The trial itself diverted
world opinion from the court’s fundamentally flawed pursuit of justice.
By Marko Attila Hoare (Balkan Insight, 17 March 06)
The trial itself diverted world opinion from the court’s fundamentally flawed pursuit of justice.
By Marko Attila Hoare (Balkan Insight, 17 March 06)
Slobodan Milosevic was not only the most notorious villain of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, but also the only top Serbian or Yugoslav political and military leader to be indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for crimes carried out in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1991 to 1995.
Milosevic’s indictments for these crimes speak of a “joint criminal enterprise” involving other Yugoslav officials of similar rank and status: Yugoslav presidency members Borisav Jovic and Branko Kostic; Federal Secretary of People’s Defence Veljko Kadijevic; Yugoslav People’s Army Chief of Staff Blagoje Adzic; and others.
Milosevic was undoubtedly the single guiltiest individual, but he was only one member of this “joint criminal enterprise”.
In indicting him alone of the top-ranking Serbian and Yugoslav officials, the chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, let Milosevic take the rap for his fellow conspirators, who were let off the hook.
Now Milosevic is dead, none of the guiltiest Serbian/Yugoslav officials will be tried for war crimes in Croatia and Bosnia.
To understand why this is so, it is necessary to look at the command structure of Serbian and Yugoslav forces during the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, and of the chronology of these wars.
Milosevic was the supreme operator, but he was on paper merely the president of one of the Yugoslav republics – Serbia. He was able to wage war in Croatia and Bosnia only thanks to the collaboration of other top officials who were in principle of similar rank and status to himself.
The Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) was during 1991 in the hands of Kadijevic, Adzic, and their deputies Stane Brovet and Zivota Panic.
Their readiness to fight on Serbia’s side – unconstitutionally, illegally and in defiance of the Yugoslav presidency and government – enabled Milosevic to enjoy the illusory military superiority that enabled him to attack, though not defeat, Croatia.
The JNA was formally under the command of the collective Yugoslav presidency, which during the war in Croatia was formally headed by a Croat, Stipe Mesic. But Kadijevic and Adzic allowed the common army of all Yugoslavia to become the army solely of Serbia and Montenegro.
In October 1991, at the height of the war in Croatia, the Serbian and Montenegrin members of the presidency – Jovic and Kostic, as well as two ciphers representing Vojvodina and Kosovo - carried out a coup, declaring themselves the acting Yugoslav presidency and, consequently, the acting supreme command of the JNA.
They remained in this role until spring 1992 and were centrally involved in planning the war in Bosnia, including establishing the Bosnian Serb army and picking out an initially minor officer, Ratko Mladic, to lead it.
Waging war in Croatia and planning and preparing war in Bosnia were the work of this “joint criminal enterprise”, as mentioned in the Milosevic indictments, which included these individuals and a host of lesser figures, including Milosevic’s Croatian Serb and Bosnian Serb puppets and the colourful but secondary figures of Vojislav Seselj and Zeljko Raznatovic “Arkan”.
All surviving members of this enterprise should have been indicted and, indeed, nearly were.
The present author worked for the ICTY’s Office of the Prosecutor in 2001 and participated in the drafting of the indictment of Milosevic for war crimes in Bosnia.
The investigative team for which I worked initially intended to indict the leading figures of the enterprise, including Kadijevic, Adzic, Jovic and Kostic, and had begun work on the preliminary draft of an indictment.
But at mid-point in this process, we received an order from Del Ponte, indicating she wanted to indict Milosevic separately. This decision shamefully let the other top Serbian and Yugoslav war criminals off the hook.
Del Ponte’s decision pandered to the Western penchant for personalising evil. The simplistic understanding of the uninformed Westerner, in which Milosevic was the only known figure, while the others had never been heard of, made it easier to sell her decision to the Western public.
This decision had more to do with politics than justice: it would appear that Del Ponte found the resistance to the ICTY of Serbia’s post-Milosevic regime – in which Milosevic-era war criminals and mafia continued to dominate behind the scenes – too tough to risk a further round of indictments of top officials.
This had nothing to do with an absence of available evidence. Kadijevic, Adzic, Jovic, Kostic and others could all have been indicted on the basis of their command responsibility for crimes carried out by their JNA subordinates at Vukovar and Dubrovnik, indictments for which already existed.
Indeed, while Del Ponte was ready to indict the Croatian Army’s chief of staff, Janko Bobetko, for crimes carried out by his subordinates at the Medak Pocket, and to indict the commander of the Bosnian Army, Rasim Delic, for crimes carried out by mujahedin fighters in Central Bosnia – in both cases on the basis of command responsibility – she was unwilling to indict the top JNA commanders and members of the rump Yugoslav presidency on the same basis.
She skewed her indictments in favour of the aggressors who conquered large areas of Croatia and Bosnia, and at the expense of those defending their countries from the aggression.
Relative to its share of war crimes, the ICTY has treated Serbia extremely leniently.
The Croatian and Bosnian publics were expected to be satisfied with the indictment of a single top-ranking Serbian or Yugoslav official – Milosevic. Now that he has escaped justice, they must be satisfied only with a handful of indictees of secondary or lower importance.
The most important of these is probably Jovica Stanisic, who headed Serbia’s State Security Service, but although his role in organising the bloodshed was central, he was very much a Milosevic subordinate.
Franko Simatovic, who headed Milosevic’s special forces was another creature and subordinate of Milosevic’s.
A third Serbian indictee, Momcilo Perisic, became Chief of the General Staff of the Yugoslav Army only in 1993, after the period of direct Serbian aggression had already ended, having been merely a corps commander during the JNA attack on Bosnia.
A fourth Serbian indictee, Vojislav Seselj, was a flamboyant ultra-nationalist loudmouth whose actual significance in the planning and execution of the wars was secondary.
Of lesser rank still are General Pavle Strugar, Admiral Miodrag Jokic and battalion commander Vladimir Kovacevic, who received very lenient sentences for war crimes at Dubrovnik, and the three JNA officers currently on trial for crimes at Vukovar.
Finally, there are the numerous Bosnian and Croatian Serb indictees, who apparently comprised an easier target for the chief prosecutor, as they were men and women of Bosnia and Croatia, not of Serbia or Montenegro; collaborators rather than aggressors. For all the huge sums invested in the ICTY, these are pitiful results. The Croatian and Bosnian publics have every right to know the bald fact: they have not received justice
Marko Attila Hoare is a Senior Research Fellow at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Kingston University. He is the author of a short history of the Bosnian Army (How Bosnia Armed, Saqi Books, London, 2004).