Victors’ Justice

Sometimes, you run across an essay that you wish you could’ve written, an essay you perhaps planned to write one day. You encounter it at first with a sense of sinking disappointment for having been beaten to the punch. But as you read it, a sense of elation comes over you as the essay articulates your points one-by-one exactly as you would’ve hoped to have done yourself.

Marko Atilla Hoare penned such an essay here. It’s a pitch-perfect critique of modern international justice, which in its quest to remain sublimely impartial, ultimately fails at its own goals. Being a Balkanist, Hoare compares the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to the Nuremberg trials and concludes that the latter were far more effective by almost every measure.

Here’s a bit on fostering reconciliation:

The UN Security Council resolution establishing [the ICTY] justified it as something that would ‘contribute to the restoration and maintenance of peace’, and its supporters frequently argue that prosecution of individual war-criminals is necessary in order to free the respective former-Yugoslav peoples of the stigma of collective guilt, thereby facilitating reconciliation between them. Paradoxically, however, it was the more overtly retributive IMT and subsequent Nuremberg tribunals, by determining in advance that one side was guilty and efficiently punishing its top surviving leaders, that appear to have been more effective in achieving reconciliation between Germany and the nations it attacked. For Germany has not been allowed to escape condemnation as the side guilty for the war, while those it attacked have witnessed that justice has been done.

By contrast, there is no evidence to suggest that the ICTY – with no prior allocation of guilt to one side in the war, by treating war-crimes on a purely individual basis, and by lumping together war-criminals from all sides – has made any contribution to reconciliation between the former Yugoslavs. On the contrary. Unlike after World War II, the international community has failed to impose a narrative of who was to blame for the War of Yugoslav Succession, and to force each side to accept it. Consequently, each side continues to see itself as the victim in the conflict, and to see the tribunal’s record purely in terms of how too many of its own people and/or too few of the other sides’ have been indicted, or how the other sides’ indictees have been wrongfully acquitted or received too short sentences. According to a recent study by an international team of scholars led by Vojin Dimitrijevic and Julie Mertus: ‘The hope that it [the ICTY] might promote reconciliation between the peoples of the region does not appear to have been realised.’

The takeaway is clear: victors’ justice works. The alternatives, not so much. Read the whole thing.