Marko Hoare wrote another excellent essay over at Greater Surbiton. It’s both a succinct summary of the history of the late part of the Balkan wars, as well as an admirable attempt at apportioning blame where blame is due.

He makes a very important point which I failed to make yesterday:

Operation Storm resulted in the exodus of at least 150,000 Serb civilians. This was not a case of Croatia rounding up the Serb civilians and transporting them out of the territory; it was a **planned evacuation carried out by the Krajina Serb leadership itself**. *[emphasis mine -dm]*

It’s crucial to keep this kind of stuff in mind when you read about these ongoing trials. The narrative of the prosecution implies that Croatia’s war of liberation was qualitatively equivalent to Serbian aggression, and that Operation Storm was “the single largest event of ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the 1991-1995 wars”. This is patently false and historically inaccurate. Yet it’s a narrative that keeps coming up again and again.

Along those lines, a seemingly unrelated passage in Dr. Hoare’s piece stands out:

In its ruling last year, the International Court of Justice ruled that the Srebrenica massacre, alone of all Serb massacres in the war, was an act of genocide. Had it not been for the Croatian Army and the US oppostion in 1995, Serb forces might last year have been found guilty of two genocidal massacres, not just one. This is one reason why Serbia, almost as much as Croatia and Bosnia, should be thankful for Operation Storm.

The problem, of course, is that Serbia proper wasn’t found guilty of anything in Srebrenica. Resultantly, there hasn’t been the kind of soul-searching within the Serbian body politic which would lead to a solid repudiation of their recent past. Instead, Serbia’s political elite is dominated by thugs like Koštunica and Nikolić who repudiated Milošević not because his wars were criminal and reprehensible, but rather because he lost them.

Tudjman was no saint, and he shares great responsibility for what transpired in the early 1990s. His litany of sins, as clearly enumerated by Dr. Hoare at the end of his piece, are damning indeed, especially when taken in as a whole. And having the Croatian public confront the individual acts of brutality which occurred during Operation Storm can only be good for the future health of the country. But the politics behind the ICJ and ICTY are not merely failing to bring reconciliation to the Balkans; they are in fact dangerous to long-term stability there.

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.