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How thorough was the ICTY’s research on the Balkan Conflicts?
Woefully inadequate, by all indications
What indications?
Judging by the many times lengthy extracts were shown during ICTY trials, the BBC documentary series ‘The Death of Yugoslavia’ was The Hague Tribunal’s guiding star throughout its existence. There are few signs that the ICTY ever questioned the flawed thesis it outlined.
What else?
The ICTY steadfastly ignored independent research. For instance, the enormous Dutch study of Srebrenica took 5 years to complete and ran to 7,000 pages. Scholars consider it perhaps the most painstaking and detailed study ever carried out on a conflict. The Hague Tribunal dismissed it as ‘not relevant to the criminal cases we’re conducting at the Tribunal’. Any proper court would have considered it a vital source of evidence.
Why did the ICTY take this position?
Dr Cees Wiebes, leader of the Dutch team, was interviewed on BBC Radio in 2004: “What I heard from good sources at the tribunal is that Ms Del Ponte (the ICTY Chief Prosecutor) thinks we are too ‘nuanced’, we are not seeing things in black and white, and good military experts in our team were never consulted.”
Wasn’t the Tribunal within its rights to think this way?
Not if it was a genuine court of justice. The fundamental aim of a court should be to test all the evidence as thoroughly as possible to uncover the truth about what took place. The Hague Tribunal was quite clearly interested only in information that would support its indictments.
But surely they had a pretty good grip on the facts?
There is no indication of that. Indeed, quite the reverse. Why else would they fail to interview the 7 accomplices of their ‘star witness’ Drazen Erdemovic? They never approached these men, despite knowing exactly where they were. Prosecutors would not take the risk that Erdemovic’s colleagues would destroy the strongest evidence they had. The Hague Tribunal was not concerned with facts, nor with the truth.
What was the consequence of all this?
The ICTY trials were no less than ‘witch hunts’. The best principles of modern jurisprudence were cast aside in favour of the crudest and cruellest medieval standards – to the deepest lasting shame of the UN and the international community.