Prosecuting Genocide

Summary

Throughline (NPR): “Prosecuting Genocide”

October 30, 2025
Hosts: Rund Abdelfattah & Ramtin Arablouei
Key Guests: Dr. Eva Fukasich (Assistant Professor, Utrecht University), Roy Gutman (Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist), Dr. Sima Jelani (physician and humanitarian)

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Overview

This Throughline episode unpacks the complex, painful evolution of prosecuting genocide—from the historic Nuremberg Trials and Raphael Lemkin’s invention of the term “genocide,” through the legal saga around Bosnia and Srebrenica, and up to present-day accusations in conflicts like Gaza. Using gripping historical storytelling, survivor accounts, and expert analysis, hosts Rund Abdelfattah and Ramtin Arablouei trace how genocide moved from being an unthinkable, unnamed crime to a term fraught with both enormous moral and legal gravity.

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Major Themes & Structure

1. Origins of Genocide as a Legal Concept
2. Bosnian War & Srebrenica Massacre: The Evidence and Aftermath
3. Legal Proceedings, Challenges, and the Weight of "Genocide"
4. Modern Repercussions and Ongoing Global Struggles with Justice

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Naming the Crime: Lemkin & Nuremberg (01:27–07:47)

• Historical Backdrop: The post-WWII Nuremberg Trials, prosecuting Nazi leaders for unprecedented crimes.
• Lemkin’s Campaign: Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, after losing nearly his entire family in the Holocaust, pushed to make “genocide” a legal concept.
  • Quote (Raphael Lemkin, 03:05): “It is for this reason that I took the liberty of inventing the word genocide.”
  • Lemkin explains: “The term is from the Greek word genos, meaning tribe or race, and the Latin cida, meaning killing... it refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups, so that these groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight.” (03:15)
• Initial Setback: Despite Lemkin’s efforts, the Nuremberg verdicts convicted Nazis of other crimes—none for “genocide” (05:46).
  • Quote (05:56): “The Allies decided a case in Nuremberg against a past Hitler, but refused to envisage future Hitlers.” —Raphael Lemkin
• UN Adoption: In 1948, the UN unanimously adopted the Genocide Convention, finally codifying genocide as a specific international crime (06:22).

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2. Case Study: Bosnia—From Ethnic Cleansing to Genocide (11:48–41:48)

a. Yugoslavia Collapses & the Rise of Nationalism

• “Coming apart at the seams is a phrase being used to describe the current situation in Yugoslavia.” —Dr. Eva Fukasich (11:53)
• Description of Yugoslavia’s break-up along ethnic lines, contextualizing deepening divides and violence.

b. Reporting from the Ground: Roy Gutman in Bosnia

• Eyewitness Testimony: Award-winning journalist Roy Gutman recounts collecting evidence of mass deportations and state-organized “ethnic cleansing.”
  • Quote (Roy Gutman, 18:32): “What was ethnic cleansing? Well, it was mass deportations… I learned from that experience that the state was the major actor. This is an organized thing.”
• The Camps: Gutman visits detention centers, observes degrading treatment, and uncovers reliable witness reports of executions.
  • Quote (Roy Gutman, 22:20): “They conveyed a whole degradation, you know, humiliation with the hands of thugs.”
• Expanding Recognition: Initially, the term “genocide” was avoided; over time, journalists and experts started using it. Gutman: “I think it added up to genocide. It’s the pieces of the puzzle that I’ve assembled here... I’m willing to state that I’m the witness.” (25:56)

c. Srebrenica: Anatomy of a Massacre (30:01–41:48)

• The “Safe Zone”: Srebrenica, declared a UN safe zone, becomes the focal point of the genocide.
  • Sima Jelani (30:52): “Bosnian Muslims fled into by the thousands.”
  • Overcrowding and lack of essentials plague the enclave.
• UN Powerlessness: Dutch peacekeepers, under-resourced and outnumbered, are unable to intervene as Bosnian Serb forces overrun Srebrenica (33:02–34:13).
  • Quote (Eva Fukasich, 34:02): “The UN has not neither the capacity nor the equipment nor the food or the water or the mandate to protect the civilians in any sort of armed way.”
• The Mass Killings: Men and boys attempt escape; thousands are executed—over 8,000 killed, mass graves proliferate.
  • Quote (Sima Jelani, 37:56): “Over 8,000 men and boys were summarily executed, shot, killed.”
• Immediate Aftermath: The world learns almost in real time through survivor testimony.
  • Quote (38:51, survivor): “I lost my brother, husband, 30 from my close family alone... We just want to find out where the bones, the remains of our father's brother's sons are to find out the truth.”

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3. Prosecuting Genocide: The Legal Odyssey (43:15–50:59)

• UN War Crimes Tribunal: After Srebrenica, the Tribunal indicts Serb leaders (Radovan Karadžić, Ratko Mladić) for genocide.
  • Quote, Tribunal judge (44:25): “These are truly scenes from hell written on the darkest pages of human history.”
  • Extensive documentation—over 5,000 witnesses (45:02).
  • Eva Fukasich (45:17): “I would say this is probably the most investigated international crime in history.”
• The First Verdict: Gen. Radislav Krstić found guilty of genocide in 2001; Srebrenica officially recognized as genocide (46:02).
  • Ramtin (46:41): “July 1995. General Krstić. Individually you agreed to evil.”
• State Responsibility?
  • ICJ rules in 2007: Serbia as a state not directly guilty of genocide, but guilty of failing to prevent it (47:43).
  • Quote (Eva Fukasich, 47:43): “To this day, we have no straightforward finding of the ICJ that any state is guilty of committing genocide.”

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4. Aftermath, Memory, & Legacy (48:26–53:36)

• Personal Effects, Lasting Pain: Identification of victims through forensics and DNA.
  • Quote (Sima Jelani, 48:26): “I recall one woman recognized a lighter, and it was her lover's… and it's all down to what? A lighter that's now blood soaked.”
• Survivor Grief and Anger: Many still feel abandoned or failed by the international community.
  • Quote (Survivor, 49:21): “They always used to call me Mommy, and on one occasion, I actually heard somebody calling me mummy, and I went to the window, but there was nobody.”
  • Quote (Eva Fukasich & Sima Jelani, 49:49): “Shame on them.”
• Limits of Prosecution: Only Srebrenica was legally recognized as genocide during the war in Bosnia. Other communities feel “cheated” (50:59).
  • Quote (Eva Fukasich): “There are whole communities in Bosnia Herzegovina and elsewhere around the world that feel cheated because what their community went through wasn't labeled, confirmed as a case of genocide.”

5. Global Echoes: Genocide's Modern Use (51:12–53:36)

• Contemporary Cases: Darfur, Ukraine, and Gaza are now sites of ongoing or recent legal and moral battles over calling violence "genocide”.
  • In September 2025, a UN commission cited Bosnia in its conclusion that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a finding Israel rejected (51:12).
  • Quote (Eva Fukasich, 51:43): “The starvation, the destruction of civilian property, the inability of people to leave... if this is not genocide, then I don't know what the hell genocide looks like.”
  • Legal proceedings may stretch for years; international law is only as strong as states’ will to enforce it (52:17).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Lemkin (03:05): “I took the liberty of inventing the word genocide.”
• Roy Gutman (18:32): “This is an organized thing... ethnic cleansing is really a vast understatement.”
• Sima Jelani (37:56): “Over 8,000 men and boys were summarily executed, shot, killed.” (on Srebrenica)
• Tribunal Judge (44:25): “These are truly scenes from hell written on the darkest pages of human history.”
• Eva Fukasich (47:43): “To this day, we have no straightforward finding of the ICJ that any state is guilty of committing genocide.”
• Sima Jelani (48:26): “He put his fingers on her lips... a lighter that's now blood soaked. That's all she has.”
• Eva Fukasich (51:43): “If this is not genocide, then I don't know what the hell genocide looks like.”
• Eva Fukasich (52:17): “International law depends on states... it is just as strong or just as weak as the states that support him.”

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Timeline of Important Segments

• 01:27–07:47 – Lemkin’s campaign & the coining of “genocide,” UN convention
• 11:48–26:31 – Eyewitness reporting from Bosnia; ethnic cleansing exposed
• 30:01–41:48 – Srebrenica: Context, siege, and mass murder
• 43:15–47:43 – War crimes tribunal, first conviction for genocide
• 48:26–50:59 – Aftermath, identification, survivor trauma
• 51:12–53:36 – Genocide’s modern consequences; Gaza and ongoing struggles

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Analysis & Reflections

• The episode powerfully illustrates the birth, limitations, and weight of the word “genocide”—a legal term with immense emotional resonance for communities affected by mass violence.
• It details the painstaking evidence required for a legal definition, and the human cost when legal or political action lags behind events.
• The stories of Bosnia resonate in contemporary debates, as the same legal standards and international inertia are tested by events in places like Gaza.
• The show underscores both the progress and the failures of the international community in living up to the vow “never again.”

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Closing

“If the Genocide Convention, the Geneva Conventions, these basic protections... collapse, then we have nothing.”—Eva Fukasich (52:17)

This Throughline episode offers a sobering look at the history and present of prosecuting genocide, illuminating both the victories and the heartbreaks in efforts to hold perpetrators accountable—and the ongoing challenge of ensuring “never again” means something real.

Transcript

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[Rund AbdelFattah]

Hey everybody, it's rund. I just want to start the show off by saying how much we enjoy the comments some of you have been leaving on Spotify and Apple podcasts, especially for our recent series on immigration, which included an episode on the history of the US Mexico border wall. Joel Elias Saunders said this has to be the most in depth and informative podcast out there. Thank you for the excellent reporting and varied points of view and experience. Thanks Joel and thank you all for listening. If you have a minute, leave us a review and a rating on Spotify or Apple. It helps people find the show and often gives us something to think about. All right, now onto the show.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

A note before we start this episode includes descriptions of violence Attention Tribunal.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Nuremberg, Germany, November 1945 Just a few months after the official end of World War II, a group of judges from Allied countries file into a courtroom, most wearing black robes. To their right, Nazi officers, some in uniform, others in suits, sit on wooden benches in the defendant's dock. The charges against them war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world, imposes a grave responsibility.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

The chief American prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, makes the opening statement.

[Narrator/Reporter]

The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Working behind the scenes is an advisor to Justice Jackson named Raphael Lemkin. Lemkin was a Polish Jewish lawyer at the U.S. war Department who'd fled Poland in 1939 soon after the Nazis invaded, leaving behind nearly all of his family. And he'd written to Justice Jackson after he was appointed chief prosecutor because Lemkin believed that the Nazis should be tried for a crime that up until then didn't have a name.

[Raphael Lemkin]

It is for this reason that I took the liberty of inventing the word genocide.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

He'd coined the term just a year earlier.

[Raphael Lemkin]

The term is from the Greek word genos, meaning tribe or race, and the Latin kida, meaning killing. The term does not necessarily signify mass killings, although it may mean that more often it refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups, so that these groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

The idea had been brewing in Lemkin's mind for years, even before the Holocaust.

[Raphael Lemkin]

The crime of the Reich in wantonly and deliberately wiping out whole peoples is not utterly new in the world. It is only new in the civilized world as we have come to think of it.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

As a university student in the 1920s, Lemkin had become fixated on studying past massacres around the world, including the 1915 massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Lemkin had asked one of his professors, so it's a crime to strike down one man, but not a crime for that man to have struck down 1 million men? His professor responded that under international law, there was no such crime. There was such a thing as war crimes, but nothing about the intentional destruction of a particular group of people. Lemkin made it his mission to change that.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

So back to 1945.

[Narrator/Reporter]

The United States will at this time present to the tribunal, with its permission, a documentary film on concentration camps.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The Nuremberg trials are underway.

[Narrator/Reporter]

The Buchenwald camp is termed an extermination factory. Bodies stacked one upon the other were found outside the crematory.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Lemkin had worked really hard to persuade Justice Jackson to bring charges of genocide against the Nazi leaders. But there were no established legal precedents, and Lemkin knew it was an uphill battle, even as he learned during the trial that 49 of his family members, including his parents, had been killed in the Holocaust. After nearly a year, the judges delivered their verdict.

[Narrator/Reporter]

For 10 months, the same routine has been observed, but now the atmosphere grows tense. The Allied judges shared with the President of the court the reading of the fateful words of the Nuremberg judgment.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

19 of the 22 Nazi leaders were found guilty, none on charges of genocide. Frustrated, Lemkin wrote, the Allies decided a.

[Raphael Lemkin]

Case in Nuremberg against a past Hitler, but refused to envisage future Hitlers.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And over the next few years, he lobbied leaders from around the world, constantly writing letters, making phone calls, organizing meetings, trying to convince the newly formed United nations to codify the crime of genocide into law. And on December 9, 1948, convention is.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Adopted by this assembly by unanimous vote.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

He succeeded. The UN adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which classified genocide as a crime under international law and defined it as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part. A national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. Intent being the key word here. Those acts can include killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

[Raphael Lemkin]

The practices of genocide anywhere affect the vital interests of all civilized people. Its consequences can neither be isolated nor localized. Tolerating genocide is an admission of the principle that one national group has the right to attack another because of its supposed racial superiority. The disease of criminality, if left unchecked, is contagious.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

The word genocide is everywhere now, in headlines, in reports by human rights organizations, in and on social media describing conflicts around the world. It has come to embody the ultimate evil humans can inflict on their fellow humans. And it can be easy to forget that fundamentally, it's a legal term. In September, an independent UN commission concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Israel has rejected the report and its findings. So what does it take to make an accusation like that and to prove it? In order to establish Israel's, quote, genocidal intent, the commission cited the very first time the Genocide Convention was put to the test after the Holocaust, the case of Bosnia versus Serbia.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The world took a long time to realize that genocide had occurred in the.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Bosnian town of Srebrenica.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

It took years of trials, hundreds of hours of testimonies, and countless documents to investigate whether genocide had taken place in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995, and to determine who was to blame. By the time genocide was declared, the lives had already been lost, the homes long since destroyed, the children traumatized in.

[Narrator/Reporter]

A field of tears. Their memories of terror and death come pouring out.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

It was really one big concentration camp.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Many of those executed were buried in mass graves, and we were held at gunpoint by the Serbs.

[Roy Gutman]

The un, he says, they did absolutely.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Nothing to protect us.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The more time passes, you know, you start losing hope.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

What is a genocide? How do you know when it's happening? And how do you prove that later in a court? What does it mean to get justice? I'm Rund AbdelFattah.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

I'm Ramtin Arablouei. On this episode of Throughline, we're taking a close look at what happened in Bosnia and in the courtrooms afterwards to examine how this first case for genocide was built and. And what the official finding meant for the perpetrators, the victims, and the world.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Hey, so I'm a recent subscriber and a huge fan already to become one of my favorite history podcasts. This is Brian Gwynne from Cincinnati, Ohio, and you're listening to Throughline on NPR.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

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[Raphael Lemkin]

Hey, I'm Daoud Tyler Amin.

[Narrator/Reporter]

And I'm Ann Powers.

[Raphael Lemkin]

We are an editor and a critic at NPR Music, and we're also friends who love into music histories and thinking about how songs can change over time.

[Narrator/Reporter]

And we're doing that on a new show. We're totally nerding out about the songs that just stick with us and why.

[Raphael Lemkin]

Find our first episode in the All Songs considered feed on October 23rd.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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[Narrator/Reporter]

Or if you work on one of.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The new shows, an all morninger. Sign up at plus.npr.org part one the.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Witness.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

Coming apart at the seams is a phrase being used to describe the.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Current situation in Yugoslavia.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Almost everyone in Yugoslavia agrees that the country is on the verge of collapse.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

In the early 1990s, the southeastern European country of Yugoslavia started breaking up.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

Ethnic and political differences have increased dramatically.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Many people believe the differences are now so great that the best solution might be for the various Yugoslav nations to go their separate ways.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Yugoslavia had been made up of six different republics divided along ethnic lines and held together for nearly 40 years by a single Communist ruler. By the time he died in 1980, Yugoslavia's economy was in shambles, and some of the republics wanted their independence.

[Historical Context Narrator]

As the first major conflict since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet central power, Yugoslavia is the first test of President George Bush's new world order, but it may be the harbinger of a new world disorder.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Radical nationalists emerged as powerful voices throughout the republics, and the loudest came from parts of The Serbian community, the Serbs, were Orthodox Christians and made up the largest ethnic group in Yugoslavia. They held a lot of the country's political and military power. If the country of Yugoslavia broke up into separate, independent nations, the Serbs risked losing that power.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

There was a saying at the time, why would I be a minority in your country when you can be a minority in mine?

[Rund AbdelFattah]

This is Dr. Eva Fukoci.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

I'm an assistant professor of international history at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Eva also grew up in the Yugoslav Republic of Croatia, which like the other republics was ethnically diverse.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

It was a peaceful country. I went to school, went to the cinema, went to play violin, had a very regular middle class life, you know, in a very sort of regular environment. And all of a sudden you hear people talking about war, and all of a sudden you hear people talking about sort of ethnic groups that I didn't even know. Was it like a thing?

[Roy Gutman]

You know.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

In many ways, violence makes you take sides.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Rumors were circulating this morning that tanks were moving from Serbia to Croatia, the two rival republics that have a long history of ethnic structures. That's right.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

The first wars broke out in 1991 in Slovenia and Croatia, which had both voted for their independence.

[Roy Gutman]

One of the clues that something terrible was happening was the rhetoric of leading politicians.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Serbia's hardline communist leader, Slobodan Milosevic, who.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Rose to power four years ago on a wave of fervent nationalism. Milosevic has talked in the past about.

[Roy Gutman]

A greater Serbia, and they were talking about any place Serb is buried is Serbia.

[Narrator/Reporter]

They can't take our graves.

[Roy Gutman]

That's laying claim to a huge amount of territory that is not theirs.

[Narrator/Reporter]

The situation is certainly getting very, very dangerous. A loud boom shattered the air right in front of me this afternoon. Everybody is furious. Flashes of light in the dark sky, full of rage and the sound of explosions in the distance. In Yugoslavia, this is the way a.

[Roy Gutman]

Civil war could begin. A few months into the war, I went to Bosnia. Everybody said that war was going to be in Bosnia.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

In 1991, American journalist Roy Gutman was reporting in the region for the newspaper Newsday.

[Roy Gutman]

I went to the town of Banja Luka, which is a predominantly Serb town in northern Bosnia, and sat down with the mayor and he took out a map and he showed me how the Serb led army was going to create a corridor across Bosnia within Yugoslavia.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

The Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina bordered the Republic of Serbia. The Bosnian population was mostly Muslim, Serb and Croat. Just under a third were Serbs. But the mayor's map showed that Serbs wanted to claim up to two thirds of Bosnian land.

[Roy Gutman]

This is a case where I couldn't believe my eyes.

[Historical Context Narrator]

Isn't this map a recipe for total war?

[Rund AbdelFattah]

In 1992, Bosnia Herzegovina voted for independence. Bosnian Serbs protested the vote. They had already declared their own state, which they said would be part of a, quote, greater Serbia.

[Narrator/Reporter]

The place is divided desperately.

[Roy Gutman]

At this moment, I was in Sarajevo. It was the day that began with a bang.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

The day after the independence vote, Bosnian Serbs seized control of all the roads leading into the capital city of Sarajevo. Ethnic lines were drawn. Just hours after the volatile republic held a referendum on secession from Yugoslavia.

[Roy Gutman]

The Serb artillery started firing and snipers started firing.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Ethnic Serbs fired on a group of demonstrators in Sarajevo.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

At least five people were killed in clashes over the weekend.

[Roy Gutman]

The Bosnians didn't have the military to defend themselves.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Remember, Serbs had a lot of control over the military in Yugoslavia. When the country started to break up, Bosnian Serbs held onto the weapons.

[Roy Gutman]

The Serbs, if they wanted to do something, could practically write their own ticket.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Roy watched as Serbs captured territory throughout the republics. And while much of the international media covered the siege of Sarajevo, Roy found.

[Roy Gutman]

The real action was taking place somewhere.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Else, in the smaller towns and villages where Bosnian Muslims lived. In July of 1992, Roy started writing stories suggesting that Serbian state officials were targeting those Bosnian Muslims.

[Roy Gutman]

I discovered a whole trainload of people had been taken at gunpoint or tank point, put on buses, and then put on the state railways and taken to Hungary. And what was interesting was that the state was using all the instruments at its command, including transportation, to carry out a policy of what was called ethnic cleansing.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

You hear the term ethnic cleansing used a lot today, but at the time, it was a newer concept that was actually popularized by international media during the Bosnian war. There were also some reports that Serbian leaders used the term themselves when talking about their plans for Greater Serbia.

[Roy Gutman]

What was ethnic planting? Well, it was mass deportations, we knew that. Carried out, really by the state against whole villages, against whole populations indiscriminately. And I learned from that experience that the state was the major actor. This is an organized thing. I wanted to, from that point on, find parallel examples of where the state was operating against civilians in a very organized way and corralling them or forcing them to do something or maybe killing them.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

So Roy starts hitting up his contacts.

[Roy Gutman]

I made some phone calls in Tabanja Luka.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

At this point in 1992, the Bosnian Serbs controlled Banja Luka, the second largest city in Bosnia. It was the city where the mayor had shown Roy the Map of land the Serbs wanted to capture before the war. And now Roy found himself on a call with a Muslim political leader there.

[Roy Gutman]

Who told him, please come in the name of God, please come. Terrible things are happening here. Now, you don't get that kind of a message very often, you know, by making a phone call to somebody you don't even know. And I had headed on the first buses to Banja Luka.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

And when he got there, Roy started interviewing people.

[Roy Gutman]

I did everything in a very routine way. I called on the police, I called on the cerblid military, I called on the political parties of the Muslims and Croats. And I learned that there was a whole series of camps that had been set up. They were described as concentration camps, and of course that's a question of definition. But they said that people were being killed in them.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

So Roy found a colonel with the Bosnian Serb military who would speak with him.

[Roy Gutman]

So I asked the innocent question. I said, other people are talking about a whole network of camps that have been set up. Is this true? Maybe it's just invention. He responded that the Muslims had set up camps all over the place and were detaining Serbs.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

And this was actually true. Bosnian Muslims had set up their own camps. And during the war, all ethnic groups were killing and being killed, but Bosnian Serbs had the most power, and it was Bosnian Muslims who were being killed in the greatest numbers. So Roy, following his leads, said, I.

[Roy Gutman]

Have the names of a couple of places here, and I just wonder if there's a possibility to visit them. And I did it in complete naivete in appearance, but as a matter of fact, I knew damn well that some terrible things were happening there. And they actually arranged to take me the next day to one of the camps.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Roy gets on another bus and heads to a town about 15 miles away.

[Historical Context Narrator]

The army turned down Newsday's request for a tour, offering instead interviews with eight hand picked prisoners and a camp doctor. Armed guards monitored each conversation. Army interviewers asked most of the questions.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Then the eight men were marched away.

[Historical Context Narrator]

None of the prisoners interviewed under those conditions criticized the camp's regime. But former prisoners interviewed away from the camp described it as a place where beatings were routine.

[Roy Gutman]

The smartest thing I ever did there was. I brought along a photographer, Andre Kaiser. I really had to have photographs to back up what I was writing.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

While Roy was there, he and his photographer witnessed another scene.

[Roy Gutman]

Up on the hillside were huge sheds where men were being held. You could see men lined up, bowing their heads down and then having their heads shaved like sheep.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

They left with photos, they just changed everything.

[Roy Gutman]

They conveyed a whole degradation, you know, humiliation with the hands of thugs.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Roy hadn't seen any violence at this detention center, but he'd heard about another one, a camp in a town called Omarska.

[Roy Gutman]

I asked my escort, Major Milutinovich, if he could take me to Omarska. This is not a request I made with great hopes. And to my surprise, he agreed. And the next day, we got into his van and started heading to Omarska, which is also in the area of Magna Luka. But about halfway there, he got a phone call saying that they couldn't guarantee my safety. But this led me to believe that something really terrible was happening, that what I saw at Magna was small potatoes compared to what must be going on in Omarska if they couldn't take me there. I became obsessed by it.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Roy knew this was a problem. It's hard to write a story about a place you can't go. So he went to Zagreb in Croatia, where he knew refugees were living and nonprofits helped him find dozens of people to interview. And the details confirmed his suspicions.

[Historical Context Narrator]

More than a thousand Muslim and Croat prisoners were held in metal cages without sanitation, adequate food, exercise, or access to the outside world, according to a former prisoner.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

In stories published In August of 1992, Roy wrote about the metal cages where prisoners were held. The people who died trying to escape.

[Historical Context Narrator]

All were shot after falling 60ft to the ground.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

One source told him that every few days, Serbian guards would execute prisoners in groups of 10 to 15.

[Historical Context Narrator]

They said they would take them to a nearby lake. You'd hear a volley of rifles, and they'd never come back.

[Roy Gutman]

I happened to, in the course of two or three months, there come upon enough examples of state action in places I didn't expect it, that it added up to a pattern where ethnic cleansing is really a vast understatement.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Around the time Roy started publishing his stories, other people had already started calling the violence in Bosnia a genocide, but the media wasn't using the word, even as more and more details emerged.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

Mosques are being blown up.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Four more mosques were reduced to rubble, churches blown up. 46% of the churches in his diocese have been destroyed.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

Historical heritage blown up.

[Narrator/Reporter]

We saw that almost every building was damaged in some way, and there are.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

Within just months, municipalities that are just missing 30,000 people. They're gone.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Local officials say that as many as 70,000 people are holed up in the town and the surrounding area. Many of them are refugees.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

So within a couple of months, we just see this organized effort to claim territory and expel to make sure that in five or 10 years, you can just say, oh, these people, they were never around.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

At this point, it had become clear to Roy that this is what an ethnic cleansing looked like. But he also started to suspect it was something bigger.

[Roy Gutman]

As a reporter, you don't have time to step back and think of what is the big picture I'm drawing here.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

But that picture would come into focus the next year, in 1993, when he was able to step back and after Roy's stories on the war won a Pulitzer Prize.

[Roy Gutman]

I was sitting down for lunch with my editor and I said to him, you know, I'm trying to figure out what this all adds up to. And I think I know what it adds up to. I think it added up to genocide. It's the pieces of the puzzle that I've assembled here without any design, but just by virtue of the fact that they're out there and they're in multiple examples, and I'm able to demonstrate it in detail it to the last degree, that makes me think that this is a genocide. And I'm willing to state that I'm the witness.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Roy published his book A Witness to genocide in 1993. It included many of the photos that he and his photographer had taken during his reporting. He would be among the first Western journalists to call the violence that unfolded a genocide. Later that year, he testified in front of the U.S. house Committee on Foreign Affairs.

[Roy Gutman]

When I did my stories about the camps, it had a real thunderclap effect on public opinion and actually on governments, but nobody ever did anything about it.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

UN peacekeepers were sent in to protect aid deliveries. Washington called for an emergency session of the UN Human Rights Commission. Journalists flooded the region, but concrete action on the ground didn't happen.

[Roy Gutman]

So there's a real hypocrisy in international life that you could have these massive crimes that everybody knows should not be going on and that are way away from anything lawful and nobody does anything about it.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

The same year Roy published his book, two different UN courts began investigating crimes in the Bosnian war. One was a war crimes tribunal that would prosecute individuals. The other one was the International Court of Justice, whose job was to settle disputes among countries or governments. And it's in the ICJ that Bosnia Herzegovina would file the very first genocide claim. Since the court was created at the end of World War II in 1993, both courts would begin their work, but it would take years to see any results. When this case comes in 1993, in front of the International Court of justice on the ground. Does anything stop? No. Coming up, the evidence for genocide becomes undeniable.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Hey, this is Travis Davenport from San Diego, California. You're listening to Throughline on npr. Hey, it's Ray from Car Talk. Are you tired of all the depth and thoughtful care that goes into NPR shows? Want some good old fashioned goofing around and stumbling to figure out what's going on? Well, I've been taking occasional car questions again. You can hear them by signing up for NPR along with lots of other bonus content.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

Just go to plus.NPR.org when someone you.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Love is diagnosed with cancer or another serious illness, all you want to do is help. But where do you start? On the Life Kit podcast, we have tips for you. Your agenda should be I'm going to be with you and be totally present.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

To whatever comes up.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Listen in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts for different ways to offer support.

[Sima Jelani]

A lot of short daily news podcasts focus on just one story, but right now you probably need more on up first from NPR. We bring you three of the world's top headlines every day in under 15 minutes because no one story can capture all that's happening in this big crazy world of ours on any given morning. Listen now to the UPverse podcast from NPR.

[Guest/Additional Narrator]

Part 2 Srebrenica.

[Sima Jelani]

Srebrenica itself is an enclave that is in the eastern portion of the in Bosnia, very, very close to the Serbian border.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

It's about three hours drive east from Sarajevo.

[Sima Jelani]

Very rural area. Lots of farmland.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

It's hilly, it's green.

[Sima Jelani]

There are small little villages around. Everybody knows everybody.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

In April 1993, the area of Srebrenica.

[Sima Jelani]

Was actually declared a United nations safe zone.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The zone included Srebrenica town and the surrounding area.

[Sima Jelani]

So this is where people were supposed to flood into to escape the ongoing besiegement from the war that was ongoing.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

This is Sima Jelani. She's a pediatrician and humanitarian aid worker who has spent time in Bosnia recording survivor testimonies.

[Sima Jelani]

So that's what they did, is that Bosnian Muslims fled into by the Thousands.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

There's about 40,000 people in this area.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And this is Dr. Eva Fukasich. She's a professor of international history at Utrecht University in the Netherlands who grew up in nearby Croatia.

[Sima Jelani]

The community swole so much that it was even unable to handle that amount of people. These are tiny towns.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

There wasn't enough food, clothing or housing. Many people slept in stairwells, in cars or on the street. And the river that ran through Srebrenica, the only Water source got polluted with sewage. But what the safe zone did have was protection.

[Sima Jelani]

It's been guarded by UN peacekeeping forces, which were largely of the Dutch battalion.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

These peacekeeping forces were lightly armed and there were no more than 600 of them in Srebrenica at a time. They provided some aid, but they weren't there to fight. At that point, the international community was officially neutral. But starting in March 1995, things would get worse fast when the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadi handed down a directive.

[Guest/Additional Narrator]

By planned and well thought out combat operations create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival or life for the inhabitants of Srebrenica and Jeppa.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The war was entering its fourth year and Bosnian Serb leaders wanted to put an end to it.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

Basically, they're sort of, you know, getting as much territory as they can.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Their goal was to build an independent Serbian state and they wanted it to be linked with Serbia proper. In order to do this, the Bosnian Serb army would have to annex Srebrenica and expel the Bosnian Muslims who live there. So on July 6, 1995, at 3 in the morning, the Bosnian Serb army attacked the outskirts of Srebrenica, the UN safe zone.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

The Bosnian Serb army enters this space of the safe area, which they were not supposed to enter.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The army advanced towards the town. The footage you're hearing was taken in Serbanicha a few days later, on July 10th and 11th. In the video, people are milling around the streets and some men dressed in army fatigues are shooting off mortars. The man holding the camera was Ebro Zahirovich. He was in his 20s at the time, and throughout the war he filmed a lot. It wasn't common to have this kind of documentary video at the time. Remember, people didn't have smartphones and this particular video would later become evidence in the UN investigation of genocide during the Bosnian war. In the video, you can see streams of people carrying their belongings on their backs. Crowds were clustered outside of UN buildings in Srebrenica, shouting. But the UN wasn't going to help them.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

The UN has not neither the capacity nor the equipment nor the food or the water or the mandate to protect the civilians in any sort of armed way.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And they didn't.

[Sima Jelani]

The Dutch ended up ceding control of that area, handing over essentially the keys to the Serbs. The Serb militia paramilitias.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

By the afternoon of July 11, Bosnian Serb forces have taken over Rabonica. Ratko Mlarich, the general in command of the Bosnian Serb army, stood in Sre and claimed victory. He said the town was a gift to the Serbian people.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

Men from teenage age to, you know, high, high age feel afraid that if they fall into the hands of the Bosnia Serb army or police, that they're going to get executed. So they make their way into the forest.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

That day, 15,000 people, mostly Bosnian Muslim men and older boys, set out on foot. Ebro Zahirovich, camera in hand, was one of them. You're hearing the footage he took of what became known as the Column, a long line of people trying to walk to safety.

[Sima Jelani]

60 miles of walking in the summer through landmines and also through forestry can wreak havoc on people who are already malnourished, starved, deprived of nutrients.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Bosnian Serb forces shot at the column as they walked. They used stolen UN uniforms and equipment to pose as peacekeepers to coax the the men out from hiding. Over the following days, thousands of men from the column were executed and buried in mass graves. Not everyone tried to escape in the column, though. By the morning of July 12, 30,000 Bosnian Muslims had gone to seek protection at the UN compound in the next town over.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

These are women, children, young boys, old men.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

This is footage from the Bosnian Serb TV station. It was incredibly crowded and there was not enough food, water, medicine or bathrooms.

[Sima Jelani]

Women were dying, giving birth. People were living on top of one another.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And by that afternoon, Bosnian Serb forces had also arrived. Arrived. Rotko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general, was there that day and spoke to the Bosnian Muslims seeking refuge. In the video, Ratko Mladic can be heard saying, anyone who wants to leave will be transported, be they old or young. Don't be afraid and don't rush. Let the women and children go first. Please don't panic. Nobody will harm you. But that same day, the Bosnian Serb army began to separate the women, children and elderly from the men and boys. The women, children and elderly were taken on buses to Bosnian Muslim held territory. As for the men and boys, Bosnia.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

Serb army and police take them to kind of culture halls and high school sports gyms.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

They were detained, many without food and water and crammed in so tightly some couldn't even sit down. Over the next several days, Bosnian Serb forces orchestrated mass killings of these men and boys.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

We know almost hour by hour where people were and which buses took them to which execution site and who was shooting and which truck was where.

[Sima Jelani]

Over 8,000 men and boys were summarily executed, shot, killed.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Just imagine this youngest boy. I had those little hands of his. How could they be dead?

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Many of their bodies were dumped into mass graves and buried.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

What happens then in the next couple of days and weeks is the women that manage to reach government held territory are asking, where is my husband? Where is my brother? They're realizing there's thousands of people missing.

[Narrator/Reporter]

NPR's Andy Bowers is in Tuzla and he says that yesterday some of the men from Srebrenica began arriving in Tuzla. Some of them are telling the UN terrible stories about massacres by the Bosnian Serbs.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

I lost my brother, husband, 30. From my close family alone, I can never tell everything. We just want to find out where the bones, the remains of our father's brother's sons are to find out the truth.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Reports from Srebrenica broke internationally as early as July 16th. Before all the killing was even over. Bosnian Serb officials denied that a massacre had taken place.

[Narrator/Reporter]

I'm asking you if these new reports.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Are true or false.

[Narrator/Reporter]

They are completely false. There is not a single case that has been proved of any massacres committed against Muslim civilians in Srebrenica during the current part of fighting.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

But the UN War Crimes Tribunal, which had already started to look into the conflict in Bosnia, would soon broaden its investigation to incorporate include Srebrenica. Meanwhile, the Bosnian Serb army mounted a cover up operation. A soldier would later testify that in September and October of 1995, he and others used tractors and backhoes to dig up mass graves and rebury bodies in secondary locations to try and hide the evidence. In the wake of Srebrenica and the outrage that followed, the international community, including the US faced increasing pressure to act. Not long after the massacre, NATO began airstrikes against the Bosnian Serb army. This international pressure and show of force led to US sponsored peace talks. In December 1995, the Dayton Accords were signed ending the war in Bosnia. An estimated 100,000 people had died. Prosecutors for the UN war crimes tribunal had been hard at work at this point building war crime and genocide cases against members of the Bosnian Serb army as well as Bosnian Serb political leaders. Bosnia was also presenting evidence to the UN's International Court of Justice alleging that the government of the former Yugoslavia should be held responsible for genocide, not just individual military leaders. These cases involved the Srebrenica massacre alongside violence committed in other villages and towns.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

How do you even go about finding thousands of victims and establishing who they were and what happened to them? Historically, if you get killed and you get dumped in a mass grave, you are never found. Nobody finds you, nobody identifies you, nobody gives your bones to your family, nobody knows what happens to you. This is how it was for centuries. And all of a sudden we have this effort to dig up mass graves, find bones, put names to bones through DNA analysis and give the bones back to family members for dignified burial.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Coming up, the quest for justice.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Hi, my name is Alyssa. I'm in Madison, Wisconsin, and I actually work in public radio. And shows like this one just keep me really engaged and inspired. So you're listening to throughline from NPR.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of FRESH AIR.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Hey, take a break from the 24 hour news cycle with us and listen to long form interviews with your favorite authors, actors, filmmakers, comedians and musicians, the.

[Sima Jelani]

People making the art that nourishes us.

[Narrator/Reporter]

And speaks to our times. So listen to the FRESH AIR podcast.

[Sima Jelani]

From NPR and whyy.

[Guest/Additional Narrator]

I'm Rachel Martin. If you're tired of small talk, check out the Wild Card podcast. I invite influential thinkers to open up about the big topics we all think about but rarely talk about. Tune in this fall to hear Mel Robbins, Malala Yousafzai and Brene Brown talk about everything from grief and God to ambition and forgiveness. Watch or listen on the NPR app, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Every day a lot happens in the.

[Raphael Lemkin]

World of politics, and every day the NPR Politics Podcast is here to make.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Sense of it all.

[Narrator/Reporter]

We're your daily companion, giving you the.

[Raphael Lemkin]

Updates and news you need to stay informed. Listen to the NPR Politics podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Part 3 agreeing to evil after the Srebrenica massacre In July of 1995, the UN War Crimes Tribunal started charging individual people with all kinds of crimes committed during the Bosnian war, including the first charges of genocide.

[Narrator/Reporter]

The United Nations War Crimes Tribunal today indicted the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovin Karadijic. We completely deny that kind of atrocities. And the commander of the Bosnian Serb army, Radkom Ladic, on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. They can't even leave this area because there are international arrest warrants for them.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

The first charges for the Srebrenica massacre itself were brought in November of 1995. And the evidence documented in court, including media reports and videos taken by civilians as well as the the perpetrators was extreme. Confronted with evidence of the executions, the attacks on the UN Safe zone and on the column of people trying to escape. A judge at the time said, quote, these are truly scenes from hell written on the darkest pages of human history. And scenes like that played out over the many individual trials the tribunal held.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Yugoslavia is now in session. The Courtroom itself is interesting and a glass aquarium, thick bulletproof glass surrounding it.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

The Criminal Court collected a ton of evidence testimonies. The prosecution called two citizens of Srebrenica. I saw those women screaming, moaning, crying.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Tearing their hair off.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

Expert reports.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Here on slide number 25, you can see photos of just some of the victims.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

DNA analysis, military reports. 5,000 witnesses were testifying.

[Narrator/Reporter]

After half an hour. Every one of them was thrown in the holes.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

I would say this is probably the most investigated international crime in history.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

In the end, the UN tribunal charged 161 people with all kinds of crimes. A majority of them were Serb military and political leaders. But there were also some cases brought against Bosnian Muslims, against Croats, against others for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Each case moved through the tribunal at its own pace. And then, in 2001, the international war.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Crimes Tribunal at the Hague has handed down its first verdict of genocide.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

It was the first time a court would officially recognize what had happened in Srebrenica six years earlier as genocide.

[Narrator/Reporter]

The court sentenced the Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic to 46 years in prison for his part in the 1995 massacre.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

At the Bosnian Muslim enclave of Srebrenica.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Krzych was a deputy commander in the Bosnian Serb army, the court said, even though he may not have personally killed anyone that he knew about the executions, the violence, the plan carried out in Srebrenica, he was found guilty of genocide. Judge Almiro Rodriguez pronounced the toughest sentence.

[Guest/Additional Narrator]

Yet handed down by the tribunal.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

July 1995. General Kage Individually you agreed to evil.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

This was a huge deal to many people, but this was just one guy. What about everyone else? Or the Serbian government as a whole? Were they guilty of genocide? It would be years later, in 2007, that the International Court of Justice, a completely separate UN court that ruled on disputes between countries, made its ruling. And in a shock to many, the ICJ said Serbia as a state was not guilty of committing genocide, though they also found that the state was guilty of failing to prevent genocide, which is required under the Genocide Convention. The ICJ ordered Serbia to transfer any people accused of genocide to the UN War Crimes Tribunal, where they could be prosecuted individually.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

To this day, we have no straightforward finding of the ICJ that any state is guilty of committing genocide.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Even after the genocide convictions, mass graves were still being excavated all around Bosnia and still being used as evidence in ongoing trials. In 2009, a couple of years after the ICJ's ruling, Seema Jilani volunteered at the International Commission on Missing Persons her job was to help identify remains of people buried in mass graves. Families looked for anything they could help to identify their loved ones, like fragments of bones or old watches and rings.

[Sima Jelani]

I recall one particular woman recognized a lighter, and it was her lover's lighter. And she goes, that's it. He's really gone now. I know that. And she told me this story of how they met in a bar. And she asked for a light for her cigarette, and he took the cigarette and he put it between his fingers, and he laid his fingers on her lips. And it's all down to what? A lighter that's now blood soaked. That's all she has. So for me, what does the word genocide matter to her?

[Ramtin Arablouei]

I can still hear steps of my.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Sons walking through the house.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

NPR covered the trials as they unfolded over the years and spoke to many survivors. Some spoke of trauma. I can still feel their presence in the house.

[Narrator/Reporter]

They always used to call me Mommy, and on one occasion, I actually heard somebody calling me mummy, and I went to the window, but there was nobody.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Others were angry that the un, the US and the international community largely stood by during the worst of the violence. It's difficult even to imagine what people.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Can do to other people and what.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Kind of animals they have to be to do this to somebody else.

[Sima Jelani]

Shameless on them, really.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

Shame on them.

[Narrator/Reporter]

I don't think that the international community.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Has learned its lesson. It still has a dirty conscience, and it didn't do enough to clear its conscience. The UN tribunal lasted more than two decades. In the end, 93 people were sentenced out of the 161 people charged. The final judgment came in 2017, when Radko Mladi, the main leader in the Srebrenica massacre, was found guilty of genocide. He is currently serving a life sentence in the Hague in the Netherlands.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

But for many people, the courts took too long to call a genocide a genocide. And that's part of the limitations of it being a legal term. It takes a ton of evidence and often a ton of time to prove. It's dependent on whether anyone brings a case. The court. It's presented in what kinds of pictures or videos or proof exist that can show the intent of the crime. According to the courts, Srebrenica was the only place genocide happened during the war in Bosnia.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

There are whole communities in Bosnia Herzegovina and elsewhere around the world that feel cheated because what their community went through wasn't labeled, confirmed as a case of genocide.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

And that's true today in places where genocide is still being litigated, like the conflicts in Darfur, Ukraine or Gaza, where in September of this year a UN commission pointed to the Bosnia case when it concluded that Israel was committing genocide in the Gaza Strip. The month before the UN ruling in August 2025, the International association of Genocide Scholars had declared that Israel's actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

The starvation, the destruction of civilian property, the inability of people to leave, the no medicine, no hospitals, no schools, the statements of high level Israeli officials, videos that are coming out of humiliation. So I think in many ways the expert community at this stage is pretty much in agreement that if this is not genocide, then I don't know what the hell genocide looks like.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

South Africa has already filed a genocide claim against Israel in the icj, but it most likely won't be decided for years. Israel has denied all the charges.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

This is the first time that we see a close Western ally being accused of such a thing. What does it mean if we as their biggest ally and their biggest arms supplier will use this word? International law depends on states. It is just as strong or just as weak as the states that support him. Now this is a moment where we either protect the system and make it better, you know, and advance it to another stage where it's more equal, it's more universal, it's more respected, or we watch it, something that we spent decades building, even sometimes self servingly go down the drain, you know, because if the Genocide Convention, the Geneva Conventions, these basic protections that are about the bare minimum of protections, if that collapses, then we have nothing.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

That's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfatah.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

I'm Ramtin Arablouei and you've been listening to Throughline from npr.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

This episode was produced by me and.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Me and Lawrence Wu, Julie Kane, Anya.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Steinberg, Casey Miner, Christina Kim, Devin Kadayama, Irene Noguchi.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Voelkel.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Thanks to the BBC and member station KBIA in Missouri for some of the archival radio reports you heard in this episode.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Thank you also to Chris Hoff, Johannes Durgi, Laura Schwartz, Nadia Lancy, Nick Spicer, Beth Donovan and Tommy Evans. This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keeley.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

Includes Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on this show, please write [e-mail] and make sure to find follow us on Apple, Spotify or the NPR app. That way you'll never miss an episode.

[Rund AbdelFattah]

Thanks for listening.

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[Guest/Additional Narrator]

On this week's Wildcard podcast. Grey's Anatomy and Scandal creator Shonda Rhimes says she doesn't need people to like her shows.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

When you believe the good things people.

[Expert/Professor (Eva Fukasich)]

Say about you, you also then are obligated to believe the bad things.

[Guest/Additional Narrator]

Watch or listen to that wild card conversation on the NPR app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.