Acquitting verdict of Šešelj pronounced by the Trial Chamber of The Hague Tribunal may be just an additional illustration of barbarism that the modern world has entered, stated the journalist Florence Hartmann, the former spokeswoman of the Tribunal and a war reporter during the wars in the former Yugoslavia.
“We have established a system which could punish those responsible of genocide, but several judges prevented it and finding out who those judges are is not difficult,” Hartmann said, adding that it is absurd that war criminals are acquitted, while journalists, such as her, are punished before the same Court for revealing secret documents.
Hartmann was arrested in Hague when she wanted to attend the pronouncement of verdict of Radovan Karadžić, because she wrote in her book “Peace and Punishment” that there has been an agreement between the Serbian government and The Hague Tribunal to retract documents that might prove the involvement of Slobodan Milošević and Serbia in the Srebrenica genocide.
“Many others wrote about that agreement, and The Tribunal did not punish them. I just said the truth, not as the spokesperson of the Court but as a journalist,” Hartmann stated.
Hartmann added that her arrest and imprisonment after a several-year-old verdict was unlawfully and that she will keep fighting against the verdict. Moreover, she said she achieved a “little victory” when the documents that she published in her book became public and legal afterwards.
While journalists such as Hartmann are being imprisoned, “according to The Tribunal, Šešelj is free to express his attitudes and call for war and killing and remain unpunished, although he was practically Milošević’s representative for the press,” Hartmann said, adding that she was not able to read Julian Berger’s book “The Butcher’s Trail” about the hunt for Karadžić, because they had taken away her portable computer where she had that text stored.
“The Court did not perform the duty for which it was established nor did it justify its tenure. With that verdict, the Court legalized Šešelj’s venom and his fascism, which is horrible. It is a kidnapping of justice and, I do not know why and for which reasons, but I know that international agreements dating from the twentieth century are no longer valid, and that is not only in case of The Hague Tribunal or my case,” Hartmann stated.
Hartmann claims that the Geneva Convention is practically no longer valid, justifying her claim with the cases of bombardment of hospitals in Syria if there is just a single person accused of terrorism in there or with the practice of torturing those accused of terrorism. These facts, and the cases when the convicted criminals and those responsible for the genocide are acquitted, point to the “crescendo of barbarism” that the world has entered and what her generation could not even dream about.
“We need to answer to ourselves: do we really need the Geneva Convention at all anymore and what is the purpose of the humanitarian law if war criminals do respond for their crimes and if unmanned aircraft kill people massively? The real dilemma we are facing with is whether we will let the international justice to be destroyed or we will fight for our rights,” Hartmann stated.
(Source: vijesti.ba)
