Justice in the Balkans: Prosecuting War Criminals in the Hague Tribunal, John Hagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), xxi + 274 pp., cloth $29.00.

Abstract

If current timetables hold, the last trials before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) will end in 2008, and the Tribunal will close shop altogether in 2010. At that point the court, established by the UN Security Council in 1993 to address atrocities in the Balkans, will pass out of existence. Only from that point on will it be possible to take proper measure of the Tribunal’s full record—its successes and missteps, its accomplishments and limitations. All the same, a number of books have appeared recently assessing the Court’s first decade of work. These books are of necessity mid-term reports. The Milošević trial had entered its fourth year with no end in sight when the defendant died suddenly on March 11, 2006. Other important trials, including the prosecution of Momčilo Krajišnik, are, at this writing, in midstream, and a spate of recent arrests of high-level functionaries promises to keep ICTY prosecutors busy until the Tribunal disbands. Given the hazards of writing about an ongoing process, most of the literature on the ICTY has sensibly focused on the court’s founding and early years. In Justice in a Time of War, Pierre Hazan, a journalist for the Paris-based newspaper Libération, does a thorough job of laying bare the formidable political obstacles that impeded the establishment of the Court, including France’s original refusal to support the Tribunal, the UN’s early unwillingness to support the Court financially, and the reluctance of NATO forces to supply critical evidence and enforce arrest warrants. According to Hazan’s bleak report, the political and logistical struggles that plagued the Court’s founding have left their imprint upon the justice it has dispensed.