THE HAGUE - Genocide, the charge facing five of seven Bosnian Serb officers facing trial Monday for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, is the gravest crime in international humanitarian law -- and the most difficult to prove.
Derived from the Greek word "genos," for people, and the suffix "cide" from the Latin "caedere," meaning to kill, it is defined as an "act committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group."
The word genocide was invented in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who took refuge in the United States, to describe crimes committed by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust.
After his tireless campaigning, genocide became a crime under international law at the 1948 United Nations convention on wartime conduct.
The convention stipulates that "killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of this group to another group," constitutes genocide.
However, the crimes have to be committed with the intent "to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group".
"Genocide is a very difficult charge to prove from a purely legal point of view because this special intent must be proven," said Avril McDonald, of the Hague-based TMC Asser institute on international law.
Unless someone has actually called for genocide or approved it, it is very difficult to judge whether an alleged perpetrator intended to kill the whole group.
Several international courts have handed down genocide convictions, but it remains a recent verdict.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) delivered the world's first in 1998 when a former mayor, Jean-Paul Akayesu, was sentenced to life imprisonment.
So far the Rwanda court has convicted 23 suspects, 20 for genocide and two on related charges of complicity in genocide and incitement to genocide.
The tribunal, based in Arusha, Tanzania, was set up to try those behind the 1994 genocide in Rwanda which, according to the United Nations, left 800,000 people dead.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) set up to try those responsible for atrocities during the 1990s Balkans wars has only handed down two convictions on genocide charges.
Two former Bosnian Serb army officials were convicted over the Srebrenica massacre, the only episode in the wars to be ruled a genocide, when Bosnian Serb forces slaughtered nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys.
In April 2004, Bosnian Serb general Radislav Krstic was found guilty of aiding and abetting genocide. In its judgement the appeals chamber ruled for the first time that to convict someone of aiding and abetting genocide it is not necessary to show that the accused himself had genocidal intent.
According to the court, it was enough that Krstic knew that the principal perpetrators were planning to commit genocide. This legal precedent could have an important impact on all other genocide cases.
In January 2005, a lower chamber of the ICTY also handed down a conviction for aiding and abetting genocide against Vidoje Blagojevic who led the capture of Srebrenica together with Krstic.
Blagojevic was sentenced to 18 years in prison but has lodged an appeal and the case is waiting to be heard by the appeals chamber.
08/19/2006 12:46 GMT