Monday, August 19, 2013

Unmistakable Signs of Genocide- I- Marking Homes

There is a news report making the rounds that Christian businesses were marked out prior to being attacked or burned. History repeats itself. Watch out for another unmistakable sign- denial after the fact. This is true in all these cases below:


Christian businesses and homes in the town are facing similar dire circumstances. One Christian resident told an AP reporter that Islamists “painted a red X on Muslim stores and a black X on Christian stores [and] you can be sure that the ones with a red X are intact” compared to the destroyed facilities marked with black paint.

"I had eighteen people killed at my house," says a man named Etienne Niyonzima. "Everything was totally destroyed -- a place of fifty-five meters by fifty meters. In my neighborhood they killed six hundred and forty-seven people. They tortured them, too. You had to see how they killed them. They had the number of everyone's house, and they went through with red paint and marked the homes of all the Tutsis and of the Hutu moderates. My wife was at a friend's, shot with two bullets. She is still alive, only ... she has no arms."

In most places, Hindu houses amongst Muslim bastis had been marked out before the attacks using saffron flags, or pictures of Ram and Hanuman, or with crosses. Evidence before the Tribunal shows that in some places this marking was done a few days before the Godhra tragedy on February 27 and which was the ostensible justification for the 'retaliation'. These markings were to avoid inadvertent attacks on Hindu homes and businesses in areas that were targeted later.


The announcements broadcast on the radio also obliged non-Serbs to hang a white cloth outside their homes as a demonstration of their loyalty to the Serbian authorities. Charles McLeod, who was with the ECMM and visited Prijedor municipality in the last days of August 1992, testified that while visiting a mixed Serb/Bosnian Muslim village he saw that the Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) houses were identified by a white flag on the roof. This is corroborated by the testimony of Barnabas Mayhew (ECMM), who testified that the Bosnian Muslim houses were marked with white flags in order to distinguish them from the Serb houses.