A Poisonous Week At The Hague Tribunal

Bosnian Croat commander Slobodan Praljak hit the headlines at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia with his sudden and dramatic suicide at the Hague. Praljak, who died after taking poison in court on Wednesday, was the wartime chief of the Main Headquarters of the Croatian Defence Council, HVO, the armed forces of the unrecognised Croat-led statelet of Herzeg-Bosnia. This suicide and ensuing debates indicated that the war may be over since almost two decades, but its aftershocks linger.

Florian Bieber, director of the Centre for Southeast European Studies in Graz and a top expert on the Balkans, writes as follows:

The nationalistic reactions to the death of Slobodan Praljak and the conviction of Ratko Mladic show that bitterly hostile disagreements persist over the reasons for the 1990s wars and the crimes that were committed.

Bieber provides various examples to nationalist reactions given to Praljak's suicide from the Croatian press and politics. Nevertheless, it is not just on the Croatian side that nationalist resentments and bitterness lie. Denial and self-victimisation abound across former-Yugoslavia. In Bieber's words:

This poisonous week at The Hague demonstrates that despite nearly 25 years of international transitional justice, EU integration and regional cooperation, political interpretations of the wars and the crimes remain antagonistic and mutually hostile; in fact more so than a decade ago.

This is not to say that the ICTY is futile and nothing has been achieved through international justice as far as war crimes are concerned. As Bieber notes, none of the culprits would have been sentenced in Serbian, Bosnian or Croatian courts. But, once wars erupt and fighting leaves a bitter legacy, there are no easy ways, no shortcuts to face the traumatic past. While coming to terms with the past will require ever new paths far beyond the ICTY itself, the efforts just cannot be abandoned — so that history may cease to repeat itself.