The International Court of Justice is to make a landmark ruling on Monday on whether Serbia masterminded genocide in Bosnia during the bloody 1992-95 occupation try.

It will be the first time that the ICJ, the UN's top court set up to deal with disputes between states, will rule in a genocide case. Genocide was made an international crime under a 1948 treaty.

Bosnia has accused Serbia of masterminding the widespread "ethnic cleansing" of Bosnian Muslims and Croats during the 1992-95 war, saying it amounted to genocide.

The Bosnian government has demanded reparations while Serbia has insisted the ICJ has no jurisdiction in the matter.

The 16-judge ICJ panel is expected to take several hours to read its verdict Monday. The ruling is final with no appeal.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the UN's ad hoc war crimes court, has handed down many verdicts relating to Bosnia but they were limited to certain events or the guilt of key people.

The only trial that tackled the whole of the Bosnian war and Serbia's involvement was against former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. But it never ended as Milosevic died last March before the proceedings ended.

In hearings before the ICJ in February last year Bosnia asked the court to conclude that the killings and rapes during the Bosnian war were "international genocide" orchestrated by Belgrade.

Proving genocide requires establishing intent to destroy a group, in whole or in part, as well as demonstrating that genocidal acts took place.

The trial was given evidence about events such as the massacre of Muslims from the town of Srebrenica near the end of the war. After capturing the town, Serb forces summarily killed more than 8,000 men and boys.

The Srebrenica massacre is the only event in the Bosnian war that the ICTY has ruled genocide. The judges there have already handed down two individual genocide convictions against Bosnian Serb officers who captured the enclave.

Legal experts say that proving Serbia as a state or Milosevic as its president had the intent to commit genocide in Bosnia is extremely difficult.

Because the ICJ was called upon to rule in a dispute about genocide, a ruling that Serbia was involved in "ethnic cleansing" cannot lead to a conviction or reparation payments.

In Bosnia people are bracing for the verdict. The case before the ICJ has been one of the most divisive issues within the country, which was split into two political entities -- the Bosnian Serbs' Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation -- at the end of the war.

PHOTO CAPTION

Names of victims of the 1995 Serb massacre of 8,000 Muslims in the former U.N. 'safe area' Srebrenica are seen in front of their graves at a cemetery in Potocari February 24, 2007.