Bosnians decry genocide ruling

Bosnians who had long hoped for the truth about the 1992-95 war to be acknowledged felt cheated. Zeljko Komsic, a Bosnian Croat leader, said: “We who were in Bosnia know what happened here right from the beginning of the war and I know what I will teach my kids.”

 

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“If a country has deliberately planned and carried out genocide, it should be responsible for its acts.” Adolfo Talpalar, Stockholm, Sweden   Send us your views

Serb human rights campaigners said ultranationalists who deny war crimes, or claim all were equally guilty, would gloat.

 

Vojislav Kostunica, Serbia’s caretaker prime minister, issued a statement which did not acknowledge any Serb guilt.

 

“The ruling … is particularly important because it has freed Serbia of the serious accusation that it committed genocide,” he said. “Light must be shed on all war crimes and their perpetrators, and must be punished in a court of law.”

 

At least 100,000 people died in the fighting, three quarters of them Muslims and Croats.

 

Bosnian Serbs using the might of the Yugoslav Army against their lighter-armed adversaries swept swathes of land clean of non-Serbs, culminating in Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II, at Srebrenica.

 

 

Aleksandar Popov of the Igman Initiative group for normalising Serbia-Bosnia relations called the verdict a “symbolic slap” and predicted “gloating” by nationalists.

 

For Bosnian Serbs who opposed the lawsuit filed by Bosnia’s Muslim-led government in 1993, the ICJ ruling established that their republic was not founded on genocide, as Silajdzic argues, and should not be dissolved.

 

In Detail

International Court of Justice judgment Background: Srebrenica genocide

Igor Radojicic, the speaker of the Serb Republic parliament, said: “This ruling sends a message that the survival of the Serb Republic is unquestionable.”

 

For Fatija Suljic, 60, who lost her husband and three sons at Srebrenica, the ICJ’s ruling was “a disaster for our people”.

 

Nenad Canak, of Serbia’s new Social Democrat-Liberal Democratic coalition, said of the ruling: “The only thing I can say is to remind you of the words of Primo Levi written on a wall in Dachau. ‘The man who denies Auschwitz is the same one who is ready to repeat it’.”