Legal experts and historians have reacted with outrage to the controversial war crimes acquittal of firebrand Serb Vojislav Seselj, saying it overturns international law and rewrites the history of the Balkans conflict. "The decision of the majority (judges) is divorced from the reality of what was happening in Croatia and Bosnia," former top US diplomat on war crimes issues, Stephen Rapp, told AFP.
No stranger to complex cases, having led the prosecution of ex-Liberian president Charles Taylor, Rapp said he was very "disappointed" that Seselj was on Thursday found not guilty of nine charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The majority ruling by a three-judge panel at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) departed "from established law and accepted practises of fact-finding," said Rapp, now an expert with the Hague Global Institute for Justice, a think tank.
Seselj, once a firebrand paramilitary leader, had been charged with murder, persecution and torture of non-Serb civilians by being allegedly a member of a "joint criminal enterprise" along with the late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. But in essence, the judges found that Seselj was a politician who ardently supported his vision of a Greater Serbia, but was not a criminal. The judges also tossed aside decades of international law by saying "the crimes happened in an atmosphere of war, and this justifies them," Balkans expert Eric Gordy told AFP. "This is simply in conflict with the law," added Gordy, a senior lecturer on Southeast European politics at University College London.