A nation on trial for its past

Serbia and Montenegro, already struggling to find its place in Europe, risks becoming the first state ever to be formally branded genocidal, as judges at the World Bank last week began hearing arguments in a Bosnian lawsuit over crimes committed during the war in the early 1990s.

The case could make Serbia, as the successor state to Yugoslavia, liable for tens of billions of dollars in reparations. But Bosnian Muslims say the suit's importance lies elsewhere, in creating an accurate and unchallengeable account of the conflict, which continues to poison regional politics.

"For our future, to have clean relations with our neighbors, we need to have a clear vision of our past and our future," says Sakib Softic, the lead Bosnian lawyer at the World Court in The Hague. "The international court has the authority, with its judgment, to finish up these questions from our past and move on toward the future."

While another international court in The Hague is trying individuals - including former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic - for war crimes, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), as the World Court is officially known, hears cases between states.

Bosnia must prove to the court not only that genocide occurred, through the policy of "ethnic cleansing," but that the Bosnian Serb militias committing it did so on the orders of Yugoslav government officials, and with their support.

The Bosnian side "seeks to establish responsibility of a state which, through its leadership and through its organs, committed the most brutal violations of ... the most sacred instruments of international law," Mr. Softic told the 16-judge panel in his opening statement last week.

When they present their oral arguments this week, Serbia's lawyers are expected to argue that the court has no jurisdiction over the case because when it was brought in 1993, the former Republic of Yugoslavia was not clearly recognized as a member of the United Nations, and thus not of the ICJ either.

It was on those grounds that in 2004 the court dismissed a suit filed by Serbia and Montenegro against the US-led bombing of Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo war.

Serbia's lawyers are also expected to argue that however horrific the crimes committed in Bosnia by Bosnian Serb forces, such as the massacre of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys near Srebrenica, the authorities in Belgrade were not responsible for them.

The case will challenge the ICJ, which is more accustomed to dealing with reconciling territorial claims in boundary disputes between nations. "This is a very, very political affair, and the decision will be a grave one," says Emmanuel Decaux, an international law professor at the University of Paris II.

In the field of international humanitarian law, the ICJ has been overshadowed by ad hoc war-crimes tribunals like those set up in The Hague to try cases arising from the Balkan wars, and in Arusha, Tanzania, to deal with those responsible for the Rwandan genocide, and by the recently created International Criminal Court, which has yet to hear a case.

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