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“The prosecution has strong incentives to try to tell the story of the war, rather than focus narrowly on successful conviction. This is the international tribunal’s signature case — especially after the termination of the Milosevic prosecution — and it will be heavily institutionally invested in the outcome and the legacy it creates, the more so because this will be one of its last cases…Many passionate advocates for Bosnian justice expect the court not simply to produce legal outcomes concerning specific acts, but to contribute to a rich, deeply textured condemnation of the principal contributors to the war as a whole, and in a proper historical context.” - Timothy William Waters, Law Professor who helped prepare Milosevic indictment, commenting in the New York Times on the upcoming Karadzic trial at the ICTY and its explicit political and historical purpose [Source].
There is near universal delight about Karadzic’s arrest. People across the world are all happy he has been caught. As one friend wrote from the Isle of Man, “People talk about how great it is that Karadzic was arrested, which of course we all agree with, but they have no idea why. “
Here in Serbia the response is one of apathy, with some tiny outbursts of half-hearted protest and the press luridly focusing on Karadzic’s alter ego, Dr Dragan David Dabic.
It all seems so simple, everyone knows the story: Karadzic is a genocidal maniac who, together with his dog of War, Mladic, led a bloodthirsty nation of nationalist aggressors as they ethnic cleansed large swathes of Bosnia using genocide (Srebrenica), mass murder, mass rape and forced migration.
Its a pretty clear case of a bad guy (one newspapers went so far as describe Karadzic as “a devil in disguise“) being caught and now finally facing justice in a fair trial.
Or so it seems.
In recent days I have read three excellent articles that challenge the conventional wisdom about Karadzic (and Mladic).
The first is “Karadzic’s Arrest: Bosnian Myths Rehashed” by Srdja Trifkovic . Published in Chronicles Magazine, this essay is one of the most cogent defenses of Bosnian Serb position I have read so far. Here is an excerpt:
At the outset of the last Yugoslav crisis, the Serbs’ basic argument—even if seldom stated with simplicity and coherence—was clear when freed from rhetoric: they had lived in one state since 1918, when Yugoslavia came into being. They reluctantly accepted Tito’s arbitrarily determined internal boundaries between the six federal republics—which left one third of them outside Serbia-proper—on the grounds that the Yugoslav framework afforded them a measure of security from the repetition of the nightmare of 1941-1945; but they could not swallow an illegal ruse that aimed to turn them into minorities, overnight and by unconstitutional means, in their own land.
Even without the vividly remembered trauma of the Second World War, they reacted in 1991-1992 just as the Anglophone citizens of Texas or Arizona might do if they are outvoted, one day, in a referendum demanding those states’ incorporation into Mexico. They demanded the right that the territories, which the Serbs have inhabited as compact majorities long before the voyage of the Mayflower, not be subjected to the rule of their rivals. In the same vein the Protestant Ulstermen demanded - and were given - the right to stay apart from united Ireland when the nationalists in Dublin opted for secession in 1921. In the same vein the state of West Virginia was created in 1863, incorporating those counties of the Commonwealth of Virginia that refused to be forced into secession. The Loyalists of Ulster and the Unionists of West Virginia were just as guilty of a “Joint Criminal Enterprise” to break up Ireland, or the Old Dominion, as were the Serbs of Bosnia-Herzegovina who did not want to be dragged into secession against their will.
Yugoslavia was admittedly a deeply flawed polity, and there could have been no rational objection to the striving of Croats, and even Bosnian Muslims, to create their own nation-states. But equally there could have been no justification for forcing over two million Serbs west of the Drina to be incorporated into those states against their will, and without any guarantees of their rights. Yugoslavia came together in 1918 as a union of South Slav peoples, and not of states, or territorial units. Its divorce should have been effected on the same basis; the boundaries of the republics should have been altered accordingly.
This is, and has been, the real foundation of the Yugoslav conflict ever since the first shots were fired in the summer of 1991. Even someone as unsympathetic to the Serb point of view as Lord David Owen conceded that Josip Broz Tito’s internal administrative boundaries between Yugoslavia’s republics were grossly arbitrary, and that their redrawing should have been countenanced at the time of Yugoslavia’s disintegration:
Incomprehensibly, the proposal to redraw the republics’ boundaries had been rejected by all eleven EC countries… [T]o rule out any discussion or opportunity for compromise in order to head off war was an extraordinary decision. My view has always been that to have stuck unyieldingly to the internal boundaries of the six republics within the former Yugoslavia… as being the boundaries for independent states, was a folly far greater than that of premature recognition itself.
[From: Karadzic’s Arrest: Bosnian Myths Rehashed by Srdja Trifkovic, Chronicles magazine, July 2008]
The second is by “The Plight of the Bosnian Serbs” by John Laughland (I am currently reading and thoroughly enjoying his book “Travesty“, about the Milosevic trial).
Laughland is a superb writer, scholar and essayist. His book travesty is brilliant and this article is a good introduction to some of his ideas.
He ends this article with a point about Srebrenica and the huge efforts to have the mass murder classified as “genocide”:
Unfortunately, there is a very clear political reason why it has been so categorised. The Muslim president of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Haris Silaijdzic, said carefully on CNN the day Karadzic was captured that Karadzic’s trial was only the beginning of the process by which justice would be done in Bosnia. He said that there were hundreds of thousands of Muslims who had been ethnically cleansed by “Karadzic and Milosevic” and that their project therefore remained in force. The clear implication of what he was saying was this: if the very existence of the Bosnian Serb republic (the autonomous region within Bosnia carved out from the republic during the civil war) is found, in a court of law, to have been had as its president a man, Karadzic, who is convicted of genocide in the process of creating it, then its status would be illegitimate and it should be abolished. The Muslims continue to claim control over the whole of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina, while the Serbs merely want the preservation of their considerable autonomy within it.
In other words, far from bringing peace to the Balkans, it is quite possible that a conviction of Karadzic for genocide will reopen the Dayton settlement and egg the Muslims on to claim control over the Serb republic too. Under such circumstances, it is inevitable that the Bosnian Serbs would try to proclaim formal secession from Bosnia, just as the Kosovo Albanians did from Serbia.
In Travesty he notes of the grossly exaggerated claims of Serb atrocities putatively committed in Kosovo, that the West was desperate to also have these classified as “genocide”. What is so important about having a crime classified as “genocide” or not? Surely establishing the fact that unlawful mass murder took place is sufficient?
Not when you are not seeking justice at all, but rather pretexts for war and intervention:
These claims of genocide had a general and particular function. Their general function was to work as war propaganda. Their particular function was a legal one. Genocide is a specific crime under international humanitarian law, coming under “universal jurisdiction’, and the existing treaties on it require all states to prosecute those accused of it. NATO leaders pretend that this meant there exists a right to “humanitarian intervention” where genocide is occurring, while in fact there is not. [From pg.11, "Travesty" by John Laughland, Pluto Press (2007)]
So this is why one keeps hearing about genocide in Kosovo even though there was none.
Laughland’s book is a revelation. It is an utter demolition of the bogus justifications for the bombing of Yugoslavia, the idea that the ICTY is anything but an illegal political instrument for conducting show trials and that the Serbs are overwhelmingly to blame for what transpired in Yugoslavia.
I will explore Laughland’s arguments about the ICTY in a separate post, but suffice it to say that after reading only the first few chapters of the book, I am completely convinced - as a relative neutral - that the “rich, deeply textured condemnation of the principal contributors to the war as a whole” that the ICTY is expected to deliver will be a grossly biased distortion of history based on show trials. It is yet another example of how lies pass into history.
The third and final article is by the Mick Hume, on of the UK’s best skeptics and questioners of convention:
It seemed strangely fitting that Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was found in an elaborate disguise when he was finally arrested, accused of genocide. Many in the international community have spent more than a decade dressing up this unexceptional local nationalist leader as a Hitlerian monster.
…The moral crusade to turn the Serbs into the new Nazis, pursued after the Yugoslav civil war through the hunt for Karadzic on charges of genocide, has served as a strange sort of therapy for many in the West. By branding the Serbs as evil, they have found a way to make themselves feel righteous. In the process, they have distorted the realities of Yugoslavia’s civil wars, risked diminishing the history of the Nazi Holocaust, and paved the way for further disastrous Western interventions.
That last point makes the Western crusaders even more determined to hang on to their anti-Serb banners today. The Balkan wars of the 1990s marked the high tide of the liberal left’s new moral case for international intervention in the affairs of nation states. The Iraq debacle has since left the credibility of that cause in tatters. The notion that they were taking a stand against the new Nazis in Bosnia and Kosovo has become just about the only thing the pro-interventionists can hold on to as proof that they are on the side of right.
…Neither I nor anybody else at spiked supports Karadzic. During the war in Bosnia he acted as a self-important petty nationalist with a romantic dream and a ruthless streak. And he was far from alone in that. The campaign to demonise Karadzic and nail him for genocide before an international war crimes tribunal, however, has been a politically motivated circus that serves interests other than justice. The fact that he has been arrested as a diplomatic stunt to help the new Serb government gain entry to the European Union is in keeping with a campaign that has been politically loaded from the start.
If you give these three articles a fair read, I doubt you will be able to tolerate the simplistic accounts of events one reads in the media. You may even see Karadzic in an entirely new light, not of saint or even innocent but just one of the three wartime Bosnian leaders, the one who happens to be Serb - and therefore automatically on the wrong side.
One can, as I do, deplore Srebrenica (and the other crimes of that war) accept it was “genocide” but simultaneously see the ICTY as a sham designed in part to lend legitimacy to an account of history that is based on falsehoods that lay disproportionate blame on the Serbs to justify aggression against the Serbs after the fact.
I still maintain that we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to counter exactly the sort of politically motivated falsehoods currently being added to the record by the ICTY.
I think that Karadzic and Mladic should stand trial, but fair trial, in open court with exactly the dame rules of evidence and due processes respected in UK and US criminal courts. I also think the civilian leadership of the other warning parties should be indicted in the same way the Serbs were. Of the 17 civilian (non military, police or militias) indictees, 15 are Serb, 1 is Croatian and 1 is Albanian. The Albanian is indicted for contempt of tribunal for refusing to be a witness in a case.
This indicated that either (A) the Serbian politicians were considerably worse than their Bosnian, Albanian and Croatian counterparts or (B) the ICTY has an objective an attack on the ideological and political underpinnings of the Serb position, not just acts that were war crimes. The more I read on this subject the more I tend to believing B.
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