Justice still doesn’t always mean convictions
The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) acquittal today of Ramush Haradinaj and Idriz Balaj has elicited the expected reactions in Serbia and Kosovo. The Kosovars are celebrating while the Serbs denounce the ruling.
My own reaction, at least until I have a chance to read the decision, is the same as the one I had a couple of weeks ago, when an ICTY appeals panel found two Croatian generals not guilty: justice does not always mean convictions. All neutral observers I know think the prosecutor in Haradinaj/Balaj case simply failed to meet the burden of proof. Why that was the case is not so clear, but it left the court with little choice. “Not guilty” does not exonerate. It only finds that adequate evidence was not presented to prove the case.
That is not how Serbs and Albanians view court verdicts. Serbs see this and the previous acquittal as demonstrating ICTY bias against Serbs. Albanians view the verdict as validation of the war conducted by the Kosovo Liberation Army against Belgrade’s security forces. Both are wrong. The court did not consider the general question of justification for the armed uprising in the late 1990s. It considered the specific allegations against two specific people, both of whom unquestionably committed acts of armed rebellion that violated Yugoslav law of the time.
I have a little personal experience with Ramush, who came to see me without publicity repeatedly after the war, when he had already laid down his arms and was beginning his political career. He pursued that with vigor until he was indicted the first time in 2005, when he resigned from the prime ministry and went to The Hague. I also visited him in2001 in Gllogjane/Glodane, the village where his family reigns supreme. He took me to the graves of his two brothers killed in the war and described to me in some detail the fighting he was involved in against Yugoslav security forces. He did not–but who would?–admit to any violence against Serb civilians. He also denied that his family was involved in any way in the fighting in 2001 in Macedonia. That, I believe, was untrue.
Ramush will now return to Kosovo, where it is widely expected that Prime Minister Thaci will try to restore his uncertain majority in Parliament by bringing Ramush’s party into the government. Ramush may extract a substantial price for his support. This could complicate the ongoing political-level talks between Pristina and Belgrade, which have seen a couple of business-like, but as yet unproductive, meetings. Unafraid of being criticized for being soft on Serbs, Ramush is likely to take a pragmatic approach to relations with Belgrade. But Belgrade’s politicians will find it harder to meet with him than with Thaci, whose war-time role was primarily political rather than military.
Proving things in court more than ten years after the fact is not easy. I don’t know if Ramush committed the acts he was accused of or not. If someone in Belgrade has stronger evidence than the prosecutor presented, they should have made it available. I do know that an orderly and deliberative court using modern methods and procedures has found him not guilty. You may not like the outcome, but little purpose is served by denouncing the court. Justice still doesn’t always mean convictions.
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7 thoughts on “Justice still doesn’t always mean convictions”
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Small, but important difference.
This is not a denunciation of the court, this is denunciation of the west.
Serbs are denouncing their previous political leadership and the whole west for it’s role, the court is kangaroo, everybody knew that from before, it’s just that few cared. 🙂
And to note, it’s not the judges, it’s the prosecution that was the real problem, the judges would not have been able to acquit otherwise, though their behavior was atrocious non the less (other high profile court cases).
If just one court was denounced, it would hardly be an issue, as I said, nobody (lets say few) really believed it was about justice, this is much bigger and is just fueling the fire for a pro Russian shift again that we do not exactly need, being surrounded by NATO.
Regarding the trial: Witnesses, oh witnesses. 🙂
Thanks for your balanced analysis of this judicial outcome.
Katherine
Where a crime has been committed there can be no justice without convictions. That there has been a crime doesn’t seem to be disputed, if these 3 were not responsible those who were need to be found and convicted. The deaths of several hundred people and the relocation of thousands of others was not the work of a few hours or a few individuals, some one had command responsibility.
Can there be reconciliation without truth? Tonight the truth seems yet more obscured and reconciliation yet further away.
Amer comments (but as it was posted in the wrong place I’ve moved it here):
Why couldn’t the prosecutor’s office prove the case? Perhaps because the accused were innocent? It’s perfectly possible that crimes were committed without their having been committed by these particular defendants.
This retrial was held to give the prosecutors a chance to call the two witnesses who refused to testify during the original trial. I took a look at the transcript from time to time (a frustrating business, with all the blank paragraphs every time the court went into closed session), and it certainly sounded like the witness was either lying or mentally disturbed. One of the two suddenly “remembered” that in addition to a beating he saw some poor guy getting on a certain date, he had also seen Haradinaj pull out a knife and cut of his ear, a point he had never thought to mention until then. It’s hardly surprising that the judges found “no credible evidence” to support any of the charges. The two witnesses may very well have been afraid to testify, but fear of facing a perjury charge, or being deported from a new home in the West for lying to an emigration officer, could have been what prompted the fear.
Geoffrey Nice – formerly with the ICTY’s Prosecutor’s Office – has some ideas on why both the cases of the Croatian generals and Haradinaj et al. fell in the water: Carla del Ponte’s insistence on bringing cases that the evidence available did not justify. He in fact suggests (in an interview at Jutarni Avaz http://www.avaz.ba/vijesti/intervju/carla-del-ponte-je-naredila-da-se-ramus-haradinaj-optuzi) that Haradinaj should follow his lawyer’s advice and take her to court. (What court, though?) It’s not the first time Nice has expressed reservations about her time at the ICTY, but by now he’s not the only one who wonders what in the world she’s doing on the UN team preparing to investigate Assad.
It’s not only the individuals subjected to multi-year trials before being finally released due to lack of evidence who are harmed in such cases, but also the Serbs who have been allowed to avoid dealing with where the greater part of the responsibility for the war crimes committed during the various wars lies and are now furious with what they see as an ICTY stacked against them.
If there were any chance of an honest appraisal of the ICTY’s principles and practices resulting from that debate Jeremic has scheduled for next April I’d say the idea is something to be applauded. On the other hand, the Serbian president is already promising to speak during his presentation until “they throw him out” about the various crimes Croatia has committed against Serbia over the centuries, suggesting it probably won’t be.
A correction: witness 80 did not in fact change his testimony to say that Haradinaj cut off an ear – he changed it to say that the incident took place, but that Haradinaj had not been present. (I should have taken notes on those transcripts – my apologies.) The Observer/Guardian has an extensive story on the problems with the prosecution today (at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/02/ramush-haradinaj-kosovo-acquitted)where it says “Witness 80 described a gruesome incident, but changed his story [during the retrial] to say that Haradinaj was not there.”
The story characterizes the new “evidence” provided by the two witnesses who had supposedly been too afraid to testify in the original trial “as fabricated and groundless.” And – in Witness 81’s case – taken solely from his handler’s file with the Serbian intelligence service.
Jeremic (and the Russians) may not like what comes out at that special session he’s called to examine the workings of the ICTY as much as he expects. He can control the speakers’ list at the General Assembly, but it’s not as though that’s the only possible venue for examining the role of the ICTY. I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, to see a panel on the subject listed under “This week’s peace picks” in the coming months. Was it all a problem of one ambitious prosecutor, or was there a higher-level agreement that reconciliation in the Balkans required the sacrifice of equal numbers of wartime leaders from every side in the interest of balance?
If you can’t get people from some parties condemned – despite the well known fact that that side killed lots of people and expelled a lot more – you have to wonder whether this whole war crimes approach makes sense. Justitia is supposed to be blind. If she isn’t you have to wonder whether it still is justice.