http://www.serbianna.com/columns/borojevic/074.shtml INTERVIEW: JOHN LAUGHLAND ON INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE Judge & Jury By Boba Borojevic August 28, 2008 International criminal prosecutions, it seems, are higher than ever before on the global agenda. International justice is also making headlines in Canada. Belgrade authorities have delivered entire former political and military leadership of the Serbian people to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague short of General Ratko Maldic and General Hadzic as their “duty to serve justice”. John Laughland*, author of several books the most recent ones “Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice” and “A History of Political Trials from Crales I to Saddam Hussein” has written extensively about the “victor’s justice’ by special courts or tribunals in the Hague whose members, both judge and jury, understand that the outcome has already been decided. In his interview to “Monday’s Encounter” on CKCU 93.1 FM in Ottawa, Laughland said that, “With international justice we are dealing with some of most fundamental questions of political life. We are dealing with the questions of who makes the rules, who has the right to rule and who adjudicates the rules. These are the questions which go to the very essence of politics. States are created around an agreement on who has the right to rule and who has the right to adjudicate and implement the rules,” said Laughland. Indisputable claims He explains that with the creation of the international tribunals we are dealing with an attempt to establish a system of right to rule on the bases of claims which are set to be indisputable: about genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and so on. “What is striking about these Tribunals and their claim of right to rule is that they claim political power but at the same time they do not wish to assume any political responsibility. When a state is created it affirms the right to rule. The state has a control over its territory and thereby it has certain rights over the people who live on that territory. But in retune for that right to rule it also undertakes obligations to protect the people who live there as a sort of contract between rulers and the ruled. What I find unacceptable about the International Tribunals is that they affirm the right to rule, affirm the right to make rules, to apply them and to adjudicate them, but they don’t take any corresponding obligations. They don’t take any obligation to protect or to govern in any way the peoples over whom they wield power,” explains Laughland. In the case of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia prosecutions are announced including of very prominent figures who played the role in the political life of their respective countries. The Tribunal says that it has the right to adjudicate them. “Indeed it does adjudicate them and in many cases convicts them and sentences them, but the Yugoslav Tribunal never bears any of the political consequences for the indictments that it issues or for the trials that it conducts,” says Laughland. “Like all the international tribunals it is structurally separate from the people and the state over which it has power. Power without responsibility “The original purpose of the ICTY was political. It was set up in 1993 under American initiative to prosecute Serbs. Although the Tribunal has indicted other nationalities from the former Yugoslavia the focus remains exclusively on Serbs. More generally, the purpose of the Tribunal was to destroy the sovereignty of Yugoslavia and also the sovereignty of the new successive states, including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and so on. Those states were recognized as members of the UN and sovereign nations but on the other hand their right to prosecute people accused of war crimes on their territory was taken away from them and handed to the Tribunal,”explains Laughland. So we have a very supranational ideology behind this. The idea was to set up a new system of supranational government with Yugoslavia as a laboratory. That is why that the chance of someone like Karadzic having a fair trial is zero. Laughland believes that, “The whole original purpose of the Tribunal and the whole ideology behind it was that this was a war where crimes were being committed largely, as they put it, by the Serbs. The war was understood from the very beginning as a criminal phenomenon. It was not understood, as it should have been, as a very classic fight over territory. Therefore without the criminal indictment particularly of the Bosnian Serbs there would be no reason for the Tribunal to exist at all and there would be no justification for the interventionism, both military and judicial which was practised against Yugoslavia generally, “said Laughland. Collective versus individual guilt Serbia’s President Boris Tadic argues that the ICTY does not seek to assign collective responsibility, but to determine individual guilt for specific atrocities in the former Yugoslavia. By now the ICTY has indict the entire former political and military leadership of the Serbian people. Laughland does not think that is possible to separate the fate of individuals from the fate of the nation as a whole when we are talking about acts of war. “It is often claimed that war crimes tribunals prosecute only individuals and not whole nations. This is fiction, which cannot be sustained. The reason why it is a fiction is that acts of war are by definition public acts. War indeed is intelligible only as a political act and only as a collective public and not a private undertaking. That is why throughout history people involved in conflict do support their countrymen and their fellow soldiers even though they are accused of atrocities. That is why it isn’t possible to separate the acts of individuals from the acts of the nation which they led. In case of Karadzic and other Serbs at The Hague, they are being prosecuted only in their capacity as leaders of a nation. They are not being persecuted in their capacity of private individuals,” concluded Laughland. *John Laughland is an academic author, journalist and author. He writes for the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday and the Spectator on European and international affairs. He has a strong interest in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. [Also pulished in The Voice of Canaian Serbs, August 2008]
