Eli Lake, Columnist

The Curious Case of the Balkan War Criminals

Did there really need to be an international tribunal to learn who committed atrocities in the Balkans in the 1990s?

July 2, 2021 at 7:34 AM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

Jovica Stanisic at The Hague, June 2017.
Photographer: MICHAEL KOOREN/AFP

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Almost 30 years ago, Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic trained and directed militias that committed some of the worst atrocities of the post-Cold War era. In the Balkan wars, their militias are alleged to have conducted massacres at hospitals, razed villages and shot prisoners to help cleanse Bosnia and Croatia of non-Serbs.

This week, Stanisic and Simatovic — the chief and deputy chief, respectively, of Serbia’s state security services in the 1990s — were sentenced for their crimes by the U.N. tribunal established in 1993 to judge the war crimes committed during the violent breakup of Yugoslavia. This long overdue verdict, says the tribunal’s supporters, shows that international law is capable of meting out justice to the perpetrators of the atrocities in the Balkan wars. The late Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic died in 2006 during his trial at The Hague, while an earlier verdict against a Serb general was overturned in 2013.