UN COURT: VERDICT

Convicted war criminal’s suicide should not thwart court’s milestone

THE HAGUE

IT was supposed to be business as usual in the sedate halls of the United Nations court for the former Yugoslavia, as judges delivered their final verdict after two decades of painstaking, groundbreaking work.

Instead, halfway through Wednesday’s appeals judgment, a tall, determined Bosnian Croat — known for his past courtroom antics — wrought chaos on the tribunal, ensuring the last day of its public proceedings will be forever remembered for his suicide.

In full view of the cameras and judges, former military commander Slobodan Praljak, 72, defiantly drank down a noxious liquid to protest the upholding of his 20year term for war crimes against Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s.

But experts were divided on Thursday, on how much the dramatic scenes would tarnish the court’s work in the long run.

“The damage to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (CTY) legacy and its international justice project is immense,” argued Jelena Subotic, a political science professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

Underscoring the importance of the court established by the UN Security Council in 1993, she said it had been “the most visible, however imperfect, mechanism of transitional justice in the region”.

As the world looked on impotently at the killings, rapes and destruction tearing Yugoslavia apart, the court was established with the aim of halting the violence by bringing to justice those behind some of the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II. It was the first war crimes court established