The war crimes trial of Croatian general Ante Gotovina got under way yesterday. For a backgrounder on the unseemly politics of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, take a gander at my article in The American Interest from a few months back:

After Dayton, the international community turned its attention to prosecuting war crimes as a further means of forcing reconciliation. Again, the underlying assumption was that all sides were guilty; Serbia was perhaps quantitatively, but not qualitatively, more guilty than the other parties, but this was not important for practical purposes. For example, the fact that Serb civilians, fearing retribution, were fleeing in front of advancing Croatian and Bosnian armies was also viewed as “ethnic cleansing”, even though the Croats and Bosnians were not engaged in the methodical slaughter of innocents and forced deportations perfected by their Serbian adversaries over the years.

Doubtlessly atrocities did occur during Croatia’s “Operation Storm”, and Tudjman and his generals certainly weren’t terribly concerned that thousands of Serbs were fleeing their homesteads. This was not, however, “the single largest event of ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the 1991-1995 wars” as the NY Times would have it.

The Croatian Serbs had massacred hundreds and expelled thousands of Croats from their homes in the intervening years, and they very rightly feared that their returning neighbors wouldn’t take too kindly to them. Tudjman’s cavalier attitude and his failure and unwillingness to provide security for these people stands as a black mark on the history of the founding of modern state of Croatia. But it doesn’t even begin to measure up to the systematic barbarities and deportations practiced by the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia during the Balkan wars. Equating the two sides, as the Times does above, is either dishonest, or more likely just plain historically ignorant and lazy.