Tracing the new quasilegal rhetoric

If it is true that the discussion in Serbia about Srebrenica—marginal and wholly instrumental participants left aside—has moved from dispute over the facts to dispute over whether the facts can be characterised as «genocide» or not, this needs to be explained. Some possible hypotheses:

1) The criminals know that they are losing both the legal and political terrain on which they have been claiming their heroism and innocence. So now they are using distance and surrogates to try to bargain over the verdict in advance.

2) In the preparation to make a public recognition of genocide as well, the familiar old faces are being trotted out for a last round of denial before their well-earned return to obscurity.

3) The issue is not about events but responsibility, namely the effort of the members of the criminal conspiracy to present their own responsibility as somebody else's, reducing the question of recognition to one of fear of consequences (On this point see the quasilegal reflections of the by no means uninterested party Ratko Marković on whether the criminal conspiracy in which he participated was a «regime» or a «state» in today's Večernje novosti.)

What makes the third possibility seem more likely is that it can be fully explained by events that are already known, and it does not require making predictions about events in the future.