yugoslavias implosion

icj held that the Genocide Convention required Serbia to surrender
criminal suspects such as Radovan Karadžić and General Ratko
Mladić who were wanted by the icty. The icj also “considers that
the most appropriate form of satisfaction would be a declaration in
the operative clause of the Judgment that the Respondent has failed
to comply with the obligation to prevent the crime of genocide.” 520
The icj’s ruling certainly hardly presents Serbia as above suspicion
of involvement in genocide in Bosnia. As Philip Grant, head of
the Swiss-based human rights organization Track Impunity Always,
noted when the judgment was made public:
The ruling, if you read it correctly, doesn’t mean that genocide wasn’t
committed. … It was indeed committed. It doesn’t mean that Serbia
was not complicit to genocide. It just says it wasn’t proven that Serbia
was complicit to genocide. And that’s sufficient to lose the case. But
if you read between the lines, I think it’s more a question of burden of
proof than about what happened. 521
The Serbian elite, of course, has avoided acknowledging such
legal niceties. It has also shown no remorse for the victims of the
Bosnian genocide. When, in January 2009, the European Parliament
adopted a resolution calling on the eu commission to observe July 11
as a day of remembrance of the Srebrenica genocide and calling on
all Western Balkan states to comply, the Serbian Assembly refused
to adopt a resolution to that effect. A group of Serbian ngo s insisted
that the Serbian government and the public take responsibility for
the crimes committed in the past and thus manifest their determination
to build a democratic state based on the rule of law and respect
for human rights. 522 Such appeals, however, fell on deaf ears. The
520 http://www .un .org/apps/news/story .asp?NewsID=21672&Cr=ICJ&Cr1
521 Quoted in Bransten, “ICJ Bosnia Ruling Sets Important Precedents .”
522 These NGOs include the Youth Initiative for Human Rights, YUCOM, Helsinki
Committee, Humanitarian Law Fund, Civic Initiatives, Women in Black,
Center for Cultural Decontamination, and the Belgrade Circle .
305
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