The Milosevic Trial by Waters Timothy William;

Author:Waters, Timothy William; [Waters, Timothy William;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199795840
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

II. The Context and the Onset of the Debate

The Vreme debate took place in the context of considerable political and public hostility toward the ICTY, some six months into the Milošević trial. It followed a year of intense pressure by Western governments, particularly the United States, for Serbia to cooperate with the ICTY by extraditing individuals to The Hague.6 As Pešić explains, this external pressure and the conditioning of vital economic aid to Serbia on such cooperation contributed to the rift within the already fractious DOS coalition that had defeated Milošević in 2000. In particular, it exposed a conflict between Serbia’s prime minister Zoran Đinđić, who championed the position that Serbia had to accept such demands in order to achieve economic recovery and a rapprochement with the West, and Yugoslavia’s federal president Vojislav Koštunica, who argued that cooperation with the ICTY was not a priority and had to be undertaken only within the framework of incremental legal change, such as the adoption of an extradition law. When it became clear that the federal Parliament and Supreme Court, populated by remnants of the old regime, were not going to enact the legal formalities in time for the deadline set by the United States before an important donors’ conference, Đinđić invoked a provision in the Serbian constitution allowing him to engineer an eleventh-hour handover of Milošević to a U.S. base in Bosnia, from which he was then transported to The Hague. Although the transfer did not provoke an immediate backlash in Serbia, it did mark the disintegration of the DOS coalition, a growing opposition to Đinđić among Serbia’s compromised security forces concerned about their own possible transfer to The Hague, and a sense among the population that Serbia simply had no choice but to give in to what was perceived as blackmail by the West.*

Popular perceptions of the ICTY also became increasingly negative following the onset of the Milošević trial. The periodic opinion polls taken by the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights showed that the number of those with a positive view of the ICTY had fallen from 30 to 25 percent and the number of those who believed that individuals should be tried by the ICTY as opposed to domestic courts fell by a similar number, thus concluding that as opinions of the ICTY became more fixed (indicated by fewer “don’t know” answers) so did negative assessments of it.7 Questions specifically related to Milošević’s transfer and trial showed similar trends: in 2002 the number of those who believed Milošević should not have been transferred rose from 44 to 62 percent, whereas those who approved fell from 43 to 27 percent. Finally, respondents gave the performance of the Prosecution and the chances of Milošević getting a fair trial the poorest marks, whereas Milošević’s self-defense received the highest mark. The trial was, if anything, discrediting the ICTY rather than Milošević in the eyes of Serbs.

It is in this context that in August 2002 an article appeared in the independent Zagreb weekly Feral Tribune by the well-known Serbian political commentator and satirist Petar Luković.

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