An error of judgment

Hours before the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was given 40 years jail for genocide and war crimes, a French journalist who had done so much to bring this butcher to justice was arrested outside the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Florence Hartmann was convicted of contempt of court in 2009 for revealing in a book that the War Crimes tribunal had kept crucial information on the Srebrenica massacre from the International Criminal Court. She had refused to pay the €7,000 fine the court imposed and went home to France, where the authorities refused to extradite her to Holland. However, last week she returned to The Hague to be with a group of Srebrenica womenfolk who had gone to the tribunal to hear the sentence on the man, who with Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic, had been responsible for the massacre of their loved ones. It has to be said, that even if Hartmann’s contempt conviction was extremely dubious, the law is the law and must be upheld. But what is deplorable is that court officials took the opportunity to send out UN and Dutch police to seize Hartmann as she stood outside the court with the Srebrenica women. Footage of the journalist being grabbed and dragged shouting and screaming back into the court building have been broadcast around the world. So too has news that Hartmann has spent the Easter holiday in a Dutch jail, because no one was around at the court during the four-day break. Hartman messaged that she was being kept in solitary confinement but had been able to spot Mladic, whose trial is currently under way at the War Crimes Tribunal, moving freely in the exercise yard. The harsh judgment has to be that the War Crimes Tribunal has sullied this moment of its triumph, when it had finally brought to justice one of the key perpetrators of the horrific Srebrenica crime, the first act of genocide on European soil since the Nazis some 40 years earlier. The tribunal’s behavior is truly inexplicable. At the very least, arrangements could have been made to follow and arrest Hartmann later in the day before she could return to France. At best it could have ignored her presence and not exercised the warrant. Now the tribunal has refocused attention on the dossier of evidence about Srebrenica that Hartmann revealed it had not shared with the ICC. Hartmann may well have known what was in the dossier but in her 2007 book, “Peace and Punishment”, chose only to reveal its existence, not its contents. Now the tribunal judges must decide how to punish the French journalist while at the same time facing a growing clamor to declare precisely what evidence they chose not to disclose to ICC investigators. The tribunal’s stubborn pursuit of Hartmann has therefore hopefully opened the door to the unmasking of fresh facts about those abhorrent events 21 years ago. It has almost certainly given the French woman the opportunity to produce a further book in which she may produce details of the dossier. The Yugoslav war crimes tribunal was created to establish the facts as well as pursue the butchers responsible. Transparency was paramount. Therefore the tribunal now finds itself in the dock. It has to explain why it chose to seal evidence that clearly should have been given to the ICC and other investigators.