SARAJEVO, April 19 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – In a landmark ruling, the Appeals Chamber of the United Nations war crimes tribunal confirmed that the 1995 massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica was "genocide".

"The trial chamber finds that genocide occurred in Srebrenica... against the Muslim population," presiding judge Theodor Meron said Monday, April 19.

The ruling was made in the case of Bosnian Serb general Radislav Krstic, who led the troops that captured Srebrenica.

Krstic was seeking to overturn his 2001 genocide conviction by arguing that the number of victims was "too insignificant" to be considered genocide.

Evidence presented to the court painted a picture, in the words of one judge, of "thousands of men executed and buried in mass graves, hundreds of men buried alive, men and women mutilated and slaughtered, children killed before their mothers' eyes, a grandfather forced to eat the liver of his own grandson".

These were, the judge said, "truly scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history", according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).

New Jurisprudence

The decision will have implications for others on trial in The Hague for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, including former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.

The ruling will also have an impact on international justice because it will create important jurisprudence about the definition of genocide.

The 1948 Geneva Convention defines genocide as "acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group".

The Appeals Chamber's ruling confirms a wider legal definition of the crime.

"It would be an expansion because it would make the killing of only men, and the deportation of women and children, a genocide and that has not been done before," said Heikelina Verrijn Stuart, an international law expert who follows the U.N. court closely.

'Scenes From Hell'

Coffins of 600 Bosnian Muslims in a factory before burial near Srebrenica in March 2003

Nine years after the end of the conflict in Bosnia, Srebrenica remains a synonym for genocide and a stain on the reputation of the United Nations, whose peacekeeping forces failed to prevent the slaughter of civilians.

Survivors' reports, aerial photography and evidence exhumed from mass graves indicate that most were killed by troops under the command of Bosnian Serb military leader Mladic and his deputy Krstic.

Mladic and Bosnian Serb war-time leader Radovan Karadzic, who are both on the run, are the chief indictees for the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II, which began after Bosnian Serb forces overran the UN-mandated "safe area" of Srebrenica on July 11, 1995.

Using tanks and artillery, the Bosnian Serbs brushed aside a contingent of Dutch UN peacekeepers while officials in the U.N. Protection Force in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, and the provincial centre of Tuzla waited for orders from their superiors.

In the hours before the town fell, anticipating the horrors to come, some 12,000 men gathered on a nearby hill and decided to gamble their lives on an arduous march through enemy-held territory to Tuzla.

While the commander of the Dutch peacekeepers Ton Karremans negotiated with Mladic over the security of his men, the Bosnian Serbs began rounding up any Muslim men they could find, including youths barely into their teens, and loading them into trucks. None was seen alive again.

 In the days that followed, the area became a killing field, with Bosnian Serb forces able to fire at will on the columns of fleeing men as they straggled blindly towards safety.

Some were tricked into surrendering by Bosnian Serb soldiers driving captured U.N. vehicles and masquerading as U.N troops.

Fewer than half the Muslims made it to safety, according to international human rights organizations and Bosnian officials.

The extent of the killing became apparent only after survivors of the long march told their stories to reporters, diplomats and human rights activists.

Srebrenica - now part of Bosnia's Serb-run part Republika Srpska - is also a testament to the success of the Serb's wartime ethnic cleansing, as few Muslims from the town's pre-war community of 27,000 have returned.

More than 6,000 bodies of the 1995 massacre victims have been exhumed from numerous mass graves over the past seven years, but only 309 have been identified. The bodies are currently stored at the cemetery complex in Visoko, near Sarajevo, and in a special facility in Tuzla.

The massacre also continues to haunt Europe: in April 2002, the Dutch government resigned over a report that partly blamed it for the Srebrenica atrocities.

The U.N. published a soul-searching report into the massacre, but none of its officials was held responsible for the failure to prevent it.

Of the 29 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Bosnia for which former Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic is charged, the most serious is the indictment for genocide for his role in the Srebrenica massacre.