The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

Securing Verdicts: The Misuse of Witness Testimony at The Hague
joint criminal enterprise. Each participant or co-perpetrator
within the joint criminal enterprise played his own role or roles
that significantly contributed to the overall objective of the enterprise.
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Now the prosecutors have presented no evidence whatsoever that
Milosevic ever pursued, ordered, instigated or intended the “forcible removal
of the majority of the Croat and other non-Serb population from
the approximately one-third of the territory of the Republic of Croatia
that he planned to become part of a new Serb-dominated state.” There
is no proof other than prosecutorial assertions that others pursued it,
and since Milosevic was part of this group, he himself must have intended
it. As noted earlier, Milosevic provided no support whatever to
the Krajina Serbs while they were being ethnically cleansed by Croatian
forces in operations “Flash” and “Storm.” But it is clear that those ethnic
cleansings, helped along by the U.S. and tacitly by the UN and
ICTY, were the real “forcible removals”—in the interest of creating the
Croat-dominated state that resulted from these actions.
The ICTY’s most notorious innovation was the so-called third category
“joint criminal enterprise.” According to this category, someone
could be guilty of a crime even if he neither committed it, nor intended
it, nor intended that anyone else commit it. The ICTY refers to
a common design to pursue one course of conduct where one
of the perpetrators commits an act which, while outside the
common design, was nevertheless a natural and foreseeable consequence
of the effecting of that common purpose. An example
of this would be a common, shared intention on the part of a
group to forcibly remove members of one ethnicity from their
town, village or region (to effect “ethnic cleansing”) with the
consequence that, in the course of doing so, one or more of the
victims is shot and killed. While murder may not have been explicitly
acknowledged to be part of the common design, it was
nevertheless foreseeable that the forcible removal of civilians at
gunpoint might well result in the deaths of one or more of those
civilians. Criminal responsibility may be imputed to all participants
within the common enterprise where the risk of death
occurring was both a predictable consequence of the execution
of the common design and the accused was either reckless or
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