The basic American mistake in dealing with Pakistan has been to put all its money on the country’s autocratic ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, who came to power in a bloodless coup in 1999, and to dismiss a democratic alternative as too messy, an inclination which was magnified once the ‘war on terror’ came along. Indeed, Musharraf’s coup was cautiously welcomed by many Pakistanis who were fed up with the venality of their democratically elected leaders. The relatively brief spells of democracy that the country had experienced since emerging from the partition of India in 1947 had not been especially happy and Musharraf seemed a rather enlightened sort of military ruler. The decisive moment in his relationship with Washington came immediately after 11 September 2001, when the US confronted him with the choice of supporting the Americans’ anti-terrorism campaign or feel the wrath of a bellicose administration bent on revenge.

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Communication between NATO and the EU, which have largely overlapping membership, is good in the field but dysfunctional at the political level, according to officials and experts.

This could undercut NATO’s 16,000-strong peacekeeping force in Kosovo, KFOR, if the province’s unilateral declaration of independence, expected early next year, leads to unrest.

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In an interview with European Voice, Rehn said that he had conveyed the message to Tadic the previous Wednesday (7 November).

“We have made it clear that we expect that Serbia will not interfere in the domestic politics of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Rehn said.

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The trade embargo against the Soviet Union was partial and half-hearted: Germany was opposed, Greece was exempt and Denmark’s participation was limited to refusing to allow goods to be shipped through its territory to or from states that were implementing the sanctions.

But the sanctions on the agenda of the EU foreign ministers’ meeting this week (15-16 October) were quite different. The ‘dumb sanctions’ of the 1980s and 1990s – blanket trade embargoes against rogue regimes in South Africa, Yugoslavia and Iraq – have been replaced by ‘smart sanctions’ that minimise the effects on the general population by targeting individuals who are directly implicated in the events that triggered the measures in the first place.

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A source of particular concern is that the EU operation in Chad will have to work closely with a contingent of United Nations police there and with a joint AU-UN military force in Darfur. Peacekeeping co-operation between the EU and the UN has steadily improved over the past few years, according to experts, but it still tends to be ad hoc, depending on personality and diplomatic alignments and hence vulnerable to misunderstandings and politics.

And then there is the classic recipe for peacekeeping disaster: deploying peacekeepers where there is no peace to keep. As the Darfur rebels have splintered, achieving a political settlement of the conflict may well be more difficult than it has ever been. Most of the UN’s thinking and planning has evolved around the number of troops needed in Darfur, says Richard Gowan, a research associate at New York University’s Center on International Co-operation, but Darfur’s collapse into political anarchy, of which the killings seem to be one symptom, means that the political basis for a deployment is absent.

“Just throwing troops into a situation will not help resolve it,” Gowan says.

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Srebrenica’s fall signaled the end of the United Nations’ ill-fated humanitarian mission in Bosnia. It also prompted the United States to come up with a strategy for a military and diplomatic endgame in Bosnia, which a few months later produced the Dayton peace accords. The Dayton accords gave the Bosnian Serb entity, the Republika Srpska, far-reaching autonomy and confirmed its hold over Srebrenica.

Today, many Bosnians — though not, on the whole, the country’s Serbs — share the growing concern among international policymakers that the constitution that came as part of Dayton has outlived its usefulness. Its complex ethnic quotas and veto points have greatly complicated the country’s recovery and continue to prevent closer ties with the European Union.

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In the past, Bosnians and Bosnia-watchers would carefully vet an incoming high representative for signs that he might depart from his predecessor’s policies or take dramatic steps in implementing the mandate of his office, the OHR. No such scrutiny awaits Miroslav Lajcak, a top diplomat in the Slovak Foreign Ministry, when he takes over from Christian Schwarz-Schilling of Germany in late June. Instead, there’s a widespread feeling that things can only get better and a suspicion that it might not matter anyway.

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The OHR was established to implement the Dayton peace agreement of November 1995 and has extensive powers over Bosnia’s domestic politics. In late 1997, after a difficult start under Carl Bildt, the OHR was handed the authority to enact or revoke legislation; dismiss public officials and bar them from holding office in the future; vet candidates for public office; and fine or ban political parties.

These so-called Bonn powers have since become the focus of an intense though largely academic debate about the legitimacy of using nondemocratic means to build democracy. The lack of an appeals or review procedure prompted particularly harsh, and justified, criticism even from observers who were sympathetic to the notion that the difficult transition from war to peace required robust tools.

High Representative Wolfgang Petritsch put the notion of “local ownership” at the center of his tenure, from 1999 to 2002, but did not shy away from using the Bonn powers where necessary. Under his successor, Paddy Ashdown, Bonn decisions reached their peak, and Ashdown’s forceful manner provoked angry shouts from the sidelines.

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A genocide verdict would have required proof that the government of then-Yugoslavia (whose legal successor is Serbia) intended to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such,” as outlined in the 1948 Genocide Convention. It was clear from the very beginning that such intent would be extremely difficult to prove, not least because Serbia has not been forthcoming in granting access to government documents that might shed light on the complex ties it maintained with the Bosnian Serbs.

The ruling therefore reflects the state of knowledge as of today, a little over 11 years after the war ended. It is unlikely to be the last word even though no appeal is possible: history will continue to be amended every time new evidence comes to light. This concerns above all the court’s finding that neither the Bosnian Serb republic nor its army “could be regarded as mere instruments through which [then-Yugoslavia] was acting,” and that “the acts of genocide at Srebrenica cannot be attributed to the Respondent as having been committed by its organs or by persons or entities wholly dependent upon it, and thus do not on this basis entail the Respondent’s international responsibility.”

Since it is open to revision, the verdict will not bring closure to the dispute between competing historical interpretations of the war in Bosnia. Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Republika Srpska will continue to maintain that it was a bloody civil war in which all sides committed atrocities, while Muslims and Croats will continue to see it as a war of aggression waged by Serbia on a newly independent member of the United Nations. But taken in their totality, the facts established by the ICTY and now the ICJ suggest a picture with considerably more shades of gray than either side would like to admit.

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