Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić was convicted today of Genocide and War Crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. He’s been found responsible for the Srebrenica massacre, the first and only recognized European genocide since the Holocaust, in which 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were slaughtered in what had been promised as a UN “safe zone”. He’s also been found guilty of persecution, deportation, murder, and in being “instrumental” in the terrorizing of Sarajevo during the siege.
It’s taken nearly eight years from the time he was discovered living under an assumed identity in Serbia to this conviction. For his crimes, Karadžić was sentenced to 40 years in The Hague. The sentence has incensed the families of his victims, who have waited over two decades for a justice promised to them by the international community, and has drawn criticism from experts on international justice. Mark Ellis, for example, the executive director of the International Bar Association, declared
“The sentence of 40 years is disappointing. Sentencing practices at international criminal tribunals tend to suffer from a lack of consistency and transparency. Today’s judgment is an example of such practices, complicated to understand and undoubtedly difficult to accept from the point of view of the victims.”
Bill Clinton and his administration had the chance to prevent the war and the genocide, but they played politics instead
Karadžić is a 70-year-old man, and for him those 40 years are a life sentence. But even though it’s merely symbolic, the difference between 40 years and a life sentence make a difference to the victims. For those looking for retribution after the slaughter of thousands and the destruction of their country, the judgment feels like a slap in the face. Still, Ban Ki-Moon and others at the UN are hailing it as a “historic day” for international justice. Thus far, though, the judgment has received limited attention from those major players instrumental in stopping Karadžić and the war in Bosnia, such as high-ranking members of the Clinton administration.
The Clinton-loving New York Times describes in their article on the Karadzic verdict how
“The atrocities in Bosnia were a source of lasting regret for Bill Clinton, the president of the United States at the time, and spurred his administration to broker the Dayton peace accords in 1995 and, subsequently, support the NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999 to prevent similar atrocities in Kosovo.”
This is a very generous description of the Clinton Administration’s Balkan activities and sentiments, and one worth exploring as we mourn once again the victims of the conflict following the insufficient attempts at justice. You see, Bill Clinton and his administration had the chance to prevent the war and the genocide, but they played politics instead.
In 1993, former U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and former UK Foreign Secretary Lord David Owen were given the task of negotiating a peace in Bosnia. They developed a peace plan, the Vance-Owen Plan, which would have decentralized Bosnia’s governance and could have prevented the killing in Bosnia. The plan, despite its imperfections, would have given the Serbs 31% of Bosnian land in disconnected autonomous areas and was endorsed by Radovan Karadžić’s Serb Republic, but was undermined and ultimately killed by Bill Clinton.
The conflict continued largely because it was good for the careers of Clinton insiders
The conflict escalated with assistance from Clinton, through means such as “lift and strike”, until 1995 when a very similar plan, but under which the Serbs received 49% of Bosnia because of the gains made during the war, became the law of the land in the form of the Dayton Accords, with support from Clinton and his foreign policy team like lead negotiator Richard Holbrooke.
To quote a local translator who had worked with the NATO and EU forces after Dayton to keep peace in the area,
“This is life. This is intervention. Here in the Balkans, nobody trusts the occupying West. We in Bosnia know that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair’s intervention was on our behalf, but what actually happened was the enhancement of the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia and increase in size of the Bosnian Serb and Croat aggressors’ lands from 31% to 49%.”
There’s a nasty joke in the study of Balkan politics: What’s the difference between 1995’s Dayton Peace Plan & 1993’s Vance-Owen Peace Plan? Answer 1: Richard Holbrooke’s airtime; Answer 2: The body count. If you laughed at either of these punchlines, you need to get out more.
The courts we use to try war criminals are flawed in that they exist only after the fact. What is necessary is prevention.
The conflict continued largely because it was good for US humanitarian-atrocity-pity politics and the careers of Clinton insiders like Holbrooke, but also because it turned Bosnia into little more than an ungovernable NATO protectorate for the two decades that followed.
It was during the time between the crushing of Vance-Owen and the creation of the Dayton Accords that Karadžić committed the acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing necessary to expand from 31% to 49% of Bosnia’s land mass (and Holbrooke’s friends the Croats had a similar growth in that time, as Holbrooke told Croat leader Franjo Tudjman right before Dayton was negotiated “what you don’t gain on the battlefield will be hard to gain at the peace talks. Don’t waste these last days.”), which means that Clinton crushing Vance-Owen is responsible for the genocide of which Karadžić was just convicted.
It’s all well and good that we have the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice to mete our justice and retribution to those who have committed heinous acts. But these mechanisms are not simply flawed in their distribution and handling of justice, they are flawed in that they exist only after the fact. What is necessary is prevention. Clinton had the chance to prevent atrocity, and in failing to do so, in scuppering the Vance-Owen plan in the interest of politics, he is also culpable in these crimes against humanity.
By allowing it to happen, the Clinton foreign policy establishment is nearly as guilty of the genocide as Karadžić is of ordering it.
