The International Court of Justice Verdict--Serbia Not Guilty

I have been meaning to weigh in on the ICJ Verdict of February 26. Roger Lippman was kind enough to email me a copy of this article by Peter Lippman, which has already been reviewed at the always-informative Bosnia Vault blog.

Lippman is, in the main, right on. The most damning part of this verdict was that it concluded that genocide was only committed at Srebrenica. I understand the focus on the issues of intent and responsibility, but this is the most serious shortcoming of the court's ruling. I understand the desire to set the bar extremely high as far as assigning guilt and responsibility (although "understand" shouldn't be read as "unquestioning agreement"), but the court was not free to rewrite history or reinterpret the meaning of the term "genocide."

The court had an opportunity to weigh in in a manner befitting a clarification of the historical record. Unfortunately, they failed miserably.

So for the most part, Lippman speaks for me, although unlike him I do see a silver lining. Oddly enough, that silver lining was echoed by not-my-favorite-writer-on-Bosnia Misha Glenny in this article from The Guardian.

I disagree with Glenny much of the time, and he seems awfully quick on the draw with his preemptive "I am not a Serb apologist" disclaimer at the beginning, but there is a germ of a good idea in this article, if you look hard enough (I had to squint--but it's there).

Glenny is correct to note that this verdict will remove the justification for a continued martyr complex by Serb nationalists; they no longer can hide from their own culpability behind the self-aggrandizing myth that they are being persecuted by the outside world. Bosnia's future depends, to a very great deal, not only on its relations with Croatia and Serbia but on popular opinion in those two countries. Bosnian Serbs, for the foreseeable future, still look to Serbia for much of their cultural and social orientation. A Serbia which is hostile and resentful toward the Bosnian government and the Muslim plurality will surely poison relations between ethnic groups in Bosnia to a degree that its fragile and tenuous stability cannot manage indefinitely.

That said, the rest of Glenny's article is about what you would expect from him. His point of view is founded on his deep-seated conviction that outside intervention is situations like Bosnia are naive and doomed to fail; by referring to the Lord's Resistance Army as an example of realpolitik in action, he shows his cards--it would be child's play for a well-armed NATO force with a mandate to use force to handle the Lord's Resistance Army, but unfortunately we know all too well that the international community is more than willing to "let Africans handle problems in Africa," as we did in Rwanda and as we are doing in Darfur.

Glenny doesn't acknowledge this, because to do would be to bring up his opposition to intervention in Bosnia in the 1990s. His argument is that in situations of international human rights violations, putting justice ahead of politics is impossible because you have to deal with the perpetrators of these crimes in order to defuse the crisis. A point of view which makes sense--as long as you accept the premise that the international community must always stand aside and leave the locals to their fate.