A nation on trial for its past

"We are in the process of creating the architecture of international accountability for human rights violations," says Nicholas Howen, head of the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists. "You need to hold individuals responsible, but there is a big gap if you can't say the machinery of a state is responsible, too."

The court's judgment, not expected until late this year, is eagerly awaited in Bosnia-Herzegovina. "I expect the court ... to give a good decision and say that Serbia is guilty," says Refik Begic, the Muslim mayor of Bratunac, a majority Serb town in eastern Bosnia. "If we are to trust each other and establish a good relationship, we need to know what happened here."

Serbian leaders, however, say that raking over the coals of the past will be bad for the future. The lawsuit could have "dramatically negative effects on future relations in the Balkans," Serbia's deputy prime minister, Miroljub Labus, told Nezavisne Novine, a newspaper published in Bosnia-Herzegovina's Serb-dominated Republika Srpska.

But in a region divided as much as anything by opposing memories and interpretations of what happened during the war "this [case] is about establishing the nature of the war, whether it was aggression or whether it was civil war," says Nerma Jelacic, a human rights investigator in Sarajevo.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), where Mr. Milosevic is on trial, has already ruled that genocide did occur in Bosnia. Although the ICJ is not bound by that precedent, "it would be very troubling, and troublesome for the coherence of international justice" if the ICJ judges find otherwise, says Professor Decaux.

It will not be easy, however, for the Bosnian side to establish the Yugoslav government's responsibility for the war crimes its proxy forces committed. Prosecutors at the ICTY have sometimes had trouble proving all the links in alleged chains of command between the battlefields and Belgrade, and Bosnian lawyers at the World Court will not be able to use all the evidence presented at the ICTY, some of which Belgrade provided only on the condition it not be released to third parties.

The hearings will continue until May 9, when the judges will retire to consider what they have heard, along with thousands of pages of legal arguments. That is expected to take several months. The case was first brought in 1993, and has been prolonged by repeated procedural incidents and political upheavals in Belgrade.

But rather than blunting the impact of the judgment, the long delay might actually give it greater force, suggests Mr. Howen. "It shows the timeless nature of the crimes, the timeless need for accountability, and the timeless nature of the law," he says.

Page: 1 | 2