I have been made aware of a recent lecture with the title “Legal Process as a Tool to Rewrite History”by Sir Geoffrey
Nice, who was a prosecutor in the trial against Slobodan Milosevic.
The lecture, a transcript of which is available on the
internet, contained an interesting discussion about the limitations on the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia’s (ICTY) ability to
provide a balanced and complete historical record of the wars in the former
Yugoslavia. In particular, it notes that ICTY’s ability to fully determine
Serbia’s involvement in the Bosnian war was constrained by not being able to
fully access Supreme Defence Council documents in Belgrade. Also of interest is
Sir Geoffrey’s observation that the leaking in 2003 of ICTY documents
constituting an investigation into allegations of Kosovo Albanian leaders’
involvement in “organ harvesting” has helped to “taint all Kosovars.”
Another limitation of the ICTY which is not discussed in the
lecture but strikes me as important is that its contribution to the historical
record largely depends on whether potential indictees are available to the
court or not. Many believe that the former Croatian president Franjo Tudjman
should have been put on trial for war crimes against Serbs in Croatia and
against Muslims in Bosnia. Had he lived for another 10 years, this may well
have happened. Such a trial would probably have helped to cement the conventional
wisdom that the Muslim-Croat civil war of 1993 to 1994 was caused by Croatian
interference. General Gotovina’s acquittal last year following an appeal
against his conviction for war crimes against Serbs in Croatia in 1995 seems to
me to have greatly enhanced Croatia’s international reputation. The effect
would have been much greater had Tudjman been acquitted of the same crimes.
Whether it intends to or not, the ICTY plays a central role in writing the
history of the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
Sir Geoffrey appears to believe that this is not the ICTY’s
intention:
“We must recall that all judges at all these courts do say
that they do not write history in their judgments - and they don’t,” he says.
To support his claim he quotes the summary of
the judgement in the Kupreskic case which concerned Croat crimes against
Muslims in central Bosnia in 1993:
‘the primary task of this Trial Chamber was not to construct
a historical record of modern human horrors in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The
principal duty of our Trial Chamber was simply to decide whether the six
defendants standing trial were guilty of partaking in this persecutory violence
or whether they were instead extraneous to it and hence, not guilty."
Note the use of the words “primary” and “principal” in this
quotation, which leave open the possibility that constructing a historical
record of the Bosnian war is at least a secondary task of the ICTY. Other
statements, such as the following from the judgement against Dario Kordic,
another Bosnian Croat convicted for crimes against Muslims in central Bosnia,
suggest that it is very much in the business of writing history:
“ [Franjo Tudjman] harboured territorial ambitions in
respect of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and that was part of his dream of a Greater
Croatia, including Western Herzegovina and Central Bosnia.”
The ICTY’s desire to control the narrative of the 1990s
Balkan wars was also strongly suggested by a letter to the Swedish state
broadcaster in 2011, which I discussed in a previous post: http://rgallivan.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/combating-revisionism-controlling-past.html. The letter seeks to undermine various assertions made in a documentary about the Srebrenica massacre, even when these assertions do not contradict the ICTY's judgment that genocide occured there in 1995. This has the effect of stifling legitimate debate about the nature of the Bosnian war.
The ICTY has uncovered many important facts about the conflicts
in the former Yugoslavia, which is to be welcomed. Its tendency to tell us
how to interpret these facts is not.
6 comments:
Hi Rory,
The problem with ICTY is that they focus too narrowly on only specific war crimes. For example, there was no attempt of the ICTY to explain what led to the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, but we know that Serbian ethnic cleansing campaign -- burning Muslim villages, persecution and mass murder of Muslims in eastern Bosnia in the first months of Bosnian war (1992) -- was central cause of the July 1995 genocide in Srebrenica.
But again, ICTY fails terribly in giving a proper perspective of war. They equate victims with agressors and have prosecuted only 1 person in relation to burning of Muslim villages in April/May 1992 and mass murder of Muslims around Srebrenica that occurred more than 3 years before the Srebrenica genocide.
While ICTY does not write history, it is important to note that we can use ICTY's judgments in combination with other judgments of local courts (this includes also judgments of Serbian courts, for example the recent judgment handed down 73 years to Serbian paramilitary members responsible for raping and killing Muslim children in Zvornik, and killing civilians, including pregnant women, see on my blog).
So, we can construct accurate and objective historical record with the use of as many credible sources as possible. It's not black and white. Sure, we will include all victims, but the Serb side is the one that committed some 90 percent of war crimes. But again, it's not black and white and it doesn't have to be, but the Serb historically bears the biggest blame for war crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Thanks for your comment.
If the ICTY gave "more perspective" about the war, we would have more comments such as the one quoted above about Tudjman's dream of Greater Croatia. My objection to these is that they are clearly debatable, but because they come from ICTY judgements, they have an enhanced status and people are less likely to question them. So by making all these sweeping assertions, the ICTY is effectively stifling debate about the nature of the Bosnian war.
The letter to Swedish state television that I referred to shows that the ICTY does not just see itself as one of a variety of credible sources. I think this letter had the effect of unfairly discrediting a flawed but interesting documentary that might have stimulated a constructive debate about the Srebrenica massacre had it been more widely circulated. Instead the documentary - and the debate - have been suppressed.
Also, could we have a source for your claim that the Serb side committed some 90% of war crimes, please?
Dado has failed to provide a source for his claim that the Serbs committed some 90% of the war crimes in Bosnia. I suspect that his source is a CIA report that was reported on in March 1995 but whose contents were as far as I know not made public. The interesting thing about the report is that it was published before the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, which means that if the report is reliable, the percentage of war crimes committed by the Serbs by the end of the war was probably substantially higher than 90%. But given that the report appears never to have been subjected to any kind of meaningful scrutiny, we should probably be a bit careful of bandying this 90% figure about. The Research and Documentation Center in Sarajevo found that about 83% of the civilian victims of the war in Bosnia were Bosniaks, and that 10% were Serbs and 6% Croats. It is difficult to extrapolate from the figures which forces were responsible for which deaths because the Bosniaks and Croats fought each other as well as the Serbs, the Bosniaks fought among themselves in the Bihac area and some of the Serb civilians were killed by Serb forces. Some soldiers' deaths would also have to be counted as war crimes. Unfortunately, the RDC website, which contains figures of war dead for individual municipalities, no longer seems to be available. If anyone knows why this is or if the figures are available anywhere else, please get in touch.
There was likely a higher percentage of civilian deaths, but due to economic collapse of Bosnia, majority of relatives LIED to the government and/or obtained false military documents ascertaining that a civilian was actually a soldier fighting a war so they could receive PENSIONS for their deaths. Recently Sarajevo daily "AVAZ" carried a story about investigation of doctors in Bosnia who were SELLING false diagnosis so people (read 'civilians') could obtain disability pension as soldiers who were injured on frontline.
As for military victims, Rory you seem to equate a Bosnian soldier who was righteously defending his people from ethnic cleansing, rape and genocide with a Serb soldier who was fighting a war in the pursuit of a criminal enterprise.
Yes, the point about whether someone is defined as a soldier or a civilian is also valid. If the full list of names from the "Book of the Dead" were available online, as I think used to be the case, it would be much easier for us to scrutinise its methods of classification.
As for military victims, can you point to anything I have written that backs up your claim that I "seem" to "equate a Bosnian soldier who was righteously defending his people from ethnic cleansing, rape and genocide with a Serb soldier who was fighting a war in the pursuit of a criminal enterprise"?
Post a Comment