The highest UN court cleared the Serbian state Monday of direct
responsibility for genocide in Bosnia during the 1992-95 war, but
said it had violated its responsibility to prevent genocide.
Bosnia had asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to
rule on whether Serbia committed genocide through the killing, rape
and ethnic cleansing that ravaged Bosnia during the war, in one of
the court's biggest cases in its 60-year history.
It was the first time a state had been tried for genocide,
outlawed in a UN convention in 1948 after the Nazi Holocaust of the
Jews. A judgment in Bosnia's favor could have allowed it to seek
billions of dollars of compensation from Serbia.
ICJ President Judge Rosalyn Higgins said the court concluded that
the Srebrenica massacre did constitute genocide, but that other
mass killings of Bosnian Muslims did not.
But she said the court ruled that the Serbian state could not be
held directly responsible for genocide, so paying reparations to
Bosnia would be inappropriate even though Serbia had failed to
prevent genocide and punish the perpetrators.
"The court finds by 13 votes to 2 that Serbia has not committed
genocide," she said. "The court finds that Serbia has violated the
obligation to prevent genocide... in respect of the genocide that
occurred in Srebrenica."
Some 8,000 Muslims from Srebrenica and surrounding villages in
eastern Bosnia were killed in July 1995. The bodies of about half
of them have been found in more than 80 mass graves nearby.
Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military
commander Ratko Mladic, both accused of genocide over Srebrenica,
are still on the run.
Earlier in the ruling, Higgins said the court found it
established that Serbia "was making its considerable military and
financial support available" to the Bosnian Serbs but that it had
not known they had genocidal intent.
Serbia had said a ruling against it would be an unjust and
lasting stigma on the state, which overthrew its wartime leader
Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.
Milosevic died last year, just months before a verdict in his
trial on 66 counts of genocide and war crimes was due.
The UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague has already found
individuals guilty of genocide at Srebrenica. Bosnia used evidence
from trials there for its case against Serbia.
In Bosnia, now split between a Muslim-Croat federation and a
Serb Republic, sentiment is split along ethnic lines, with Muslims
hoping the court would brand Serbia an aggressor.
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(China Daily via agencies February 27, 2007)
