THE KARADZIC TRIAL AND BOSNIAN REALITIES
Agoravox
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Nov 4 2009
The trial of the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic is a test of
justice and accountability over terrible crimes. But the trend of
events in Bosnia itself also demands the international community’s
urgent attention. By Martin Shaw.
he trial of Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Serbian nationalist regime
in Bosnia in the early 1990s, resumed in The Hague on 27 October
2009. The accused initially refused to appear in court on the basis
that he needed more time to prepare his defence, but announced in a
letter to the presiding judge on 2 November that he would indeed be
present to face the court at a procedural hearing the following day.
Karadzic is charged with genocide over the attempt "to permanently
remove Bosnian Muslims [Bosniaks] and Bosnian Croats from the
territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina claimed as Bosnian Serb
territory" between 1992 and 1995, as well as over the infamous massacre
at Srebrenica in July 1995. The other charges include extermination;
murder; persecutions; deportation; inhumane acts; acts of violence
the primary purpose of which was to spread terror among the civilian
population; unlawful attacks on civilians; and the taking of hostages.
These can be seen not as a series of different crimes but as components
of a single campaign of genocide. Indeed the charges potentially
broaden the overall legal assessment of the Serbian genocide in
Bosnia-Hercegovina, which in earlier judgments – like that of the
International Court of Justice in February 2007 – has been restricted
to Srebrenica; the importance of the charges against Karadzic is that
this enables understanding that Srebrenica was only the most murderous
moment in the three years during which Serbian forces systematically
targeted the destruction of the non-Serb population in the areas they
controlled (see "The International Court of Justice: Serbia, Bosnia,
and genocide", 28 February 2007).
The trial – which starts sixteen months after Karadzic’s arrest
in Serbia in July 2008, following thirteen years in hiding there –
is widely seen as the last major case of the International Criminal
Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which is scheduled to begin
winding down from the end of 2009 – despite the scandalous failure
to arrest Karadzic’s fellow indictee Ratko Mladic, who commanded the
Bosnian-Serbian forces at Srebrenica. The ICTY has had considerable
success in arraigning secondary war-criminals of all nationalities,
but no settling of the accounts of the post-Yugoslav wars of the
1990s will be complete until Mladic joins Karadzic in the dock. The
fact that prime architects of Yugoslavia’s ethnic destruction in the
1990s – Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic’s (who died in March 2006, during
his trial) and Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman (who died before he could be
indicted) – escaped justice, means that the tribunal’s record will
appear even more seriously flawed unless Mladic and Karadzic are
successfully tried.
The new trial will doubtless rekindle the deep divisions which Bosnia
opened in western publics in the 1990s. A reminder of these came on
29 October 2009 when Ed Vulliamy, the Guardian reporter who (with
colleagues from the broadcaster ITN, Penny Marshall and Ian Williams,
exposed the Serbian concentration-camps at Omarska and Trnopolje in
August 1992) published an open letter to Amnesty International; this
protests against the NGO’s invitation to the radical academic Noam
Chomsky to give the annual Amnesty lecture in Belfast on 30 October.
Chomsky, says Vulliamy, has encouraged the "revisionist" view which
denied the character of the camps (even if it was others such as
Thomas Deichmann, writing in Living Marxism magazine, who were the
direct authors of this denial [see Ed Vulliamy, "Poison in the well
of history", Guardian, 15 March 2000]).
In 2005, Chomsky told a Guardian interviewer: "Ed Vulliamy is a very
good journalist, but he happened to be caught up in a story which
is probably not true." Vulliamy reminds Amnesty that he directly
witnessed the situation he described, and went on to collect hundreds
of testimonies; he accuses the human-rights organisation of "giving
comfort" to Mladic and Karadzic through its invitation to Chomsky.
The logic of Dayton
The political realities on the ground in Bosnia put some of these
controversies in perspective. Radovan Karadzic may be in the dock
in The Hague, but the Serbian statelet of Republika Srpska (RS)
which he founded is firmly entrenched. The first phase of the Serbian
campaign in 1992-93 left RS in control of a formerly mixed territory,
from which 90% of the non-Serb population (principally Muslims and
Croats) were expelled through the brutal methods described in the
ICTY’s indictment of Karadzic.
The Serb forces failed fully to defeat Bosnian and Croatian forces, but
the diplomatic settlement of November 2005 – the Dayton (Ohio) peace
accords, agreed by Bill Clinton (the United States president), Slobodan
Milosevic, Franjo Tudjman, and Alija Izetbegovic (Bosnia’s president)
– left the Serbian nationalists in control of the RS, even if it was
reincorporated into a nominally unified and internationally supervised
Bosnia-Herzegovina. The international regime was supposed to support
the return of refugees to RS (as to Croatian- and Bosnian-controlled
areas). In the event, the small number of returns achieved have not
altered the outcome of the genocidal war: Serbs today form almost 90%
of RS’s population.
The Dayton settlement thus (in Marko Attila Hoare’s words) "established
a Bosnia-Hercegovina that was more partitioned than united", and
subsequent developments have reinforced the partitionist logic. For
every year that the Dayton settlement persists it brings Bosnia another
step closer (Hoare again) "to full and complete partition. Every
year, Republika Srpska further consolidates itself as a de facto
independent state; the Office of the High Representative [OHR;
Bosnia’s international overseer] declines in power and authority;
the international community’s will and ability to coerce the Republika
Srpska are that much weaker; the already dim prospect of Bosniaks and
Croats returning to Republika Srpska recedes further; and the share
of the Bosnian population that can remember the unified, multinational
country that existed before 1992 becomes smaller."
Even in late 2007 it was possible for Peter Lippman to argue that the
international regime was having some success in integrating the police
and the army into a unified Bosnian force (see "Crisis and reform: a
turnaround in Bosnia?", 18 December 2007). Two years on, the low-key
current international efforts to move Bosnian politicians towards
reform are completely deadlocked. Serbian secessionist impulses –
part-cause and part-consequence of this situation – are never far
from the surface. Moreover the current RS administration of Milorad
Dodik is growing in its defiance of the international regime and
(a linked matter given the statelet’s provenance) its denial of the
very crimes of which Karadzic is accused.
Dodik, who has denied that genocide was committed at Srebrenica,
further provoked the non-Serb population of Bosnia in September 2009
by pointedly denying one of the worst Serbian atrocities of the war:
the massacre of seventy young people in a square in Tuzla in May 1995.
(In this context, Ed Vulliamy is right to say that the questioning of
well-documented atrocities such as the concentration-camps by western
commentators is no academic matter; and that Noam Chomsky’s attitude
to these issues raises questions about Amnesty’s choice of lecturer).
Against this background, even a conviction in the Karadzic trial –
assuming the accused’s spoiling tactics are unsuccessful – will be
a hollow victory for his victims. The danger, Hoare suggests, is
that "however monstrous the injustice that Bosnian partition would
represent, with every year that passes, the injustice is further
forgotten by the world and full partition – like death – draws nearer.
We need only look at the other injustices that have become realities
on the ground: the three-way partition of Macedonia in 1912-13;
the dispossession of the Armenian population of Anatolia; the
dispossession of the Palestinian population of present-day Israel –
these are realities on the ground" (see "Bosnia: weighing the options",
Bosnian Institute, 13 October 2009).
The cost of failure
It is difficult to gainsay this bleak assessment of the historical
record: partitions have always involved appalling injustices which
have rarely been reversed (see Sumantra Bose, "The partition evasion",
23 August 2007). The Indian partition of 1947 is one of the worst
examples. For a century, western "statesmen" have been tempted to draw
lines on maps and consign hundreds of thousands of people to suffering;
all the more reason by now to have learned from these experiences.
If the partition of Bosnia is indeed steadily becoming irreversible,
this should cause alarm across Europe. It should not be assumed that
Balkan politicians’ need for European recognition and funding will
always inhibit radical moves that would once again destabilise the
region. The integration of southeastern Europe into the European Union
and western institutions has not proceeded so far as to provide full
insurance against a new Bosnian – or even wider Balkan – war.
The situation of Bosnia, and especially of its Bosniak majority areas,
is – under the pressure of Serbian separatism – getting more serious.
It is time for western politicians, having accepted responsibility
for Bosnia, to consider and take the steps necessary to prevent this
already divided country from moving towards new and dangerous schisms.
Peter Lippman also argued in 2007 that "nationalist leaders –
Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks" had a responsibility "to show that they
are serious about developing the reforms that would allow Bosnia &
Herzegovina to exist as a functional state that can join the European
Union on its own." But it is even more urgent that "the international
community and the OHR maintain a robust stance with regard to these
reforms, in order to prompt and encourage Bosnian leaders to see them
through." The Radovan Karadzic trial is a reminder of the worst that
could happen if they fail.