The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

Securing Verdicts: The Misuse of Witness Testimony at The Hague
tion in a courtroom. 40
Mitigating concerns such as these are not to be found in the judgment
the ICTY delivered against Drina Corps commander Radislav
Krstic, though eyewitness testimony placing him at relevant locations
was far more dubious. Unlike most ICTY judgments, the Limaj decision
is painstaking in its attention to detail and in its concern about the
need for certitude. Most interesting of all was the ICTY’s treatment of
the criminal culpability of the KLA. The court announced that, while
KLA policy was “to target perceived Kosovo Albanian collaborators who
were believed to be or suspected of associating with Serbian authorities
and interests,” there was no evidence to suggest that the KLA had “a general
policy of targeting civilians as such, whether Serbian or Kosovo Albanian.”
41 The KLA attacks thus could not be “considered to have been
directed against a civilian population.” 42 The judges then declared that
the smallness of the scale of the abductions and killings relative to the
total Kosovo population militated against a finding that the civilian population
was under systematic attack. The abductions, the judges declared,
occurred in diverse geographic locations, were relatively limited
in number and involved relatively few abductees in comparison
to the civilian population of Kosovo, such that it is not possible
to discern from them that the civilian population itself was the
subject of an attack, or that Kosovo Albanian collaborators and
perceived or suspected collaborators and other abductees were
of a class or category so numerous and widespread that they
themselves constituted a ‘population’ in the relevant sense. 43
The smallness of the total number of Muslim men allegedly executed
at Srebrenica relative to the total Muslim population of Bosnia did not
stop the ICTY judges from handing down genocide convictions against
Radislav Krstic and Vidoje Blagojevic. Attacks on individuals suspected
of being “collaborators”—an anodyne term to refer to law-abiding officials—serves
the strategic purpose of terrorizing the civilian population
into not cooperating with legitimate government authorities. However,
upon reaching their conclusion, the ICTY judges threw out all of the
crimes against humanity charges against Limaj. All that was left was the
relatively simple task of discrediting the witnesses arrayed against him.
One witness after another was found to be deficient in some way.
The testimony of KLA leaders such as Shukri Buja concerning Limaj’s
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