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.