‘Court failed to reconcile Balkans’
Serbian PM lashes at ICTY
BELGRADE, April 2, (AFP): Serbia’s prime minister lashed out Friday at the UN war crimes court that tried Ultranationalist Serb leader Vojislav Seselj, accusing it of being “political” and failing to reconcile the Balkans.
Seselj was acquitted Thursday on nine charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity arising from the 1990s Balkan conflicts after “what was without a shadow of a doubt a political trial”, according to Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic.
He told reporters in Belgrade that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague had “acted mainly as a political court, not a legal institution”.
Many Serbs feel the court has unfairly targeted them in its quest to bring alleged Balkan war criminals to justice. Croats and Muslims, on the other hand, reacted angrily to Seselj’s surprise acquittal.
A week before the verdict, the tribunal’s judges sentenced wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic to 40 years in jail for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Vucic said reconciliation had been one of the main goals of the court but “there is no doubt that The Hague tribunal has not fulfilled this goal”.
“Instead the court has repeatedly hammered nails into the coffin of the sleepy Balkans, which is expected to continue in the future to deal with its past — wars, blood and conflicts — and do nothing else,” he said.
While Seselj’s supporters celebrated his acquittal, the ruling sent shock waves though much of the Balkans, with Croatia promptly banning him from entering the country.
Prosecutors had alleged Seselj was behind the murder of large numbers of Croat, Muslim and other non-Serb civilians, as well as the forced deportation of “tens of thousands” from parts of Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia during the 1990s wars.
The judges ruled that while “Seselj was driven by an ardent political ambition to create a Greater Serbia” this was in “principle a political plan, not a criminal plan”.
Analysts warned the not-guilty ver- dict could threaten already fragile relations in the former Yugoslavia.
“No one is satisfied, no one feels that justice will be served,” Croatian Serb leader Milorad Pupovac told N1 television, referring also to the court’s earlier acquittal of prominent Croat and Kosovo Albanian figures.
Vucic however called on Serbs to “behave differently” to others in the region by understanding the suffering of their neighbours.
“We citizens of Serbia will probably not see others respect our (war) victims in the manner we are obliged to respect their victims,” he said.
The leader of the Serbian Radical Party, 61-year-old Seselj spent nearly 12 years in detention at The Hague before returning to Serbia for cancer treatment in 2014.
He plans to stand in a general election later this month and has publicly burned EU and NATO flags, although his anti-Western and pro-Russian rhetoric hold less sway in Serbia today than Vucic’s pro-European line.
Staunch
The pair were once staunch ultranationalist allies until Vucic split from the Radicals.
Although Vucic criticised Seselj’s trial, he said he would “strongly oppose” his politics, which “push Serbia into the past”.
Legal experts and historians have reacted with outrage to the controversial war crimes acquittal of firebrand Serb Vojislav Seselj, saying it overturns international law and rewrites the history of the Balkans conflict.
“The decision of the majority (judges) is divorced from the reality of what was happening in Croatia and Bosnia,” former top US diplomat on war crimes issues, Stephen Rapp, told AFP.
No stranger to complex cases, having led the prosecution of ex-Liberian president Charles Taylor, Rapp said he was very “disappointed” that Seselj was on Thursday found not guilty of nine charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The majority ruling by a three-judge panel at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) departed “from established law and accepted practises of factfinding,” said Rapp, now an expert with the Hague Global Institute for Justice, a think tank.
Seselj, once a firebrand paramilitary leader, had been charged with murder, persecution and torture of non-Serb civilians by being allegedly a member of a “joint criminal enterprise” along with the late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic.
But in essence, the judges found that Seselj was a politician who ardently supported his vision of a Greater Serbia, but was not a criminal.
The judges also tossed aside decades of international law by saying “the crimes happened in an atmosphere of war, and this justifies them,” Balkans expert Eric Gordy told AFP.
“This is simply in conflict with the law,” added Gordy, a senior lecturer on Southeast European politics at University College London.
Chief ICTY prosecutor Serge Brammertz is already studying the judgement to see if there are grounds for appeal, and said many of the judges’ arguments were “absolutely not in line with the factual reality.”
Dissenting judge Flavia Lattanzi, in an unusually strong opinion, said her two colleagues had used “insufficient reasoning, or no reasoning at all” to support their acquittal of Seselj, “in contravention” of the court’s rules.
Read by French judge Jean-Claude Antonetti, the judgement acquitted Seselj of any wrongdoing during the period of the indictment between August 1991 and September 1993.
“The prosecution failed to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that there was a widespread and systematic attack against the non-Serb civilian population in large areas of Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina,” Antonetti said.
He specifically mentioned Vukovar, a Croatian town razed by Serb forces in November 1991, and Zvornik where some 40,000 non-Serb Bosnians were expelled by paramilitary groups in 1992.
The judges could not rule out that the buses used to transport non-Serbs away from Serb-claimed territories “were in fact provided on humanitarian grounds,” Antonetti said.