Requiem for a court
What is more important: to dispense justice or to achieve some kind of peace? The court in The Hague wrote the history of the Yugoslav dissolution by politically motivated parcelling of responsibility among former belligerents. This new historical narrative will have far reaching negative consequences.
In 2011 the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague convicted the former Chief of the General Staff of the Yugoslav Army, Colonel General Momčilo Perišić for aiding and abetting war crimes in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and sentenced him to serve 27 years in prison. On February 28, 2013 the Appeal Chamber of the ICTY acquitted him of all charges. This decision of the Appeal Chamber is the latest in a series of highly controversial judgements of this international legal body.
It is closing time in The Hague, and the powers behind the bench have decided to forgive, forget, and close the court files on the wars in the former Yugoslavia. The international community and the ICTY are tired of dealing with the ghosts of the Yugoslav collapse, and wish to exit this house divided as soon as possible.
Every side in those wars has received parting gifts from the ICTY. Those included the judgements on the Croatian Operation Storm, and the lack of culpability of Serbia in the Srebrenica genocide but also the acquittals of the former officer of the Bosnian Army, Naser Orić and of the Croatian generals Gotovina and Markač as well as the former Prime Minister of Kosovo, Ramush Haradinaj. One must hope that the latest reversal of Perišić’s original sentence was the last-remaining gift-basket, before the shop in The Hague closes its doors for good.
Notwithstanding the controversies surrounding the work done by the ICTY, one needs to acknowledge a number of good things that came out of the proceedings in The Hague over the last twenty years. The most obvious is the amassing of the evidence on genocide and war crimes committed, and processing a number of those found responsible. The body of evidence available in the court archives is a significant depository of information crucial for researchers who desire to fully understand the complexity of the Yugoslav wars. Moreover, the ICTY did set the precedent by bringing to trial a president of a country. Outside of the trial chamber, court experts worked on modernizing and strengthening legal infrastructures in the Yugoslav successor states, and even helped create new legal bodies to address war-related issues on the local level.
It is equally important to stress that the many decisions taken by the Appeal Chamber cast a shadow over the proclaimed mandate of this court. The acquittal of Colonel General Momčilo Perišić further darkens that shadow and breathes new life into the longstanding argument of nationalists about the ICTY as a political court. Even though the political nature of the ICTY does not differ much from that of earlier international legal bodies that dealt with war crimes and genocide, the freeing of Perišić has highlighted a number of structural faults of the court, exposing the political short-sightedness that produced them.
From its inception, the ICTY fostered unrealistic hopes of local communities that their individual and collective suffering would be fully acknowledged and addressed through convicting those directly responsible and those who designed policies that led to war crimes being committed. Furthermore, the ICTY was projected as the institution that could and would dispense absolute justice to all those who were wronged.
The ICTY has failed on both counts because its work was primarily guided by political considerations and the logic of compromise.. Read more:
