The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

CHAPTER 5
Securing Verdicts: The Misuse of Witness
Testimony at The Hague
George Szamuely
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
(ICTY) has played a crucial role in enshrining the official orthodoxy
on Srebrenica. The ICTY’s operating assumptions are those of the
NATO countries and institutions that provide most of its funding, in
particular the U.S. government which chose most of its original staff.
According to these assumptions, established long before any meaningful
assessment of the causes and conduct of the wars in the former Yugoslavia
could take place, the Serbs were the instigators of these wars;
Serbs perpetrated genocide; Serbs, unlike any other ethnic group in the
wars, committed atrocities as a matter of state policy; Serbs were criminals
carrying out criminal orders issued by a criminal leadership; and
Serbs must be made to acknowledge their guilt to expiate their sins. Indeed,
one of the architects of the tribunal, former State Department official
Michael P. Scharf, wrote candidly of the mission of the ICTY in
the Washington Post: 1
In creating the Yugoslavia tribunal statute, the U.N. Security
Council set three objectives: first, to educate the Serbian people,
who were long misled by Milosevic’s propaganda, about the acts
of aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed
by his regime; second, to facilitate national reconciliation
by pinning prime responsibility on Milosevic and other top
leaders and disclosing the ways in which the Milosevic regime
had induced ordinary Serbs to commit atrocities; and third, to
promote political catharsis while enabling Serbia’s newly elected
leaders to distance themselves from the repressive policies of the
past.
The words “justice” and “fairness” and “international law” are not
found in these three raisons d’etres, and, indeed, the ICTY has pursued
openly political objectives at the expense of legal procedures adopted
long ago by the very Western nations that created and funded this ad
hoc tribunal.
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