Homecomings From “The Hague”

Abstract

Based on the analysis of media reporting on the release and return of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) defendants after the end of their trials or imprisonment, this article focuses on the homecoming celebrations organized for politically prominent defendants. While large celebratory homecomings were vastly covered and discussed by local media, most of the defendants actually returned with no public welcome. This article demonstrates that the homecomings of politically significant returnees became part of a normalized political folklore, in which the convicted individuals are welcomed in the same manner as those acquitted. Nevertheless, this article suggests that these events are not necessarily (or not only) an expression of popular support to wartime “heroes.” Instead, it argues that political actors seek to utilize the occasions of the return of those ICTY defendants who possess symbolic capital as wartime political or military leaders in order to gain political profit. As these homecomings have become an expected political and media spectacle, they are treated by media professionals as such. The local media coverage of the homecoming spectacles reveals that while they are politically potent events, they are also contested: on the one hand by the proponents of competing ethnonational historical narratives and on the other by more critical media outlets that refuse to take them at face value.