Serbia Can No Longer Whitewash Its Role in the Bosnian Genocide
By
Hamza Karcic
Haaretz
June 7, 2023
Three
decades of slow, painful but vital work bringing Bosnian genocide
perpetrators to justice have now ended, with the convictions of Serbia's
wartime spy chief and a notorious military commander. How should we assess
The Hague Tribunal’s legacy, its shortcomings, and its message for war
crimes deniers today?
On May 31,
2023, an appeals court in The Hague handed down a judgment confirming what every
Bosnian knows, but is under constant pressure from toxic revisionism: that
Serbia’s security service was involved in the war in Bosnia and that its top
security chiefs helped commit appalling crimes against civilians in Bosnia.
The Appeals
Chamber of The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, an
awkwardly-named institution established by the United Nations Security Council
in 2010, is a successor to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia (ICTY), with the objective of finalizing its work.
The ICTY,
known widely as The Hague Tribunal, was an ad-hoc international court formed in
1993 to prosecute suspects involved in crimes committed in Bosnia and the rest
of what was once Yugoslavia.
The ICTY
functioned from 1993 until 2017. During this time, the Tribunal indicted 161
individuals, including former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb
leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. In 2001, a top Mladic deputy –
Radislav Krstic – was found guilty of genocide in Srebrenica and sentenced to 35
years' imprisonment.
The top
echelon of the Bosnian Serb wartime leadership was not only indicted, but also
convicted by the Tribunal. Karadzic was found guilty of genocide and sentenced
to life in prison. Similarly, his military chief Mladic, too, was convicted of
genocide and given a life sentence. Biljana Plavsic, a former professor, evaded
a genocide conviction after having claimed remorse for her wartime activities.
In other
words, the key founding fathers of what is today the Serb-dominated Republika
Srpska, one of the two administrative entities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, have all
been convicted by The Hague Tribunal.
Apart from
these convictions, a looming question for years has been whether the Tribunal
would find top officials from Serbia itself responsible for crimes committed in
Bosnia, and thereby confirm Belgrade's role in the war crimes.
Milosevic died
in 2006 as the case against him was ongoing. In 2007, the International Court of
Justice confirmed the Srebrenica genocide and Serbia’s failure to prevent it.
But Belgrade got off the hook for direct responsibility.
For years,
Belgrade denied its role in the war and crimes across Bosnia. In fact, over the
past decade, there has been a sustained campaign aimed at changing the narrative
about the war with the aim of whitewashing its role. Furthermore, a number of
war criminals have found refuge in Serbia, including Novak Djukic, who was
responsible for the shelling of the Bosnian city of Tuzla and massacring 71
young people in May 1995.
Now, just over
31 years since Bosnian Serb forces, aided and abetted by Serbia proper, started
their rebellion in the newly-independent Bosnia in spring 1992, the Residual
Mechanism handed down its verdict last week.
The Appeals
Chamber found that the Head of the State Security Service of the Ministry of
Internal Affairs of the Republic of Serbia Jovica Stanisic and his top aide
Frano Simatovic were a part of a “a joint criminal enterprise … and that it had
a common criminal purpose to forcibly and permanently remove the majority of
non-Serbs from large areas of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
They were both
found “liable as members of a joint criminal enterprise for crimes committed by
various Serb forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992, in Bijeljina, Zvornik,
Bosanski Šamac, Doboj, and Sanski Most and for crimes committed in 1995 in
Trnovo and Sanski Most. It also found them responsible for a murder committed in
Daljska Planina, Croatia, in June 1992.” Both were sentenced to 15 years’
imprisonment.
The ruling is
a positive, but insufficient, step in ascertaining the full scale of Belgrade’s
involvement in the war in Bosnia. What is glaringly absent from this ruling is a
genocide conviction for the two intelligence officials.
The sentences
for 72-year-old Stanisic and 73-year-old Simatovic are grotesquely lenient given
the scale and scope of the crimes they oversaw. Still, the ruling is more
important than the punishment. This case will go down in history as one in which
the direct involvement of Belgrade’s top security officials in crimes committed
in Bosnia was confirmed by an international judicial institution.
Furthermore,
this verdict will be crucial in writing the history of the 1990s in Bosnia and
this part of Southeast Europe. And it can serve as a brake on the rising
revisionism in the region. It is little wonder that Serbia’s media completely
ignored the ruling.
Following last
week’s judgement, the Residual Mechanism has delivered its final say. This marks
an end to The Hague Tribunal’s verdicts on former Yugoslavia. Three decades
after its establishment, scholarly attention now turns to assessing the
Tribunal’s legacy.
Four major
shortcomings stand out.
First, the
Tribunal could not hand down death penalties. While no punishment is sufficient
for convicted genocidaires responsible for the deaths of thousands, a death
penalty should not have been ruled out. For the planners and executioners of the
Bosnian genocide, spending years in the relative comfort of prisons in countries
of Western Europe was a grossly inadequate punishment for their vicious crimes.
Secondly, the
Tribunal was inexplicably lenient. Take the case of Drazen Erdemovic, who served
in the Bosnian Serb Army as a member of the 10th Sabotage Detachment. After the
capture of Srebrenica in July 1995, Erdemovic was a member of the killing squads
at the Pilica farm near Srebrenica. He confessed to have personally executed 70
Bosniaks. Erdemović pleaded guilty and received a prison term of just five
years.
Thirdly,
convicted war criminals have been able to get early releases. Former top Bosnian
Serb leader Biljana Plavsic was released in 2009 for good behavior after having
served two-thirds of an 11-year sentence. A notorious war criminal from the
eastern Bosnian town of Visegrad named Mitar Vasiljevic walked free in 2010
after serving two-thirds of a 15-year sentence. He was given a hero’s welcome in
Visegrad, which Serb forces – from Bosnia and Serbia – had "cleansed" of its
Muslim population during the war.
On top of
lenient sentences, early releases proved that perpetrators paid a small price
for their crimes. What is more, convictions at The Hague produced no real
remorse on the part of perpetrators, and certainly not on the part of their
defenders in Serbia or Republika Srpska.
Fourthly, the
Tribunal engaged in a minimization of the Bosnian genocide committed across the
country, so that it was limited to the genocide committed in Srebrenica in July
1995. This became known as the “municipalization” of the Bosnian genocide.
Contrary to
academically-established truth, the Tribunal’s judicially-established truth set
an artificially high benchmark for proving a genocide. Raphael Lemkin would have
been shocked at how judicial procedures came to undermine the ideals for which
he struggled.
This
minimization of genocide served as a convenient tool for genocide deniers to
claim that Bosniaks killed outside Srebrenica, before or after July 1995, were
not genocide victims. What of Bosniaks murdered in Visegrad, Foca, Gorazde? What
of the victims of the siege of Sarajevo? What of Bosniaks murdered in camps in
Prijedor?
For all its
shortcomings, the Tribunal did succeed in one key aspect: an international
judicial institution established the truth, albeit minimally. For a small nation
like Bosniaks, this is an improvement which stands in contrast to the largely
unacknowledged and unrecognized suffering in previous cycles of violence in the
past century.
In the absence
of the Tribunal, much of what we now know about the machinery of genocide would
have remained unknown. In fact, the current rampant genocide denial in Bosnia
and Serbia would be even far more widespread had there been no trials at The
Hague.
For the
civilians in other countries, not least Ukraine, currently targeted by war
crimes, the slow, painful but necessary process of bringing perpetrators to
justice is just as salient.
Hamza Karcic is an associate professor at the Faculty of Political Science at
the University of Sarajevo.
Originally published at
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/06/07/will-the-united-states-abandon-kosovo/