The International Court of Justice: Serbia, Bosnia, and genocide

[struggle4progress]

Martin Shaw
28 - 2 - 2007

The ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the case brought by Bosnia-Herzegovina against Serbia, delivered on 26 February 2007, is a compromise judgment, giving something to the Bosnian victims but largely denying the Bosnian genocide and exonerating the Serbian state of its role. Although seen by some western media as a progressive judgment, it is has largely been greeted with dismay by Bosnians and welcomed by apologists for the most reactionary Serbian forces, including those who seem to occupy the comment pages of the Guardian whenever Yugoslav war issues return to the headlines.

This was the major remaining opportunity for an authoritative legal ruling on the Bosnian genocide and Serbia's role, since former Serbian and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic's death deprived the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) of the possibility of ruling on his responsibility. Although the ICTY has found that genocide was committed in Bosnia, especially at Srebrenica in 1995 (when over 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were massacred), and has convicted individuals for their roles in this crime, the ICJ ruling concerned the responsibility of the Serbian state for genocide committed in Bosnia against Muslims and others over the entire period of the Bosnian conflict (1992-95).

The Bosnian genocide began in spring 1992 when Bosnian-Serbian nationalists, led by Radovan Karadzic (today a fugitive from the ICTY), taking over units and weapons from the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav national army, backed by Milosevic (who was then president of Serbia), and supported by murderous Milosevic-funded militia from Serbia proper, launched their violent campaign against the non-Serb (primarily Muslim and Croat) populations. Serbian forces burned villages, killed community leaders, incarcerated and murdered men in concentration camps, and raped women and girls - thus terrorising 90% of the non-Serb population into leaving the areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina that they controlled or conquered.

This so-called "ethnic cleansing" (the term entered the international vocabulary as a result of this campaign) was a deliberate policy of Belgrade and Bosnian-Serbian nationalists to destroy the Muslim and Croat communities in these areas. It thus clearly fell within the scope of the United Nations genocide convention of 1948, comprising killing and other acts committed with "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such". The Bosnian government first brought its case to the ICJ in 1993, when the most extensive murder and brutality against civilians had already taken place, and two years before the Srebrenica massacre in the closing stages of the war ...

http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-institutions_government/icj_bosnia_serbia_4392.jsp