Recent IWPR article reviews differing opinions about the possible effect of Milosevic's death upon the lawsuit brought against Serbia by B-H before the International Court of Justic

When the team of lawyers representing Belgrade in Bosnia's genocide case
against Serbia and Montenegro packed their briefcases last Friday and left
the imposing baroque Justice Hall of the International Court of Justice,
ICJ, little did they know that just a day later their case would get an
unexpected boost - a man who was inextricably linked to this lawsuit, and
probably the main reason Serbia has a case to answer to, died an innocent
man.

Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic died of a heart attack on March
11, just months before the Hague's war crimes tribunal, ICTY, was to
expected complete the case, and render a judgment on the charges against
him, which included allegations of genocide in Bosnia.

A conviction, say all observers, could have had a great impact on Bosnia's
case against Serbia at the ICJ. ‘If Milosevic had been convicted of
genocide [in Bosnia], it would definitely have had a negative effect on our
case,’ member of the Serbian team Tibor Varadi told Belgrade news agency
Beta, a few days after Milosevic was found dead.

‘That means ICJ will now have to make a decision without having the
foundation of a Hague tribunal decision to follow.’

In a landmark suit, which was launched 13 years ago and is the first of its
kind, Sarajevo hopes to prove that Serbia - under Milosevic's rule at that
time - was responsible for genocide against Bosnia's non-Serb population
during the 1992-95 war.

Varadi's claim that Bosnia's case has been ‘seriously weakened’ by
Milosevic's death was rejected out of hand by the Sarajevo team as
‘completely unfounded’.

‘His death will have no effect on this case whatsoever,’ Bosnia's legal
representative Sakib Softic told IWPR.

Milosevic's Belgrade lawyer Toma Fila triumphantly told news agencies
shortly after his client's death that evidence presented during Milosevic's
four-year trial will now be useless to anyone, especially to the team
representing Bosnia in its genocide case against Serbia.

Natasa Kandic, a leading human rights activist in Serbia, who has provided
important evidence to the UN war crimes prosecutors in Milosevic's case,
disagrees.
Even though she recently told Bosnian television Hayat that Milosevic's
death before the end of the trial has caused ‘historic damage’, she added
that ‘all the evidence and all the documents presented during the open
hearings remain, they are valid and can be used in .Bosnia's case against
Serbia and Montenegro’.

There is no doubt that Milosevic's name was closely linked to the case. As
they laid out their case, the Sarajevo team used much of two years' worth of
evidence presented during the prosecution phase of Milosevic's trial. This
was the evidence that had already convinced ICTY judges that he had a case
to answer about genocide in Bosnia.

‘He left when we needed him most,’ an ironic Zadravko Grebo, a Sarajevo law
professor, told Bosnian television station Hayat, the day Milosevic died,
summing up the frustration of most Bosnia's citizens with this unexpected
turn of events.

Whether their expectations were realistic or not, many Bosnians hoped that
Milosevic would have been found guilty of genocide before the end of this
year. If that had been before the decision on Bosnia's lawsuit had been
delivered, this would, they think, undoubtedly have increased the country's
chance of winning the case.

‘The death of Slobodan Milosevic is the worst thing that could have happened
to us,’ said Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje reporter Nagorka Idrizovic, who has
followed the hearings at the ICJ since their beginning.

‘If he had been found guilty of genocide, that would have been extremely
valuable for Bosnia's case. And more importantly, the main perpetrator of
that crime would have a name,’ she said.

Despite Milosevic's unexpected demise, it was business as usual for the ICJ
this week. The Serbian team continued presenting their arguments in a manner
which was ‘quite predictable’, observers told IWPR.

This week, lawyers dedicated a significant portion of the hearings to the
events in Srebrenica in July 1995, which have already been judged by the
ICTY as genocide.

In his presentation on March 13 and 14, British lawyer Ian Brownlie
described the murders of about 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica
following its takeover by Bosnian Serb forces as ‘local reprisals’.

‘No long-term planning was involved, and certainly no planning in Belgrade,’
he told the court.

He quoted further from the report of the Netherlands Institute for War
Documentation on Srebrenica published in 2002, which stated that ‘there isno evidence to suggest any political or military liaison with Belgrade, and
in the case of this mass murder such a liaison is highly improbable’.

‘The report does not contain any suggestion that the Belgrade government had
advance knowledge of the attack,’ suggested Brownlie.

He went on to say that ‘Republika Srpska and its armed forces were not under
the effective control of the Belgrade government’ nor ‘by the Yugoslav army’
and he accused the Bosnian team of ignoring the ‘substantial evidence of the
status of Republika Srpska as an independent state and the clear evidence
that as of May 1992 General [Ratko] Mladic no longer accepted instructions
from Belgrade’.

On March 15, Brownlie's French colleague Xavier de Roux accused Bosnia of
using ‘propaganda and misinformation’ as a weapon of war ‘just as effective
as many divisions of troops’.

He said the Sarajevo authorities ‘understood very quickly that they should
present themselves as a weak and innocent victim of war faced with the
powerful force’. To achieve that goal, Roux said they even engaged a famous
American public relations agency, Rudder & Finn Global Public Affairs,
which, according to Roux, had the job of convincing international public
opinion that Bosnian Muslims were the victims of genocide.

De Roux quoted an interview apparently given by the agency's director James
Harff in October 1993, in which he said that the agency presented ‘a simple
story of good guys and bad guys’, and that they mainly targeted ‘Jewish
audience’, using words with ‘high emotional content such as ethnic
cleansing, concentration camps, etc’ to a great effect.

‘The emotional charge was so powerful that nobody could go against it’, de
Roux quoted Harff as saying in this interview.

The French lawyer said he did not deny that the camps in Bosnia, such as
Manjaca, Omarska, Trnopolje, Keraterm and other notorious Serb-held prison
camps ‘were contrary to humanitarian law and were often against the laws of
war’, but insisted they were not ‘concentration camps’ as they were often
described in the press. He also put it to the court that they were not as
nearly as bad as the camps in which Jews were held during the Se

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