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Justice in Croatia

Outs and ins

The political ramifications of several judicial rulings

Nov 24th 2012 | from the print edition

Celebrating with the generals

IN THE Balkans the big news is who is out of jail, who is in and who is going to court.All the cases are high-profile and all have political fallout. The most significant was theacquittal on November 16th of two Croatian generals by the UN war-crimes tribunal inThe Hague. Croats were ecstatic, Serbs bitter.

Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac were first convicted in 2011 of conspiring, as part of

a joint criminal enterprise, to drive Serbs out of Croatias Krajina region. WhenYugoslavia disintegrated in the early 1990s the Serbs, backed by Serbia and the Yugoslavarmy, carved out their own mini-state in Krajina. But in 1995 the Croatian army took most of it back. Some 200,000 Serbs fled, most never to return. Nobody denies that war crimes took place. But the acquittal of the two generals means that the court believesthere was no organised plan for ethnically cleansing the Serbs.

The generals returned home to a heroes welcome. Mr Gotovina may even enter politics.If he does it will be as a man of the right close to the Catholic church. No Croat has untilnow been convicted by the UN tribunal for actions during the war in Croatia. For Croatsthe ruling vindicates their struggle against the Serbs as one without original sin.

Serbs greeted the release of the generals with fury. The decision belittles the Serbvictims and makes them worthless, said Ivica Dacic, Serbias prime minister. Serbs havealways believed that the UN tribunal is just an anti-Serb kangaroo court. Liberals havefought tooth and nail to persuade their compatriots otherwise. For them the ruling is acatastrophe. On November 29th the court will rule on the appeal of Ramush Haradinaj, aformer prime minister of Kosovo, and two others. They were acquitted in 2008 but anappeal was allowedin part, said the court, because of serious witness intimidation.

No Serbs expect them to be convicted now.

If the court could not prove a joint criminal enterprise in Croatia, how can it prove that

one existed in the cases of the two Bosnian Serb leaders on trial, Ratko Mladic andRadovan Karadzic? One of the UN courts remits is reconciliation. Legal judgmentsaside, achieving this will now be harder than ever.

War crimes are not the only cases in the news. On November 20th Ivo Sanader, Croatiasformer prime minister, was jailed for ten years for corruption. A week earlier Radimir Cacic, Croatias deputy prime minister, resigned. He was convicted for causing twodeaths in a road accident in Hungary and is set to go to prison. In Serbia a former deputy

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prime minister has been arrested as part of a fraud investigation. And in Kosovo Fatmir Limaj, a significant political figure, has been charged with organised crime andcorruption and sent for retrial on war-crimes charges of which he was previouslyacquitted. There has never been a better time to be a Balkan lawyer.