In a ruling more than a decade in the making, whose length is so long that most people will only ever read the summary, the International Court of Justice in the Hague has decided that Serbia can not be held directly responsible for ethnic cleansing and genocide that occurred during the war in Bosnia, but should have used its influence to prevent it. The focus on the ruling also mainly focused on Srebrenica as the major case in which it happened.

February 26, 2007 — The United Nations’ highest court ruled today that Serbia was not directly responsible for genocide or conspiring to commit genocide during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) said Serbia should have made efforts to halt massacres in Bosnia, and said the killing of nearly 8,000 Muslims by Bosnian Serbs in Srebrenica amounted to genocide — the first time the ICJ has called an event genocide.

However, The Hague-based court said that Bosnian Serb forces operated with a degree of independence from Belgrade, and that the Srebrenica killings “cannot be attributable” to Serbia.

Bosnia had accused Yugoslavia of genocide and demanded financial compensation, but the court said Belgrade would not have to pay reparations.

Earlier, Judge Roslyn Higgins said Montenegro is no longer part of the case because Serbia alone had assumed the “legal identity” of the former Yugoslavia.

The ruling comes with Serbia still facing challenges linked to the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.
Closer ties with the European Union have been frozen over Belgrade’s failure to hand over war crimes suspects for trial.

Serbia also faces final talks with the United Nations on the future of Kosovo, with the province heading toward near-statehood despite Serbian opposition.

The ruling is sure to inspire a variety of emotions on both sides. I can see the Bosnian Muslims, whose friends and families were raped and murdered, breathing sighs of pain and grief. On the other hand, there is the everyday Serbian who is breathing a sigh of relief — not just because of national pride, but because this case had focused on the collective guilt of the entire state and not just the Radko Mladiks and Slobodan Milosevics. It was the first time in the history of the world that an entire country had been put on trial by an international court. Whatever the result, it would be unprecedented.

It was not just the Bosnian Muslims that were largely disappointed with the ruling, but most of the Western World as well. The conventional wisdom is that the Balkan wars and the genocide and displacement that occurred were a terrible series of events. Indeed they were. But with Serbia taking the mantle of the former Yugoslavia, the continuance of this creed is that justice must be served for what happened. Unfortunately, this justice is taking shape in the wrong way. Rather than punishing those actually involved in committing genocide, the case had attempted to establish a collective guilt for the entire nation of Serbia.

Unprecedented though any ruling would be, that potential end would have been ridiculous. The collective wisdom at that point, and the desired outcome derived from that wisdom, is therefore completely wrong. The issue is therefore worth re-examining. To start, here is a post by contributor Russel Mitchell who, nearly a year ago, challenged these assumptions and paved a new way for these events to be looked at.

Bosnia has brought up Serbia on war crimes. Yes, the entire nation. This has never been done before, and there????????s a good reason for that: the Allies didn????????t hang the entire population of Germany for war crimes after World War II, the entire Serbian nation didn????????t somehow wake up one morning and think ???????let????????s go murder all the Bosnian Muslims.???????

Now, for those of you who are rightly beginning to protest, don????????t get me wrong. I know folks who were in Sarajevo. I can remember to this day handling the piece of shrapnel that the Bosnian I was introduced to kept to commemorate the piece of metal, one half of which cut his hair and sat in his pocket, the other half of which tore his best friend????????s head off. At no point do I wish to even pretend that what Milosevic engineered does not fully justify putting him and his at the end of a short rope, just as was done to the men who ran the Nazi concentration camps. But just as it would be ridiculous to hold every Croat guilty for the expulsion of Serbs from the Krajina, mass judgment in this case is an abrogation of, rather than a support for, final justice.

The trial is giving rise to self-righteous screeds like this, which sacrifice history on an altar of sanctimony. History is more complicated than an editorial-page sound-bite, and the Serbs also suffered terribly at the hands of Milosevic as he rallied the Chetniks???????? long memories of earlier horror as a distraction from what he was doing to the populace at large. The Bosnian government????????s attempt to create collective guilt papers over certain inconvenient facts, like Milosevic????????s little habit of putting Chetnik units directly behind the lines in order to keep Serbian line units from simply deserting en masse out of a war with which they wanted nothing to do in the first place.

I don????????t know where Ratko Mladic???????? is. Neither does the average Serb, and the Serbian government appears to take its responsibility regarding the fugitive seriously. That some Chetniks are in denial over the whole process, or even actively aiding and abetting this monster even today, does not justify making a mockery of history by putting forth collective judgment. Collectivism makes a mockery of justice. If everybody owns the land, nobody owns it. The same thing applies to atrocities. The individuals who took part in the mass killings and rape rooms need to be brought to full, merciless justice. Otherwise, individual accountability suffers, and it becomes easy enough to once again subordinate one????????s guilty conscience under the murderous goals of an evil regime.

The 20th Century should have unequivocally taught us this lesson.

If history cannot be surmised in an editorial page, then it certainly can’t be captured in a headline. A quick browse of Google News shows that most stories are titles “Serbia clear of genocide, or ” “Serbia failed to prevent genocide.” The details are lost in the overarching simplicity of the headlines, the articles, and the desire to try an entire nation.

History is much more complicated than that, and most people are more decent than they are made to be. Most working Serbs did not support the genocide. Even most Serbian soldiers did not agree with it, having been forced into such acts on the pain of death or themselves and their families. It also cannot be forgotten that in 2000 the Serbian people rose up against Slobodan Milosevic. and he died rotting in prison afterward. The fact is that it is impossible to try an entire nation or genocide when most of its people are not guilty of it, even indirectly, and even helped overthrow their dictator when they could.

While I can certainly understand why Bosnian Muslims are upset at the ruling, this feeling is based on a gross oversimplification of the case. Everyday Serbians are no more guilty for the genocide than the Americans or Germans or whoever are for not stepping in to prevent it on time.