A Bosnian Serb general jailed by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre has confessed to having “aided and abetted the genocide”.
Survivors and families of the more than 8,300 people who died in the mass killing reacted with scepticism to the confession by Radislav Krstić, a corps commander who led the assault on the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica and oversaw the execution of captured men and boys.
The campaign groups Mothers of Srebrenica and the Association of Victims and Witnesses of Genocide suggested the confession was a ploy to win early release. They said others convicted of war crimes from the Bosnian war had made confessions only to recant once they were released.
“This kind of behaviour is a continuation of the already established practice of war criminals who are trying to get free in every possible way,” the groups said in a joint statement.
Krstić became the first defendant to be convicted of genocide by the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2001 and was sentenced to 46 years in jail.
His confession was made in support of an appeal for early release after 26 years in a series of prisons around Europe. It was presented in a four-page handwritten letter to the president of a residual legal mechanism set up in The Hague to deal with cases tried by the tribunal and its sister tribunal for Rwanda.
In the letter, Krstić said he supported a resolution passed by the UN general assembly in May commemorating the genocide and making 11 July an official day of remembrance for the victims.
“My name is mentioned because I aided and abetted the genocide, my name is mentioned because I committed an unimaginable and unforgivable crime. I do not ask for forgiveness, I am not looking for justification; I do not seek understanding because I know that I cannot and will not receive them,” the 76-year-old former general wrote.
“Every moment of every day, I think about the victims of the genocide in Srebrenica, I mourn them and pray for their souls. I know that the mother and sister of the innocent victim will not believe that these words are truthful; I also know that my words cannot ease the pain or the suffering that will never disappear.”
He said that if he were ever released, he would ask permission to visit the Srebrenica memorial in the village of Potočari, “to bow to the victims and ask for forgiveness”.
The confession made news across the Balkans because Serbia and the leadership of Bosnia’s Serbs deny that the Srebrenica killings constituted a genocide.
Iva Vukušić, an expert on the war crimes tribunals and assistant professor in international history at Utrecht University, said: “Maybe he’s just scared to die in a cell. But maybe, maybe, he is sincere. It could be sincere, and if it was, I’d be delighted. To have him go to Potočari and bow, I think would be massive. These opportunities for remorse, and connection, are so rare.”
Milan Dinić, a director of content strategy and innovation at the polling organisation YouGov, noted that in a poll in Serbia in May, 82% of those questioned said they did not consider Srebrenica a genocide.
“I don’t believe this letter will significantly impact public perception in Serbia,” Dinić said. “Where this letter might draw substantial attention is in academic research, where it could have impact in the long run.”
The Srebrenica mothers and victims associations labelled Krstić’s letter “a lie”. “Let him tell about the graves, about the missing, about the plans when in 1998 they carried out the ‘sanitisation of the terrain’ when they hid the bodies and moved the mass graves,” they said in a statement, calling on the convicted former general to provide testimony identifying who ordered the genocide.
