9 responses to “HAVE YOUR SAY: Can war crimes trials deliver true justice?”

1. bobby says:
   30 Jul 2008 19:36:38 GMT

   Karadzic will most certainly NOT get a fair trial, FACT.

   Anyway, when will Bush, Bill Clinton, Albright all be sent to the Hague to defend themselves over the crimes they have committed? I still don't understand why these criminals are loose on the sterets of America? Someone from the Hague care to explain???????????

2. John Heinrich says:
   31 Jul 2008 07:54:09 GMT

   The My Lai Massacre was the mass murder of 347 to 504 unarmed citizens of South Vietnam, almost entirely civilians and majority of them women and children, conducted by U.S. Army forces on March 16, 1968. Before being killed some of the victims were raped and sexually molested, beaten, tortured, or maimed. Some of the dead bodies were also mutilated. The massacre took place in the hamlets of My Lai and My Khe of Son village during the Vietnam War. The U.S. soldiers, one platoon of which was led by Second Lieutenant William Calley, went in shooting at "suspected enemy position". After the first civilians were killed and wounded by the indiscriminate fire, the soldiers soon began attacking anything that moved, humans and animals alike, with firearms, grenades and bayonets. William Calley is now living a comfortable and quiet life in the US, he was considered by many here in the USA fo being a "WAR HERO"! JUSTICE for who! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre

3. Betty says:
   04 Aug 2008 17:59:52 GMT

   I truly feel that we have war criminals in Africa and in the rest of the world.However,I wonder if the so called developed countries who have interest in these countries will ever stop.Who sells arms to say darfur?who deserves to be punished?when will everyone take responsibility for their mistakes?lets own up and segregative justice is not justice at all!

4. Rene Wadlow says:
   06 Aug 2008 11:42:22 GMT

   Dr. Radovan Karadzic : Death, War and Sacrifice

   René Wadlow
   Radovan Karadzic is a psychiatrist; his wife Ljiljan Zelem-Karadzic is a psychiatrist; their daughter Sonja is a psychiatrist. Had Yugoslavia continued united, Karadzic probably would have headed a private clinic for wealthy neurotics to whom he would have read his poems in the evening. Or he might have, as has done for the last 12 years under the name of Dragan Dabic, gone into alternative medicine, stressing the role of thinking and meditation and writing advice articles for the journal Healthy Life.
   However, Karadzic has now been sent to the Hague where the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia will put him on trial for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The Tribunal was set up in 1993 while the wars in former Yugoslavia were going on but reports of war crimes had attracted world attention. Since its inception, the Tribunal has convicted 56 persons, acquitted 10; there are 27 on trial and 210 others in pretrial stage. The Serbian General Rathko Mladic has been indicted but is still at large.
   Karadjic’s political career was much shorter than his 12 years of alternative medicine. He was not particularly active in politics during the Yugoslav federation. He became active in politics on the eve of the break up of Yugoslavia when the future of Bosnia was in doubt. The Serbs of Bosnia needed a vocal representative. Karadjic was known as a poet who spoke well in public (even if his poetry was difficult and not widely read.). His nationalism was of the type based on the use of myth as best developed by the French historian Georges Dumézil who developed the idea of a common Indo-European people organized in three fuctional categories 1) the sacred, represented by priests, 2) physical force represented by warriors, 3) production and reproduction, represented by herdsmen, agriculturalists and artisans. Islam represented a non-Indo-European culture that was a constant danger to European civilization, the barbarians at the gates. Memory of past Serbian glory is the l! ast, best defense against chaos.
   Bosnia was the only Yugoslav republic without a dominant nationality, having large Serb, Croat and Muslim populations, often mixed together. However ‘Muslim’ was not really a ‘nationality’ in the sense that Serb, Croat, and Macedonians were considered a ‘nationality’. ‘Muslim’ is a religious definition, regardless of what they believed as individuals. ‘Muslims’ were thought to be Croats and Serbs who had converted to Islam during the Ottoman period. Many Serbs and Croats thought that the ‘Muslims’ would revert to their Serb or Croat ‘nationality’ once they had a chance, especially as Islamic practice was low among the Bosnian Muslims. Thus the leadership in both Serbia and Croatia were willing to divide Bosnia between them and to integrate their respective sections into Serbia and Croatia. In 1991, there was an agreement between Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Franjo Tudman of Croatia on the division of Bosnia-Herzegovina between them.
   However, the Bosnian Muslims �€" the Bosniaks as they called themselves �€" were not willing to be so divided and struggled under the leadership of Alija Izethegovic for an independent state. There were some who hoped that Bosnia would be an undivided, multi-ethnic, multi-religious republic. (1). But the forces of division were stronger than those of cooperation. In March 1992, Bosnia-Hercegovina declared its independence, and at the same time, Republika Srpska was declared under the leadership of Radovan Karadzic. A month later, in April 1992, the siege of Sarajevo began lasting until February 1994. Although the siege was continuing in an effort to prove that a multi-ethnic society could not exist, in September 1992, the Geneva Peace Conference on Bosnia began at the UN headquarters under the co-leadership of Lord Owen on behalf of the EC and Cyrus Vance, former US Secretary of State, for the UN. Vance later withdrew and was replaced by Thorvold Stoltenberg. I had b! een in Belgrade in 1991 at the start of the Yugoslav conflict to see if NGOs could play any role in conflict reduction. With the start of the negotiations in Geneva in 1992, I followed the discussions as closely as possible, especially as federalist ideas were being discussed as a structure for Bosnia.
   Radovan Karadzic created the capital for Republika Srpska in Pale, a small ski resort above Sarajevo. The court trial will, hopefully, bring out how much control he had over the Bosnian Serb forces led by General Ratko Mladic. There were in addition to the regular military, a number of militias, more criminal bands than nationalist movements. It is very likely that a charge of genocide �€" the destruction of a people �€" will hold against Karadzic. Genocide does not mean killing everyone; it means the destruction of the identity of a people. There was a widely held belief among both Serbs and Croats that the ‘Muslims’ were not a ‘people’ and that by the heat of war, they would find their ‘true identity’ as Croats and Serbs who had been forced by the Ottomans to become Muslims. Karadzic put a Christian coloring on his views �€" how sincerely one never knows, but religion could serve as a bond among Serbs. As Karadzic said in many speeches “Our faith is p! resent in all our thinking and decisions, and the voices of the Church is obeyed as the voice of supreme authority.” The priestly function was that which was to guide society, and he saw himself in the mythical role of priest-warrior.
   By 1995, the Hague Tribunal had issued an arrest warrant for Karadzic and Mladic. Thus it was Slobodan Milosevic who negotiated both for himself and for the Bosnian Serbs when the 1995 Dayton Accords on the future of Bosnia were negotiated. The accords were signed in Paris in December 1995. Both Karadzic and Mladic resigned from their posts of Republika Srpska and went into hiding.
   Karadzic seems to have had the identity papers of Dragan Dabic, a Serb killed in the fighting around Sarajevo and went to live in Belgrade to take up work in alternative medicine and healing techniques.
   In the 12 years spent in his new identity, he may have had time to return to a ‘father’ of psychiatric thought, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in particular his Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) and his Why War? (1933) a short exchange of letters with Albert Einstein for the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations. By the time Why War? Was published, the establishment of the Nazi regime in Germany had made the question one of tragic timeliness. In both works, Freud analyses civilization in terms of two basic types of man’s instinctual life, on the one hand, man’s instinct to love and cooperate, and on the other, man has an impulse to attack and destroy. The first impulse is called by Freud (as by Plato in his Symposium ) Eros, of which sexual love is only one manifestation. The purpose of the erotic impulse is to tie together, to establish ever greater unities, whereas the purpose of the second, the death instinct, is to att! ack, dissolve, destroy and finally, to reduce living things to an inorganic death. Freud maintains that civilization owes its existence to the possibility of extending love for one’s family into wider friendship and loyalty to the group, society and the world.
   Yet the very act of this wider expansion of the circle of those loved creates tensions and frustrations that strengthen the aggressive drive of the person. Thus, the progress of civilization and the establishment of peace is a constant struggle between the cooperative and destructive impulses.
   Norman O. Brown made this duality the basis for an effort to reshape psychoanalysis into a wider general theory of human rapture, culture and history in his Life against Death. (2)
   Karadzic has shown that the impulse of death can be stronger than that of life. It is reported that, following the pattern of Slobodan Milmosevic, he wishes to defend himself alone at the Hague Tribunal. We will have to see if his years from political action provided him with insights into the dual impulses of eros and death. For the moment, his life is a clear example of the triumph of the will to death over the will to life.
   (1) See Rusmir Mahmutcehajic.The Denial of Bosnia (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000, 156 pp.)
   (2) Norman O. Brown. Life against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959, 366 pp.)
   René Wadlow, Representative to the United Nations, Geneva, Association of World Citizens and editor of the online journal of world politics, www.transnational-perspectives.org

5. Aleks says:
   12 Aug 2008 11:03:13 GMT

   It rather depends on whether you believe all the liberal 'humanitarian war' drivel and 'doing something'.

   A better question would be "What would it take for a western leader to be indicted for war crimes?"
   It seems our buds get a free pass. Indonesia has recently offered a half-baked apology to East Timor in return for not being sent to the ICC. In the background, the US, Australian and other allies have rebuilt their relations - Indonesia is an important ally in the war on terror.
   The ICTY is about punishment. This is why the ICC is based and designed differently. No western leader, let alone one of any powerful nation would submit themselves to a court run in the way that the ICTY is, which was designed as a one shot device and strictly (and conveniently) limited to that particular territory. If the ICC, whoose goal is that of a permanent criminal court is ever to succeed, there is no way that would be possible if it were an upgraded ICTY clone.
   The only good news about the ICTY is that the published transcripts show how bad the court is and highlight many critical events and information that the media either did not know or denied people.
   The ICTY doesn't do fair trials and is institutionally racist. The largest proof here is how the ICTY decided to redefine genocide to get a conviction because it considered the bar of proof to be set too high. Having read the judge's summation, if applied retro-actively, then genocide has happened hundred of times this century alone.
   One must also recall that it was set up amongst massive and false propaganda that up to 200,000 bosnians had been killed by the end of 1993 and that 60,000+ bosnian women had been raped (punctured by the dame anne-warburton report that found very little evidence of the numbers, let alone as a policy). Even before the war broke out in the former yugoslavia, rape was not considered a war crime. Why not?
   As much as the moralists like to talk of justice and reconciliation, people will never forget what happened to them and who did it. You can throw money at the problem and teach the children in school the fluffy media correct version of events, but when those kids go home and ask mum and dad (if they haven't been blown up, had their throats slit or other), they will hear an entirely different story. That is the reality.
   That the media and others continue to peddle such myths straight from the politicians mouths as humanitarian war, then we will certainly not get anywhere.
   War crimes tribunal are for foreigners. Our war criminals when uncovered are retired, pensioned off and allowed to go into a peaceful sunset with a gin & tonic in hand. They die in peace. Our allied war criminals are given the benefit of the doubt, like General Pinochet - someone the humanitarian bombers have conveniently forgotten about.

6. Dan Kustudich says:
   12 Aug 2008 11:06:54 GMT

   Hello Mr. RenA Wadlow, It is obvious that you are quite and informed person. However, let me point out at some of the mistakes in your "reasoning" Here are the two sections of your letter: (i) Radovan Karadzic is a psychiatrist; his wife Ljiljan Zelem-Karadzic is a psychiatrist; their daughter Sonja is a psychiatrist. Had Yugoslavia continued united, Karadzic probably would have headed a private clinic for wealthy neurotics to whom he would have read his poems in the evening. Or he might have, as has done for the last 12 years under the name of Dragan Dabic, gone into alternative medicine, stressing the role of thinking and meditation and writing advice articles for the journal Healthy Life. (ii) For the moment, his life is a clear example of the triumph of the will to death over the will to life. To me, these two statements are contradictory. It is most likely that Mr. Karadzic was caught in the messy internal Yugoslav conflict - which has been orchestrated by various "monetary, millitary industrial" and international gangs, for whose interests it was important to break down a reasonably well run Federal Yugoslavia. These same "power brokers" have established the kangaroo court in Hague, so that THEIR filthy activities couls be transferred to the victims of their intrigues. Sooner or later, the World will find the way to liberation and getting rid of these unscrupulous World manipulators. Dan K.

7. Kirungi Ndyanabo says:
   24 Sep 2008 10:45:15 GMT

   I have always wondered how politics works in the world. when many Africans were killed during the aphetheid in south Africa, the west preferred the installation of the truth and reconciliation chaired by Desmond Tutu. why? because the culprits were white and suported by those western countries. why dint we prosecute them also. what happens to many of those who lost there dear ones during the white mans rule in SA. since we were fighting for freedom we should consider the killings in south Africa as war crimes and prosecute those responsible. why should we always try the perpetraitors in any conflict where the west has not mastermided but we leave and set up reconcilliaition committees where the west is a culprit

8. Ruth says:
   24 Sep 2008 10:48:39 GMT

   There are plenty of examples of truth commissions without legal consequences apart from South Africa, especially in Latin America. What about Guatemala's Commission for Historical Clarification, for example?

9. Micheal Breathnach says:
   06 Oct 2008 12:13:01 GMT

   War crimes trials, to date, have been a universal disgrace. Frighteningly corrupt and even deadly as in the case of Mr. Milosevic.

   However, I feel Mr. Karadzic's life will be spared as any 'mishaps' would be just too coincidental. Furthermore, many of the rats and lampreys who were involved in his downfall are running scared, especially as they did not forsee a decade and more ago how powerful the internet would become in the sharing of information.

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