Blogging the democratic revolution
In a ruling more than a decade in the making, whose length is so long that most people will only ever read the summary, the International Court of Justice in the Hague has decided that Serbia can not be held directly responsible for ethnic cleansing and genocide that occurred during the war in Bosnia, but should have used its influence to prevent it. The focus on the ruling also mainly focused on Srebrenica as the major case in which it happened. February 26, 2007 — The United Nations’ highest court ruled today that Serbia was not directly responsible for genocide…
The first parliamentary elections since the devolution of Serbia-Montenegro into their own respective countries took place in Serbia on Sunday. Ultra-nationalist Radical Party took home the most votes of any party, with just less than 30% of the vote, but the victory will go to the many Western-oriented, democratically minded parties who will hopefully be able to bang out some sort of coalition in the coming weeks. Here is the result as reported by ISN Security Watch. Radicals take home the most votes, but a coalition of democrats could save Serbia from isolation, but not without a great deal of…
A much talked about concept (and concern) over the summer and autumn in EU foreign policy circles has been the birth of what is being called the “Kosovo double-standard,” by which the EU and United States support Kosovo’s independence from Serbia while declining to recognize the supposed self-determination of Georgian breakaway provinces Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The idea came about this year as talks began in February over Kosovo’s status, as well a vote this summer which allowed Montenegro to declare independence from Serbia. If last year was the year of democratic revolutions, then this is certainly the one of…
Montenegro is no longer the suffix of Serbia. With an overwhelming turnout, just over the required 55% needed votes were cast in favor of independence, making it the last country to break away from the core of what once was Yugoslavia. There are a lot of issues here. Will the Serbian unionists fight back? Can a state so small defend itself an build a proper economy? What about EU membership? These are the questions that will be answered in the coming days, months, and years. So I will not bother with them now. It will come. Peaceful self-determination is a…
Ratko Mladic was the former Army Chief under Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. Along with Karadzic, Mladic is largely responsible for the campaign of ethnic cleansing of Croats and Muslims. Mladicwas indicted in 1995 by the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for genocide and crimes against humanity for his role in the siege of Sarajevo, which claimed 12,000 lives, and for orchestrating the massacre in July 1995 of more than 7,500 Muslims at Srebrenica. Mladic and Karadzic are the two most wanted suspects from the Bosnia conflict, and both are still on the run. When Slobodan Milosevic…
Everybody knows he’s died. Yet, with the exception of the true believers, and folks pointing out Russia playing its usual domestic-politics shenanigans vis-a-vis the old “Slavic Brotherhood with Serbia” chestnut, you can almost literally feel the pause before the blogosphere explodes. Everybody’s waiting for the toxicology reports. Was the former Serbian dictator murdered? Did the War Crimes Tribunal err by allowing healthy skepticism to undermine basic healthcare? As this excellent summary by the IHT demonstrates, part of the problem is that, like most international institutions of its sort, the Tribunal doesn’t particularly feel any need to be transparent with the…
A Serbian rebel leader convicted of crimes against humanity was found dead in his jail cell, having apparently committed suicide. It was not revealed how Milan Babib did it, just that he did. Milan Babic, the Serb leader of a rebel republic in Croatia and one of the key figures in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, committed suicide in prison, the U.N. war crimes tribunal said Monday. Babic, who was serving 13 years for crimes against humanity, was found dead Sunday evening in his cell at the U.N. detention center in Scheveningen, a suburb of The Hague, said a…
(Disclaimer: I’m in a heavy-OT zone today, and do not have the time to write this up with the care that it deserves, but the issue needs to be raised, because the “common wisdom” is beginning to accrete in a dangerous direction.) Bosnia has brought up Serbia on war crimes. Yes, the entire nation. This has never been done before, and there’s a good reason for that: the Allies didn’t hang the entire population of Germany for war crimes after World War II, the entire Serbian nation didn’t somehow wake up one morning and think “let’s go murder all the…
It has been ten years since the Dayton Accords ended officially ended the war in Bosnia, which killed over 200,000 people and displaced over a million more. The agreement marked a peaceful separation of nations into a loose, autonomous confederacy of three peoples who had been forced together under Soviet totalitarianism and left to kill each other after its fall. But after all these years, it’s possible that these people are willing to begin the move toward living — together — under a unified nation. The first step will be reforms to enable more effective governance, along with the capture…
I wanted to highlight this because it’s really very dramatic given how much the international eye has refocused on Serbian war crimes. The wife of one of the leaders indicted for genocide spoke out on regional television stations appealing for his surrender. I can’t even imagine how hard that must be. 29 July 2005 (RFE/RL) — The wife of war crimes indictee and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic appealed to her husband in a broadcast carried by several regional television stations yesterday to surrender to the Hague-based war crimes tribunal. Bosnian and international media said the appeal came as…