Europe | Balkan war-crimes

Winding down with a whimper

The controversial recent judgments of a tribunal in The Hague

THE International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which was set up 20 years ago, is winding down amid controversy. Recent judgments have shocked supporters of the tribunal and left many in the former Yugoslavia stunned. Refik Hodzic, a Bosnian and former spokesman for the ICTY, says that it is no longer “our court” and that it is now undergoing a “baffling self-destruction”.

On May 30th the tribunal in The Hague acquitted the former head of Serbia’s secret police and his right-hand man. The judgment offered great detail about the various militias they had formed, trained and financed and the crimes these had committed, but argued that there was no evidence that the accused had ordered these crimes. A day earlier six Bosnian Croats were convicted. Direct links between them and their crimes had been established.

Eric Gordy of London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies says that the standards for convictions have changed in the last few months compared with earlier judgments. It is no longer enough “to have provided the resources to have committed a crime…you needed specific knowledge of it”. According to a court insider, some people already jailed would not have been convicted under the court’s new doctrine. He added that the latest judgments will have consequences for the future of international justice because they have weakened the criteria for holding political leaders accountable, especially if the crimes were committed abroad.

The tribunal did not convict a single person who was an official of the Serbian or Croatian governments for a crime committed in Bosnia. Only four members of the Yugoslav armed forces were convicted of atrocities perpetrated in Croatia and no Croats for crimes committed against Serbs in Croatia. So the judicial record does not match the historical record, according to Mr Gordy.

In all, the tribunal indicted 161 people. So far, 69 have been convicted, 18 acquitted and 13 sent home for trial. Proceedings are unfinished in 25 cases. Three of them are particularly prominent ones: those of Radovan Karadzic, the wartime leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Ratko Mladic, his military chief and Goran Hadzic, a former Croatian Serb leader.

One thing the tribunal has done will be of lasting value. It has created the most complete archive of witness testimonies of any war that has ever been fought. Its archive contains 1.6m pages of transcripts. That of the prosecutors has 9m pages of documents, orders and intercepts. The testimonies of some 4,500 witnesses have been preserved for history. So the tribunal’s verdicts will not be the last word.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline "Winding down with a whimper"

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