Credit for inspiring this volume belongs primarily to the Bologna-based Giuseppe Torre Foundation. Two essays in this book, “ICTY and Srebrenica” and “When justice fails: Re-raising the question of ethnic bias at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)” shared first prize in the Foundation’s 2018 competition.
In “When justice fails” the young American scholar of Serbian descent Jovan Milojevich investigates the possibility of bias in ICTY verdicts. His meticulously documented study reaches the sad conclusion that “the only factors that predicted verdict and sentencing were defendant ethnicity and victim ethnicity.” If correct, that sounds like a far cry from blindfolded justice.
In “The ICTY’s open contempt for justice”, distinguished international lawyer Christopher Black dissects the inner workings of the Hague and Rwanda ad hoc tribunals, in both of which he has practiced. His report, if accurate, does not bode well for the future of international justice.
Political scientist Višeslav Simić asks many pertinent questions about the impact of the Hague Tribunal on local co-existence and reconciliation in “Perceptions of injustice: The ICTY has planted the seeds of future Balkan wars,” plainly suggesting (and amply documenting) his perspective from the title on.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, colloquially known as ICTY or the Hague Tribunal, is a peculiar institution. It was illegally set up in 1993 in contravention of the UN Charter and with heavy hints of intelligence agency involvement,[1] it has violated elementary principles of judicial independence by allowing itself to be largely staffed and financed by states with a political interest in the outcome of its proceedings, and it has dutifully produced boiler plate verdicts often devoid of substantive evidence but heavy on “conventional wisdom”.[2] Yet over twenty years later, it is an institution that continues to simulate a proper international court and still finds an audience that is willing to take it seriously.
That is particularly blatant in the case of the Srebrenica controversy. ICTY is the main prop of the bankrupt conventional narrative about Srebrenica, which consists essentially of two tirelessly repeated refrains, blended together by wartime propaganda: “genocide” and “8,000 executed men and boys”. Once a war is over the propaganda which accompanied it normally recedes into oblivion. No one today takes seriously the allegation, common in World War I, that German soldiers were eating Belgian babies for breakfast. Once it became unnecessary to generate outrage and rouse the fighting spirit, like many similarly outlandish allegations that one also was quietly shelved. The same assuredly would have been the fate of the Srebrenica narrative but for the fact that its political uses transcended the conflict in which it was spawned. Whatever tactical purposes Srebrenica may have served at its inception in July of 1995 (such as overshadowing the NATO-orchestrated Croat ethnic cleansing and murder rampage in Krajina which began three weeks later, as freely admitted by US ambassador in Zagreb at the time, Peter Galbraith,[3] or preventing hard-line Bosnian Serb leaders from participating in the Dayton peace conference, as confirmed by Galbraith’s diplomatic colleague, Richard Holbrooke[4]) shortly thereafter, as it turned out, Srebrenica was assigned some strategic political tasks as well.
To name a few, Srebrenica soon evolved into the founding myth of the Bosnian Muslim ethnicity. It emerged also as the generator of a seemingly permanent rift between Muslim and Orthodox communities in Bosnia, the two largest, necessitating in turn the permanent presence of imperialist forces supposedly to ensure stability and maintain peace between the opposing factions. And last, but not least, it was transfigured into a handy rationale for the imperialist doctrine of R2P, Right to Protect. In its practical application – inspired by the slogan “never another Srebrenica” – the doctrine has led to several destructive and illegal Western military interventions motivated by narrow geopolitical interests and plain plunder. Those “humanitarian” wars have so far cost several million – paradoxically mostly Muslim – lives.
Without the quasi-judicial veneer provided by the Hague Tribunal’s mercenary treatment of Srebrenica, arguably much of the above would not have happened or at least could not have been as easily accomplished. Nor could – in the eyes of many superficially informed laymen – the “conventional wisdom” of the Srebrenica wartime propaganda narrative have been ostensibly validated by what is misleadingly packaged to appear as a serious international judicial institution.
Stephen Karganovic,
President, Srebrenica Historical Project
Endnotes:
[1] See DCI Interagency Task Force, February 1, 1993, p. 7, policy recommendations addressed to CIA director, including “Establish a War Crimes Tribunal, CIA Historical Balkan Task Force Collections Division document #C05916707
[2] The phrase is gratefully borrowed from: Jokic, A. “Conventional Wisdom About Yugoslavia and Rwanda: Methodological Perils and Moral Implications,” Journal of Philosophy of International Law, (2013) v.4(1)
[3] Interview in Nedeljnik (Belgrade), November 22-29, 2012.
[4] ICTY a “useful tool,” quoted in Schabas, W., The UN International Criminal Tribunals [Cambridge University Press, 2006], p. 21. Directly on point, see “we used the indictments to prevent Karadzic and Mladic from coming to Dayton,” in Foreign Policy Online, July 24, 2008 (https://foreignpolicy.com/2008/07/24/seven-questions-richard-holbrooke-on-radovan-karadzic/ )
