BELGRADE, Serbia — The United Nations’s highest court blamed Serbia yesterday for failing to stop the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. But in an historic ruling, it cleared the Serbian state of direct responsibility for genocide during the Balkans war of the 1990s.

Fourteen years after the Bosnian government issued a writ alleging genocide against Belgrade, the president of the International Court of Justice in the Hague spent nearly three hours reading out a judgment that dismayed Bosnian Muslims.

The British president of the court, Rosalyn Higgins, said the judges concluded by a 13–2 vote that the slaughter of Islamic men and boys in July 1995 — the worst incident of its type in Europe since World War II — was an act of genocide.

But it decided it could not be proved that the Serbian state deliberately intended to “destroy in whole or in part” the population of Bosnian Muslims — a critical element in the 1948 Genocide Convention. In the first case where an entire nation was being held to judicial account for genocide, the judges found that Serbia, though it supported the Bosnian Serbs, fell short of having effective control over the Bosnian army and the paramilitary units that carried out the massacre.

It also rejected Bosnia’s claim for monetary reparation. “Financial compensation is not the appropriate form of reparation for the breach of the obligation to prevent genocide,” the judgment said.

However, it specifically demanded that Serbia hand over for trial the military commander who oversaw the Bosnian Serb onslaught at Srebrenica, General Ratko Mladic, to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which has so far found four Serbs guilty of genocide.

The ruling raised the possibility that the former Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, would have been found innocent of at least one charge against him, which involved the genocide at Srebrenica. He died in the United Nations’s jail in the Hague last March.