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The court rooms of the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague have seen
many a drama in the last twenty-four years, however nothing compared
to the televised suicide of a defendant. And yet, this is what
happened on 29 November 2017, at the end of the trial of six Bosnian
Croats for crimes committed in Bosnia between 1992 and 1994. The
judge, Carmel Agius, had just finished reading his verdict to the
former general Slobodan Praljak, sentencing him to twenty years in
prison, when the tall and imposing Praljak stood up, shouted at the
judges and drank something from a small vial. One could see the
other two defendants sitting next to him looking up in surprise, and
the judge glancing over his reading glasses. At first, everyone took
it as a typical case of the defendant causing a brief commotion
before sitting back down or being accompanied out of the court room
– like what happened recently with the Serbian war criminal Ratko
Mladić. But soon a curtain was drawn and the court proceedings were
interrupted. Live television transmission was suspended and Praljak
was taken to hospital.
A few hours later, it emerged that Praljak had
taken poison and died. What was left were two highly theatrical, yet
iconic images documenting his death. In the first, we see the face
of elderly man with white hair and beard. His mouth is open, he is
yelling, tense from the effort to make himself heard. His face is
red and distorted, his eyes are bulging in the seizure of anger. If
we look more carefully at his eyes, however, we also see something
else, a hint of despair. We understand that what he is shouting is
something terribly important to him, that if he is not heard the
whole performance will be a failure, a disaster. Since we are now
looking at his image post mortem, we also know that the despair in
his eyes comes from the fact that he is about to commit the final
act of suicide. He is convinced it is a heroic act, but that look
betrays him. But since the hand with poison is already raised, there
is no time for deliberation.
In the next image, he is drinking the poison. The
movement of his hand is quick and decisive, his eyes are closed.
There is nothing more to be said or done. His role is finished, the
curtain literally falls for him. If we didn’t know that at this
moment he was taking his life, we would be indifferent to the image.
It is our awareness of what it represents that gives his gesture a
special value. We have seen death in front of a camera before. But
not of a perpetrator, nor a suicide so carefully prepared and
performed live. ‘Judges! Slobodan Praljak is not a war criminal! I
reject your judgment with contempt!’ – he shouts before he sits
down. ‘I just drank poison’, he says to his lawyer.
Before becoming a soldier, Praljak was – among
other things – a stage and film director. His final performance was
directed and played by him. His cry, his last words to the court, to
the public and especially to Croats were calculated to get maximum
attention. Being on the front pages of the international press is
the ultimate dream of every theatre person. But to everyone who
knows who Praljak was, it was clear that this act was aimed not only
at the foreign media. His message was political, intended for
political use in Croatia. Speaking of himself in the third person,
his words attest to that. By committing suicide, Praljak managed to
become a hero and martyr. In an instant, he turned himself into a
national monument.
The task of the ICTY was to individualize crimes
in order not to criminalize entire nations. Praljak, an educated and
intelligent man, subverted that principle on purpose. By turning
himself, the perpetrator, into the victim, he symbolically
transferred his crimes onto the collective body of the Croatian
people.
Reactions in Croatia to his ultimate performance
were seismic: astonishment, anger, tears. The spectacle began with
the prime minister Andrej Plenković expressing his dissatisfaction
with the verdict, stating that Praljak’s suicide ‘speaks of a deep
moral injustice towards the sentenced six’. It did not take long for
the president, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, to proclaim emphatically in
an address to the nation that Croatia was not the aggressor in
Bosnia and that the ICTY had demonstrated itself to be a political
arbiter. ‘Nobody, not even the ICTY, will write our history’, she
said. The next day the parliament held a minute’s silence in honour
of the deceased war criminal. Other politicians, Catholic priests,
war veterans and ordinary people all took turns to express what was
now the official truth: that Praljak took his life for moral reasons
and that this was proof of his innocence.
As if this mass display of remorse were not
enough, on the day of the official commemoration, organized by the
Croatian Assembly of Generals and held in Zagreb’s main concert
hall, the traffic in the capital was regulated by the police and
citizens were told to use free public transport to get to the event.
The international press watched the reaction of
the Croatian government with bewilderment and horror. The Guardian
wrote that the prime minister’s statement was thought to be ‘the
first declaration by the head of an EU government in support of a
convicted war criminal’. Der Spiegel Online wrote critically about
the reaction in Croatia, as did Le Monde, La Stampa, Jyllands
Posten, Aftonbladet, Der Standard and many others. The international
image of Croatia has been tainted by this outburst of nationalist
emotion – a parallel reaction to what had happen a short time before
in Serbia, when Ratko Mladić’s verdict came through. Not to mention
that the voices of victims of the sentenced six could barely be
heard in the noise produced by the crowd mourning the perpetrator.
This bizarre and shocking reaction to the public
suicide of a war criminal has its roots in Croatia’s troubled
relation towards the past, beginning with WWII when Croatia was a
fascist puppet-state. Franjo Tudjman, the first president of the
newly established Republic of Croatia, stated in 1990 that the
so-called Independent State of Croatia (NDH) was ‘not only a
quisling construction, but also an expression of the desire of the
Croatian people for independence’. In the eyes of the far-right
leadership of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), the largest party
in the current coalition government, the new Croatia was a
continuation of the NDH. According to the HDZ, a country that is
defending itself can not commit war crimes. Franjo Tudjman’s
speeches, conversations and ideas – meticulously recorded in his
autobiography and in a number of documents and on tapes – were of
great help in prosecuting Praljak and the other five defendants. But
nobody likes to hear that today, since it might tarnish the image of
Tudjman as the Founding Father.
In the last few years, the HDZ has turned sharply
to the right. Its leading politicians and the Catholic Church
express openly revisionist views. One infamous example was the
placing of a memorial plaque with a fascist salute in close
proximity to the site of the former WWII concentration camp in
Jasenovac. Among the taboo topics, the biggest are Croatian
aggression in Bosnia and the civil war between the Serbian and
Croatian populations in Croatia. The public television station HRT
recently instructed its staff journalists to respect in their work a
parliamentary document from 2000 entitled ‘Declaration on the war
for the homeland’. Talk show host Aleksandar Stanković was
reprimanded for failing to do so. The document states that Croatia
waged a just, legitimate, defensive war.
The government is not reacting merely to the
guilty verdict. Preljak is being used as a pretext – the real
protest is directed at the confirmation of Croatian aggression in
Bosnia, the aim of which was the annexation of Herzegovina (a part
of Bosnia with a majority Croatian population). This is complicated
by the fact that Croatia, under pressure from the USA, signed the
Washington Treaty in 1994, thus becoming an ally of the Bosnian army
against the Serbs. The verdict also opens up the issue of
reparations for the tens of thousands of people who passed through
the Croatian concentration camps in Bosnia. The protests need to be
seen as a response to this too.
Finally, if Croatia’s two highest ranking
politicians were forced to make such statements, then they did so
out of self-interest: both the prime minister and the president are
brought to and kept in power by the most radical wing of the HDZ. If
they want to keep their posts, they must behave accordingly.
It seems that the Croatian government is no longer
much worried by the country’s image abroad. If it has learned a
single lesson in the past four years of EU membership, it is that
once you are in, you can do what you want – just like Hungary and
Poland. If big and important countries can behave like this, then
small and unimportant Croatia can permit itself even more. But
perhaps the display of nationalism and revisionism went too far. Let
us hope that rejecting the ICTY verdict and turning war criminals
into heroes is simply too much even for a disoriented European
Union.
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