Acquittal of Serbia was scandalous!

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) sees its sharp criticism of the judgment of the International Court of Justice at The Hague confirmed in that the court has acquitted the regime in Belgrade on the charge of engineering the mass destruction in the whole of Bosnia-Herzegovina and found "only" the massacre of Srebrenica to be genocide. This decision of the Court of Justice was criticised immediately by the President of the GfbV International, Tilman Zülch, as a "scandalous miscarriage of justice".

The "New York Times" has now announced that the International Court of Justice refused before and during the trial to call for documents which had been kept secret by Belgrade, documents to which the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague had ready access. This latter had however according to the edition of Easter Monday given in to the Serb authorities during the previous case against Milosevic, stating that it would not make public these archives and documents.

Various prominent lawyers who were interviewed by the "New York Times" at The Hague and Belgrade stated: "The judgment in this case would probably have been different if the ICJ had carried out its duty." Diane Orentlicher, professor of law at the "American University" in Washington, commented: "Why did the ICJ not call for the full documents? The fact that important passages were blacked out implies that these were the ones which would have made the difference." At all events none of the 15 judges saw the censored archives. The Vice-President of the ICJ, Awn Shawkat al-Khasawneh from Jordan, wrote that it was regrettable that his court had not acted. It was sensible to expect that these documents would throw light on the "central questions". Thus in 1993, for example, more than 1800 officers and other not named ranks of the Yugoslavian army (JNA) were appointed, paid, promoted or retired in the Bosnian army, so that these, although nominally separated, formed in reality since 1992 an appendix of Serbia's army. Montenegro's former Prime Minister, Momir Bulatovic, wrote in his book "Unspoken Defense", which was published recently in English, that in 1994 more than 4000 Serb soldiers fighting in Bosnia were paid by Serbia. Another dissident judge, Ahmed Mahiou from Algeria, said that the inappropriate action of his ICJ colleagues in not calling for the material lay in the intention of not wanting to meddle with Serbia's sovereignty. Phon van den Biesen, a lawyer of the Bosnian team, inclined to the view that the delivery of the documents in full would have shown that the Bosnian-Serb forces were Serb agents controlled by Belgrade.

"A trustworthy judgment of the ICJ based on constitutional standards would have shown that the genocide against the Bosnians and the warfare against their pathetically armed units were centrally directed by Belgrade", said Zülch. Involved here were the Serb ministries of the interior and of defence, the Belgrade secret service and Serb armaments manufacturers. Paramilitary units and cadres of the Yugoslavian army were used. It is then hardly surprising that the two main war criminals, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, remain in hiding, shielded by the Serb military and the Serb authorities. The victims of the Milosevic regime were 90% Muslim Bosnians, who were to be destroyed as an ethnic and religious community either completely or partially.

Zülch pointed to the torment of the victims in at least 100 Serb concentration and internment camps, in which about 30,000 prisoners were murdered, to the planned rape of at least 30,000 women, some of whom were held for months in rape camps, to the systematic arrest and murder of members of the academic and political elites, to the encirclement, starvation and shelling, which lasted nearly four years, of about 500,000 Bosnians in the so-called UN protected zones of Bihac, Sarajevo, Srebrenica and Zepa, to the expulsion and flight of some 2.5 million Bosnians and the planned destruction of hundreds of villages and towns, of 1,300 mosques and about 500 Catholic churches.