Efforts to revise the 1995 Srebrenica Genocide have increased recently and there is not much international courts can do about it as it is up to the local communities and the goodwill of the people to stop it, Judge Carmel Agius, the President of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT), told N1.
Agius served as the President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) until the institution was closed in 2017 and presided over numerous war crimes cases at the court. The IRMCT is the international court tasked with finishing the job of the ICTY.
RELATED NEWS
He said that revisionism is “not an unknown phenomenon.”
“Denial and revisionism were to be expected, because denying one’s guilt, denying one’s responsibility for crimes committed during that particular part of history, has happened in the past, has happened in your case, and will continue to happen in the future,” Agius said.
As for Bosnia in particular, he said he thinks that it happened “because there was a vested interest in certain individuals and a certain section of the population maybe, and also some politicians, to take this position because it was easiest and most convenient for them”.
“The wounds of the Srebrenica 1995 genocide haven’t healed, they are still bleeding. And what the deniers and the revisionists are doing is that they are stabbing these victims once again, in the same wounds that have still not healed,” he said.
“This is very serious and it has to stop! One way or another, it has to stop,” he stressed.
But to achieve that is “the responsibility of the communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the politicians, but also the people and, particularly, the younger generation,” he said.
“The younger generations have the right to not be indoctrinated but to know and discover for themselves the truth. The truth is there, we have provided it. The archives of the ICTY and the Mechanism are readily available online for anyone who wants to do research and try and establish the truth,” he said, adding, “I think the future of BiH lies in the goodwill of the people.”
The full interview with the Carmel Agius can be seen in the video above.
