Bass - Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals

Stay the Hand of Vengeance

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PRINCETON STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AND POLITICS

Series Editors
Jack L. Snyder
Marc Trachtenberg
Fareed Zakaria

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Stay the Hand of Vengeance

THE POLITICS OF WAR CRIMES TRIBUNALS

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With a new afterword by the author

GARY JONATHAN BASS

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2000 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY
All Rights Reserved

Third printing, and first paperback printing, with a new afterword, 2002
Paperback ISBN 0-691-09278-8

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows

Bass, Gary Jonathan, 1969

Stay the hand of vengeance : the politics of war crimes tribunals / Gary Jonathan Bass.

p. cm. (Princeton studies in international history and politics)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-04922-X

1. International criminal courts. 2. War crimes trials. 3. Law and politics. I. Title. II. Series.

KZ6310 .B37 2000
341.69dc21 00-036692

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in New Baskerville

Printed on acid-free paper.

www.press.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

FOR THE

PEOPLE OF BOSNIA,

TOO LATE,

AND IN MEMORY OF MY GRANDFATHERS,

NATE BASSERABIE

AND

CHONA (JOE) BOBROW

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* Abbreviations *

Stay the Hand of Vengeance

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[W]hen these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.

Justice Robert Jackson, U.S. opening statement at Nuremberg

* CHAPTER ONE *

Introduction

T IHOMIR BLASKIC was brought into court in The Hague on June 24, 1997, flanked by two policemen wearing the baby-blue of the UN. An unexceptional dark man with wispy thinning black hair and gold glasses, dressed for the occasion in a gray civilian suit, Blaskic looked constantly grim. He did not change his expression as the morning wore on. He gave no hint of emotion, even when the prosecutor, a square-jawed American draped in a black robe, described the 1993 sack of Ahmici, a small, innocuous village in central Bosnias Lasva Valley.

Blaskic had then been a colonel and the commander of the Bosnian Croat armys operations in central Bosnia. In April 1993, Dario Kordic, the young local Bosnian Croat leader, decided to take the Lasva Valley, a rugged area populated both by Muslims and Croats. Forces under Blaskics command launched an assault on the Bosnian governments forces and the Muslim towns of the Lasva Valley. The rain of shells took a heavy toll on Muslim civilians. Men allegedly under Blaskics command rounded up hundreds of Muslims who remained in the valley, and held them in makeshift facilities in Vitez and Busovaca. They forced the prisoners, hungry and thirsty, to dig trenches on confrontation lines or used them as human shields to deter the Bosnian government forces from striking back at the Croat forces. The atrocities in Ahmici, a mostly Muslim village, were the most notorious: its mosques and the homes of its Muslim inhabitants had been razed, and ninety-six civilians were killed.

But that was all a world away. Now Blaskic could only see Ahmiciwith its Muslim houses gutted, and Croatian nationalist graffiti spray-painted on a toppled Muslim minaretin stark black-and-white video images, filmed by a swooping camera that had been carried by a NATO helicopter. Blaskics old headquarters at the Hotel Vitez, only about five kilometers from Ahmici and mere blocks away from what became a mass grave site, were also just pictures on the screens in a hushed and darkened courtroom on the other side of Europe. Instead, Blaskic was surrounded by the self-important trappings of a new effort at international justice.