I fell on my back, and so I remained

lying.

They were shooting while I was giving life signs, individually

later, when they all fell.

When everything was quiet, then they moved away, but I couldn't look

how I fell, because they could see me.

I was not killed.

I kept quiet until the other truck came again.

Then, I had to take a step back and go to the

row we were in.

I turned my head and looked at how they were moving and how they were moving in

four rows.

As soon as the truck started, they started shooting at them, and that's how

killed them, and that's how it went on.

Maybe I'll live for a second.

And when it really came to me, I jumped off with the rest, I think there were

four men, my feet hurt from the stones.

When I came a little closer, to the right side of the truck,

I saw a kind of killed people.

One kind, then another, then the third.

I couldn't see the end, but I could see them floating in the dark.

I thought my mother would never know where I was.

When it was dark, when they came with the light...

Then I stayed in the shade, maybe 10 -15 meters away from the

lights. I was pulled out from under the dead, and then

I crawled on my knees to the end of the dead. I needed maybe 10 meters to the

end.

When we got to the place, someone told us to get down.

And as we went, not to lie down, but to fall forward.

So we were turned to the side.

The traveling began.

There were only a few survivors, but luckily we had the chance to hear from

survivors about the events.

very touching descriptions of how they felt, the helplessness, and that

sometimes men would be so thirsty that all that they could think of was just to

have a bit of water before being executed.

How many people do you estimate, Mr. Adamovich, were executed at

the Branjevo farm on the 16th of July?

Your unit,

the members of the 10th, all of the members who went on this assignment,

including Branjo, participated in those executions, did they not?

No.

As reports of these crimes emerged, the ICTY began to investigate.

The investigations were hampered by the secret removal of the executed boys and

men from their mass graves and their relocation to secondary or tertiary

sites to avoid detection.

What we mean by secondary graves, this is a term that was used by the

archaeologists when they...

exhumed these large mass graves where the executions took place, they found

very few bodies in them and found evidence

that the bodies had been removed and taken somewhere else.

This was determined from the archaeological analysis of the soils,

anthropological analysis of the bodies being hacked in pieces by something like

heavy machinery.

and by aerial imagery that showed the soil being disturbed in July when the

crimes occurred, and then again in September.

So secondary graves were the name that was given for the graves where the

bodies that were stolen or robbed from the primary graves were taken.

And over the years we identified over 50 secondary graves that contained the

vast majority of the 6 ,000 people that we have now identified coming out of

mass graves.

So again, this was...

And a concerted action required a lot of resources, and we speak about around

7 ,000 men who had to be reburied. So that was in an attempt to hide the

crimes committed.

The identification of the mortal remains found in mass graves was essential to

establish the facts of what happened and to offer closure for the families of

the missing.

The International Commission was established in 1996, originally to

cooperation of the governments in the former Yugoslavia to account for the 40

,000 persons who went missing as a consequence of the conflicts of the

So trying to use, let's say, traditional methods to identify missing persons

cases, which is something that Physicians for Human Rights was

to do, meaning taking anti -mortem data from families of the missing and trying

to match the anti -mortem data to the skeletal remains, was impossible because

the bodies were unrecognizable. They had been so disarticulated.

There were five primary graves that we were aware of. Each contained well over

,000 bodies, some more, some less.

By December, there were serious negotiations going on at Dayton that

potentially allow NATO forces into Bosnia to secure the peace.

So we believe that in September, when we know that these reburials

occurred,

that there must have been some concern that...

five big graves could be found, or at least one or more of them could be

and if they contained a thousand bodies, that would be incredibly damaging to

the Bosnian Serb and Serbian cause, and that to prevent that, they should

rob those graves and spread them out and hide them in isolated places all over

eastern Bosnia.

The effort to cover up crimes was the most extensive we have ever seen. I

I can't now compare that to any other place in the world, but it was massive.

Using DNA, we were able to reveal the extent to which these secondary graves

existed. For example, there were bodies so severely disarticulated that it

became clear that heavy machinery was used to bulldoze mortal remains from

primary sites and remove them, as I said, to multiple secondary sites.

With DNA, to make one Cerbanese identification, on average, we'd have to

about seven DNA match reports, meaning that we'd have one bone sample found in

location X, another one found in location Y, sometimes 50 kilometers away

each other. So this was extensive.

The ICMP began the process of reaching out to all families of the missing

throughout the region and the world to take reference samples for DNA

on a large scale.

to identify the mortal remains found in mass graves.

Using DNA proved not only instrumental in being able to identify the victims,

and just to give you numbers now, of the 40 ,000 people that went missing in the

region of the former Yugoslavia, over 70 % of those individuals have now been

accounted for. That is unprecedented. That's never happened ever in the world.

With regard to the 8 ,000, approximately 8 ,000 persons who went missing from

Srebrenica, we have been able to assist Bosnia -Herzegovina in identifying

almost 90 % of these victims.

There were a number of trials before the tribunal that dealt with the events in

Srebrenica. Amongst them, there were four trials that only considered the

in Srebrenica, which were the trial against Kerstic, the Blagojevic

case, the Popovic case, and the Ptolemy case.

Apart from these four trials, there was also a case against Razan Erdemovic. who

pleaded guilty, and also in the Blagojevic case, two of the accused,

Obrenovic and Momia Nikolic, pleaded guilty and were sentenced based on these

guilty pleas. There are also the trials against Karadzic and Mladic, which,

amongst others, also have been accused for the events in Srebrenica.

In parallel to the indictments and investigations by the ICTY, Authorities

Serbia and Republika Srpska promoted alternative explanations for the crimes.

Here in Serbia, what was the

strongest side of the propaganda was persistent persecution and displacement

with responsibility for crimes.

Then the entire state machinery shifts to that. But there is also that

injustice, always historical,

In the case of the Serbs, they were constantly accused of Srebrenica, which

a lot of weapons.

It was a hidden base of the soldiers Orić and Izetbegović.

In this way, the factual basis

of what was done in Srebrenica was constantly weakened.

Every marker here with a stick with a piece of yellow tag, every marker here

a bullet casing of some sort.

As the investigations and trials progressed, other theories evolved,

deny or diminish the crimes.

These denials continue to this day.

that on July 1,

1995, in the house of a Muslim, former president of the municipality, in

Zvornik, where two representatives of the Muslim government were present in

Sarajevo, representatives of a paid military

formation in the Serbian Army, but not under the command of

the Serbian Army, but the French intelligence service,

initially i think some of the allegations were that only 100 people

Srebrenica that was number one then secondly that there was a conflict that

place that soldiers died on a massive scale and that there was a conflict that

took place I've also heard, I think, other stories when ICMP began working

Thailand to assist persons and identify missing persons from the Southeast Asian

tsunami, that we actually took bodies from Thailand and we buried them in

Srebrenica. That's another interesting story.

Another one was that people went into Bosniak cemeteries in Sarajevo and they

removed dead bodies from these cemeteries in Sarajevo and moved them to

Srebrenica. So I think the narrative about what happened there, either

the extent to which persons were killed in Srebrenica or fabricating these

different scenarios is profound.

under President Kolević at the end of August.

Lies. Nothing happened in Srebrenica. And it didn't happen in Srebrenica

My attention was turned to Srebrenica and civilians.

And something happened 80 to 100 km away from Srebrenica and not with civilians.

The attack on Srebrenica was not an attack on civilians.

It seems much more

understandable that the murders are immediately for

disrespecting Mladić's demands for surrender or the consequences

of a malicious decision to remove the potential

danger that a large number of prisoners represent for...

The defense over the years have tried to suggest the secondary graves aren't

really secondary, that they're primary, that they're battle casualties that were

put there, or that they were removed for some sort of health purposes, but

there's really never been any significant effort to try to explain

it's so obvious what, the evidence is so obvious what really happened and why it

happened. Well, he never talked about the facts.

Not a single politician, not

during the trial of Milosevic, not later, not with

a single judgment, said that the facts that the Hague Tribunal claimed were not

true, that they were true.

Another method, another approach has always been chosen, to say that the

Tribunal a political tribunal, that he is against Serbia, that he is making

decisions against Serbia, that the Serbian people want to be seen as a

genocide people. And when that message is sent to people that they are members

of a genocide people, I think it is not pleasant for people. No one wants to be

a member of a genocide people.

But the message is very skillful, urgent,

I want to state clearly that our defense

does not deny that a large but still unknown number of Muslim men was

after the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995.

It was apparently a serious crime punishable under both national and

international law.

However, we strongly deny that such crime amounts to genocide.

Similarly, We dispute the Church from paragraph 25 of the indictment that

VRFs and MUC forces murdered over 7 ,000 Muslim

men and boys.

Our submission is that such allegations have been widely and

unnecessarily exaggerated to meet one of the requirements for Genocide

Church.

Ethnic cleansing is not genocide.

What happened in July 1995 is that the VRS was looking for a piece of

land to be in a good position to negotiate, as the ABIH was doing trying

fight in Sarajevo, and as the Croats were doing fighting for Operation Storm.

So what are they arguing then? They're arguing that a crime against humanity

committed? In what way is a crime against humanity less horrifying than

genocide?

When they broke through the Serbian territory, they could not identify and

more than 2 ,500 or 3 ,000 people.

And then that research material is being judged here by people.

For Srebrenica, that research material goes from eye to eye. The unkilled were

killed by 8 ,000. Let's see that material, let's see DNK.

The work that we did with Mr. Karadzic, who was mounting his own defense, where

he wanted all the genetic reference samples related to Srebrenica, which

huge. I think the trial chamber in that case ruled that we could work with Mr.

Karadzic, that he could select 300 cases himself randomly, which he did. And we

went back to 1 ,500 families of the missing, because remember we had to have

three reference samples per missing person, to see if they would be willing

provide their genetic information to the alleged perpetrator. So we were able to

do that. We met the needs of... the defense in these cases and in each one

these cases there was irrefutable evidence regarding the identity of this

person.

The total number of persons killed after the fall of the enclave has also been

disputed by defense teams for the accused as well as by Bosnian Serb

Then based on the evidence as a whole including forensic evidence and the

demographic evidence, it simply cannot be concluded beyond a reasonable doubt

that more than 7 ,000 Muslim men from Srebrenica were killed as a result of

crimes forming the basis of this indictment. Our submissions in our brief

clearly show that beyond a reasonable doubt, the maximum number of

persons who have been killed as a result of the crimes committed in this case

does not exceed 3 ,000.

It's sufficient that thousands of men were killed, whether it's 4

,000, 5 ,000 or 7 ,000 men.

It's sufficient to establish that genocide was committed.

However, the sheer number is also not the only criterion and should not be the

only criterion to establish genocide.

There are other criteria.

The recognition of the truth in Srebrenica is necessary for all sides.

Part of this truth is that despite the pain, despite the suffering, despite the

loss caused by the murderers in Srebrenica, these actions were not

done with the intention of destroying the whole or the whole of Bosnian

as a group.

The truth is...

Some of the criteria that were found by the trial chamber and made it

conclude that genocide was committed was the systematic and organized manner

with which the killing operation took place.

The fact that only Bosnian Muslim men were targeted.

Attempts were also made to justify the Srebrenica killings with crimes

committed in the area against Serb civilians.

Another powerful message was that when there was a war, everyone committed

crimes, and that Serbia was different, but others

committed crimes, and that Serbia wanted to say that everyone committed crimes.

That worked for people, so people said, yes, everyone committed

crimes.

This accusation, and it is clear, it exists, it is easy to prove, this

accusation for all Muslim holidays and Catholic holidays issued an order to

on as much as possible.

And they killed us in World War II and this war, the biggest Serbian holidays.

You will see here what they did in Kravica.

In 1993, on Božić Street, 8 -9 months after the war broke out, the

people who were ready to celebrate were slaughtered.

Civilians, without any reason.

It was an attack on civilians, without any reason.

The Kravica Christmas attacks by the Muslims were one of the incidents

that Serb propagandists and others point to as a vicious attack where hundreds

and hundreds of civilians were killed. Well, we have the report from the

Ratanats Brigade on that attack, and it's not more than...

I believe 17 or 18 civilians that are killed in the context of a very heavily

fought and heavily defended fight over the Kravica area. The actual number of

murders that we can prove has been very low. It's nothing like the thousands and

thousands that we saw in Srebrenica.

The Center for Research and Documentation in Sarajevo has come up

of how many victims they can document, and that number is 116.

Republika Srpska in making its official claims gives a number of 600.

The Center for Research on Genocide based in Belgrade has offered a number

,200, but they haven't told us what that number is based on or which 1 ,200

people are being counted.

That number is probably invented.

But then this memorial center in Bratunac, which could have, I suppose,

116 victims to commemorate what they have done, they have grouped together

civilian with military victims in order to increase the number.

They have brought in remains of military victims and combined the burial site

with a military cemetery that had been previously existing to further inflate

the number.

They have brought together military victims from other parts of Bosnia and

Herzegovina and from previous conflicts so that finally the number of victims

that are commemorated at Bratunac is around 3 ,200.

And you can see what the strategy is.

It's to try to make the number of victims larger and larger so that it

competitive, although this is a vulgar way of putting it.

One of the things that's often said is, oh, well, the Srebrenica massacres were

revenge for earlier killings of Serbs in Bratunac now.

I'm not sure that that is actually the case, but whether or not it is the case,

it's no grounds for carrying out mass murder.

Many chambers established that revenge is not a defence and the fact that

one group commits crimes against another group doesn't justify it.

the other group then in turn to commit crimes against the first group.

But I must say, in all these years I have seen it repeatedly that the defense

has again and again tried to bring that, this is the so -called argument, so

what you do to me, I will do to you, and yeah, it has never been, I mean.

considered by the Chamber.

But that is why the loudest are those who react when someone says, let's see

many crimes were committed, which crimes, let's see those legal decisions,

see those facts, how many victims of war crimes, not soldiers, let's see the

victims of war crimes.

how many Serbs there are, and how many Muslims

are victims of racial crimes.

Then they come to the conclusion that very few are accused, given the number

of crimes.

But frankly, it's still possible to find many people who will reject the notion

of genocide and even reject the evidence that over 8 ,000 men and boys were

murdered north of Srebrenica in the events in July 1995.

They'll say, oh, there was something, but it was an exaggeration.

Maybe 2 ,000, maybe 1 ,000.

The court record shows very clearly over 8 ,000 people were killed and

somewhere close to 6 ,000 of those, I believe, have been identified.

The remains of others remain unidentified still, but the remains are

As the trial and appeal judgments were rendered for crimes in Srebrenica, the

facts were established of what happened before, during and after the fall of the

enclave.

Imagine thousands of people stuck in some buildings, without water,

without food.

The witnesses described in front of the chamber the climate of terror that

reigned, the rapes, the murders, the mistreatments, to the point that some

refugees committed suicide or tried to commit them.

Bosnian Muslim prisoners who were captured or surrendered from the column

to Sandici Meadow were marched or transported to the nearby Kravica

What followed this initial killing episode can only be described as a

of the prisoners held in the warehouse.

Members of the Bosnian Serb forces besieged the prisoners with gunfire and

grenades.

The assault upon the prisoners lasted through the night. By the end, at least

,000 Bosnian Muslim men had been killed.

Excavators arrived on 14th and 15th of July to remove the bodies.

These crimes were committed in little more than one week with a level of

brutality and depravity.

not previously seen in the conflict in former Yugoslavia and are among the

darkest days in modern European history.

Loaders and excavators were either already at the time of the executions

or arrived soon after to bury the dead in mass graves.

In the wake of these mass executions, The Bosnian Serb forces ordered a

so -called mopping -up operation throughout the enclave and executions on

smaller scale continued in the Dzvornik area between the 16th and the 27th of

July 1995.

Bosnian Serb forces, triggered by a main staff order, took measures to conceal

these crimes.

A massive reburial operation was set in place.

The victims from Kravica warehouse, those killed in Orahovac, Petkov Zidam,

Kozluk, Branjevo Farm and Pilica, that had been buried after their murder,

were disinterred and buried again in secondary gravesites at, to name a few,

Hodzici Road, the Snagavo -Lipje Road, and a total of 12 sites along the

Chanchali Road.

The establishment of the facts of these crimes was aided by the guilty pleas of

several of the perpetrators.

first guilty plea at the tribunal.

And what was important about it was the combination of, in his case, a VRS

soldier acknowledging he was involved in mass murder. That's hugely important

for the world to see, that there is an acknowledgment from someone inside the

criminal system that is doing it, for the naysayers and the deniers of the

to actually see a soldier admit it. So that's hugely important by itself.

What was important...

for the ongoing investigation and trial was also critically important in that

Erdemovic told us where it happened, who did it to some degree, the extent of

it, and everything he told us was backed up and we were able to corroborate by

investigation. So that was a huge boost for the investigation.

It put us light years ahead of where we would have been without it.

He also agreed in that plea agreement to testify in all Srebrenica trials,

which he did, and he did beautifully, I will add, and it was never...

seriously contradicted or hurt by any cross examination.

and its victims, that the state bodies of the Republic of Srpska

and all individuals who took part in the crime follow my path,

admit their participation and guilt, surrender and answer

for what they did.

Several ICTY trial and appeals chambers independently found that the Bosnian

Serb forces committed genocide against the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica.

So the definition of genocide comes from the Genocide Convention, which was

adopted by the General Assembly in 1948.

is actually a verbatim record of Article 2 of the Genocide Convention.

deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring

about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended

to prevent births within the group, forcibly transferring children of the

to another group.

These requirements have been found to be customary international law.

All the men of Srebrenica, at the age of fighting, decided

to make it impossible to survive the population of

Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. In other words,

we went from ethnic cleansing to genocide.

Well,

once it was determined to be genocide by the Kerstet Trial Chamber, then it was

the Appeals Chamber's turn, in that case, to review it.

They looked very carefully at it and very strictly at it, and they found it

be justified as genocide. So it's a legal determination that is made by the

trial chamber and backed up by the appellate chamber.

Those who devise and implement genocide seek to deprive humanity of

the manifold richness its nationalities, races, ethnicities, and religions

provide.

This is a crime against all of humankind.

It's harm being felt not only by the group targeted for destruction, but by

of humanity.

The chamber found that from at least 1994 and throughout July 1995,

the accused made numerous statements expressing a need to take revenge on the

Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica.

adding that they would have, and I quote, disappeared a long time ago,

end of quote, had it not been for the involvement of the international

community.

He further stated on several occasions during the Hotel Fontana meetings that

the Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica could, and I quote again, live or

vanish, end of quote, and

quote again, survive or disappear.

For having committed these crimes, the chamber sentences Mr. Ratko Mladic

to life imprisonment.

The overwhelming evidence in most of those cases against the people that were

closest to the killing.

found them guilty of genocide, but always found that there was what we call

murder operation to commit mass murder.

We've identified the crime scenes and we've identified the victims to an

extent that was unimaginable 21 years ago. We've found almost everyone.

We've found almost all the sites.

And we have convicted the people most responsible for it. We have the most

serious and awful crime committed in a four -day period.

And we have identified it and convicted the people responsible for it. The story

is, you know, in terms of the numbers of persons that were killed, I think

there's irrefutable evidence.

And I think this is where the scientific proof that ICMP provides using DNA

now cannot be contested.

It does not require us to read all the existing documents, all the evidence,

but it is enough to see the regime of the strongest evidence, then

it is clear what it is about, what it should be about and how much it is.

How many political confessions are there here, just so that facts are not known,

how much is the passion to just hold positions, at least by repeating

the same thing all the time, we are the victims, we are the victims, but how

long will it be acceptable?

I don't think there is a big future for that.

And if you ask me as a legal professional and somebody who has

the testimony of hundreds of witnesses who witnessed the events,

thousands of documents, I can only say there is no

basis for you to still deny it. If you ask me also as a German

looking at...

What happened in Germany, now in particular during the Second World War,

Holocaust, it took us at least two generations to be

really able to admit our guilt or to admit what has happened and to confront

us with it.

So in that sense, I'm also hopeful that at one point...

the communities will be able to face it.

Those who deny this is their problem and they need to face the fact

that this is happening because of themselves, not because of us, but

their children, and of course because of ourselves.

We will never start to calm down.

The process of change will never start without true recognition.

Through DNA and other evidence, guilty pleas by some of the perpetrators, and

testimony from over 1 ,000 witnesses, the ICTY irrefutably established that

crimes committed after the fall of Srebrenica amounted to genocide.

The tribunal also showed that those who commit these crimes will not escape

justice, and will be held accountable for their actions.

Dear revisionists, deniers, you will never succeed in hiding the true

nature of this genocide.

Your children, your grandchildren will one day realize that the truth

of what happened here does not lie in the homes where it has been distorted,

outside where it is readily available.

They will discover the truth.

the undistorted truth and when they do, they will wonder what else you have

hidden from their view.