The Media Negotiations of War Criminals and Their Memoirs

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 391-405 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarina Ristić
Keyword(s):  
Transitional Justice ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Main Function ◽  
Cultural Criminology ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
The Past ◽  
War Criminals ◽  
New Type ◽  
The Media

The literature on transitional justice in former Yugoslavia holds that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) proceedings, meant to establish the facts about the past, punish the perpetrators of mass violence, and even facilitate reconciliation, have led to the unexpected transformation of convicted war criminals into heroes in their home countries. Drawing on cultural criminology, the article looks at the phenomenon of “criminal celebrity,” which emerges at the juncture between public personality, intensive media attention, and high audience resonance. Considering that this transformation largely depends on the ability of different actors, including the convicts themselves, to create socially acceptable public personalities by reframing crimes, and their contexts and perpetrators, this article looks at the attempts to create such alternative accounts in the memoirs of the convicts, and in the media. This article argues that the mediation of war criminals in the ICTY facilitated a new type of criminal celebrity—the “ICTY celebrity,” who emerges from his/her relation to an allegedly unjust legal authority, rather than to the crimes. The ICTY celebrity is not a hero, known for heroic deeds or achievements—instead, his main function is to represent a flattering and consoling narrative about the past, enabling wide identification within the ethnic community.

scholarly journals “I Would Prefer to Be Famous”

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 372-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Karstedt
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
World War ◽  
War Criminals ◽  
Atrocity Crimes ◽  
The Impact

The reentry of sentenced perpetrators of atrocity crimes is part and parcel of the pursuit of international and transitional justice. As men and women sentenced for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the other tribunals return from prisons into society and communities questions arise as to the impact their reentry has on deeply divided postconflict societies, in particular on victim groups. Contemporary international tribunals and courts mostly do not have penal or correctional policies of their own, and the legacy of early release, commuting of sentences and amnesties that Nuremberg and other post-World War II tribunals have left, is a particularly problematic one. Germany’s historical experience provides an analytic blueprint for understanding in which ways contemporary perpetrators return into changed and still fragile societies. This comparative analysis between Nuremberg and the ICTY is based on two data sets including information on returning war criminals sentenced in both tribunals. The comparative analysis focuses on four themes: politics of reentry, admission of guilt and justification, memoirs, and political activism.

Rape and Human Rights

PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (5) ◽  
pp. 1662-1664 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Franco
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Ethnic Group ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Geneva Conventions ◽  
War Criminals ◽  
The United Nations

According to the report of the United Nations commission on Human Rights, rape is the least condemned war crime (coomaraswamy, Further Promotion 64n263). Although wartime rape was listed as a crime against humanity by the Nuremberg Military Tribunals and by the Geneva Conventions, it was not until 2001 that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia identified rapists as war criminals. In that year the tribunal sentenced three men for violations of the laws or customs of war (torture, rape) and crimes against humanity (torture, rape) committed during the war in Bosnia during the 1993 takeover of Foca, where women were systematically raped and killed, the purpose being “to destroy an ethnic group by killing it, to prevent its reproduction or to disorganize it, removing it from its home soil.”

scholarly journals Traumatized War Criminal? Documenting the Case of Esad Landžo

2020 ◽  
pp. 105756772094078
Author(s):  
Olivera Simic
Keyword(s):  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
Psychological Trauma ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
Serious Injury ◽  
Main Protagonist

Perpetrators’ voices have been traditionally ignored in the transitional justice field and beyond. Esad Landžo was only 19 when he committed the crimes of willful killing, torturing, and causing serious injury to the detainees of notorious Čelebići camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2001, Landžo was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for the crimes he committed in 1992. After serving two thirds of his sentence in 2006 and settling in Finland, Landžo and the Danish filmmaker, Lars Feldballe Petersen, embarked on the project of making a documentary movie about Landžo’s traumatic memories, remorse, and regret. Landžo had a strong urge to extend his apology to each victim individually and in 2015 went to Čelebići to meet his former detainees. This article will build on a scarce conversation in scholarly, and legal discourse, as to why psychological trauma is considered to be an experience that belongs to victims. It will analyze difficult and untold perpetrators’ experiences of criminal acts and explore whether in these experiences there is potential for inner and group understanding. This article draws on the author’s interviews with Landžo, the main protagonist in the movie The Unforgiven: A War’s Criminal Remorse, a film that documents the extraordinary story of Landžo: from his denial to redemption.

scholarly journals Beyond good and evil? Popular songs, mathemes and bus rides (art and transition in the region of the former Yugoslavia)

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-87
Author(s):  
Sanja Bahun
Keyword(s):  
Transitional Justice ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Peace Building ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Public Intervention ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Life Impact ◽  
Actual Operation

Art production and art reception play a vital role in transitional societies. However, their actual operation and patterns of impact often appear ‘messy’ to those who use and evaluate art in transitional contexts: an artwork can serve as a catalyst for peace building and transitional justice processes, but it can also obstruct such processes, or impart ambiguous meanings to them; and its modes of operation (including the art producers’ awareness of their role in transitional justice processes), its reception trends and its influence on transitional society all vary over time. Framed by transitional justice theory and an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates the insights of psychosocial cultural studies, comparative arts and the phenomenology of embodiment, this article scrutinizes this ambivalent operation in relation to the fluctuating sphere of reception in the region of the former Yugoslavia since the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993. The author juxtaposes art practices widely different in terms of expression, format, scope, reach and ambition, but comparable insofar as they all operate in the ‘open’ and appeal to senses and repetition engagement to create patterns of affiliation. These include various types of popular music (turbo-folk, rock, hip-hop, soft pop) and the public intervention activities of the Serbian DAH Theatre and pan-regional art and theory collective Monument Group. The article argues for the development of hermeneutic and axiological thinking that befits the complex functioning of art in transition: nuanced and multilevelled, challenging inherited hierarchies and paradigms while appreciating the prolonged life/impact of art practices and the sensorial, cognitive and ideological variation in their reception. It proposes moving beyond the binary assessments and adopting a more dynamic approach to the evaluation of artworks in transition for the benefit of both scholars and practitioners in the field.

scholarly journals Medijska konstrukcija kolektivnih sjećanja: Tretman prošlosti u polju novinarstva, s osvrtom na postdejtonsku Bosnu i Hercegovinu

2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (2 2013) ◽  
pp. 39-65
Author(s):  
Mirza Mahmutović
Keyword(s):  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
The Media

In this work we critically consider the practice of treating history in the area of journalism respectively media as an distinctive institutional arena of contemporary communities for establishment, maintenance and transformation of common frameworks of understanding and commemorating of certain episodes from the past. We intent to offer plausible explanations regarding the relations between ''culture of remembrances'' and ''culture of reporting''. Article suggests how to approach the often misunderstood history in informative activitiy, which in its field of action and by definition does not have the dimension of history but the dimension of social situation of contemporariness. We also form the key operations and strategies used in shaping the repertoire of journalistic reports on the past. Described practices we study on the example of post-Dayton BiH, analysing media treatment of conflict areas during the recent war history. Legitimisation of ethnic-national visions of the past through the discourse of reporting has been recognised as the dominant way of working in the ''media memory filed''. Two key paradoxes of these practices are highlighted: coexistence of opposite discourses of commemoration and codification of abjection experiences by the same group of significations which have initially inducted the war traumas. We point out at least two conditions which facilitate these paradoxes: ambiguity of the past, concpetion of time which is assumed by post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina as an inherently uncompleted/imperfect country and technologies of culturised steering of trauma, which is being used by regimes of therapeutic/transitional justice'' to cope with disturbing history in post-conflict communities.

scholarly journals The Mallam and “Mallamism” in Ghana: An Exploration of the Functions of Muslim Clerics in the Wa Municipality

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-74
Author(s):  
Mohammed Abubakar Abdulmoomin
Keyword(s):  
General Public ◽  
Main Function ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
Sacred And Profane ◽  
The Media ◽  
Wa Municipality

In Islam, Muslim clerics are the heirs of the prophets. They represent a continuation of the prophetic traditions and functions in the Muslim community. These Muslim clerics are known as mallams in Ghana. Indeed, as heirs of the prophets, the mallams contribute towards promoting the wellbeing of the people in both the sacred and profane spaces. However, those clerics who participate in the production of spiritual goods and services are the only ones the general public refers to as mallams. The Ghanaian populace believes that the title mallam is the exclusive preserve of those who have the ability to manipulate the course of events as mallam. As a result, Ghanaians often ascribe ‘the unexpected’ to the works of the mallams. The mallam is, therefore, generally perceived as an exclusive agent of the spiritual. This paper explores aspects of the activities of the mallam in Ghana, using the Wa Muslim community as the site of exploration. The paper argues that although some of them render many spiritual services, dissemination of Islamic heritage is the main function of the mallam. The paper explains that the influence of the mallam in the past and their presence in the media in contemporary times together contribute to the perception about the mallam in Ghana today. It concludes that exclusively limiting the title to the spiritualist only is, therefore, not sustainable.

Some Kind of Justice

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Orentlicher
Keyword(s):  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
War Crimes ◽  
International Justice ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Local Impact ◽  
Over Time

Created in 1993, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has operated longer than any war crimes tribunal in history. It thus offers a singularly important case study of how and why the local impact of an international criminal tribunal (ICT) evolves over time; the circumstances in which international justice can advance the normative, reparative, and other aims of transitional justice; and, more generally, the goals ICTs are either well-suited or unlikely to advance. The book explores the ICTY’s impact in Serbia, whose wartime leader plunged the former Yugoslavia into vicious ethnic conflict, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which experienced searing atrocities culminating in the Srebrenica genocide, over the life of the Tribunal. It focuses on the Tribunal’s impact in three spheres: victims’ experience of justice; official, elite, and community discourses about wartime atrocities, as well as official gestures of acknowledgment; and domestic accountability processes, including the work of a hybrid court in Bosnia. While highlighting the perspectives of Bosnians and Serbians interviewed by the author, the book incorporates a rich body of interdisciplinary research to deepen their insights.

Narratives of Justice and War in Croatia

2020 ◽  
pp. 445-461
Author(s):  
Ivor Sokolić
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
Human Rights Norms ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Self Defence

This chapter examines the relationship between war and justice narratives in Croatia, based on focus groups, dyads, and interviews conducted in 2014 and 2015. The war narrative is based on a pervasive conception of self-defence against a larger Serbian aggressor. It contrasts with a justice narrative that is focused on the norms of transitional justice and the expressivist effects of trials. The two narratives exist in the same space and interact with each other. This chapter outlines these narratives and analyses their reproduction. It argues that the emotional war narrative’s strength makes it difficult for the justice narrative to take hold and, consequently, for the trickle-down expressivist effects of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and human rights norms to occur. This tolerance for deviance was based on notions of legality that were defined differently in relation to Croats and Serbs.

Perpetrators on Trial

2019 ◽  
pp. 273-295
Author(s):  
Mirza Buljubašić ◽  
Barbora Holá
Keyword(s):  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
Empirical Basis ◽  
International Crimes ◽  
Atrocity Crimes

Existing research on atrocity crimes perpetrators is predominantly theoretical and generic. Exploration of characteristics of individuals tried for their involvement in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide might provide an empirical basis for a better understanding of the nature of international crimes and of criminal trials after atrocities. This chapter analyses defendant-related and crime-related characteristics of perpetrators tried by all courts in Bosnia and Herzegovina and by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) following the armed conflict in the 1990s at the territory of former Yugoslavia. Based on original data, collected as of January 2016, it briefly examines perpetrators convicted of international crimes by domestic and international courts, and their socio-demographic and crime-related characteristics. In addition to enriching debates on perpetrators of international crimes, the results can serve as a basis for further discussions on transitional justice after atrocities in Bosnia, its scope, and merits.

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