Honoring one Hero: Jean-René Ruez – the Srebrenica genocide Investigator.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZyCxJWitEw

{-(Jean-René Ruez, a senior French police official, was the central figure in establishing the facts about the executions of at least 8,372 Bosniacs in Srebrenica.

As a Chief Investigator for Srebrenica appointed by the Hague Tribunal, Jean-René Ruez has spent the past 14 years working tirelessly to collect the evidence of the Srebrenica genocide and prove that the massacres were planned and covered up in an attempt to hide the crime.

Before being appointed to lead what became the biggest criminal investigation in Europe since World War II, Jean-René Ruez studied law and entered in the elite French police commissioners’ school.

He worked as a Senior police investigator in Paris, Marseille and then Nice.

After joining the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, he went straight to the field collecting evidence – going as far as digging out mass graves.

Haunted by all he has learned and worn down by the weight of his responsibility, Jean-René Ruez has sacrificed everything to try and hold the guilty to account.

His contribution to the truth about the Srebrenica genocide is enormous.

Through his eyes, we gain a fresh perspective on what happened at Srebrenica.

For example, Serbian journalist Zoran Petrovic filmed the Srebrenica massacres and then blacked out key scenes to conceal the crime.}{cf srebrenica genocide Blog}.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e5MCWrdbAk

{Only thanks to Jean-René Ruez, the lost images would be uncovered and later usedas evidence in the Courts).

- cited cases of adults being forced to kill their children or watching as soldiers ended the young lives.

He gave evidence that Bosnian Serb forces had killed and tortured refugees at will.

Streets were littered with corpses, he said, and rivers were red with blood.

Many people committed suicide to avoid having their noses, lips and ears chopped off, he said.

Following these murders, the victims of Srebrenica were buried in mass graves that continue to mark the landscape with traces of the crime.}{cf Srebrenica genocide blog}.

Reading the press, I found other words of witnesses, investigators, writers, journalists: “In a five-day orgy of slaughter at Srebrenica in July 1995, up to 8000 Muslims were systematically exterminated in what was described at the U.N. war crimes tribunal as “the triumph of evil.”

“What made it worse was the genocide took place in what had been designated a U.N. “safe area” three months earlier.”

A judge at The Hague tribunal was later to describe what happened in Srebrenica as “truly scenes from hell written on the darkest pages of human history.”

Thousands of Bosnian Muslims had sought refuge in the spa town of Srebrenica in 1995 as the Bosnian Serb army marched towards them.

They were protected by just 100 lightly equipped Dutch peacekeepers – who proved no match for the advancing, heavily-armed Serb army.

“So that region was the theatre of a fierce manhunt, and I know that they were collecting people at three locations.

One of them was the stadium near Nova Kasaba.

The second one was a farm, agricultural farm in the village of Kravica.

The third location was an elementary school or part of a factory in Kravica.”

“The Bosnian Serbs, sought both to annihilate the Bosniac presence from the Srebrenica enclave  and to hide all evidence of the deed.

“To create, the illusion that their victims had never existed”.(Florence Hartman).