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Gotovina won a nasty war, yet he is under trial.

By your definition, there is no such thing as "war criminal".

*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.

by DoDo on Thu Jul 24th, 2008 at 09:06:34 AM EST
[ Parent ]
You're right. Croatia did win the war - which is why their political and military leadership is - by and large - NOT being prosecuted for ethnically cleansing 250 000 Serbs from Krajina and Slavonia, or their tens of thousands of Serbian and Muslim victims.

Gotovina was an attempt to show that The Hague is not a biased court seeking to demonize Serbs, whereas the figures prove otherwise. The overwhelming majority of those tried and convicted are Serb.

Based on historic observation, a war criminal is almost always on the losing side.

Do you think that the British incineration of Cologne in WW2 was a crime? What about Nagasaki? What about the circa 700 000 dead in Iraq?

Unfortunately, it's always a question of power and politics... not justice.

by vladimir on Thu Jul 24th, 2008 at 09:26:25 AM EST
[ Parent ]
So are you saying that the Serbian  Government is complicit in this demonisation process seeing as they are the ones handing him over to the ICTY?

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
by ceebs (ceebs (at) eurotrib (dot) com) on Thu Jul 24th, 2008 at 09:30:04 AM EST
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I believe that given the Tribunal's outrageous acquittal of Haradinaj and Oric, the new government of Serbia is not serving justice by handing Karadzic over to The Hague.
by vladimir on Thu Jul 24th, 2008 at 09:36:16 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Two injustices don't make one.

And for your information,

  1. it was not the acquittal that was outrageous, but the lack of Western action (because it wasn't all in the Tribunals' power) to protect the witnesses whose non-appearance necessitated the acquittal,
  2. the Haradinaj case is not over: the prosecutors are on appeal, and two Kosovo Albanians were indicted for contempt of court for organising the pressurizing of a witness.


*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.
by DoDo on Thu Jul 24th, 2008 at 09:41:14 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Your argument re WWII leads logically to the conclusion that the Nazis were unfairly targeted, just like Karadzic. Do you really want to pursue the parallel?
by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Thu Jul 24th, 2008 at 09:31:23 AM EST
[ Parent ]
The ICTY is imperfect, but your claim of one-sidedness goes way too far. Gotovina is not the only Croatian indictee (chech the list), but the highest-ranked. Unlike Milosević, Tuđman was dead by 1999 (the year Milo was indicted).

If you believe that an objective trial would have found equal numbers of suspected war criminals among the conflict sides, you have to prove that the war crimes were really equally shared. (It's not enough to prove that the Croatian, Bosniak and Kosovo Albanian sides committed war crimes, too.)

Your words about history are a diversion from the current case. But for your information, I do think that fire bombing by Britain was a war crime (even if there were far more more German war criminals in WWII, thus even an international war tribunal in place of Nuremburg should have shown similar ratios as the ICTY today), and so are nuclear bombs on cities.

*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.

by DoDo on Thu Jul 24th, 2008 at 09:37:13 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Croatia did not win this war.NATO did.Croatia was lucky this time to be on a winer side...this was not always case with Croatia.They joined Hitler in WWII but they jumped the winner's wagon toward the end of WWII.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind...Albert Einstein
by vbo on Fri Jul 25th, 2008 at 11:00:09 AM EST
[ Parent ]

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