My piece at the Independent on the outcome of the Ejup Ganic trial in London provokes the usual flurry of comments:
Mr Crawford is one of the morons that manipulated both US and UK foreign policy towards Bosnia in the 1990s. As an officer in the NATO force that arrived in Bosnia in 1995 I can say, unequivocally, the Bosnian muslims were just as much criminals as their Serbian and Croatian counterparts. It is time to start punishing their leadership as well. The Ganic story is not over.
What about those poor conscripts who have been burnt down by
thugs who call themselves ,,Bosnian Army,,? Do they deserve justice?No?And why? Because,they were Serbs.How unfortunate. How much did you get paid for your ,,opinion,,? Lunch? Shame on you!
Appalling! His excellency, the former ambassador Crawford (to Serbia) reminds Serbia that it should shut up because that is the script handed to it by the International Community. Serbia is guilty by definition, so the accusations of war crimes that Serbia may have against others are not to be considered (Ex turpi causa non oritur actio)! Talk about specious syllogisms!
Mr Charles Crawford is a man of honor and integrity. SHame on you for attacking him.
Some background.
The Independent asked for 400 words. I sent them some 500. They condensed that down to 330 without sending me a final version. So key nuances which went some way at least to tackling points made in the critical comments were lost.
Such is Journalism.
In case anyone is still interested, here is what I think is the full judgement.
The judge said this:
There is nothing within the request which would bring the conduct alleging issuing a command to attack a military convoy within the meaning of a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions 1949. However there is a reference to an Ambulance within the convoy and the request alleges that Dr Ganic expressly ordered an attack upon the Ambulance within the convoy. To that limited extent I am satisfied that the conduct alleges an extradition offence.
I am not satisfied that the rest of the convoy had any right to protection or that the soldiers in the 30 vehicles were prisoners of war.
Without having heard the evidence presented it is hard to say why he reached this conclusion. But it is clear from the video footage of the Dobrovoljacka St shootings that the JNA convoy was leaving Sarajevo under some sort of UN-brokered ceasefire agreement.
Is there really no case to answer that it is a breach of the laws at war to attack a convoy in such circumstances? Apart from the wider policy issues, this finding directly contradicts the testimony of a British expert on the whole story whom the judge praised for his accuracy.
The Serbia side does not appear to have found any satisfactory answer to the Sarajevo/BH side’s arguments that Serbia offered to let the Ganic extradition request lapse in exchange for political support for Serbia Srebrenica Declaration. The judge reasonably gives significant weight to this in support of his wider concern that Serbia’s application was in one way or the other ‘politically’ motivated.
The judge took evidence from various notable people on that point including from Dr Schwarz-Shilling (sic and Lord Ashdown), former High Representatives in Sarajevo. Both asserted that the extradition request "is about politics rather than justice". Since neither of them have lived in Belgrade and both have seen the BH issue mainly from the vantage-point of Sarajevo, their evidence on this point should have been dismissed on the grounds of irrelevance.
Lord Ashdown even linked the extradition request to the date of the opening statement by Radovan Karadzic at ICTY, a linkage so footling that the judge explicitly dismissed it.
The judge was improperly dismissive of the role of the Belgrade war crimes courts and seemed to accept as true various tendentious generalisations about Serbia and Serb views put forward by Noel Malcolm and others.
These statements persuaded him that Serbia’s application should be barred by Section 81(a) and (b) of the Extradition Act 2003 on the grounds that the request had been made "for the purpose of prosecuting or punishing him on account of his race, religion, nationality and political opinions". This in my view is a far-reaching and obnoxious finding, based upon noisy assertions rather than hard facts.
All in all, a powerful but not especially coherent and convincing judgement. That said, in the circumstances it probably was correct enough.
It looks as if the Serbia side had not prepared its case re launching the extradition request and then thought through how best to handle the extradition hearing. It did poorly in presenting witnesses to rebut the openly ‘political’ case put forward by the Bosnia side. And by attempting some behind-the-scenes deal with Sarajevo while the matter proceeded in the UK courts, Belgrade foolishly laid itself open to a charge that its ‘real’ intentions were ‘political’ rather than legal/justice focused.
To be 100% clear for the record.
I am NOT saying or suggesting that war crimes against Serbs should not be prosecuted. I pressed hard for that to happen when UK Ambassador both in Sarajevo and Belgrade.
Nor am I saying that because of Srebrenica/Mladic Serbia is disqualified from running war crimes trials in Belgrade, or from putting in extradition requests such as this one.
Nor do I believe that Belgrade is unable to run a fair trial of non-Serbs. I do think that keeping fair is a difficult problem for all the local war crimes processes in former Yugoslavia:
The ICTY is not the whole story. Special courts for “lesser” war crimes have been set up in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia. These important trials are little acknowledged elsewhere in Europe. As British ambassador in Belgrade, I hosted a Kosovo family in Belgrade to give evidence in one of the first trials, involving alleged war crimes by Serbs in Kosovo. They said they had been treated honorably by the Serbian authorities.
The core problem with these trials is that each ethnic community concerned likes to see a conviction of someone from another community who brutalized their fellow ethnic cousins. But they hate it when “their” court is expected to put on trial one of “their” people. They hate it even more when a court elsewhere in the region looks to go lightly on someone from “its” community. Why, cry Serbs, has the Bosnian legal system for nearly 20 years done next to nothing about the 1992 Dobrovoljacka Street killings?
The reality is that every community in the former Yugoslavia sees itself as a victim of something or other. And a central part of being a victim is that you never get justice. So local politicians who believe in pushing the war-crimes agenda face an uphill task — where are the votes in doing so?
To make it even more difficult, the Serbian government is (as the Amnesty woman at the “Storm” screening rightly pointed out) undermined when other European countries won’t respect Belgrade’s warrants to arrest people indicted in Serbia on war-crimes charges. It makes no sense for the European Union to insist that the region run these trials to high international standards and then not respect local efforts to do that.
BUT…but…
The hard fact of it is that there is a nasty, neo-national socialist tendency in Serbia which flourished under Milosevic, and that those poisonous attitudes infect the way the Serbian elite presents itself. (Similar neo-national socialist tendencies of course are alive and well among Croats, Albanians/Kosovars and Bosniacs/Muslims, a key point lost on some of the supposedly expert senior witnesses presented by the defence at the Ganic trial.)
Serbia’s internal struggles continue over what Serbia and Serbs represent both to the world and to themselves.
And that was what ultimately undermined Serbia’s case in London; in form and substance it just wasn’t convincing.
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The hard fact was that the attack on the JNA column in Sarajevo wasn't a war crime: it was an attack on a legitimate military target. At most, the Bosnian TO was guilty of violating a ceasefire agreement extracted from them under duress, by an enemy that had attacked them, been defeated, then sought to extricate itself from its defeat by kidnapping their democratically elected president and holding him as a hostage. The real guilt of Bosnia’s leadership in the spring of 1992 was not that, on this and one or two other occasions, its forces attacked and killed soldiers belonging to the army of a foreign state that was attacking its country. Its guilt lies in the fact that its forces did not do so more often. In Tuzla, Sarajevo, Bihać, Goražde and Srebrenica, where the local defenders fought back, the population was spared the massacres, expulsion, torture and rape that befell the citizens of other Bosnian towns captured by the JNA (although Srebrenica would eventually suffer a very heavy price for their resistance). But in towns where the Bosnian authorities followed Izetbegovic’s lead and did not resist the JNA, such as in Zvornik and Višegrad, the non-Serb population was massacred, raped and expelled.
Izetbegović and Ganić were certainly guilty in relation to the JNA [Yugoslav People’s Army] – they were guilty of failing to prepare their country to resist its aggression, and for failing to take action against it even after this aggression had begun. Already during 1990, in preparation for its attack on Bosnia-Herzegovina, the JNA, without authorization from the Yugoslav Federal Presidency, had begun disarming the Bosnian Territorial Defence (TO), but had run into resistance from sections of the later and the Bosnian communist authorities, which refused to turn over their weapons. After Izetbegović and Ganić came to power in the Bosnian elections of autumn 1990, their Bosnian presidency actually ordered the Bosnian Territorial Defence to turn over its weapons to the JNA. Izetbegovic and Ganic continued to restrain Bosnian resistance to the JNA until long after the aggression had begun. When the Serbian paramilitaries of Zeljko Raznatovic ‘Arkan’ attacked the Bosnian city of Bijeljina on 1 April 1992 in the first major attack and takeover of the war, Izetbegovic sanctioned the JNA’s occupation of the city, in the belief that it would restrain the Serb extremists (which it did not do). In the second week of April 1992 the JNA intensified its aggression, with the JNA’s Užice and Novi Sad Corps launching a widespread attack against Eastern Bosnia, which was essentially defenceless against it, and the JNA's Banja Luka and Knin Corps capturing most of Western Bosnia-Herzegovina, conquering most of both regions by the end of April. The JNA also launched its assault on Croatian forces in the Neretva Valley, the JNA Bileća Corps began shelling the city of Mostar.
While this was happening, Izetbegovic was still systematically vetoing moves by Bosnia’s commanders to strike back against the JNA. Most SDA politicians neither believed that war would break out, nor prepared their constituents for such a possibility, and believed that a peaceful and negotiated solution to the crisis was possible. Izetbegović naively believed that the JNA could be worked with to prevent inter-communal fighting, and bent over backwards to avoid provoking them or the SDS [Serbian Democratic Party – Radovan Karadzic’s Serb nationalists], he allowed the JNA to disarm the Bosnian TO as late as December 1991, although this order was ignored by some lower level commanders., and he allowed the JNA to disarm and arrest members of the Patriotic League. Although he was in a difficult position, Izetbegovic’s weak and vacillating response to the JNA, even after war began, was a major cause of the Serb’s successes in the first 2 years of the war, and deeply angered the Croats, who were much less naïve in relation to the JNA's or the SDS’s intentions.
I suspect that it was a war crime. Not all attacks on military targets are legitimate attacks, especially if they are withdrawing. But it will never be clear who actually committed it and how far up the Bosniac/BH policy chain runs any clear line of responsibility.
This excellent interview with Gen Divjak explains the confusion on the day and makes what looks like a sane assessment of different levels of responsibility including on the Serb side. See also http://charlescrawford.biz/2010/03/06/dobrovoljac…
http://www.rferl.org/content/What_Really_Happened…
Hello Charles Crawford. I agree that war crimes can still be committed in attacks against military targets (though I'm not sure if breaking ceasefires or attacking withdrawing troops are by themselves war crimes). But I see no war crime in this instance.
1. It was not agreed that the JNA garrison could leave Sarajevo with their equipment and the equipment that it had illegally confiscated from the Bosnian TO. Allowing this was out of the question; had the JNA garrison been allowed to leave with them, these weapons would almost certainly have ended up in the hands of the VRS.
2. As your link mentions, in the days before the attack the JNA had launched a major offensive against Sarajevo (destroying the city's telephone exchange), and had throughout April been attacking it with artillery fire. This is something Serbian nationalists simply ignore when talking about events in Sarajevo on 3 May, simply presenting it as an unprovoked attack.
It's impossible to know whether or not this attack was ordered by