International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia is presented as an international court whose pursuit of Serbian war criminals becomes a focal point in the book’s discussion of wartime justice. Its role is set against the treatment of Croatian and Bosnian defendants by their own courts, and the contrast complicates the narrator’s effort to remain attentive to victims on whichever side they are found.

Role in the account

The Tribunal enters the narrative through the reflections of journalists Jean Hatzfeld and Jean Rolin, whose experiences of the siege of Sarajevo inform a wider meditation on how to choose a side without pretending that either side is morally uniform. The narrator describes the Tribunal in The Hague as steadfastly prosecuting Serbian war criminals, while Croatian and Bosnian counterparts are left to the predictable leniency of their domestic courts. The court’s activity is therefore presented not as a detached institutional detail but as part of the moral and political landscape that observers must interpret.

Perceived imbalance

The contrast in the account is between international prosecution of Serbian crimes and the handling of Croatian and Bosnian crimes by national courts. The narrator treats that difference as evidence of an imbalance and links it to a broader concern about partiality. The claim is framed as a judgment about the pattern of prosecutions and the expected leniency of domestic proceedings; the passage does not supply case details or assess individual rulings.

That perceived imbalance matters because it appears after the narrator has described the difficulty of maintaining an allegiance to victims rather than to a fixed national side. Acknowledging wrongdoing among the weaker party and wrongdoing among the stronger one does not, in this account, require pretending that power is evenly distributed. But when the distribution of power changes, the observer must be ready to revise where attention and solidarity fall. The Tribunal’s apparent selectivity becomes one test of whether institutions, like observers, can respond consistently to victims across shifting alignments.

Narrative significance

The Tribunal sharpens the book’s distinction between recognizing complexity and treating all sides as equivalent. The narrator rejects the easy conclusion that everyone is equally culpable, while also insisting that crimes by the weaker side cannot be ignored. Against that standard, the contrast between international cases against Serbian war criminals and domestic leniency toward Croatian and Bosnian counterparts exposes the difficulty of making justice appear even-handed.

The institution thus functions in the narrative as a measure of the distance between a principle and its application. The account does not offer a comprehensive history of the Tribunal or a legal analysis of its work; it uses the perceived disparity to show why taking the side of victims requires continued scrutiny, rather than a once-and-for-all declaration of allegiance.