One year after the war began in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in April 1993, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Yugoslavia – then composed of Serbia and Montenegro – to "prevent the commission of the crime of genocide." However, it would take 14 years before the ICJ ruled on Bosnia and Herzegovina's complaint, with a mixed outcome for Sarajevo. "The acts (...) were committed with the specific intent to destroy in part the group of the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina" in Srebrenica, the judges stated in early 2007. Therefore, these acts constituted genocide. In July 1995, nearly 8,000 men of fighting age were executed one by one. Women and children, forcibly displaced far from the enclave, were spared.

However, the judges attributed responsibility for the acts to individual officers, not to Serbia itself. Belgrade was nonetheless found guilty of failing to prevent the genocide and punish its perpetrators. At the time, General Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb military and political leaders, were still on the run, evading arrest warrants from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

You have 68.9% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.