From the article:

"the [UN] court...established that the massacre of some 7,000 adult male Muslim civilians ...amounted to genocide"

I am not questioning the verdict here or the horrible atrocity but I would like to clarify the terms 'genocide', 'Bosnian' and 'muslim'.

My Oxford states genocide is about targeting a "race". Coming from, the Ancient Greek, "geno" = race. Religion is not mentioned.

So, if this definition is true, the verdict handed down cannot relate to "muslims" at all, no matter how many of the victims were muslim.

The verdict must relate to a "race" of people, the "Bosnians" and how a large group of that race were killed by another race, "Serb", (or, more confusingly the article says the race of "Bosnian-Serb" actually attempted to kill itself).

It seems then that references to "religion" are misleading if we are really discussing genocide and merely help amplify the already misguided islamist mindset.

Muslims are obviously not a race. If the serbs killed muslims for being muslims then that would be mass murder but not genocide.

Clearly race is not a belief system - they are certainly not the same thing. One cannot convert to another race.

I am not arguing here that Serbs didnt pursue muslims because of their religion. That may have happened. But not according to the UN which finds that genocide took place instead.

So, for argument's sake, the Serbs attacked Bosnians for being Bosnian and for being muslim. Okay, but if the UN ICJ is dealing with establishing the fact of genocide, the fact victims may have been muslim was irrelevant to the case.

To take an Australian situation, the Victorian anti-vilification laws.

Clearly in the legislation today, "race" and religion" are defined differently. They're not the same thing under the law.

Thus presumably the Australian court would not uphold the UN verdict of "genocide" if it was asked to test the Serb-Bosnian case. That is, it could not find for genocide if the fact of being of muslim was the material reason for the massacre as suggested by the article.

Ro: "My Oxford states genocide is about targeting a 'race'. Coming from, the Ancient Greek, 'geno' = race. Religion is not mentioned."

Ro, you'd better get another Oxford. Every dictionary I've seen, including the online Compact Oxford (from the same publisher as the classic unabridged OED), defines genocide more widely than you would, to include the deliberate and systematic total or partial destruction of an ethnic group; nation; religious group; cultural group; etc.

And note how international law defines genocide: http://www.preventgenocide.org/genocide/officialtext.htm

Thanks for the link.

However, your comment is interesting because the (Compact) Oxford Dictionary online, for example, does not define the word as you do. This is the full entry it provide:

genocide
/jennsid/

• noun the deliberate killing of a very large number of people from a particular ethnic group or nation.

— DERIVATIVES genocidal adjective.

— ORIGIN from Greek genos ‘race’ + -CIDE.

(http://www.askoxford.com/dictionaries/?view=uk)


If you then ask this dictionary to define "nation" it introduces "culture" as the only possible tip to religion. But if you look up "culture" it certainly does not imply religion or religious belief only "custom" which is behaviour not belief.

I still think this common conflation of meanings is not a helpful one and somewhat of a red herring. Plus the confusing conflation doesn't seem to be upheld in our state law as I mentioned.

Of course religious groups can be races if they have lived in the one area and only married people from their own religion for generations. After all a race is a bloodline.
I prefer the word tribe to race myself it gives a clearer picture.

When people dont have a fanatical religion to use as an excuse for genocide then they elect leaders to use as scapecoats.

I don't believe for a moment that the Serbian people didnt support what their leaders did. Their reluctance to hand over their leaders proves that. But in the final analysis the people WILL sacrifice their leaders and deny their own guilt.

The German people knew exactly what Hitler stood for in relation to the Jews when they elected him and there is no way they could have driven past that walled up ghetto in Germany day after day and not known the Jews were imprisoned in there. Also they quitely moved their own families in to the houses that the Jews were forcibly removed from.

Dirty ravage!
If all those who died, whether muslim or not, did really die in vein then the court's injustice to justice is indeed a sad move. The truth of the matter is that the Serbs have blood in the hands and "I know the history I will tell my grand children".

Ro, my definition was a sort of conglomeration of what various dictionaries say.

See http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=GGLJ%2CGGLJ%3A2006-07%2CGGLJ%3Aen&q=define%3Agenocide

The point is that none of them limit the victims of genocide to racial groups. All define the term more widely, to include other sorts of groups, such as ethnic group; nation; religious group; cultural group; etc. Of course none of these terms can be defined with any sort of scientific exactness (perhaps least of all “race”), and there is significant overlap between them.

Perhaps the Greek “genos” means something like “race”, but the origin of a word is not the same as its definition.

Ro: “If you then ask this dictionary to define ‘nation’...”

Look up “ethnicity”. While the Compact Oxford only lists “common national or cultural tradition”, most dictionaries include common religion as another possible basis for ethnicity.

See http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=GGLJ%2CGGLJ%3A2006-07%2CGGLJ%3Aen&q=define%3Aethnicity

Consider that Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” around 1944, in light of the Jewish Holocaust. Did he have in mind that Jews are a race? Nation? Religious group? Cultural group? Tribe? There is no easy answer because Jewish identity does not neatly fit into any of these terms, but it makes no difference – in any case, it was clearly a case of genocide.

Ro: “the confusing conflation doesn't seem to be upheld in our state law as I mentioned.”

If by “state” you mean Australia, I’m not Australian and not an expert on Australian law. But the World Court is bound by international, not Australian, law. Furthermore, Australia is a signatory to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and thus bound by that law, which refers to genocide as targeting a “national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.