Defining Genocide Down in Bosnia

Sometimes judiciousness may not be good judgment. A landmark decision on genocide Monday by the International Court of Justice that attempts to be well-measured has only added fuel to the old fires of the ethnically challenged Balkans.

In July 1995, amid the Balkans war, the small eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, a U.N.-protected safe haven, saw its 370 lightly armed Dutch peacekeepers overwhelmed by Bosnian Serbs who seized control of the enclave. Within one week, they had killed all Bosnian Muslim men of military age in Srebenica — altogether some 8,000 people. This was by far the most brutal and most organized ethnic cleansing campaign in a war that included many.

On Monday, after almost 10 months of deliberation, the court declared that the 1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica was indeed an act of genocide. However, the ICJ also declared that, apart from Srebrenica, the pattern of Bosnian Serb atrocities was "too broad" to qualify for the definition of genocide, and that there wasn't enough evidence to pin the blame on the neighboring country of Serbia, which actively encouraged the ethnic Serbs in Bosnia during the 1992-1995 war. The ICJ found Serbia in violation of the Genocide Convention on only two counts: for failure to prevent the massacre in Srebrenica, and for failure to arrest Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic, the alleged mastermind of Srebenica, who is believed to be a fugitive in Serbia.

During the war, which claimed more than 100,000 lives, Serbia was ruled by Slobodan Milosevic. He actively supported Bosnian Serb efforts to purge Bosnian Muslims in order to create an ethnically pure Serbian state in Bosnia. Milosevic died last year, during his trial before another court in The Hague — The International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Milosevic had been charged with genocide and other war crimes, and his trial provided evidence that he aided ethnic Serbs in Bosnia during the war financially, militarily and politically.

If Serbia had been found culpable of a policy of genocide and aggresion, Bosnian political leaders might have received tens of bilions of dollars in war damages. Instead, the ICJ said that material compensation "would not be appropriate." The court ordered Serbia to issue a parliamentary declaration condemning the Srebrenica massacre, and to step up the effort to arrest Mladic. Failure to arrest the general, indicted by the war crimes tribunal, has already led to the suspension of Serbia's membership talks with the European Union.

Serbia is unlikely to meet any of those court orders satisfactorily. The country's President, Boris Tadic, has urged the parliament to pass a motion condemning the Srebrenica massacre but its Prime Minister, Vojislav Kostunica, has reservations. Kostunica insists that any such declaration should also pay tribute to Serbian victims of the Bosnian war and condemn war crimes by Bosnian Muslims. Meanwhile, the far-right Serbian Radical party, which won a third of the vote at the last month's elections, claims that the Srebrenica massacre is an invention of Serbia's enemies and has vowed to block any motion to condemn it.

In the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, the verdict was met with a mixture of anger and disapointment. "I don't know whether the ruling resulted from the lack of evidence by the Court, or from a deep misunderstanding of what has happened here during the war," said Zeljko Tomsic, a member of the Bosnian Presidency, the council of ministers that rules Bosnia. Haris Silajdzic, also a Presidency member and the leader of the largest Bosnian Muslim party, said that he "regretted" that Serbia was not declared guilty and said that the verdict was "incomplete."

That has roiled relations between the groups that warred against each other back in the 1990s. The two autonomous entities that now make up postwar Bosnia (the Bosnian-Croat Federation and the Serbian Republic) are at each other's throats. Bosnian Muslims in the Bosnian-Croat Federation had already been pushing for the dismantling of the rival Serbian Republic , claiming that it was created as a result of wartime genocide and ethnic cleansing. The ICJ's declaration that Srebrenica was genocide is now adding fuel to this demand. "We now need to annul the results of the genocide by changing the system and the constitution," Silajdzic said. Bosnian Serbs, on the other hand, fear that Silajdzic wants to end their self-rule and create a centralized, Muslim-dominated Bosnia. The Serbian Republic's Prime Minister Milorad Dodik has already condemned Silajdzic's statement and said that, in his opinion, the Srebrenica massacre "was not a genocide, although it was a terrible crime."

The court has spoken but, in issuing a Balkanized verdict — with a little bit for every party — it has allowed nothing to change in the Balkans.

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