Karadzic, the Hague, and the truth about Bosnia
Radovan Karadzic in 1994 and in his disguise as “Dragan Dabic,” a practitioner and lecturer in alternative medicine
In the wake of the arrest of former Bosnian Serb president and accused war criminal Radovan Karadzic in Belgrade yesterday, Serge Trifkovic has been writing and speaking a great deal about the history of the Bosnian war. Here is a lengthy
article by him at
Chronicles, and here is the
video of an interview on
Russia Today. In the below excerpt from a BBC
interview that he has sent by e-mail, Trifkovic gets quickly to his main point. He is not defending Karadzic, whom he says is “absolutely” a war criminal. Rather, he argues that the Hague Tribunal, far from seeking the truth of what happened in Bosnia, is serving as the instrument of a U.S.-dominated ideology which claims that all evil in Bosnia came from the Serbs alone.
Also, here is the New York Times story on the remarkable disguise by which Karadzic, living and workingly openly in the Serbian capital, evaded arrest for the last 12 years.
KARADZIC AND THE HAGUE: Interview with Srdja Trifkovic
BBC Radio 4, “The World Tonight,” Tuesday, July 22, 2008, 22:14 BST
The BBC talks to Dr. Trifkovic the forthcoming Karadzic trial at The Hague Tribunal. “This trial would need to mark a new beginning by The Hague,” he says, “and yet I have no reason to believe that such a beginning will indeed be made.”
* * * * *
BBC: The fact that Karadzic could face trial at The Hague is causing consternation among those who consider the court to be anti-Serbian. Srdja Trifkovic is one of them. He is an American historian, journalist and political analyst, and an expert on Balkan politics:
TRIFKOVIC: It would be a hugely significant moment if it were to be followed by a fair and just trial that would seek to establish the facts of the case, not only on Srebrenica but also on what came to pass in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995. However, in Serbia many people—including those who favor the new, pro-European government—have a very jaundiced view of The Hague Tribunal, especially since the release of Nasir Oric, the wartime commander of the Muslim garrison in Srebrenica, came just before the capture of Karadzic. In fact, in Belgrade The Hague Tribunal is universally regarded as a politically motivated tool for providing quasi-legal justification of political decisions made by the powers-that-be back in the early 1990s.
BBC: What about the indictment against Mr. Karadzic? Do you think the war crimes were committed?
TRIFKOVIC: The war crimes were committed, absolutely. What remains to be seen is to what extent the war crimes committed by the Serbs will continue to be treated as uniquely more substantial, more evil and more massive, than those committed by the other two sides. What we have witnessed in the case of Nasir Oric in particular, is a truly egregious failure by The Hague Tribunal to connect the commander of Srebrenica with the war crimes which the Tribunal itself does not deny have taken place: thousands of Serbian civilians in the surrounding arreas were killed between 1992 and 1995. For Serbia’s “European perspective,” for Serbia’s ability to come to terms with the past in the way that does not provide grounds for fresh resentment and revisionism, this trial would need to mark a new beginning by The Hague—and yet I have no reason to believe that such a beginning will indeed be made.
BBC: And yet this individual, who is charged with such heinous crimes, needs to be brought to justice, even if—as you argue—there are others still out there who haven’t been brought to justice. But here’s one opportunity to deal with one set of crimes, surely?
TRIFKOVIC : The problem is that dealing with “one set of crimes” in connection with “one individual” is not fulfilling the function of the Tribunal as stated at the time of its establishment in 1993, which was to establish an equivalent of an international “truth and reconciliation commission.” Quite the contrary, in the case of Serbia The Hague Tribunal has only generated fresh controveries and provided fresh grist for the mill of the nationalist wing of Serbia’s body-politic, which keeps claiming that the cards are stacked against the Serbs’ favor.
- end of initial entry -
Ken Hechtman writes:
TRIFKOVIC : The problem is that dealing with “one set of crimes” in connection with “one individual” is not fulfilling the function of the Tribunal as stated at the time of its establishment in 1993, which was to establish an equivalent of an international “truth and reconciliation commission.” Quite the contrary, in the case of Serbia The Hague Tribunal has only generated fresh controveries and provided fresh grist for the mill of the nationalist wing of Serbia’s body-politic, which keeps claiming that the cards are stacked against the Serbs’ favor.
Stated where, exactly? Neither the quoted phrase “truth and reconciliation” nor the concept it implies appear anywhere in either the ICTY mission statement or the text of the Security Council resolution creating the ICTY and I would have been very surprised if they had. Nuremberg-style criminal tribunals and South African-style truth commissions might both be valid options for countries in postwar transitions. But they’re polar opposites in terms of their methods, goals, scope of inquiry, everything. The ICTY is a criminal court, period. It arrests, tries, convicts and punishes defendants. Any “reconciliation” it provides to the Balkans will have to come from that. It is absolutely not in the business of trading “amnesty for honesty” the way the South African commission did. I have to wonder about one other thing: Would a conservative like Trifkovic be defending an ultra-liberal institution like truth commissions at all if it wasn’t his boy on trial in a no-nonsense criminal court? If, as you say in your previous article, a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged then a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested—or whose compatriot has been arrested.
LA replies:
I haven’t read all of the main Trikovic article at Chronicles that I linked which is very long and extremely detailed about Bosnian politics in the early ’90s prior to independence, but if we accept your point that the Hague Tribunal was not established as a “truth and reconciliation” body but purely as an international criminal court, that would not logically undermine Trifkovic’s complaint (leaving aside whether his complaint is factually true or not) that this Tribunal only goes after Serbs.
Ken Hechtman replies:
Well, of course the ICTY mostly (though not exclusively) prosecutes Serbs. The Serbs lost the war. That’s like asking why Bomber Harris and Curtis Lemay weren’t tried at Nuremberg. If we’d lost WWII, they would have been.
The purpose war crimes tribunals serve (and truth commissions too, in a different way) is not so much to dispense impartial justice. It’s to mark the transition between the old order and the new. When SS officers go on trial for their lives and shtetl Jews appear as witnesses for the prosecution, it’s obvious to everyone what’s changed.
That’s why the discipline that looks at these kinds of institutions is called “transitional justice”. It used to be called “peace studies” until the Evergreen College lightweights gave “peace studies” a bad name.
What the ICTY prosecutors did, and Trifkovic probably also objects to this, is they took that mandate far too literally. They could have simply proved the details of this massacre and that group expulsion, established some degree of command responsibility and left it at that. Instead they acted as if Milosevic and the others were charged with Premeditated Nationalism in the First Degree and that was the case they needed to make.
Dimitri K. writes:
Citing Mr. Trifkovic, you write: “Hague Tribunal … is serving as the instrument of a U.S.-dominated ideology that claims that all evils in Bosnia came from Serbs alone”.
I remember those time very well, and my impression was, though personal and incomplete, that not only U.S. many parties tried to blame Serbs alone. Among them all other republics of Yugoslavia, Germans and some Eastern Europeans, which by coincidence happened to collaborate with Germans during WWII. I’ve gotten a strong impression that there was a great deal of historical revenge in that common enthusiasm about the war against Serbia.
However, now they will probably blame everything on U.S. It seems that America is becoming again a convenient scapegoat for some European nationalists, like Mr. Trifkovic.
LA replies:
Please don’t judge Trifkovic’s position from my characterization of it, but from his own words. “U.S.-dominated ideology that claims that all evils in Bosnia came from Serbs alone” is my general take on where I think Trifkovic is coming from—and it’s also been my view at least since the Kosovo war of 1999 when I saw the U.S. take a zero-sum civil conflict and portraying it as: Serb oppressors, Albanian victims. In any case Trifkovic doesn’t use the phrase “U.S.-dominated ideology.” Yet clearly at least from 1995 onward the U.S. took the lead in the Balkans, and had a generally anti-Serb view, and that position also seemed to be the European consensus. So obviously other parties were also blaming the Serbs. So there’s not necessarily a contradiction between your formulation and mine. The only difference would be on whether this anti-Serb view was led by the U.S. or not.
Dimitri replies:
The U.S. led the coalition, but who initiated the international propaganda campaign? I don’t want to say that the U.S. is without a sin, but I have a suspicion that U.S. may have been smartly manipulated. Say “atrocity” and all U.S. is on its feet. Someone must have said it. After all, the U.S. is far away, and the campaign itself was an international effort. And in the end the U.S. will be one to blame.
Anthony O. writes (July 24):
Ken Hechtman wrote:
“Well, of course the ICTY mostly (though not exclusively) prosecutes Serbs. The Serbs lost the war. That’s like asking why Bomber Harris and Curtis Lemay weren’t tried at Nuremberg. If we’d lost WWII, they would have been.”
This reply strikes me as glib and evasive. In the first place, the Serbs didn’t lose a war against their local enemies, they lost a war to Transatlantic powers operating under pretenses of impartial justice founded on a concept of universal human rights. The claim here is of the application of a double standard. Mr. Hechtman’s reply avoids confronting the substance of that charge.
Secondly, the assertion that the Allied bomber commanders would have been tried as war criminals invites a judgment of moral equivalence of them and the Nazis and of the Allied tribunals and of hypothetical Nazi or Imperial Japanese ones. I’m aware that Lemay himself once remarked, in effect, that he could imagine being tried as a war criminal for the incendiary attacks on Japanese cities. However, I’m not aware that the Nuremberg courts ever took issue with German bomber commanders who directed attacks on British cities. My position is not that the area bombing of cities is morally unproblematic, only that suggestions of equivalence between the parties to WWII doesn’t bear scrutiny, whatever extreme measures were sometimes taken in a state of all out war against ruthless and unprincipled adversaries.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 23, 2008 07:45 AM | Send