Plenums and Power (Power v. Force III)

Posted on February 26, 2014 by James Thomas Snyder

A plenum convened in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, on February 9, 2014 (via Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso)

The past two weeks have been astounding to witness in Ukraine and Bosnia- Herzegovina. While I haven’t been able to follow quite as intimately what has happened in Ukraine, media reporting from that country has been very good. In Bosnia I have several friends, and I heard my colleague and friend Jasmin Mujanovic, a New York-based academic (and apparently inexhaustible tweeter), speak on a panel yesterday to a packed house at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs about the dynamic events in that country.

It’s been very interesting to note the similarities, as Jasmin’s co-panelist Janusz Bugajski did yesterday, between the two countries. In both countries, citizens took to the streets to protest a sclerotic and unresponsive political system, widespread and petty corruption, and a sluggish economy. In Ukraine and Bosnia, people want closer ties to Europe and the West (if not necessarily the European Union). I would note, as Gene Sharp has noted, that initial protests were sparked — or helped organizers to consolidate demonstrations — around a singular provocative event. In Ukraine, it was President Viktor Yanukovich’s refusal to proceed with closer ties with the European Union that brought thousands of people onto the street. In Bosnia, it was the federal parliament’s inability to issue identity papers and passports, effectively rendering a new generation of children identityless, that brought thousands of mothers out to demonstrate.

And critically, in both countries peaceful demonstrations were set upon by overreactive security services to which the protesters reacted violently. In Bosnia, protesters attacked municipal buildings in almost every major city in the country. In Ukraine, protesters stood their ground and fought back against the security services. In both cases, there were echoes of the first response against Egyptian security in Tahrir Square, when the people had just enough power to counter the force of the government to prevail. This is an important, if unsettling, development. Because in both cases, the government may still have the monopoly of force. It depends entirely on whether the military will side with the government or stay off the domestic battlefield.

But here the two countries diverge. In Bosnia, the initial violence almost immediately abated. It’s clear from those I’ve heard from that seeing the burning buildings reminded too many of the war from 20 years ago and peace was quickly restored. This is an extraordinary development. The Bosnian army or, for that matter, the small European Union force contingent in the country, was never called up.

In Ukraine, it appears that Western pressure — public calls by US civilian and military officials and their counterparts in the European Union and NATO, all of which have worked diligently during the past 20 years to build strong institutional and personal relationships with Ukraine’s military establishment — paid off by keeping the Ukrainian army (for now) out of the political power struggle. That kept bloodshed to a minimum, at least, and avoided the precedent we’ve seen in Egypt of making the military establishment a political kingmaker or outright ruler in the country.

Unfortunately, while the Ukrainians figured out a way to counter the initially violent response of the state, and in such a dramatic way, this essentially means there is no rulebook for the way forward in the country. The opposition, now in control of Kiev and, presumably, the western part of the country, could reach out to the Russian-leaning east and Crimea. But if divisions in the country become acute there is no precedent for the peaceful sharing of power across the entire country. If Crimea wants to join Russia or parts of the country want to break away or become autonomous, it may require the army to enforce union. And why not? Kiev was defended with force and won fairly the same way — that is to say, violently.

But in Bosnia something more astonishing took place and continues to take place. People have abandoned violence entirely to assemble spontaneously in municipal “plenums” and issue collective demands to their own local authorities. This has led to the resignation of at least five cantonal governments. Bosnia’s “federal” government structure, imposed by the Dayton peace accords, is Byzantine and bloated to an extreme. Exhausted and exasperated by this internationally imposed, ethnically dominated, and thoroughly corrupt system, Bosnians are now asserting their own, direct, democratic axis of power to demand that their government respond to them and their needs.

It is important to note, particularly in the context of the regional and linguistic divide in Ukraine, that the protests in Bosnia have asserted themselves as Bosnian rather than ethnic, religious or linguistic. This is a critical development. While limited to the Federation, Bosniaks and Croats have reached out to Serbs in the Republika Serpska and have been rewarded by several individuals and organizations rallying to them in reaction to a political system that helps none of them and punishes all of them equally. While I’m sure there are some who are trying to make the same argument in Ukraine, I think the dividing line is far more stark in that country.

While the concept of the assembly is as old as democracy, it is amazing that the Bosnian plenum is so fresh and new to this wave of popular uprisings against thuggish and sclerotic regimes. De Tocqueville wrote admiringly of American civil society and our town hall culture. Hannah Arendt wrote about citizens’ assemblies (she unfortunately wrote about the early “soviets”) as a unique expression of democratic power and direct governance. She also wrote about the concept of politics as an open space where people could gather to discuss issues of common concern — the more open, the more free and dynamic a political space is. That is exactly what we are witnessing in the Bosnian plenums.

What makes them more extraordinary is that the plenums themselves are opening a political space between the people and their own, nominally democratic and elected governments. The Dayton constitution, exacerbated by ethnic chauvinism and sheer political myopia, had simply closed off politics to most Bosnians. The plenums have very effectively crowbarred open the political space again. Where once we saw Solidarity seated on one side of the round table from the Communist Party in Warsaw — forcing the political space open between the people and their government — today we see the Bosnian plenums assembling down the street from the governments that purport to represent them in Sarajevo, Tuzla, Zenica and elsewhere.

As a result, I am more optimistic about events in Bosnia than I am in Ukraine. I am not fatalistic about what will happen on the Black Sea, but I am concerned that the recourse to violence there will beget more violence. The protesters in Bosnia recognize their power in the plenum. That is an extraordinary, unique and genuine contribution to political and democratic development that, if successful, should be a model for us all to emulate.

###

Lessons from Robben Island

Posted on December 6, 2013 by James Thomas Snyder

Nelson Mandela repairing prison clothes on Robben Island in 1966 (via ezakwantu.com)

I visited Robben Island, South Africa’s prison colony off the Western Cape, more than a decade ago when I was in South Africa with the woman who would become my wife. Then as today it is a national heritage site and it is a physical part of the extraordinary life of Nelson Mandela, who died yesterday at age 95.

Nothing is inevitable about the political development in complex societies, and fortunately the commentary about Mandela’s crucial contributions to South Africa’s transition to democratic rule have emphasized his unique abilities as conciliator and canny politician.

I remember the day he became president realizing, in 1994, that he had been in prison longer than I had been alive. I thought, How does anyone do anything under those circumstances? In 1963 he barely escaped a death sentence with his friends only to be condemned to a life term. He said he was willing to die, but how could he give his life when he was condemned to prison exile? It is important to remember he was just one man: thousands of unnamed and unsung prisoners joined him in punishment for protesting apartheid. How did they endure the uncertainty of their actions?

The tour of Robben Island is guided in part by former inmates. I was immediately struck by one of them who thanked those who visited for the international boycott that punished his country and, as some have argued, hurt black South Africans most of all during the divestment years. It was important to hear, and I learned a few things, then and now, about supporting the long walk to freedom — in South Africa and elsewhere.

Sanctions work. Economic boycotts, divestment campaigns, industrial action, coordinated sanctions — these bring real pain to regimes and nations we want to bring to heel. We’ve seen this in South Africa, Burma, now (hopefully) Iran. Interestingly, fellow Nobel laureate Lech Walesa — who visited Washington this week on the occasion of his 70th birthday — argued that it was the deliberate economic impact of the Solidarity protests as much as the political effects that forced the communist authorities to negotiate their way out of power in 1989. Constant strike actions and work stoppages at the Gdansk shipyards, ironworks, and factories, meant that what little industrial output Poland could boast in the Comintern was at the mercy of the workers. This was an economic disaster in a country that couldn’t produce enough to eat, never mind politically untenable in the workers’ paradise. It’s a shame, of course, that somebody as forceful and articulate on the dehumanizing nature of communism as Ronald Reagan couldn’t bring the same moral clarity to the brutalizing inhumanity of apartheid.

Gestures are important. Mandela talked about the importance of the salute by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics (it is interesting to note that fellow medalist, the Australian Peter Norman, also joined in the protest by wearing a badge to show solidarity with Smith and Carlos and also to protest official Australian policy). While it is easy to dismiss the empty, effect-less, “political gesture” — the op-ed, the speech, the demonstration, the outburst — they are incredibly important to maintain morale for those who are engaged in political struggle against authority or enormous odds, and acutely so if they are in prison. Official gestures are even more important. When the United States takes sides, or defends individual dissidents, the effect is tremendous. They are always worth the political risk. Speeches by John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan at the Berlin Wall, when they leaked to the other side, told those living under communism that we understood their reality. But if the United States is tepid, or “balanced,” fighters for freedom can smell equivocation. Their reaction breeds resentment, suspicion and cynicism.

Information is ammunition. One amusing but poignant story told during our Robben Island visit involved the insatiable need for information among the political prisoners. They were at the head of the revolution in South Africa, but the authorities cut them off from all news and virtually all communication from the outside world. They were not just news junkies: to be effective and relevant, they had to know what was going on. And information was vital to their morale. Any sign from the outside that they were recognized, that the struggle was continuing, made their experience worth enduring.

The story was this. A priest came to lead a prayer session with a group of inmates. He arrived with an attache case, which he left casually open on a chair next to him at the front of the room. The priest invited an inmate to lead them in prayer, which he promptly did by going to the front of the room on the other side of the chair. He peeked inside the attache case and saw a newspaper. He immediately asked everyone to close their eyes and bow their heads in prayer. As soon as he was convinced everyone had closed their eyes, he pinched the newspaper and led the prayer.

President Barack Obama, in his remarks on the death of Nelson Mandela, said he spent his life studying the great man and would continue to do so. In Mandela there is the ennobling experience of an entire nation. Indeed, as we found on Robben Island, there is much more to be learned not just from him, but from the whole country.

###

In Egypt, Force v. Power (II)

Posted on July 27, 2013 by James Thomas Snyder

(KHALED DESOUKI AFP/Getty Images via Globalpost.com)

It’s been sickening listening to usually sensible and decent people try to justify the ugly ouster of Egypt’s first democratically elected head of state. Watch David Brooks, for example, speaking on PBS’ Newshour, contort himself into a principle for the outcome of a wholly unprincipled thing happening to somebody he hates:

I used to think, if we just have elections, that the elections will have a moderating effect on governments.

Even if you take radicals, especially throughout the Middle East, you take radicals, they have to pay attention to public opinion. They have to pick up the trash. They have to fix the potholes. The act of governing will moderate them. And, therefore, we just should insist on election after election and we should respect the results of every election.

I think the evidence from the Muslim Brotherhood, at least, is that if you have got a group which is really a radical, almost religious totalitarian group, the elections will not have a moderating influence. They will take advantage of elections in essence to end democracy.

And I think that is what they were slowly doing. They were undermining democracy to make democracy impossible. It was a self-negating election. And so I think what the coup people did was legitimate. And what all those millions of people on the street did is legitimate.

A friend of mine, Jeffrey Goldberg, had a good line. May be bad short term for democracy, good long term for progress.

I quote him at length to avoid any reductionism. Brooks sounds peculiarly like an early agitator for Communism, from which many of his friends on the neoconservative right crawled, placing any violent or repressive means at the disposition of the all-important End. Who cares if democracy is harmed, when progress – Communism’s ultimate end for all humanity! – is achieved? (To make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs!) And what good is democracy, anyway, if elections are “self-negating”? (Can’t we just throw the people out and elect a new one?)

It only gets worse. Jeremy Pressman writes that a military government may be better at “protecting minority rights, creating space for genuine and lasting political competition, and, more broadly, helping Egypt move forward.” Progress again! Couldn’t the army and police do that under a democratically elected president? Never mind that the army ultimately chooses whose rights, whose space, and which direction forward, because it controls the state. There is no real politics without moral choice, because there is no real choice out of the barrel of a gun. The concept of the benign dictatorship is a venal lie that refuses to die in the craniums of people smart enough to know better.

Joshua Keating and Ozan Varol seriously consider a “democratic coup d’etat,” as if that makes a lick of sense. Can you have an “authoritarian election”? “Totalitarian freedoms”? “Transparent censorship”?

It doesn’t take much to see all these observers’ frightening lack of faith in, and understanding of, politics and political process independent of democratic mechanisms. Even taking Brooks’ argument at face value – that Morsi was dismantling the very democracy that had elevated him to power – the protests against his rule indicated Egypt was a midpoint of the drama, not at its climax. And for anyone who would argue against this point, and to say that Egypt is better off now under military rule, we need look no farther than Turkey, where a political opposition movement has flourished against a similarly pugnacious president. The difference there is the army has, after 100 years, finally removed itself to the sidelines. While contentious and occasionally violent, Turkey’s protests have left far fewer people dead as a result. And Turkey’s democracy is still intact.

It is incredible that Brooks failed to acknowledge the inseparable actions of the Egyptian army in the coup. It was not the “people” who deposed the president, but the armed forces. Morsi is still being held incommunicado, now charged with espionage and murder. It is compelling indeed that hundreds of thousands of people took to Tahrir Square in Cairo and elsewhere to protest against the President and the ruling Muslim Brotherhood. This is as it should be in an open, free and political society. Of course we and President Morsi should take a petition signed by 22 million seriously. But now that movement and those millions have been denied their right to rein in the president on their own, by their own power, because the army has subsumed them by brute force.

Worse for the future of Egypt, this establishes a very ominous precedent, one Turkey took nearly a century to overcome: the ultimate arbiter of political rule is now the army. Having sat out the 2011 revolution and then forcefully deposed Morsi early this month, the army is effectively Egypt’s Pharaoh-maker. This is indisputably bad for Egyptian democracy and Egyptian politics, because the army may always have its metal-jacketed finger on the country’s political balance.

And it demonstrates to the Muslim Brotherhood – those whom Brooks despises so much – what they and their allies must do now. No longer content to build a true political power base in Egypt’s neighborhoods and quartiers and mosques and prisons and schools, they realize they must infiltrate the army, too. All over the Middle East, the like-minded are taking their lesson.

This is a terrible development. Because after decades of preaching the benefits of democracy, which includes the rule of law and democratic control of the armed forces, Egypt – with the tacit consent of the West – has cynically conceded that force can trump power. But that only means as long as those men with guns hold the future of political control in their hands along with their weapons, politics will be inseparably defined with violence, and bloodshed, and heartache.

###

Confining and Defining Terrorism in Syria

Posted on September 8, 2012 by James Thomas Snyder

Syrian refugees in Turkey (Muftah.org)

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently declared Syria a “terrorist state” while the country has hosted a crush of refugees fleeing regime persecution across the two countries’ shared 556-mile border.

Turkey is a powerful and influential country in a volatile region, and this sounds like tough rhetoric regarding an intransigent and repressive neighbor. For many observers, this was precisely the kind of language needed to pressure the regime of Bashar al-Assad to change course or relinquish control to the opposition and end the most violent uprising of the Arab Spring.

Indeed, there is a stream of thought that firmly believes that “terrorism is terrorism” whether committed by state or non-state actors. The notion of equivalence focuses on the victims — usually civilians — and the particular horror inflicted by armed violence. The United States (and its allies) are regularly if frivilously accused of “terrorism” by those on the left. More sophisticated commentators, such as my fellow observer at Foreign Policy Remi Brulin, apply a post-modern argument to the application of “terrorism”. In essence, he argues that “terrorism” has been entirely stripped of any real or intrinsic meaning and therefore serves almost entirely as a political weapon: label your enemy as a “terrorist,” and you win. (This is most easily seen by Assad’s regime, who regularly blames state massacres on “terrorists”.)

I am entirely unsympathetic to this argument because it does not reflect the real world, nor is this the world we want to live in. We want to live in a world where violence does not solve our political conflicts. Even when force is required or necessary, we want force to be controlled by the rule of law of states. To throw up our hands under the belief that anyone or any thing can be a terrorist ignores reality, international law, and state law.

Terrorism, as defined by U.S. law, confines the crime to an individual committing acts of violence in order to change policy. It is important to note, of course, that terrorism is limited to the individual and its political component: terrorism is a political crime. But that is why terrorism is and should be seriously condemned. Particularly in a democracy, the means for political change are readily available to the individual. Violence for the purpose of political change is not acceptable. (I admit I was annoyed that the “War on Terror” never was articulated in clear moral terms, as antithetical to democracy and the international state system.)

We may have an honest difference of opinion and ideals when it comes to the appropriate and legitimate use of force for political change at the state level. But this is where I believe the equivalence of state and individual terrorism is both false and unhelpful. Because both state and international law provide a cause of action for the inappropriate and illegitimate use of force. War crimes, aggression, crimes against humanity, rape and genocide are each a cause of action in international law. For the individual — mostly murder, assault, rape and other similar crimes — are all punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the criminal and military codes of states. It is entirely appropriate to label these crimes as such when they arise: labeling a state a terrorist or an individual unaffiliated with a state a war criminal is not just confusing, it is simply bad law.

It is true that terrorism has not been specifically defined under international law (certain arguments notwithstanding) and that does have much to do with the political wranglings that Brulin discusses (the canard that one country’s “terrorist” is another man’s “freedom fighter,” etc.). But this illuminates the fuzziness of Erdogan’s statement about Syria. A “terrorist state,” under current law — state and international — is no terrorist at all. Erdogan’s characterization, while sharp, invokes no cause of action under international or Turkish law and demands nothing of Erdogan, his neighbors or his allies. It changes nothing.

This is important for reasons I have outlined before: international law is entirely dependent on the political will of the international community for enforcement actions. Had Erdogan accused the Assad regime of war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide, he would have invoked the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. This would have put the UN Security Council on the hook to enforce the ICC founding statute. Turkey’s political capital is substantial, but not substantial enough under these circumstances in effect to bring the UN to the brink of war in Syria. (And Assad is not so stupid as to attack outright Turkey, a NATO ally that can invoke the collective defensive provisions that would bring down the might of the Western democracies that deposed Muammar Gaddafi.)

In short, this argument demonstrates the importance of a precise and legal definition of terrorism — and a precise and legal discussion of terrorism. We could all agree and nod sagely and cynically with Remi Brulin and his postmodern compatriots that Erdogan called a spade a Kalashnikov, but it does absolutely nothing to change the situation for tens of thousands of refugees, the Free Syrian Army, or the millions of average Syrians caught between a brutal and repressive state and the opposition trying desperately to change the country. Only the actions of states and individuals — by law, ideals or interest — will bring that about.

###

Justice or Politics?

Posted on March 28, 2012 by James Thomas Snyder

Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, indicted Serbian war criminals, in the early 1990s. (Reuters)

The Canadian academic and politician Michael Ignatieff has written extensively and profoundly on law, politics and policy during an extraordinary career that has taken him from Toronto and British Columbia to Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard to the leadership of Liberal Party. His corpus includes more than a dozen books and scores of articles.

He remains one of the most active and engaged North American public intellectuals of our time and possibly that most rare and courageous one who crosses over from thinking about politics to engaging in politics. Rarer still for a political man, he continues to think while he acts. Famously, he wrote about second thoughts supporting the Iraq War, a nuanced mea culpa exploring the nature of political judgment. And more recently, he reviewed All the Missing Souls by David Scheffer, a diplomatic memoir of sorts about the development of the war crimes tribunals during the 1990s.

I want to take measured exception to Ignatieff’s and Scheffer’s approach to the war crimes tribunals, which I see as representing the consensus view of international law as embodied by these international courts. Scheffer, who served as special envoy for war crimes in the Clinton Administration, was pivotal in creating the tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the International Criminal Court to investigate and punish perpetrators of heinous war crimes. Ignatieff was an early advocate for intervention in both those countries to end those crimes. Both condemn opponents in the Clinton and Bush administrations who want to exempt Americans — politicians and service personnel both — from the jurisdiction of the international courts. In Ignatieff’s words, this is true American “exceptionalism” — Americans are exceptionally exempt from the oversight of international law and can act unilaterally and with impunity anywhere and against anyone as a result.

This is a seriously problematic argument from two perspectives. First, the International Criminal Court was created expressly with a quasi-federal purpose in mind: in the event that a state is too weak or politically unwilling to find or punish war criminals, the ICC had the mandate (if not the means) to carry out justice on behalf of the victims. The special tribunal for Rwanda was similarly created for this end. An analogy is the U.S. civil rights statutes enacted during the Civil Rights era to bring down federal investigators on recalcitrant local jurisdictions in the case of gross abuses of human rights. But these would only be invoked in the event that the local authorities abdicated their responsibility. No serious observer has alleged that during the wars of the last decade that the American judicial system has shirked its duty policing American servicemembers, and our political system has demonstrated extraordinary resilience at the same time.

But the more important argument to be made about these courts is political. As my friend Pierre Hazan argued in his book Justice in a Time of War, the war crimes tribunals were wielded by Western leaders as a hammer during the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. That is, the courts were a political tool — a weapon just as useful if not as destructive as a cruise missile — applied to resolve a political problem: the war.

The essentially political nature of these courts becomes more salient the more we realize that political conflicts become bound up with them. The desire to place American servicemen under the ICC’s jurisdiction surely is proof enough of that, particularly as a result of the visceral hatred of President Bush’s policies in Iraq. But another, less polarizing example is the war in Liberia and the peaceful transition to democratic rule becoming contingent on the surrender of the former president Charles Taylor to the Special Court in The Hague, or the European Union’s insistence that Serbia capture and surrender indicted war criminals on their territory in exchange for a favorable position in accession negotiations.

Moreover, the entire concept of transitional justice — with deep respect to my friend Pierre and the work of thousands on this issue in very difficult places — is inherently political. This is the notion that a court — a judicial body — should help achieve peace and stability by administering justice. These are not bad things, surely, but we must admit they are political and social goals rather than strictly legal objectives. Only in the international arena are we willing to to allow a judicial body to execute a transparently political function.

To further this point: there is really no reason why Charles Taylor, Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic, Leon Mugesera and the other cast of horribles could not be tried by modern courts in Western countries. This is perhaps the real scandal Ignatieff and Scheffer should be writing about. But in many cases — Taylor and Karadzic come to mind — this would open up a series of unpleasant questions for the prosecution. Such as, if they were war criminals, why did the U.S. and Canadian governments have open political relations with them? Avoiding war crimes prosecutions at home becomes a political issue best resolved by “clean” international tribunals.

If we play through the implications of this question we recognize the uncomfortably political nature of the international courts. If we impose upon domestic courts the responsibility for prosecuting war crimes committed by foreign actors against populations abroad, we stretch our judicial systems into the exclusive domain of the executive and legislative. We already saw during the wars in the former Yugoslavia how awkward it was to negotiate the end of a war with a political leader under threat of international indictment. More important is the recognition that extending domestic powers of indictment or investigation also requires policing powers, which abroad are exclusively military. That invokes executive powers, which are resolutely political for exceptionally good reasons.

An inverse approach to this problem involves the two men pictured at the top of this post. They were very recently arrested by Serbia and extradicted to The Hague and are now on trial for war crimes. Knowing their case as well as I do, I would like nothing better than to see them die in prison after conviction. If this is the preordained outcome — no one seriously doubts it, not even the Serb chauvinists who still support them — what real difference is there between that judicial outcome and the political equivalent of their death on the battlefield? After all, that’s effectively what Milosevic’s interminable trial achieved in The Hague.

It is important to remember we are not strictly limited to political or judicial means to achieve justice for these high crimes. And it is important to know that justice means different things to different political cultures. We forget that forgiveness, even amnesty, is important to justice. (Hannah Arendt once wrote that forgiveness is a political act.) South Africa and Morocco have created truth and reconciliation commissions. Or take the example of the Brasil: Nunca Mais, a South American samizdat commission that simply and suddenly exposed the former military regime’s human rights crimes.

I am not inclined to criticize Scheffer for his idealism and struggle against bureaucracy to create a rule of law to end war crimes. But I am suspicious of the peculiarly political aspect of these courts, and particularly of the unwillingness of international legal experts and scholars to admit and confront the paradox of their mission. Warfare is inherently political, so it will be difficult to separate the commission of crimes during war from their political context. In order for justice to be achieved in wartime, we have to be willing to admit that much.

###

War, Truth and Justice in the Balkans

Posted on February 2, 2012 by James Thomas Snyder

As a law student studying in an appalling banlieue satellite campus of the University of Paris in 2000, I quite by accident stumbled across a book by Pierre Hazan on the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal. Published that year as La Justice Face à la Guerre, I instantly recognized it as the first significant history of the international court established to try war criminals from the conflict that tore apart the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s.

Since I was then studying international criminal law, I knew no such book existed in English. Filled with visions of glory — or at least knowing I had nothing to lose — I wrote Pierre in my middling French asking him if he would allow me to pitch a translation to American publishers. To my astonishment and eternal gratitude he accepted. During the next four years I worked feverishly on the translation, adding notations and photographs. It was published in 2004 by Texas A&M University Press as Justice in a Time of War. Pierre graciously and enterprisingly added an additional chapter about the trial of Slobodan Milosevic — his arrest and extradition to The Hague occurred after the French edition appeared — and eerily predicted Milosevic’s death in detention. (For myself I saw Milosevic during his trial in The Hague while on a trip to The Netherlands in 2003, but witnessed nothing of his infamous histrionics.)

You can purchase Justice in a Time of War at Amazon.com (including Kindle format), where it remains a top seller on military justice and the former Yugoslavia.

Pierre is an accomplished war correspondent for Libèration in Paris and Le Temps in Geneva and has since expanded his reportage into scholarship on transitional justice and other issues at Harvard University, the U.S. Institute for Peace, and l’Institut d’etudes politique (Sciences Po) in Paris. You can read more about him here. He has since published additional works in French and in English, including his most recent, Judging War, Judging History.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has lasted longer than all of the wars in that benighted former federation combined. Fortunately the two worst war criminals are now in the dock — Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic — and with the last wanted suspects in custody the long mandate of the court will at last have an end date. It also means that the independent nations of the Balkans will be able to reconcile and move towards prosperity and protection within the European Union and NATO.

###