Miroslav Milosevic, a photographer not related to the late president, jumped a fence in his hometown of Pozarevac to thrust a hawthorn pole into the tomb where [Slobodan Milosevic] was buried a year ago, the MTSMondo.com website said. The action by the former member of Otpor, the student movement that for years protested against Milosevic, was a medieval ritual used in eastern Serbia to kill off vampires or expel evil spirits.

Here is a debate that could occur only in Washington -- a bizarre mix of frivolity and moral seriousness, of constituent pandering, far-flung history and front-line foreign policy. And that's just on the American side; in Turkey there is the painful struggle of a deeply nationalist society to come to terms with its past, and in the process become more of the Western democracy it wants to be.

After all, historians outside of Turkey are pretty much unanimous in agreeing that atrocities against Armenians worthy of the term genocide did occur. Though Congress may look silly with its "findings," the continuing inability of the Turkish political class to come to terms with history, and temper its nationalism, may be the country's single most serious political problem. Prominent Turkish intellectuals, including a Nobel Prize winner, have been prosecuted in recent years under laws criminalizing "insults" to Turkey -- such as accurate accounts of the genocide. In January a prominent ethnic Armenian journalist was murdered by an ultranationalist teenager.

Political and humanitarian experts say oil in Darfur could deliver much-needed development and investment to the region but that attempts to search for oil now may intensify the conflict by raising the stakes in an already war-torn area. The government has recently awarded three new oil concessions in the region.

As is described below the Armed Forces and Militia/Janjaweed did not target any rebel presence within these particular towns and villages. Rather, they attacked these towns and villages based on the rationale that the tens of thousands of civilian residents in and near these towns and villages were supporters of the rebel militia. This strategy became the justification for the mass murder, summary execution, and mass rape of civilians who were known not to be participants in any armed conflict. Application of the strategy also called for, and achieved the forced displacement of entire villages and communities.

The court concluded that there was no genocide in Bosnia, except for the massacres in July 1995 around Srebrenica. Therefore, there could be no question of FRY responsibility for genocide, except with regard to its responsibility for Srebrenica. Because the ICJ was exercising jurisdiction under the Genocide Convention, it did not determine whether crimes against humanity or war crimes had been committed or FRY responsibilities for such crimes.

The FRY was not directly responsible for the genocide at Srebrenica, because the Bosnian Serb military units that carried out the Srebrenica massacres were not legally “organs” of the FRY, nor were the Bosnian Serb political and military leaders acting under the direction or control of the FRY.

The FRY was not responsible for “complicity in genocide,” a separate offense under the Genocide Convention, because it was not established that the FRY provided aid or assistance to the perpetrators at Srebrenica with knowledge that those perpetrators had the specific intent to commit genocide.

The court did, however, conclude that the FRY violated its duty to try to prevent genocide:

In view of their undeniable influence and of the information, voicing serious concern, in their possession, the Yugoslav federal authorities should, in the view of the Court, have made the best efforts within their power to try and prevent the tragic events then taking shape [at Srebrenica in July 1995], whose scale, though it could not have been foreseen with certainty, might at least have been surmised.

The violence is neither spontaneous nor popular. Displaced people view the most extreme religious fronts—the Office of Muqtada al-Sadr and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) on the Shi'a side, and the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS) and the Islamic Party on the Sunni side—as the main drivers of sectarian displacement. The displacement clearly helps further the political agenda of these extremist groups. The groups all share in fact common goals: to consolidate their territory, to maintain some of 'their' people in the territory of the 'other' and, in the context of a feeble government, to pose as both protector and provider.

First of all on this, I read a report suggesting that this is again an unsubstantiated report on the organization of genocide. I have not taken any action on either downgrading – this was a wrong report – and I am looking at the shortlist of nominating a successor to Mr. Mendez on this matter. I have a high priority on this very important issue, to prevent genocide.

"We are seeing elements that closely resemble what we saw in Rwanda in the genocide in 1994 and I think we have an opportunity here to avoid such a tragedy from occurring again," UNHCR's Matthew Conway said.