- published: 15 Nov 2009
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The Srebrenica massacre, also known as the Srebrenica genocide (Bosnian: Masakar u Srebrenici; Genocid u Srebrenici), was the genocidal killing, in July 1995, of more than 8,000 Muslim Bosniaks, mainly men and boys, in and around the town of Srebrenica during the Bosnian War.
The killings were perpetrated by units of the Bosnian Serb Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) under the command of General Ratko Mladić. The Scorpions, a paramilitary unit from Serbia, who had been part of the Serbian Interior Ministry until 1991, also participated in the massacre. In April 1993 the United Nations had declared the besieged enclave of Srebrenica—in the Drina Valley of northeastern Bosnia—a "safe area" under UN protection. However, in July 1995, UNPROFOR's 370Dutchbat soldiers in Srebrenica failed to prevent the town's capture by the VRS — and the subsequent massacre.
In 2004, in a unanimous ruling on the case of Prosecutor v. Krstić, the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), located in the Hague, ruled that the massacre of the enclave's male inhabitants constituted genocide, a crime under international law. The ruling was also upheld by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2007. The forcible transfer of between 25,000 and 30,000 Bosniak women, children and elderly which accompanied the massacre was found to constitute genocide, when accompanied with the killings and separation of the men.
Srebrenica (Cyrillic: Сребреница, pronounced [srêbrenit͡sa]) is a Bosnian town in the easternmost Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Srebrenica is a small mountain town, its main industry being salt mining and a nearby spa.
During the Bosnian War, the town was the site of a July 1995 massacre of the town's Bosniak population, determined to have been a crime of genocide.
On 24 March 2007, Srebrenica's municipal assembly adopted a resolution demanding independence from the Republika Srpska entity (although not from Bosnia's sovereignty); the Serb members of the assembly did not vote on the resolution.
The municipality (општина or opština) is further subdivided into the following local communities (мјесне заједнице or mjesne zajednice):
The borders of the municipality in the 1953 and 1961 census were different. In 1953, Muslims by nationality had been yet to emerge as an ethnicity leading Slavic Muslims to identify as Yugoslavs. As Yugoslav was itself not adopted in 1948, they were all classified as other. In 2003, Bosnian Serbs comprised 95% of the population of Srebrenica.