Dismay and Jubilation Over Hague Court Judgment

While the World Court’s landmark ruling is supposed to help the people of both Bosnia and Serbia move ahead with reconciliation, initial reactions indicate there is still a long road ahead.

Sarajevo was understandably disappointed by the ruling, while Belgrade breathed a sigh of relief and Banja Luka remained on the sidelines, unable to decide exactly what the judgment meant for the Bosnian Serb entity.

Legal analysts concluded the International Court of Justice, ICJ, took a “rigid” view in determining what constitutes an act of genocide and a state’s involvement in it.

The ICJ broadly exonerated Serbia of having played a role in committing, aiding or abetting the crimes committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1992-1995 war.

The Hague-based court said while the crimes committed in Bosnia during the war were massive and widespread, they did not constitute genocide.

At a meeting in Sarajevo’s National Theatre, which was repeatedly bombed in the siege of the capital, survivors of the war voiced shock and dismay.

“We are bitter and aggrieved about the verdict,” a representative of the Women Victims of War association told Balkan Insight. “The international community has once again shown whose side it is on.”

Faruk Sabanovic, an artist in a wheelchair who was wounded during the shelling of Sarajevo, said the court had failed to appropriately condemn a great wrong inflicted on Bosnia.
“We the survivors are witnesses of what happened here. We are witnesses that the war ended where it started – in Belgrade with [former Serbian leader] Slobodan Milosevic’s signature,” he said.

“Even if it [the verdict] had been different, I still could not get up from my wheelchair and start walking again,” he added. “The dead can’t rise from their graves, either.”

Most speakers described the judgment as the second international betrayal of Bosnia, the first being the world’s failure to prevent the crimes from happening in the first place.

“I didn’t expect a different verdict,” Izet Gagic a survivor from Travnik, in central Bosnia, said. “I remember the early days of the war and how international community’s sanctions against Bosnia prevented the country from defending itself.”

“The ICJ has walked over the rule of law,” agreed Murat Tahirovic, president of the Association of former camp inmates. “If the evidence of what happened in Bosnia does not point to genocide I do not know what does.”

“What else is needed for a guilty verdict, knowing that members of our association were held in detention camps in Serbia?” he asked.

Survivors of the Srebrenica massacre were especially unhappy with the verdict. “As a survivor of genocide who is now disabled, I know who to blame – Serbia and Montenegro,” said Sefika Skorupan whose male relatives were all murdered when she was only 16.

Survivors from other parts of Republika Srpska were also bitter. The family of Edin Ramulic, from Prijedor, north-west Bosnia, were killed in Keraterm, one of three Serb-run detention camps in the town.

“The verdict reaffirmed that genocide was committed in Srebrenica,” he said, “but the downside is that it did not find that genocide took place in Prijedor and several other locations.”

The reactions of Bosnia’s politicians were more divided, reflecting their different ethnic and political constituencies. The tripartite presidency, for example, all issued individual statements.

Haris Siljadzic, the Bosniak member, said the judgment gave partial satisfaction in that it said Serbia had violated the UN’s genocide convention by failing to prevent the crime or punish the perpetrators.

Silajdzic, a foreign minister in the war, said it was more important for Bosnia to work itself on “annulling the results of genocide”.

“To do this we must change the structure and constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” he added, returning to his political programme for the reorganization of the country’s entity based politics.

Nebojsa Radmanovic, the Serb member of the presidency, said the verdict would inevitably incur “heavy disappointment”, adding that the lawsuit had aggravated relations within the country.

Zeljko Komsic, the Croat member, made an emotional TV appearance in which he said he would respect the court’s decision but would always teach children that genocide had taken place.

Sulejman Tihic, president of the Party of Democratic Action, SDA, said he was partly satisfied with the judgment, as “the court ruled that there was genocide and widespread crimes and that the government of Republika Srpska were responsible for this”.

Some parties in the Republika Srpska, RS, claimed politicians from the Federation might use the ruling to attack the Serbian entity.

Mladen Bosic, head of the Serbian Democratic Party, SDS, the nationalist party founded by the fugitive former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, said the Federation would “now try and accuse RS of the same crimes as it did Serbia and Montenegro”.

The RS President, Milan Jelic, on the other said the ICJ verdict would resolve many outstanding issues in the country.

“The verdict will give great incentive to all countries in the region, notably to Bosnia and Herzegovina, to press forward with stabilization and put an end to the rhetoric of aggression, genocide, victims, winners and losers,” he said.

“The outcome is a victory for everybody in Bosnia,” he added.

The RS Prime Minister, Milorad Dodik, said he always considered Bosnia and Herzegovina’s genocide charge “illegal and illegitimate,” regardless of the verdict.

He said it was beyond doubt that a crime had been committed in Srebrenica but maintained that the verdict showed genocide had been neither planned nor committed in Bosnia.

Responding to the ICJ ruling that Serbia had held responsible for not preventing or punishing genocide in Srebrenica, Dodik retorted: “One should wonder why the international community didn’t either.”

Miroslav Mikes, deputy of the RS House of Peoples, agreed that the verdict showed no one was a clear winner and a loser.

Mikes said RS politicians had no reason to gloat over the not-guilty verdict. “A part of its territory rests on the verdict [of genocide] and a part of its army led by one of its commanders has committed genocide.”

Nedjo Savic, a Bosnian Serb war veteran told Balkan Insight he was deeply dissatisfied. “This verdict means we are responsible for everything as if not a single bullet, an artilery shell, a unit or an instructor crossed the border with Serbia. Serbia was in this as much as we were, but Serbia does not have to live with Muslims in a joint state and we do.”

Branko Todorovic, president of the RS Helsinki Human Right Committee, told Balkan Insight that commentary on the judgment should be left to legal experts.

He added that the verdict would play a major role in the regional process of facing up to the truth.

“Even those likely to react emotionally to the verdict, namely the victims and their families, will be reasonable enough to accept the ICJ’s professional credibility with a cool head,” Todorovic said.

He added that people in Bosnia and the region needed to focus on putting pressure on the domestic authorities to apprehend and try remaining war crimes suspects.

Some NGOs in Serbia mainland strongly criticised the verdict, however.

Biljana Kovacevic Vuco, president of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, said the verdict represented “victory for the politics of Slobodan Milosevic, the victory of Ratko Mladic, of Vojislav Kostunica and Serbia’s [ultra-nationalist] Radicals.’

The verdict will not help Serbia confront its past, Aleksandar Popov, of the NGO Igman Initative said.

“The Srebrenica verdict is only symbolic and does not give the complete picture of Serbia’s role in the wars of the last decade,” Popov said.

The head of the Youth Initiative for Human Rights, Andrej Nosov, said he hoped the verdict would mean Serbia could no longer deny it had nothing to do with events in Srebrenica.

“The verdict opens a moral question about what Serbia could have done to prevent genocide in Bosnia,” Nosov said.

“Regardless of the verdict, Serbia has an obligation to tell the whole truth about the victims and give them justice and reparations,” he added.

The president of Vojvodina’s Social Democratic League, Nenad Canak, condemned the ICJ verdict. “Let Bosnia’s blood and ashes rest on the hands of all those who made such a judgment,” he said.

Boris Tadic, President of Serbia, said the verdict was good for Serbia but called on the country’s parliament to adopt a resolution on Srebrenica and arrest Mladic.

“Today once again the name of Serbia was used in the context of war crimes and genocide in global media,” he said. “The politics that brought us again into the negative spotlight is the politics of Slobodan Milosevic,” Tadic said.

He said anyone working against the fulfillment of Serbia’s obligations towards the ICTY is actually working against Serbia’s future.

Serbia’s Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica hailed the judgment as “especially important, as it freed Serbia of genocide charges”.

He said that Serbia would continue to fulfill its obligations towards the ICTY.

The nationalist Radical Party also hailed the verdict, saying the ICJ had confirmed “what the whole world already new – that Serbia took no part in any genocide”.

The party’s vice-president, Tomislav Nikolic, however, added that the finding about Srebrenica was dangerous for the RS. He also denied the accepted death toll of the massacre, saying: “Srebrenica was a mass crime in which between a 1,000 and 2,000 people were killed”.

In Montenegro, officials were relieved that the ICJ exonerated the republic of all responsibility. Since its declaration of independence in 2006, the country was no longer responsible for any crimes that Yugoslavia had been charged with.

Montenegro’s president, Filip Vujanovic, said he had expected his country to be exonerated. “Montenegro has already expressed its sorrow for the crimes in Srebrenica …and have labeled it as genocide,” Vujanovic said.

Rajko Kovacevic, a spokesman for Montenegro’s ruling Democratic Party of Socialists, DPS, said he hoped for an end to “petty political interpretations by some individuals regarding Montenegro’s alleged responsibility for the events that took place in the early 1990s.”

“Montenegro is committed to punishing the perpetrators of crimes committed in that period if their guilt is proven,” Kovacevic said.

The opposition Democratic Serbian Party praised the court for abiding by international law “unlike the ad hoc Hague Tribunal for War Crimes in the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY, whose verdicts are often politically motivated”.

“We’ve always said the war in the former Yugoslavia was a civil war, which excludes the possibility that Montenegro was an aggressor,” the party said.

Nebojsa Vucinic, a Montenegro international law school professor, said the verdict showed Montenegro’s authorities could not be blamed for events in Bosnia but added that Montenegro’s “moral and political responsibility” was another matter.

“Especially so the Montenegrin leadership’s responsibility in 1992 and 1993,” Vucinic underscored.

In Zagreb, the ruling raised concerns about the fate of its own claim against Serbia, which it put before the ICJ in 1999.

The ICJ has yet to declare whether it has the jurisdiction to deal with this case but Croatian officials felt that after the ruling on Bosnia their chances were slim.

Zagreb university professor Ivo Josipovic said: “The conservative approach to the definition of genocide … will require great work in proving that the horrible crimes which were committed are qualified as genocide and that the former SRJ had influence in their commitment,” Josipovic said.

Croatian President, Stipe Mesic, said the country’s legal team would look at the judgment on Serbia before proceeding.

Vesna Terselic, of the Documenta center for facing the past, said she could not understand the ruling that Belgrade was not responsible for actions in Bosnia.

“The intention of ethnic cleansing was present in BiH as well in Croatia as part of Serbian policy,” Terselic told Balkan Insight.

“In Croatia there was ethnic cleansing of all non-Serbs in 1991 in one-third of the country, there was intention in this as well as in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the same practice and the Serbian policy occurred,” she said.

“Ethnic cleansing was launched out of official Belgrade due to policy of creating Great Serbia,” Terselic added.

She said she could not predict what would happen with the Croatian case against Serbia but “it is obvious that the ICJ has sent a message about ‘what can be and what can’t be expected out of international courts’.”

For Terselic, this verdict sent out a message to all countries where such crimes have happened.

“This is a message they shouldn’t expect a lot from the international judicial institutions,” Terselic continued. “With this verdict, international justice gave itself a slap in the face.”

Legal analysts say the court set a very conservative and high international law standards in the process of proving a genocide charge.

Edina Becirevic, a genocide expert in Sarajevo, said if the ICJ’s standards had been applied to the Jewish Holocaust, it would have been hard to prove Germany’s intent to commit the crimes to the Jewish people.

Professor Josipovic agreed that the bar had been set high. “The court has continued the tradition of classical, and a little conservative, interpretation of genocide. That is why only genocide in Srebrenica has been accepted,” Josipovic said.

“On the other hand the approach taken to establishing the role of another state in the commitment of the crimes is very conservative,” he added.

This was a step back compared to the approach taken by ICTY, which accepted that agents could commit crimes in the name of the state, he went on.

Such a verdict will not help with putting to rest the complex and controversial question of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, some experts say.

“The verdict says genocide wasn’t orchestrated from Serbia but committed by a number of individuals controlled by the government,” Jakob Finci, president of Jewish community in Bosnia said.

As such, the verdict has made the delicate situation in the region even more complicated, he went on.

“It makes one wonder what exactly the ICJ tried to say in its final statement,” he continued. “On the one hand, it seems that the court wanted to acknowledge that genocide did take place while on the other, it apparently sought and found an option not to blame Serbia for it and pin it on individuals tried and convicted by ICTY,” he added.

“The verdict has failed to resolve any of the controversial issue Bosnia and Herzegovina has encountered since 1996; on the contrary, it has made all our problems even more complex,” Finci concluded.

Nerma Jelacic is BIRN BiH director. Balkan Insight`s contributors Gordana Katana in Banja Luka and Aleksandar Roknic in Belgrade, BIRN Justice Report editor in Sarajevo Nidzara Ahmetasevic, BIRN Montenegro coordinator in Podgorica Nedeljko Rudovic, BIRN editor in Zagreb Goran Jungvirth and BIRN Serbia editor Aleksandar Vasovic contributed to this report. Balkan Insight is BIRN’s online publication.