J. Laughland on the Arrest of Radovan Karadzic
and more: Moscow hopes a trial of Radovan Karadzic to be unbiased / MOSCOW ACCUSES HAGUE-BASED TRIBUNAL OF DOUBLE STANDARDS / The lost chance for peace in Bosnia (Letters to The Independent)
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Russian Information Agency Novosti
July 22, 2008
On the Arrest of Radovan Karadzic
John Laughland, Director of Studies at the Institute
for Democracy and Cooperation in Paris
MOSCOW - The arrest of Radovan Karadzic comes almost
exactly seven years after the first appearance of
Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague on 3
July 2001.
Milosevic's handover was, like Karadzic's, the
immediate result of regime change in Belgrade: just as
Karadzic's arrest swiftly followed the formation of a
pro-European and pro-Western government in Serbia on 8
July, so Milosevic's arrest in April 2001 was the
result of the victory of the Democratic Party (whose
leader is now the President of Serbia) at the
parliamentary elections in December 2000.
The arrest shows that political power matters deeply
when it comes to criminal prosecution: obviously, as
with Milosevic, the fact that Karadzic's friends lost
power in Belgrade caused it.
But this truth also applies to the ICTY itself.
At the end of June, the ICTY released Nasir Oric, the
Bosnian Muslim commander at Srebrenica whose forces
used the cover of the UN safe haven there to conduct
nightly raids against the surrounding Serbian
villages, and which committed numerous atrocities
against civilians.
Oric's release followed the ICTY's acquittal in April
of the former Prime Minister of Kosovo and former KLA
leader, Ramush Haradinaj, even though the Tribunal in
its ruling noted that several prosecution witnesses
had been mysteriously killed before they could come to
The Hague to give their testimony.
Many Serbs, then, will be convinced that the ICTY has
a fundamental anti-Serb bias.
But the majority of Serbs has evidently also been so
worn down by a decade and a half of such hostility
from the West in general, that it has presumably
decided that if you can't beat them, join them: this
is why Serbs voted for a pro-European president in
February and a pro-European government in May.
They, or at any rate their leaders, have concluded
that Karadzic should be sacrificed for the greater
national good, which in their view means absorption
into the EU and NATO.
Serbia's inclusion into these structures, which is now
inevitable, will merely complete the West's
geopolitical project in the Balkans.
Therefore, while it may well be true that the ICTY is
anti-Serb, this is to miss the key point about the
ICTY's political agenda, which is to justify the
West's new doctrine of military and judicial
interventionism.
According to this doctrine, military force can be
deployed against a state when its government commits
human rights abuses.
The Serbs are just the people on whom this policy has
been tried out.
While it may have great superficial appeal, since
there is no doubt that atrocities were committed in
the Balkan wars, the hypocrisy of this policy lies in
the fact that neither NATO nor any of the Western
powers have ever tried to get truly international
support for it, for instance by drawing up an
international treaty or by reforming the UN charter
which currently prohibits such interventionism. The
policy has simply been announced unilaterally.
No criminal trial of a political leader in history has
ended in acquittal, in spite of the fact that the
tradition stretches back to the trial of the King of
England, Charles I, in 1649.
This is because the prosecution of a former sovereign
is a means of demonstrating that a new regime is in
power, and that the old regime was never legitimate in
the first place.
In the case of Karadzic, things will be no different.
The ICTY commits numerous violations of the best
principles of legal procedure to obtain its
convictions, and it has in particular elaborated a
theory of liability which is so broad that defendants
are effectively required to prove their innocence
against the presumption of guilt.
Even if no order is produced from Karadzic instructing
people to commit war crimes, he will be convicted on
the basis that he should have known or must have
known.
The ICTY will do this because the political narrative
behind his trial is be that he, as Bosnian Serb
president, was only ever a criminal; that the state he
headed never had any legitimacy; and that NATO's
intervention against the Bosnian Serbs in 1995 was
therefore not an act of aggression in international
law but instead a justifiable act.
The logic tested in the Balkans 1995 and 1999 (when
NATO attacked Yugoslavia over Kosovo) was implemented
much more dramatically when the US and Britain
declared that they alone had the right to enforce UN
Security Council Resolutions in Iraq.
That war - also subsequently legitimised by a
political trial - has now consumed nearly a million
lives and plunged a whole region into seemingly
interminable chaos.
It is time for the world to reflect seriously on the
danger of introducing the criminal law into
international relations.
John Laughland - British political scientist, Director
of Studies at the Institute for Democracy and
Cooperation in Paris. His book on the Milosevic
trial, "Travesty", was published by Pluto Press in
London in 2007.
---
Voice of Russia
July 22, 2008
Moscow hopes a trial of Radovan Karadzic to be unbiased
Moscow hopes a trial of the former Bosnian Serb leader
Radovan Karadzic by the International Tribunal for
Former Yugoslavia will be unbiased.
Mr. Karadzic was charge with war crimes in the Balkans
in the early 1990s.
Commenting on his arrest, the Russian Foreign Ministry
spokesman Andrei Nesterenko said the issue was an
internal matter for Serbia.
At the same time he noted that the Hague-based
tribunal had repeatedly demonstrated bias against
Serbs and acquitted Kosovo Albanians despite
irrefutable evidence of their involvement in war
crimes.
Russia insists that the tribunal be dissolved and all
the remaining cases be tried by judicial bodies of
former Yugoslav republics.
---
Voice of Russia
July 23, 2008
MOSCOW ACCUSES HAGUE-BASED TRIBUNAL OF DOUBLE STANDARDS
Vyacheslav Solovyov
Moscow has again urged the International Tribunal for
Former Yugoslavia to renounce double standards and
bias.
The call came in a statement released by the Russian
Foreign Ministry following the arrest in Serbia of the
former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.
13 years ago, the tribunal indicted him in absentia
for military crimes during the war in
Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 90s of the past
century.
It is no secret that neither Serbs, nor Bosnian
Muslims, nor Croatians spared each other during that
war.
Nevertheless, despite evidence of crimes committed by
each of the sides, there is only one defendant –
Radovan Karadzic.
The tribunal is notorious for its bias against Serbs.
Over more than a decade, about 100 Serbs and just 25
Croatians, 9 Bosnian Muslims and 8 Albanians have
stood trial on charges of war crimes in an obvious
attempt to hold the Serbs responsible for the events
in the Balkans.
While the Serbian government is receiving
congratulations from Washington and European capitals
on Mr. Karadzic’s arrest, the majority of Serbs, most
of whom treat Mr. Karadzic as a hero, suspect Belgrade
of political bargaining.
This is how Borislav Milosevic, the brother of the
former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic who died
in prison during a trial in the Hague, commented on
the issue:
"For a big part of the Serbian population, Radovan
Karadzic is a national hero and the Hague-based
tribunal is an anti-Serb court convicting Serbs only.
As the Russian Foreign Ministry has said recently,
this tribunal must be shut. It’s been a tool to exert
pressure on Belgrade and our people."
The tribunal’s former chief prosecutor Carla Del
Ponte, in her book titled “The Hunt: Me and My War
Criminals”, published after her resignation,
acknowledged that evidence of severe crimes had often
been ignored if those crimes were committed by Bosnian
Muslims, Croatians or Kosovo Albanians.
For one, the tribunal turned a blind eye to the
abduction and killing of more than 300 Serbs by
Albanian militants in Kosovo and the subsequent sale
of their organs for transplant surgery.
No investigation into these facts has been launched.
---
The Independent
July 24, 2008
The lost chance for peace in Bosnia
It's all the fault of the Serbs and Radovan Karadzic,
according to Marcus Tanner ("Karadzic, the
psychiatrist who became a genocidal madman", 22 July).
He may care to ask why the Dayton Agreement was not
reached before the Bosnian wars broke out. There was,
after all, the confederal-cantonal Cutileiro Plan,
which was provisionally agreed by Bosnia's three
ethnic leaders at negotiations hosted by the European
Community in Lisbon on 23 February 1992.
The Muslim leader, Alija Izetbegovic, who all along
wanted a centrally governed Bosnia, flew back to
Sarajevo and met the US ambassador to Yugoslavia
Warren Zimmermann. Encouraged by Zimmermann,
Izetbegovic disowned the plan. Washington had, in
effect, pushed the Europeans aside and paved the way
for war. Some three and a half years later, a
muscularly interventionist Washington was
congratulating itself for having engineered the
confederal-cantonal Dayton Agreement.
And the beliefs of Alija Izetbegovic echoed those of
Islamists. His authorship of The Islamic Declaration
in 1970 earned him a prison sentence. In it, he
yearned for a caliphate subject to Islamic law from
Morocco to Indonesia, and ultimately elsewhere,
whenever and wherever Muslims attained a majority. At
no time did he disown the publication.
Irony abounds. Just as many British today fear
Islamist organisations advocating a caliphate, so
Bosnia's Serbs and Croats feared a centrally-governed,
Izetbegovic-led Bosnia. Moreover, if Izetbegovic were
alive today, he would not be granted entry into the
US.
Yugo Kovach
Twickenham, Middlesex