Serbian Nationalists and Karadzic

It's no surprise that Serbian nationalists believe that the Hague ICTY is incapable of providing Radovan Karadic with a fair trial. That said, the trial is going forward. One of the most recent developments concerns Karadzic's attempt to sack his court-appointed attorney. Karadzic is doing everything in his power to delay the trial, and continues to insist that he is innocent on all 11 counts of war crimes. His most infamous act was to oversee the massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. Karadzic continues to argue that war war was avoidable and that Alija Izetbegovic as well as foreign (German) interference was largely responsible for the outbreak of war. Also, there's no denying that the origins of the conflict are difficult to unravel. Still, this trial is not ultimately about establishing blame for the outbreak of the war. Karadzic needs to stand trial for specific war crimes.

Serbia and Russia: Slavic Brothers Always

Here's an interesting story from NPR. The Russians want to put a gas pipeline through Serbia. Apparently, many Serbians "welcome" Gazprom's bid to own a controlling interest in Serbian state gas and oil. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Serbs and Russians have cultivated "pan-Slavic" nationalism. More recently, the Russians supported Serbia during the Yugoslav war and during the NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999.
There's no doubt that this move will serve to strengthen Russia's geo-political position in Europe even as it strengthens Serbia's legitimacy in the Balkans. In recent years, both the Russians and Serbians have felt that Americans and Western Europeans have misused and misunderstood them. There's little doubt that such feelings will drive them to work more closely with one another.

Criticism of the ICTY in the Hague

Marko Attila Hoare's essay (12/24/08) is highly critical of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. He compares the course of its trials to those at Nuremberg following WWII, and concludes that the "difference in aim and organization" between the two insitutions explain why one was far more successful than the other. The ICTY, in his opinion, has proved "toothless" because it sought reconciliation rather than justice. This, in turn, has been the result of the international community's failure to "impose a narrative" assigning blame for the "War of Yugoslav Succession". Ultimately, all sides feel simultaneously victimized and vindicated. "There is a lesson to be learned from the respective experiences of the IMT and ICTY: so far as war-crimes are concerned, there can be no real justice without the real defeat of the perpetrators."

"Balkan Troubles"

In Monday's Wall Street Journal Europe, Morton Abramowitz and Daniel Serwer remind us that the Balkans have not vanished. Ethnic tensions, they argue, still threaten to degenerate into violence. The "wounds of war are still raw", they write, and the European Union and the United States are too concerned about the threat of intensified nationalism to understand that they need to display "stiffer resolve", particularly in Bosnia.

Radovan Karadzic faces Two Counts of Genocide

On July 18, 2008, Serbian security forces arrested Radovan Karadzic, who had successfully evaded capture for over a decade since the end of the war in Bosnia in 1995. Karadzic, a Serbian ultra-nationalist, is now imprisoned in the Hague and will go on trial for--among other charges--two counts of genocide. He is best known for commanding Bosnian Serb forces, orchestrating the siege of Sarajevo and ordering the Srebrenica massacre (1995). Just today, United Nations war crimes judges in the Hague [ICTY] rejected a request from Stojan Zupljanin to combine his own trial with that of Karadzic. Karadzic himself continues to claim that United States officials offered him immunity in 1996, a claim that former peace envoy Richard Holbrooke denies. UN judges have ignored Karadzic's claims, asserting that they are "invalid under international law".

The following is an AP report on the arrest and extradition of Karadzic to the Netherlands in July:



Compare the first account to the story as Al Jazeera covered it:

Don't forget the Balkans.

Radio Free Europe reminds us that the Balkans remain a source of instability. The western (and certainly American) media is obsessed with Barack Obama's move to Washington DC and the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Important stories, to be sure, but it seems that nobody remembers the anti-American riots in February following Kossovo's declaration of independence. The RFE story is pretty optimistic, suggesting that independence and an election repesent a "break from the ethnically driven politics of the past, and a step toward greater integration with the West."