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Were ICTY trials known for compelling witness evidence?
No, quite the reverse. Some of those who claimed to be massacre survivors gave dramatic testimony. But most gave it anonymously by remote link, without corroboration. The ‘evidence’ which secured the guilty verdicts achieved during the 24-year life of the ICTY featured only one star prosecution witness, Drazen Erdemovic. He gave testimony in many all of the major genocide trials.
Was his testimony powerful?
The Tribunal thought so. Others were much less impressed. Erdemovic was a mercenary who had fought for all sides in the Yugoslav conflicts. He had known mental health problems and was initially deemed unfit to stand trial. But when he was offered and accepted a plea-bargain deal, he was suddenly a perfect witness.
What did he claim?
He said in repeated trials that he had been part of a special unit which had executed some 1200 Bosnian Muslims near Srebrenica in the space of a few hours.
Why are there doubts about what he said?
On top of the fact that his testimony earned him – a self-confessed murderer of around 100 people – an extremely lenient sentence, his story was doubted for numerous other reasons. In particular, his seven accomplices were never interviewed by the ICTY even though their names and addresses were publicly known and the Court had promised that they would be.
Was there anything else?
Other doubts concerned his claims to have been in charge of the operation, though there were other more senior soldiers in his unit. Author Germinal Civikov raised devastating practical doubts about the possibility of 1200 people being executed in the way Erdemovic described within such a short space of time. And Erdemovic’s claim that his unit was working for the Bosnian Serbs was conclusively disproved.
What does this tell us?
That throughout its existence the ICTY had the greatest difficulty in producing any substantive evidence to support its indictments. All the smoking guns turned out to be spluttering penny bangers. Damning ‘intercept recordings’ turned out to have been destroyed and only existed in transcript form. The infamous “Greater Serbia” master plan turned out to be full of Croatian spellings expressions and was clearly a forgery. Many of the massacre witnesses gave indications of being coached. Many prosecution witnesses changed their stories under cross-examination.
So how did so many defendants get convicted?
All sorts of evidence was admitted as fact when it should have been ruled inadmissible. For example, the forensic and DNA evidence collected by the International Commission for Missing Persons was never presented to the court. Huge amounts of hearsay evidence were admitted. There was plea bargaining and many other abuses of proper justice.
Why was nothing done about this?
The ICTY was a law unto itself.