Slobodan Milosevic’s Last Waltz

March 12, 2007
The New York Times
By RUTH WEDGWOOD - Washington

EVEN from the grave, Slobodan Milosevic roils the international system. When he was alive, his violence in the Balkans required NATO to intervene twice. He swaggered on the stage of the Dayton peace negotiations. And even after he was bundled off to a United Nations court to stand trial on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, Mr. Milosevic tried to convert his criminal defense into a political rant to be shown nightly on Serbian television. The trial meandered for four years, and both the presiding judge and Mr. Milosevic died before a final verdict could be returned.

Now the skeleton’s waltz has turned one more time around the dance floor. This round brings us the ruling of the International Court of Justice, in a civil suit that should never have been brought if its result was to be so meager.

In 1993, Bosnia sued Serbia in the International Court of Justice, sometimes known as the World Court, for planning, abetting and committing genocide in the Bosnian conflict. Bosnia argued that the Serbian militias’ sniping and bombardment of civilian enclaves, torture and assassination of detainees, and ultimately, slaughter of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, amounted to genocide.

Last month, the court dismissed Bosnia’s case on almost all counts. The judges sitting in Andrew Carnegie’s peace palace in The Hague held that the Serbian campaign of violence and ethnic cleansing against Bosnian Muslims could not constitute genocide. The only actionable instance of genocide, said the court, was the wholesale execution of prisoners at Srebrenica in 1995, and even there, Serbia was not adequately implicated in the crime’s commission.

This is a remarkable result. It’s true that Srebrenica woke the West from its stupor and brought NATO military action. But the ethnic conflagration had already raged for three years, with countless acts of nationalist violence aimed at expelling Muslims from the north, south and east of Bosnia. Yet the International Court of Justice shrinks from recognition, failing to explain why the deliberate slaughter of civilians in the riverside town of Brcko in 1992, or the torture and execution of Muslim civilians in Foca, were legally different in kind from the Srebrenica murders.

The court does lay one misdemeanor at Serbia’s doorstep: Belgrade failed to take steps to “prevent” the genocide at Srebrenica. For this, the court says, no damages are due. But that passive fault fails to account for Belgrade’s robust program of financing, equipping and supporting criminal militias like Arkan’s Tigers and the Gray Wolves, as well as the forces that specialized in leveling Muslim villages.

The court’s judgment has broad implications. It amounts to a posthumous acquittal of Mr. Milosevic for genocide in Bosnia. Though he planned to divide the country in two, in a scheme devised with Croatia’s president, Franjo Tudjman, and engineered the strategy of violent ethnic cleansing, the court concluded that this did not amount to a campaign to destroy the ethnic group of Bosnian Muslims in whole or in part, for he was just pushing their reduced numbers somewhere else. As a law student might suppose, it will take years of study to understand how that could be true.

Worse yet, by saying that only the Srebrenica massacre amounted to genocide, the International Court of Justice limits the charges that can be effectively brought against the Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, if Belgrade at last allows them to be arrested.

It is hard to say why the court did not step back from these dire consequences. But there were both technical missteps and political snares in its judgment.

First, the World Court rejected the standard of vicarious liability used in the United Nations criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. In applying the Geneva Conventions to the Bosnian fighting, the criminal court early concluded that Belgrade’s support was enough to make major portions of the conflict into an international war.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.