Threatening to Resign

Something must have pleased the Hague Tribunal President Antonio Cassese very much earlier this week because when VREME asked him to comment about announcements that he would resign over the obstructions the Tribunal has been exposed to he replied this was out of the question. "Announcements of his upcoming resignation are the fruit of confusing reality and wishful thinking," said Tribunal spokesman Christian Chartier, on Cassese’s behalf, "President Cassese has never contemplated resignation. He is convinced he will achieve more by continuing his work than by abandoning his mission".

This, however, is not entirely true. Last weekend, the media reported the Western governments’ concern about Cassese’s resignation in protest against the West’s inefficiency to force war criminals to appear in court. Cassese himself said in Florence in mid-June that the Tribunal did not want to try only "small fry" and elaborated: "Goerhing, not SS captains, were tried in Nuremberg." He added that Karadzic and Mladic, as well as Bosnian Croat leaders Dario Kordic and Ivica Rajic, had to face justice before the elections and urged the international community to "choose one of the three options": that they be arrested by IFOR, that Belgrade and Zagreb arrest them and extradite them to The Hague, or that the UN Security Council introduces sanctions to force Pale and Mostar to arrest these leaders and turn them over to the Tribunal. Earlier, in an interview for Nasa Borba, Cassese underscored: "I said that if we don’t have several indictees in detention and if we don’t launch several trials by the end of the year, we better turn in our resignations and go home. Why should we waste UN money for nothing, only on Tadic?"

The West obviously hasn’t known for months now what to do with the International War Crimes Tribunal, which was set up "exclusively for persecuting people responsible for gross violations of international humanitarian law" in the spring of 1993 by the Security Council, appalled by the images from Bosnian camps, the rape, mass murders. The indictees, of course, will not go to the Hague by their own free will. Political leaders of the ruling Western countries were unable to decide and order NATO to arrest the inditees in Bosnia - the Croats, probably because Croatia is their ally, the Serbs, because there might be unwished for consequences. They do not want to reintroduce sanctions against the Bosnian Serb Republic either, since the implementation of the military aspect of the Dayton accord is getting along well, and, besides, who could expect the BSR to take part in the elections the West desires so much if the West introduced sanctions against them?

The initial good reputation of the Tribunal has been considerably compromised, one of the reasons being that it has not dispelled the criticisms that it are focusing on Serbs, while the rest are being tried to merely achieve some kind of balance. Senior officials, unofficially, of course, explain this by the fact that prosecutor Goldstone is an "American man" but that he is stepping down soon anyway and that the Canadian lady replacing him does not have such a problem.

It is uncertain whether Karadzic's defense attorney Igor Pantelic’s departure for the public hearing at the Hague will change anything, not only because Pantelic is better known as a member of Arkan’s Party of Serbian Unity than as a lawyer, or because he himself says his job is to "examine whether the hitherto proceedings were regular and in keeping with the law". Both "the scissors and the fabric" remain in the West’s hands, but it seems it will be unable to preserve the Tribunal’s credibility and simultaneously avoid all risks looming above it and its current policy.