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Seselj Hunger Strike “a Publicity Stunt”

23 11 2006  Radical party leader’s real worries may be more to do with crumbling ratings than ill treatment.

By Aleksandar Roknic in The Hague (Balkan Insight, 23 Nov 06)

Vojislav Seselj’s hunger strike at the Hague tribunal’s detention unit is a less a protest against his conditions on the eve of trial than an attempt to boost his party’s crumbling ratings ahead of elections in January, say observers.

Seselj, who is charged with war crimes, started the hunger strike on November 10, in protest against what he called the court’s harsh treatment and failure to meet his demands.

He accused the tribunal of banning visits by his wife, Jadranka, and said the court had not met his demand to register a team of legal advisers mostly made up of supporters of his Serbian Radical Party, SRS, or of the sympathetic Socialist Party of Serbia, SPS.

Seselj, who is due to go on trial on November 27, has also requested that his correspondence with the court and the prosecutor's office be conducted only in Serbian.

The tribunal spokesman, Refik Hodzic, denied the court had cut or halted visits by Seselj’s family to the detention unit in the Netherlands.

“Seselj is certainly not prevented from having anyone to visit him, particularly his family,” said Hodzic. “In keeping with the detention unit management’s decision, his visits are monitored as prescribed by the rules on detention.”

A Balkan Insight source said the tribunal had begun monitoring family visits to his cell early in October owing to worries about material being smuggled out to sympathisers in Serbia.

The source said protected documents and lists of witnesses, including protected witnesses relevant to his case, had been smuggled from the Scheveningen detention unit.

“Those witness lists have been handed to people in or close to Seselj's party and some witnesses have now declined to give testimonies after receiving threats,” explained the source.

Seselj has been indicted on 14 counts concerning crimes against non-Serb civilians in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and in Vojvodina, in northern Serbia, from 1991 until 1995.

He is charged with participation in “a joint criminal enterprise” alongside Serbia’s late former president, Slobodan Milosevic and the fugitive Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic Ratko Mladic.

The alleged purpose of the enterprise, it reads, was “the permanent forcible removal of a majority of the Croat, Muslim and other non-Serb populations from approximately one-third of the territory of Croatia, large parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina and from some parts of Vojvodina in Serbia to make these areas a part of a new Serb-dominated state”.

Seselj voluntarily surrendered to the tribunal on February 23, 2003, one day after the international court indicted him.

At the status conference preceding his trial, Seselj had said his defence would include an argument that the man most responsible for the crimes he was accused of was the late Pope John Paul II, as the late Pontiff strongly supported international recognition of the independence of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

At home, the SRS claims more than 200,000 Serbian citizens have signed a petition in support of Seselj’s demands and they say they aim to collect over a million signatures.

Several Hague indictees have also signed the petition, including former Bosnian Serb strongman Momcilo Krajisnik and the Croatian Serb police boss Milan Martic.

Aleksandar Vucic, the SRS secretary general, said they had also received letters of support for Seselj from Jonathan Levy, a member of the International Criminal Bar in The Hague, and from the lawyer, Jacques Verges, well-known for defending high-profile cases such as that of Klaus Barbie, Carlos the Jackal and Milosevic.

The Serbian authorities have jumped on the bandwagon, demanding information on Seselj’s hunger strike from the tribunal and requesting that a Serbian doctor examine him.

The tribunal’s reply, sent by Judge Fausto Pocar and Registrar Hans Holthuis, clarified that Seselj “does not eat but ingests only liquids and his detention cell is under constant video surveillance since he refuses to communicate with medical staff about his condition”.

It added, “His requests are currently being processed; a possibility for consultations of the accused with doctors from Serbia is envisaged by the rules… all necessary measures will be taken to maintain good health of the accused.”

The public in Serbia has long been divided over the issue of cooperation with the tribunal. Analysts believe Seselj’s hunger strike is intended to target nationalist sympathisers who are already hostile towards the tribunal, viewing it as an “anti-Serbian” institution.

Most of the public certainly believes the Hague court contributed to, or directly caused, the deaths of Milosevic and the former Croatian Serb leader, Milan Babic.

“They did not killed them but helped them to die,” said Milan, a street vendor from Belgrade, voicing the opinion of many Serbs.

Cvijetin Milivojevic, a political analyst, said the Radicals might get an additional blast of wind ahead of the polls from the hunger strike, which had been “timed to take place in parallel with the elections”.

But he warned that not all the anti-Hague forces in Serbia were ready to support the hunger strike, as not all of them wanted the Radicals to reap the electoral benefit.

Observers believe the hunger strike is timed also to reverse the slide in the fortunes of the Radicals, whose ratings began to slip in July from a highpoint of 36 per cent to around 30.

The party has lost ground mainly to the centrist Democratic Party, led by the popular Serbian president, Boris Tadic.

But there remains everything to play for, owing to a huge number of floating, undecided voters. Polling by the Centre for Free Elections and Democracy, CESID, in Belgrade, in May, showed about 28 per cent of voters remained uncommitted.

Other analyses say 10 to 15 per cent of the electorate will decide which party to vote for at the very last moment.

Whether Seselj’s hunger strike can shift these undecided voters into the Radical camp remains to be seen – and depends partly on how the strike goes. Seselj has already lost 11 kilogrammes in weight in detention.

“The Hague tribunal cannot force Seselj to take food or anything else,” Hodzic told Balkan Insight. “The decision not to take food anymore is his and his own.”

Milan Nikolic, of the Belgrade Centre for Studying Alternatives, doubted the hunger strike would gain the Radicals new votes.

“They are trying hard to take advantage of Seselj’s hunger strike to score political points and portray him as the defender of the Serb cause,” Nikolic told Balkan Insight.

But Nikolic added that most people now wanted to put the Hague tribunal, Seselj and Milosevic behind them now, “The Radicals must persuade voters they can actually do something practical and concrete for them.”

Zoran Stojiljkovic, a political analyst, said Seselj might have started his strike too soon, as most voters tended to remember only things that happened in the last climactic days of the election campaign.

“This type of political action will certainly not win over anyone new, though it will stabilise that part of the electorate already affiliated with the Radicals,” said Stojiljkovic. “Therefore, it probably won’t have any direct effect on the election outcome.”

Aleksandar Roknic is a Balkan Insight contributor in The Hague. Balkan Insight is BIRN’s online publication.