ABSTRACT
Widespread disappointment greeted the near unanimous decision of the World Court in The Hague, formally known as the International Court of Justice (ICJ), to the effect that Former Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY; i.e., Serbia) was not guilty of genocide in Bosnia during the 1990s.1 The outcome, although troubling in some aspects and complex overall, should not be viewed as a defeat for the Bosnian side just because of this failure to hold Serbia legally responsible for genocide. The World Court did decide that the 1995 massacres at Srebrenica resulting in the deliberate killing of about 7,000 Bosnian Muslim males was “genocide.” It also held that the Serbian government in Belgrade failed to fulfill its duties under Article I of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (1951) by not doing what it could to prevent these events.2 And further that the Serbian refusal to arrest General Ratko Mladic, the commander of the Srebrenica operations who was known to be present in their territory, and turn him over to the criminal tribunal in The Netherlands for prosecution was a further breach of its legal duties.
