30th Anniversary of Srebrenica Genocide

Today marks 30 years since the genocide at Srebrenica, where

7,000 young men and boys were massacred just because they were

Muslims, and just because the Bosnian Serbs wanted

to create their own

ethnically pure greater Serbia, carve out, uh, their own little rump

state.

We'd be poor without the Muslims. It's good to have them around,

but in a smaller

concentration.

I remember the butcher of the Balkans who conducted the Srebrenica

massacre and directed it, Ratko Mladić, a really terrible man,

pure evil, who had rung rings around the

international community

for all the years of the Bosnia war.

Uh, what's the lady's name?

Uh, Christiane.

Christiane Amanpour. I like Kennedy's Christina.

Oh,

like Kennedy's Christina.

It won't be difficult for her to understand because

when I saw her first reports

from Sarajevo, I was very angry.

The signs were clear from Srebrenica, even years earlier.

I was in a town outside when there was a rare evacuation of

the injured, and I'll never forget standing,

waiting for a

truckload of injured. None of us expected to see it filled with

children. And to this day, I remember the first little boy who

was brought out and evacuated into the hospital where we were standing and

waiting, and he was bandaged in, in, in just

the most terrible way, and he was crying, and of course, he was scared and really

badly wounded. And I remember one of the Bosnian doctors

saying, in

Bosnian, "Don't be afraid anymore, you're safe now."

"You're free now.

Don't be afraid anymore," he says to this young boy so savagely

injured.

"Come here. Come here." This little

boy is pleading for his mother. As bad as this is, those even

worse off had to stay behind, too weak to make the long journey out.

Well, he might have been, but the rest of the Srebrenica residents

were left to Mladić's evil devices, and they were

murdered. They were massacred. The full story of what happened in

Srebrenica, of what the international community knew,

and when did it know it,

has not yet been publicly told. Only fragments of the story are out.

I am

General Ratko Mladić.

The only thing that has come out of that has been the

creation of international criminal tribunals which have held to

account those butchers, which have convicted them and

sentenced them on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and

other war crimes. And actually, that is something that's gone around the

world for other war zones and wars as well.

And I always remember, even in these terrible days where war

crimes still

are being committed, that the Geneva Conventions

say even wars have rules. You cannot

kill civilians, men, women, and children who are non-combatants

with impunity, or else you are going to be held accountable.