Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans

3. The Truth is in Croatia's Favor

83 3 THE TRUTH IS IN CROATIA’S FAVOR Croatia’s commitment to transitional justice has for many years been best described as one step forward, two steps back.1 The Croatian government has mostly cooperated selectively, reluctantly, and insufficiently with the Hague tribunal. The pressures coming from the ICTY but also from other international organizations and individual states have created deep divisions within the Croatian state, with the “Hague issue” dominating domestic political debates and pitting strong domestic interest constituencies against one another. This lackluster cooperation ended in 2005 when Croatia transferred the last ICTY indictee to The Hague, effectively fulfilling its obligations to the tribunal. Croatia was generously rewarded for this move with the promise of European Union membership. This journey, however, has been a difficult one for Croatia. Current debates going on in the country about the character of the 1990s war and war crimes committed indicate that while institutional obligations have been met—all suspects have been transferred to The Hague—profound divisions about the Croatian past still remain deeply embedded in the national consciousness. To begin with, unlike Serbia, Croatia had the misfortune to wage the war on its own territory for an extended period of time. After it declared independence in 1991, the Croatian government was immersed in a war against its sizable Serb minority.2 Croatia’s nationalism began to harden under president Franjo Tud̄man, 1. For a detailed history of Croatian cooperation with the ICTY, see Victor Peskin, International Justice in Rwanda and the Balkans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), chs. 4–5. 2. Available census data from 1991 put the Serb minority in Croatia at 12 percent. 84 HIJACKED JUSTICE who changed the constitution in 1990 to make Croats the only “constitutive people ” of Croatia, de facto relegating Serbs to a minority, an “alien body” in Croatia . With direct prodding from Serbia, Croatian Serbs chose to respond to their change in status with armed rebellion instead of constitutional negotiation. In many ways this was not a homegrown effort but an uprising coordinated,financed and managed from Belgrade.3 For their part, the Croatian militia was spoiling for a fight, and in a series of meant-to-provoke incidents by both sides, the large-scale war began in 1991. It lasted in full force until the spring of 1992, when an even more brutal conflict erupted in Bosnia, and the Croatian front remained largely silent, with clearly delineated territories controlled by the Croatian government and rebel Serbs. Croatia suffered many casualties in the beginning of the war, as the federal Yugoslav National Army (JNA), as well as volunteer and paramilitary groups from Serbia proper, supported the Serb rebels. The more memorable atrocities in the war were committed by the Serbs during the three-months-long brutal siege of Vukovar, while international attention was grabbed by the indiscriminate Serbian bombardment of the historic city of Dubrovnik, a gorgeous medieval port on the Adriatic Sea, whose destruction had no strategic value to the Serbian army other than demoralizing and humiliating Croatia. However, as the Bosnian war raged on, Croatia became more deeply involved in this conflict by arming and supporting Bosnian Croats and as part of a widely reported pact between Milošević and Tud̄man to divide Bosnia between Serbia and Croatia.4 In the course of the Bosnian war, Croatian troops and paramilitaries and their Bosnian proxies also carried out atrocities against Bosniacs. Finally, in 1995, as Serb troops were beginning to lose ground in Bosnia, the Croatian army regrouped and carried out two complex military operations— Flash and Storm—which effectively retook control of most of Serb-held territory but in the process also deported, or “ethnically cleansed” the entire Serb population of Krajina—some two hundred thousand people. In the course of the operation, the Croatian military and paramilitaries also burned Serbian houses to the ground and killed almost all the Serbs who refused to or could not leave— mostly disabled and the elderly.5 The Croatian message was clear—the state of Croatia was no longer a welcoming place for Serbs. 3. Human Rights Watch, “Weighing the Evidence: Lessons from the Slobodan Milošević Trial,” vol. 18, no. 10(D), New York, December 14, 2006. 4. For an overview of documents pertaining to the Tud̄man–Milošević agreement, see Predrag Lucić, ed., Stenogrami o podjeli Bosne [Notes on the Division of Bosnia] (Split, Croatia: Kultura & Rasvjeta, 2005). 5. Croatian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, Military Operation “Storm...