Serbia has been cleared of genocide, but it still protects the guilty, says janine di giovanni |
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In December, just after the Dutch government awarded its former peacekeepers medals for their mission in Srebrenica, I rang a friend in Sarajevo.
Like nearly everyone I know there, he had lost family members in brutal killings during the Bosnian war. The decision to award men who did nothing to save Srebrenica from its terrible fate in July 1995 did not anger my friend as much as I had expected. "What can we do?" he sighed, echoing the wartime refrain. "We must move on."
But yesterday's decision by the UN's International Court of Justice to exonerate Serbia for the mass slaughter of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica did anger him. The civil suit, in which Bosnia sued Serbia for genocide, was a chance, he felt, for Bosnians to see "a recognition of Serbia's guilt".
Now Serbia is cleared forever of being a genocidal nation. The judges did, however,
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| Serbia supported the tin-pot Bosnian Serb Republic, ruled by former psychiatrist Radovan Karadzic |
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throw the Bosnian Muslims a bone and admit that Serbia had failed to prevent genocide, by "failing to comply with its obligations to punish those" who carried out the executions. They also ordered Serbia to hand over suspects for trial by a separate UN court.
In effect, this means that the judges believe no Serbian state official showed deliberate intention to "destroy in whole or in part" the Bosnian Muslim population - a critical element in the 1948 Genocide Convention. But the judges did find that Serbia had supported the tinpot Bosnian Serb Republic, ruled by former psychiatrist Radovan Karadzic (left), and had failed to take effective control over the Bosnian Serb army and the paramilitary units that carried out the massacre.
For Bosnian Muslims like my friend in Sarajevo, the court's decision is simply not good enough. Perhaps the worst blow is that the judges rejected Bosnia's argument that the "accumulated pattern of atrocities" was fueled by Serb nationalism.
Anyone who hung around the Balkans in the dark years of 1992-1995 saw the bloody 
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