A confidential United Nations report says the government of Sudan is flying arms and heavy military equipment into Darfur in violation of Security Council resolutions and painting Sudanese military planes white to disguise them as United Nations or African Union aircraft.

Lawyers interviewed in The Hague and Belgrade said that the outcome might well have been different had the International Court of Justice pressed for access to the full archives, and legal scholars and human rights groups said it was deeply troubling that the judges did not subpoena the documents directly from Serbia. . . . “It’s a question that nags loudly,” Diane Orentlicher, a law professor at American University in Washington, said recently in The Hague. “Why didn’t the court request the full documents? The fact that they were blacked out clearly implies these passages would have made a difference.”

But it's not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that it was a genocide, in the sense that there was a concerted attempt by the Turkish authorities to destroy every single Armenian.

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.

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.