The ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on February 26 cleared Serbia of all five counts of the charge of “committing, conspiring, helping, instigating and collaborating in genocide” in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The ruling in the case brought by the Muslim authorities in Sarajevo is of great significance, since it has shattered some of the myths and outright lies regarding the Bosnian war 1992-1995.

AUDIO Srdja Trifkovic on World Court ruling that Serbia is innocent in Bosnian conflict. Listen

To consider the significance of the ruling, we bring you a transcript of Srdja Trifkovic’s interview on the ICJ decision broadcast on CKCU 93.1 FM in Ottawa, Canada. We asked Dr. Trifkovic to acquaint us with the key points of the decision itself:

ST: The ICJ verdict states: “Serbia has not committed genocide, through its organs or persons whose acts engage its responsibility under customary international law. Serbia has not conspired to commit genocide, nor incited the commission of genocide and has not been complicit in genocide.” The verdict is fairly clear and straightforward.

It was almost amusing to observe how the mainstream media, the heaviest of investors in the “bank of collective Serbian guilt,” have distorted the verdict – notably the New York Times, which in its headlines put the emphases on the ICJ allegedly establishing the fact of the genocide in Bosnia and then in the subheadings facing that the Court admonished Serbia for not doing more to prevent it happening. That is news management of the most blatened sort, because it bypasses and conceals the real news in favor of the editorial spin.  We have seen the similar reaction all over the spectrum. For instance, headlines in the Sydney Morning Herald over a Reuters story about the verdict said: “We know what happened, Serbia!” The Indianapolis Star said, “Serbia cleared of genocide but blamed for letting it happened.” The reader who does not go into the minutiae of the text itself wouldn’t really know what happened.

The ICJ verdict is an event of major international significance. The entire basis of the case against the late Slobodan Milosevic had rested on his alleged incitement of the Bosnian Serbs to commit genocide, and his supposed personal responsibility for its occurrence. It would be interesting to see, if Milosevic were still alive, how would The Hague War Crimes Tribunal (ICTY) spin, or otherwise deal with the ICJ verdict. As John Laughland noted in The Guardian on February 28, Slobodan Milosevic was posthumously exonerated by the ICJ ruling: “The former president of Serbia had always argued that neither Yugoslavia nor Serbia had command of the Bosnian Serb army, and this has now been upheld by the world court in The Hague. By implication, Serbia cannot be held responsible for any other war crimes attributed to the Bosnian Serbs.”

Srdja Trifkovic

A TALE OF TWO TRIBUNALS

These two institutions, ICTY and ICJ, should not be confused. The International Court of Justice has been based in The Hague for decades and it is a highly respected institution that deals with the disputes between sovereign states, which agree to its jurisdiction in advance. It operates on the bases of established norms of public international law that have been universally accepted for decades, if not centuries.

On the other hand the ICTY is a political, rather than judicial institution. It was established by the Security Council of the United Nations in 1993 on the basis of Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter (Resolution 827), with the self-proclaimed “jurisdiction” for crimes committed only after January 1, 1991. The U.N. Genocide Convention could not possibly provide the basis for the Tribunal. It is an international treaty, approved by the General Assembly and ratified by member-states, which does not endow the U.N. with radical new powers. In reality, the Security Council acted illegally in setting up the Tribunal; it had no authority to do so. (Boutros-Ghali himself declared that, "in asking the Secretary-General to consider this project, the Security Council has given itself an entirely new mandate".)  The formal basis invoked for the Tribunal, Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, deals with “threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression” and, to meet them, it authorizes the U.N. to deploy the armed forces of its member-states in peacekeeping operations. It would take a very flexible legal mind indeed, to interpret this as carte blanche to investigate individuals, indict them, try them, find them guilty and keep them in prison.

Invocation of Article 29 in the resolution establishing the Tribunal gives the game away: The Security Council may establish such subsidiary organs as it deems necessary for the performance of its functions. This amounts to an admission that the Tribunal is not an independent court of law, but a “subsidiary organ” of its political masters. But while the Tribunal remains fundamentally subordinate to the Security Council, its statute provides it with primacy over national courts, including the authority to demand the surrender of the accused. This is in clear violation of the Charter, which insists that the U.N. may not usurp the sovereign rights of states. The Hague Tribunal amounts to the abandonment of positive international law and a revision of the U.N. Charter. A dangerous precedent has been created, and it would be shortsighted for the American public to overlook it. ICTY may yet prove to be a step towards the globalist dream of a permanent International Criminal Tribunal.

The proponents of the myth of Serbian guilt deliberately inserted the new quasi-judicial institution into The Hague to confuse the issue, to create an aura of respectability for an ad hoc politicized Tribunal that has no bases in international law and which makes its rules and procedures as it goes along. Its verdicts are not dependent on the gravity of the alleged crime but on whether the accused are Serbs, Croats, Albanians or Muslims.

BB: Was the decision to accept the claim of genocide in Srebrenica a political decision by the ICJ, or a decision based on the international law?

ST: The International Court of Justice in this case accepted the opinion of the War Crimes Tribunal because it was politically impossible to do otherwise. It would have meant an explicit denial of the ICTY verdict and it would have brought the backers of the both institutions into an abnormal situation which the ICJ cannot afford.

By the same token the ICTY is now in a rather unpleasant situation, because it still has in dock Serbian officials and politicians who are blamed for “genocide” across the Drina, notably Dr. Vojislav Seselj. Unless they drop the charges now, it will be in totally untenable situation: the ICJ has accepted the opinion of the ICTY on the genocide issue, but the ICTY does not accept the consequences of the ICJ ruling on the complicity of Serbia and Belgrade.

BB: Who benefited from this decision?

ST: The decision reflects the fact that the ICJ modus operandi is based on the traditional application of international law. It is not subject to the voluntaristic, ad hoc use and abuse of the  law for political ends as we go along. Unlike the ICTY, ICJ was established at the time when international law was still regarded as the province of genuine jurists and not of politicians who use quasi-legal and pseudo-legal means to pursue political ends. The main beneficiary is the remaining sense of legality in international relations – much to the chagrin of the international chorus of Serbophobes in the academia, the media and political establishments of different countries. They of course already “know” that the Serbs are guilty by definition and that any verdict should simply reflect that inviolable “fact.”

BB: Will this decision destabilize the Republika Srpska, however, and in particular the relations among three constituent nations of Bosnia-Herzegovina?

ST: Those relations are already as destabilized as they can be. We do not need any legal decisions to make them any worse. They are about as fragile as they had been in 1991-1992, on the eve of the inter-ethnic civil war in Bosnia. At least with the decision of the ICJ we know that it was an internal Bosnian affair, and not a matter of Serbian aggression. The crimes and violations of human rights that followed in 1992-1995 were not the direct result of anyone’s nationalist project as such. These crimes were the results of the war and their particular characteristics, not the causes. The crimes of the warring parties, however severely they must be judged, were the consequence of a great, complex international blunder, and of Izetbegovic’s decision to secede. Events cut channels deeper and less controllable than the intentions of anyone.

The fighting became an extrapolation of a collapsed Bosnian social structure, it started as an event in a Yugoslav civil war. It is simply unintelligible on other terms. The war is not explained by “ancient hatreds” but by loyalties, by anger and by suspicion. The Yugoslav loyalties were twentieth-century, but the suspicions – automatic distrust in time of danger – were rooted in the pre-Yugoslav past.

In the end, the effect of the legal intervention of the “international community” with its act of recognition was that a Yugoslav loyalty was made to look like a conspiratorial disloyalty to “Bosnia” – largely in the eyes of people who supposed ex hypothesi that if there is a “Bosnia” there must be a nation of “Bosnians.” Never was there a better case of the accuracy of the old English rhyme:

Treason doth never prosper. What’s the reason?
If it prospers, none dare call it treason.

Law courts throughout the ages have failed to escape this dismal logic.