Serbia absolved in war crimes case
Published 9:00 pm Monday, February 26, 2007
BERLIN – The United Nations’ highest court ruled Monday that Serbia failed to prevent the massacre of Muslims during the Bosnian war but was not directly responsible for the atrocities, ending a landmark case in which an entire nation was tried for committing genocide.
The decision, closely watched by countries facing allegations of war crimes, was viewed by Serbia as a vindication for its role in the 1992-95 war. The ruling angered Bosnian leaders – and ended their efforts to win reparations over the killing of about 7,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica.
The court did find that the army of Bosnian Serbs had committed genocide and that Serbia had “known influence” over them. The 13-2 ruling by the International Court of Justice in The Hague blamed Serbia for not taking “any initiative to prevent what happened or any action on its part to avert the atrocities.”
The murders in Srebrenica were the worst massacre in Europe since World War II. The town had been declared a safe haven by U.N. peacekeepers until it was overrun by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995.
The court ordered Serbia to turn Ratko Mladic over to the war-crimes tribunal in The Hague. Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general accused of orchestrating the massacre, and former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic have been indicted for crimes against humanity but have been at large for years.
The failure of western governments to find Mladic and Karadzic and arrest them has led many Bosnians to charge that the West is unsympathetic to the deaths of tens of thousands of Muslims.
The judges ruled, however, that because Serbia’s government did not deliberately intend to “destroy in whole or in part” the Muslim population, Bosnia would not be entitled to billions of dollars in reparations.
“Financial compensation is not the appropriate form of reparation for the breach of obligation to prevent genocide,” the court said.
The decision is also likely to exacerbate tensions between Bosnia’s predominant Muslim population and the largely autonomous Serbian entity within Bosnia known as Republika Srpska. Since the breakup of the former Yugoslavia was formalized by a peace agreement in 1995, Bosnia has lingered as an unsettled patchwork of Muslim, Serb and Croat nationalist ambitions still presided over by international peacekeepers.
“I am stunned,” Hedija Krdzic, who lost her husband, father and grandfather in Srebrenica, told reporters Monday outside the court. “This is terrible. I saw with my own eyes who started this war and who kept up the aggression. It was the Serbs.”
