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Serbia cleared in genocide, to a point
The U.N.'s highest court cleared Serbia Monday of genocide against Muslims in Bosnia's bloody war. But it said the country's former government should have stopped the 1995 slaughter of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica and ordered Serb leaders to hand over the alleged architect of the massacre.Wasn't really "genocide," y'see, just a whole lot of dead people. All of a certain persuasion, but that don't make it genocide, nope, nope ... The case marked the first time a state had been taken to court over allegations of genocide, outlawed in a U.N. convention in 1948 after the Nazi Holocaust, although individuals have been convicted in genocide cases linked to massacres in Bosnia and Rwanda. In a 171-page ruling, the International Court of Justice said the massacre of thousands of Muslims by Bosnian Serb forces at the U.N.-protected Srebrenica enclave was an act of genocide. But the fault lay with somebody else. We're not sure whom. Can we blame Slobo? He's dead after all, it'd be more convenient ... But the 15-judge panel rejected Bosnia's claim that the Serbian state was responsible for the killing, saying it did not have effective control over the Bosnian Serb forces it had helped arm and finance. Instead, the judges ruled that Serbia stood by and allowed the massacre to happen. Serbia, "could, and should, have acted to prevent the genocide, but did not," the court's president, Rosalyn Higgins, told reporters. The ruling sparked outrage in Bosnia, which filed the case, and among dozens of war survivors who gathered outside the gates of the International Court of Justice. "Shame on the people who reached such a verdict. How can they say not guilty of genocide when there are photos, video footage," Zinaida Mujic of the Mothers of Srebrenica association said in Sarajevo. The Srebrenica massacre was the worst mass killing in Europe since World War II and the bloodiest episode in the violent breakup of Yugoslavia into six independent states, including Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia. The fighting started in Slovenia in 1991, spread to Croatia in 1992 and Bosnia the same year leaving at least 200,000 dead. In the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, Muslims, Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs fought each other. Posted by: Fred 2007-02-27 |
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