You wrote:
“A few thousand is far from “killing off all of its men”, especially during an ongoing war. It would be a war crime, yes, but a genocide?”
It would be considered part of a program of genocide if Srebernica seemed to be only an installment thereof. That’s what many people thought was happening. And don’t forget about the organized rapes and ethnic cleansing against non-Serbs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u49unD69Lqs&feature=related
If Ante Gotovina can be put on trial because his troops committed 150 murders and ethnically cleansed 200-250,00 Serbs out of Croatian controlled territory then how can the Serbs not be guilty or at least deserving of trials for doing those same things on a greater scale?
Look at Dafur. Everybody calls it genocide because 200-400,000 people have been killed AND BECAUSE OF THE ORGANIZED RAPES, AND ETHNIC CLEANSING.
The bulk of the Muslim men that died were killed by military action as the armed column fought its way to Tuzla.
If the Muslims were really worried about genocide, they certainly wouldn’t have left their women and children to the mercy of the Bosnia Serb army!
Srebrenica was a armed camp used by the Muslims to terrorize the surrounding population!
In a major embarrassment for the Bosnian Government, two Muslim brothers whose supposed murders were used as evidence in a highly publicized war crimes trial to condemn two Bosnian Serbs to death have been found living in a Sarajevo suburb.
Jailed Serbs' 'Victims' Found Alive, Embarrassing Bosnia (NY Times)
In a major embarrassment for the Bosnian Government, two Muslim brothers whose supposed murders were used as evidence in a highly publicized war crimes trial to condemn two Bosnian Serbs to death have been found living in a Sarajevo suburb.
Jailed Serbs' 'Victims' Found Alive, Embarrassing Bosnia (NY Times)
Operation Storm was the largest example of ethnic cleansing during the bteak-up of Yugoslavia. More specifically, subsequent to the US-trained Croation forces attack on Knin and taking most of the Krajina, this led to a reduction of the Serb populaton of approximately 12% to a mere 3%.
That's a lot of people, Vladimir.
And do you know of other large scale mass executions? Because the Hague doesn't. If anyone did, we'd be hearing the name of it over & over like we do "Srebrenica". (Not battles with those shooting back.)
"And don’t forget about the organized rapes and ethnic cleansing against non-Serbs."
Rapes are unfortunately a part of every war. "Systematic rapes" are not. I have yet to hear of "a Serbian Rape Battalion" and "the Serbian rape camp" stories proved to be a lie. Were Muslim women raped? Yes. Were Serb women raped? Undoubtedly, yes. Is that "genocide"? No, unless it cuts both ways and that would make Muslims "genocidal", .
Interestingly enough we NEVER hear the sad stories of Serb woman raped, even though the "systematic rape of Bosnian Serb women" were the first rape cases of to be reported to the UN -- and I can't imagine none took place after that.
Rape is a war crime, not genocide.
"Ethnic cleansing" (forcibly relocating an ethnic population against its will) may have been a hugely shocking buzzword back in 1996. But after we assisted the Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Albanians in ethnic cleansing about a half million or more Serbs from Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, its pretty much a non-starter buzzword anymore. "Sometimes you have separate populations to keep them from killing each other" is more the thinking today -- and Dayton, fully institutionalized that idea.
The Laughland point is that the use of the word "genocide" was key to writing the entire Bosnian war off as "an aggression by Serbs", instead of seeing it for what it was -- a bloody vicious, multi-sided civil war over political issues -- that while it included war crimes, was not a war crime in and of itself.
One needs to separate and examine the political issues that created this war, separately from the war crimes committed during it. Because war crimes are the result of war, not the cause of it. War can exist without war crimes, but war crimes don't happen without war.