Bosnian papers put brave face on U.N. ruling

SARAJEVO (Reuters) - Sarajevo newspapers on Tuesday tried to put a brave face on the World Court's ruling that cleared Serbia of genocide but found it guilty of failing to prevent it, saying it could avert atrocities in the future.

Commentators said the International Court of Justice's (ICJ) ruling on Monday was reminiscent of what they called the United Nations' hypocrisy of trying to stop the 1992-95 war through an arms embargo that deprived Bosnia of the means to defend itself.

At least 100,000 people died in the fighting, three quarters of them Muslims and Croats. Bosnian Serbs, backed by Serbia, swept swathes of land clean of non-Serbs, culminating in the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica.

"Only the most unrepentant idealists could have expected that a verdict based on justice would arrive from The Hague yesterday," Sejad Luckin wrote in Bosnia's best-selling Dnevni Avaz daily.

"But even that futile international community, which primarily respects the law of force, and the international court could not have closed their eyes in the face of undisputable facts," wrote Luckin, a Muslim.

Bosnia had asked the ICJ to rule on whether Serbia committed genocide through the killing, rape and ethnic cleansing that ravaged Bosnia, in one of the court's biggest cases in its 60-year history.

Muslim politicians had hoped that a conviction on all counts would help reverse the division of the country under the 1995 Dayton peace treaty into a Muslim-Croat federation and a Serb Republic, which they claim was founded on genocide.

The ICJ said the court concluded the Srebrenica massacre constitute genocide, but the Serbian state could not be held responsible for the mass killing, or complicity in the act.

War veterans and victims' families will hold a "Justice for Victims" rally later on Tuesday to protest the verdict.

The decision was nevertheless "historic", Luckin said, because it established that genocide did take place, even if only in Srebrenica, and that Serbia did nothing to prevent it or to punish the perpetrators.

"For the first time in history it was said that genocide was committed against a people and because of that Serbia needs to take legal, political and moral responsibility because it did not stop the evil, and it could have done so," he said.

For Zija Dizdarevic of the Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje said the ruling would offer no comfort to the victims and their families but should be the first step to those who want to build a better future.

"All in all, the ruling of the international court needs to be accepted as a kind of a contribution in the prevention of war and genocide," Dizdarevic wrote.

Bosnian Serbs opposed the lawsuit filed by Bosnia's Muslim-led wartime government and front-page headline in the Bosnian Serb newspaper Glas Srpske said the ruling was a "Verdict Based on Truth".