Hague court releases Serbian war criminal

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Hague court releases Serbian war criminal - Sputnik International
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MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti commentator Dmitry Babich) - The Hague Tribunal has approved the early release of the former president of the Republika Srpska, Biljana Plavsic, 79, who has served two-thirds of her sentence.

MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti commentator Dmitry Babich) - The Hague Tribunal has approved the early release of the former president of the Republika Srpska, Biljana Plavsic, 79, who has served two-thirds of her sentence.

Plavsic was the president of the Republika Srpska from 1996 to 1998, and she voluntarily surrendered to The Hague Tribunal in January 2001. In 2003, she pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and the persecution of non-Serbs in Bosnia in the 1992-95 war. She was sentenced to 11 years in prison and served her term in a Swedish prison.

That war was the bloodiest conflict in the former Yugoslavia after its disintegration in 1990-1992.

The case of Plavsic is unique. First, she is so far the only woman to have been sentenced by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for crimes against humanity. Second, she is the only high-ranking Serb leader to plead guilty and ask forgiveness.

This separates her from many defendants in The Hague court who love to expose others' sins.

Few people in Russia know that Slobodan Milosevic, former president of Yugoslavia and Serbia, betrayed the Bosnian Serb leaders in 1995 by denouncing his recent allies as military criminals.

It is unlikely that Milosevic suddenly felt sorry for Bosnian Muslims, who were killed by the thousands until the West took their side in 1995. His denouncement of his former allies was part of a package deal Milosevic and Bosnian Serbs made with the United States and its European allies in Dayton.

Milosevic and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, whose trial is currently under way in The Hague, have more than once referred to the Dayton agreement in their defense. They claimed that they had been promised personal safety and immunity in return for Milosevic's pledge to stop supporting Serbs in Bosnia and Karadzic's pledge to give up leadership of his political party and to drop out of public life.

They said they received the promises from high-ranking U.S. diplomats.

Karadzic claims that he made an unambiguous political deal with Richard Holbrooke, special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan under the Obama administration. Holbrooke has denied it, saying that Karadzic stepped down without any conditions.

Two things are obvious no matter which of the two speaks the truth.

First, references to secret agreements with the U.S. will not help Karadzic. Holbrooke's alleged promises to him mean nothing to the court, which is formally (unfortunately, in many cases only formally) separate from the executive power and diplomacy in the West. The fact that Milosevic and Karadzic believed Holbrooke's promises only points to their legal and diplomatic naivete.

Second, Karadzic does not look like a Serbian resistance hero, as some Russian politicians described him. Heroes do not prepare fallback positions through American diplomats.

Both sides were guilty in that war, just like in any other ethnic conflict, and The Hague court has accepted this truth, even if unwillingly. It has tried not only 92 Serbs but also seven Bosnian Muslims. But Plavsic is different because, while she did point to others' crimes, she also admitted her own guilt.

Ramush Haradinaj, a former Kosovo Liberation Army guerrilla leader, looks much worse. Although charged with the murder of 38 civilians in Kosovo, he was allowed to return to Kosovo during the hearing because he was elected the province's prime minister in 2004. Did he take this opportunity to govern his province or to deal with the remaining witnesses?

Unlike Plavsic, Haradinaj has not pleaded guilty and has not dropped out of political life. He is currently the leader of the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo. Why is that?

Carla del Ponte, former prosecutor at The Hague Tribunal, once said about Haradinaj: "It is said that he is a kind of a stability factor. I cannot understand this. For me he is a war criminal."

These facts have not improved the tribunal's reputation, but neither do they justify the praises some Russian politicians showered on the former Serb leaders.

Authorities in Belgrade plan to apply for entry to the European Union this year. Given a choice between the EU and Russia, Serbia will certainly opt for the EU, but it wants to join it with natural gas, gas storage facilities and other advantages which only Russia can provide, hopefully not for free.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.

 

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