'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

ICTY: Reconciliation, or its opposite?

With about 95% of the votes counted in Sunday's election in Serbia, the BBC is reporting that, "the SRS [Serbian Radical] party and the Socialist Party of Serbia, both headed by men facing war crimes charges at the UN tribunal in The Hague, were on track to get 103 seats - of a total of 250."

The two defendants in question are the SRS's Vojislav Seselj and the Socialist Party's Slobodan Milosevic.

Earlier today (Monday) the SRS, which won 81 of those seats, offered to form a coalition with the party which came second in the polls, the Democratic Party of Serbia (53 seats), which is more reformist than the two very hardline parties. But like Milosevic and Seselj, Democratic Party leader Vojislav Kostunica is extremely critical of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY)...

It'll be interesting to see what happens. Some excellent background on the complex interactions between ICTY and internal political developments in Serbia can be found in a good article by Tim Judah, "The fog of justice", in the latest issue (January 15, 2004) of The New York Review of Books.

(Sorry, but the NYRB usually does not put full-text versions of its pieces online.)

In the piece, Judah gives some insight into the thinking on these matters of ICTY President Ted Meron, whose views make an interesting complement to those of the Rwanda Tribunal President Erik Mose, as I quoted them in my recent piece about the Rwanda court in Boston Review.

One of the "main aims" of ICTY, Judah writes, is "to encourage reconciliation in the Balkans." Well, that may be a little of an exaggeration. But contributing to reconciliation was certainly one of the aims listed in the preamble of the 1993 Security Council resolution that established the court.

He quoted Meron as saying that although "reconciliation was one of the historic goals for establishing the tribunal, more than on any other aspect the jury is still out" on this. ("Jury" is a play on words here, evidently, since juries play no part in the workings of any of the UN's international courts... ) But Meron continued, according to Judah, "Were it not for such a tribunal, prospects [for reconciliation] would be greatly, adversely affected." Without justice, Meron reportedly then said, men's primary instinct is revenge...

Well, personally I dispute that. That is NOT always the case-- as my work in Mozambqiue and South Africa has vividly shown me. But still, Judah seems to be assuming that Meron-- who is himself a Holocaust survivor-- has been informed in his current work by that experience. A desire for revenge has certainly been the reaction of many, but not all, Holocaust survivors to that existentially searing experience...

Anyway, most of Judah's fine piece deals with the reactions of "former Yugoslavs" to the 10 years' work of ICTY up until now, and to the effects of ICTY's work on political developments inside the various former-Yugoslav republics. This is, I think, over the long run, the most appropriate lens through which to look at and evaluate the work of these UN Tribunals: Do they indeed contribute to long-term healing and reconciliation, or do they exacerbate and perpetuate the existing cleavages and hatreds?

In particular, Judah was examining the extremely important question of how the court's work has affected politics inside Serbia. His judgment:

I don't believe that the Hague Tribunal is the only, or even a major, reason for the collapse of the reformist government that led Serbia since 2000, but it has contributed to it...