Baltimore Sun, MD
March 4 2007

Judged wanting
Originally published March 4, 2007

Serbia, acquitted last week of the charge of genocide, has been
handed a unique opportunity. If Serbia was not complicit in the
effort to exterminate Bosnian Muslims in the first half of the 1990s
– as the International Court of Justice ruled Monday – Serbia should
have no reason to keep on protecting the two Bosnian Serb leaders who
did have genocide in mind: Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic. If
Serbia’s hands are clean, it should turn these two men over to the
international tribunal in The Hague.
Clean hands? The court says so – but the court was looking through a
very narrow window. Serbia clearly had a major role in the
atrocity-riven war in Bosnia, and it encouraged ethnic cleansing of
Muslims and Croats. But atrocities and ethnic cleansing are not
genocide, and what the court ruled was that there was no evidence
that the government in Belgrade had set out to commit that particular
crime.

Genocide happened, the court said – in the silver-mining town of
Srebrenica, in July 1995, where 7,000 or more Muslims were killed by
General Mladic’s men. (Again, a narrow view – scores of thousands of
civilians were killed in Bosnia during the war, but perhaps only
Srebrenica fit a textbook definition of genocide.) Belgrade could
have stopped it, and didn’t, the court said. But there is no proof
that it was a result of national Serbian policy, according to the
ruling, and therefore Bosnia today cannot collect reparations from
Serbia.

The court’s decision raises an interesting question: What is the
culpability of the so-called Republika Srpska, set up by Bosnian
Serbs and, under the Dayton accord of 1995, one of the two entities
that make up Bosnia today? Bosnian Serbs did commit genocide. What
should the penalty be? On the other hand, neither the Bosnian Muslims
nor Croats have clean records, either – but no court has issued a
finding of genocide against them.

This was the first case in which one country sued another on a
complaint of genocide. The legalistic result isn’t very satisfying,
though it’s better than a resumption of war. Clearly, it’s too early
for historians to sort things out, or for the survivors to be
mollified by historical findings. Turks and Armenians are still
arguing bitterly – or, more often, refusing to talk to each other at
all – over events that took place back in 1915. The war in Bosnia is
an unhealed wound; courts alone can’t resolve the damage.

But they can tackle a piece of it, and that makes this is an
opportune moment for Serbia to recognize its responsibility as a
nation in good standing – and hand over the men who brought so much
death to Bosnia.