Bosnia-Herzegovina: Chaos

Attempts have been made. People have been sent to this city and that city to aid people affected by genocide what is present day Yugoslavia. Peacekeepers have been sent but that did not help. Basically, this genocide needed to stop. The killing and torturing of thousands of people needed to stop. If it did not stop, there would still be people killed, tortured and in camps.

Bosnia-Herzegovina, which used to be Yugoslavia, went through a huge genocide in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At this time the President of Yugoslavia was Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic was not only the President of former Yugoslavia, but also the President of Serbia. He became one of the big figures in the Yugoslav wars during the 90s. In May 1999, he was indicted but the U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Several charges were brought to him for crimes against humanity. About a year and a half later, there were violations of customs and laws of war in what is now Bosnia. Milosevic was eventually forced to resign from his office position due to a very popular uprising from citizens that were against his rule. After he resigned from office he was to stand trial.

After his resignation occurred, new evidence came to surface and Milosevic was charge with several more crimes against humanity. After just five years in jail, and fifty hours of the testimony's left in his trial, Slobodan Milosevic suffered from high blood pressure, diabetes chronic heart ailments and eventually died of a heart attack.

Milosevic was not the only thing that was on trial. Yugoslavia itself was pressed with charges of violating the Genocide Convention. Yugoslavia protested these charges that were put forth by Bosnia. Bosnia asked the courts to declare that Yugoslavia indeed violate the Genocide Constitution. Yugoslavia wanted to dismiss the entire case. This did not happen though. Yugoslavia said that the Court lacked jurisdiction. The Court eventually said that the case would go and continue with the case. Yugoslavia ended up losing

the case.

During the genocide in Yugoslavia an estimated two hundred thousand people were killed, there were eight hundred detention facilities and prison camps that held over a half a million people in them. It was also estimated by Professor M. Cheriff Bassiouni, who is a Professor of Law at DePaul University since 1964, and is also the President of the International Human Rights Law Institute, that more than fifty thousand people in Yugoslavia were tortured.

Professor Bassiouni did an investigation in what was former Yugoslavia for two years (between 1992 and 1994). During his investigation, he and his team examined over one thousand six hundred different cases of rape and sexual assault. He also participated in personal interviews with two hundred twenty three actual witnesses and victims of these rape cases. Mr. Bassiouni and his team were also able to retrieve affidavits of the victims who could recognize the people who committed the rape crimes on them.

During Porfessor Bassiouni's investigations, of Yugoslavia genocide that occurred, the team was able to identify at least one hundred and fifty one graves that contained between five and even three thousand bodies. He stated that "...visiting these areas, being in mass graves from which we exhumed bodies, standing up on my knees in dead bodies..." (1995 Congressional Hearings) In a grave in Vukovar, they found two hundred and four Croatian people that had been taken out of the local hospital in Vukovar. The two hundred and four people were taken into and open field in the middle on nowhere. Then they were put into a five kilometer whole and shot, then buried in a low and thin grave. Most of the graves that they found were close to the main places of detention. So far, everything that has been found up until this point only occurred in an approximation of a year and a half.

Another hospital incident happened in Kosevo Hospital. It was estimated that the civil hospital was bombed two hundred and eighty nine times. These bombings happened over a two year time frame. Most of the bombings happened during the times of noon and two o'clock in the afternoon, right in the middle of visitation at the Kosevo Hospital.

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