Obituary for the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995)

By Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law, 12 December 1995

On 15 December 1995, the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina will be carved up in Paris by the United Nations, the European Union Member States, the United States, and the many other states in attendance, despite the United Nations Charter, the Nuremberg Principles, the Genocide Convention, the Four Geneva Conventions and their two Additional Protocols, the Racial Discrimination Convention, and the Apartheid Convention, inter alia, as well as two overwhelmingly favorable World Court Orders this author won for Bosnia on 8 April 1993 and 13 September 1993. This second World Court Order expressly prohibited such a partition of Bosnia by the vote of 13 to 2.

Bosnia is to be sacrificed on the altar of Great Power politics to the Machiavellian god of expedience. In 1938 the Great Powers of Europe did the exact same thing to Czechoslovakia at Munich. The partition of that nation state did not bring peace to Europe then. Partition of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina will not bring peace to Europe now.

This U.N.-sanctioned execution of a U.N. Member State violates every known principle of international law that has been formulated by the international community in the post-World War II era. This nihilistic carve-up of Bosnia indicates that the current regime of international law and organizations set up by the United States and Europe in direct reaction to the genocidal horrors of the Second World War is in the process of gradual but irretrievable disintegration. The unstopped genocide in Bosnia has already served as the harbinger to the genocide in Rwanda. Bosnia will become the precedent for the perpetration of similar mass slaughters around the world in the future.