This book engages with a personal and emotional issue: a matter of identity to me, to all participants in this study and to the majority of the Croatian public; a narrative that helps a state, a nation, an ethnicity and many individuals define themselves and make sense of the world around them. It is the narrative of the Homeland War in Croatia.
Even to me, who left Croatia at a young age, it is a facet of my identity. Notions of victimhood and defiance make up who I am and how I respond to life events, since Croats are those who survive, who defy the odds and persevere. I left, but I remember the stories I was told and the images I saw on TV. For many people who were at the front of this war, however, this narrative continues to command a central role in their lives. It defines who they are, and how they see their neighbours, their society, their country and the world around them. They are based on traumatic memories: the smell of decaying bodies from a nearby town; sitting in a bomb shelter during an artillery attack; or watching the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) enter Vukovar . This is an emotional narrative. It is everyday. It forms a part of the Croatian social fabric and reverberates in both the public and private spheres.
This book investigates this narrative and how war crimes tribunals, both domestic and international, attempted to influence it. Academics and practitioners, although far from agreeing on the topic, have for some time argued that such courts and related civil society efforts have the potential to instil universal human rights norms in post-conflict, transitional societies through their expressivist, or extra-legal, effects. This book shows that in Croatia this did not occur; the norms became distorted when they reached local publics. Narratives provide a useful social construction to study expressivist effects of transitional justice, since they are the expression of norms. Given the powerful and emotional nature of the war narrative, this may not come as a surprise. The case study of Croatia highlights the context within which such efforts often operate in, where judicial narratives presented in a top-down fashion by judicial institutions face significant contestation by bottom-up, everyday narratives . If judicial narratives do not conform with everyday narratives, they struggle to take hold in society.
The Homeland War, or Domovinski Rat, was the name given to the 1991â1995 conflict in Croatia by the TuÄmanist narrative of the 1990s (JoviÄ 2009). The term can be interpreted as loaded and only representing the Croat side of the conflict, but it has come to be accepted across most of Croatian society since the 1990s. Today, it is commonly used in Croatian politics, culture, education and media. The conflict began with the eruption of violence in 1991, as the dissolution of Yugoslavia gathered momentum, and lasted until 1995. It encompassed much of Croatia and left 13,000â16,000 dead, 500,000 internally or externally displaced, and about 12% of housing structures destroyed or damaged, as well as 30% of industrial infrastructure. 1 As much as 21% of the economyâs GDP is estimated to have been wiped out, as well as US $37 billion accrued in damages (London 2003). To this day, 2138 individuals remain missing and many of the over 2 million mines laid in the country are yet to be demined. 2 The conflict in Croatia ended following two Croatian military offensives, Operation Flash and Operation Storm, and the peaceful reintegration of Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Sirmium.
Croats had first-hand experience of the war and a large part of the population witnessed violence of some sort. This contrasts with, for example, the nature of the conflict in Serbia, where much of the conflict was experienced second-hand. 3 Moreover, the conflict had an international nature; International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) trials and judgments show that Bosnian Croat forces operating in BosniaâHerzegovina had continuous and significant military support from the armed forces of Croatia. A chain of command existed, official or unofficial, between Zagreb and armed forces in Bosnia .
The wars in the region were unique in that they were the first to have an international criminal tribunal overseeing their conduct as they took place. They were also the first conflicts that took place in a global environment where human rights had become an important part of international rhetoric (especially so in countries with close ties to Croatia, such as Germany) and in which civil society had a significant international presence. In addition, they were the best recorded conflicts to date, and their day-to-day progress was reported globally. This meant that the situation in which the conflict in Croatia took place, although not completely original and without precedent, contained unique and new elements.
Croatian transition from Yugoslav socialism was not to liberal democracy, but to the competitive authoritarian regime of President Franjo TuÄman and the HDZ (Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica or Croatian Democratic Union). Formal democratic institutions were in place, but they were primarily a means for TuÄmanâs HDZ of obtaining and exercising political authority, which meant conventional standards of democracy were not met (Levitsky and Way 2002: 52). Media and judicial freedoms were neither fully repressed, nor were they completely free. For example, TuÄmanâs attempts to revoke the licence of the independent radio station, Radio 101, divided the HDZ and sparked public protest (Levitsky and Way 2002: 58). Likewise, judges did not always limit media freedom, although anti-government outlets often found themselves dealing with the judiciary. Moreover, as later chapters will outline, TuÄmanâs regime also used language policy as a method of national identity building (Chapter 5) and gave disproportionate power to Croatian war veterans (Chapter 6).
TuÄman died in 1999, and the HDZ lost the parliamentary elections in 2000 to a centre-left coalition that began Croatiaâs process of transition to liberal democracy in earnest. During the TuÄman regime, Croatian cooperation with the ICTY (at the time the main instrument of transitional justice) was minimal and the process of transitional justice as a whole was scarcely present. 4 Only from the 2000 regime change was the process of transitional justice in the country allowed to gather pace. Not all discussion about the past began at this point, but up until then the HDZ government that ruled the country during and after the war took serious steps to restrict this and hardly encouraged it. 5 To a certain extent, it had prepared the public to resist the temptation to deal with the past according to any narratives other than its own.
The United Nations (UN) Security Council set up the ICTY in May 1993 with the aim of restoring regional security and addressing the serious human rights violations that had occurred during the conflict. The asserted goal was to restore peace in the midst of the ongoing conflict; it had secondary, broader aims of dispensing justice and achieving reconciliation in the region. These additional aims were gradually added to the Tribunalâs long list of goals as time passed, ultimately leaving a range of expectations that no court could be expected to meet. Since inception, the ICTY has at one point or another been expected to create a historical record of events, heal war wounds, reassign collective guilt to individuals, prepare societies for reconciliation and deter future violence (Allcock 2009: 379).
The trial chambers did sometimes state expressivist goals in verdicts, such as to strengthen social solidarity and incubate moral consensus in the public, despite causing a high degree of controversy among lawyers, who often rejected any kinds of goals that were not narrowly legal (see ICTY Prosecutor v. KordiÄ and Äerkez, IT-95-14/2-A). Trials aimed to draw a line for the future and achieve a sense of legitimacy in the transition (Teitel 2005: 845). A way of doing this was to create a clear division between the past and present.
While the ICTYâs success in the region more broadly has been considered imperfect, Croatiaâs achievements have been relatively impressive in terms of compliance with the Tribunal and handover of indictees. Subotic (2009) and Nettelfield (2010) argue that the particular circumstances that the Croatian state was in since 2000 have allowed for the Tribunal to be more effective there than in other neighbouring states, especially in terms of transfer of accused to the Tribunal. Moreover, these processes were supported by Croatiaâs own concurrent domestic war crimes tribunals. These struggled with a high number of trials in absentia against ethnic Serbs, especially shortly after the war, as well as issues of bias in favour of ethnic Croats (see, for example, the first instance Lora verdict). State-provided information on trials is out of date, but as of December 2014, 3553 individuals have been tried for war crimes in domestic courts, of which 589 have been sentenced. 6
Truth-seeking efforts through trials, as well as commissions, face the inherent conceptual problems that âcoming to terms with the pastâ faces. The term is too broad, since it connotes so many different ideas (e.g., remembrance, commemoration, acknowledgement and truth seeking), but it is also too narrow since it expects that the only successful outcome of the process is for a society...