The capture of the last individual indicted for war crimes in the Balkans is a milestone for the UN war crimes tribunal


Goran Hadzic (wearing beret), Serbia's last major war crimes fugitive, captured in July 2011. Photograph: Ranko Cukovic/Reuters

Saturday 13 August 2011 17.00 BST Last modified on Thursday 31 December 2015 21.55 GMT

The timing couldn't have been more auspicious. Just days after International Justice Day (the anniversary of the International Criminal Court's treaty adoption), justice caught up with Goran Hadzic, the UN war crimes tribunal's last remaining indictee.

On the run for seven years, Hadzic, whose charges include the slaughter of hundreds Croats and other non-Serbs from Vukovar hospital in 1991, was identified and arrested not for another violent act against non-Serbs, but for his illicit dealings in Italian art. The man behind one of the most infamous massacres during the war in the Balkans, the Vukovar massacre, was brought down after he attempted to sell allegedly plundered art – in this case, a Portrait of a Man, by 20th-century Italian painter, Amedeo Modigliani. The last time the spotlight focused on Hadzic, he was the president of republic of Serbian Krajina, in Serb-controlled Croatia. Once powerful, arrogant and seemingly invincible, despite a UN indictment for 14 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and after years on the run, the former president, it seems, was reduced to peddling stolen art to survive.

For the "ad hoc" war crimes tribunal in The Hague, the arrest and recent court appearance of Hadzic marks the beginning of the end. Established by the United Nations security council in 1993, the tribunal's prosecutors indicted 161 alleged war criminals, from all three main ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia – Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims. Over the years, however, many have doubted whether all the indictees would be brought to justice.

And indeed, over the years, they have not all come willingly. On many occasions, including in many of the cases on which I once worked while in the office of the prosecutor, they were brought to justice not by local government arrests, but due to the outstanding assistance of Nato-led special forces commandos. It is fair to say that, in the earlier days of the tribunal, there would have been far fewer trials, had the tribunal been forced to rely entirely on local officials to arrest those who were indicted in The Hague.

Thankfully, over time, this has changed. National leaders in the Balkans, who once scored political points by bashing the tribunal and its professional staff, are now seeing the wisdom in cooperating with tribunal judges, prosecutors and staff – and perhaps not just to gain better standing in the eyes of the European Union and the United States. Sadly, not all national leaders have been equally cooperative and equally responsible. Some still continue to live in the past and, in doing so, arguably hinder their own future, and the future of their people.
Advertisement

But for those responsible officials who have decided to look forward, and for those who have chosen to assist the tribunal in its efforts to help bring peace and justice to the region, Hadzic's arrest marks, as Chief Prosecutor Serge Brammertz called it, a "milestone". Of the 161 indictments issued by the tribunal, not a single one now remains at large.

For the experiment that is international justice and its international tribunals – an experiment that begin in Nuremberg 65 years ago – this is a milestone that should be celebrated. And those who made it possible can congratulate themselves: the tribunal's tenacious staff and their supporters, whether they may be found in the general assembly and security council of the United Nations, or in the many national government offices that decided, year after year, to provide additional funding and support to the institution.

But we should recognise that the triumph marked by Hadzic's court appearance will be short-lived. It will be overtaken quickly by events in Sudan, Syria, Libya and elsewhere in the world. But for those suffering in Sudan, Libya and elsewhere – and awaiting the day of justice for Omar Al-Bashir and Muammar Gaddafi – the Balkan milestone serves as a reminder that justice is possible and, with time, it will come – so long as we demand nothing less from our national and international leaders.

• Editor's note: the standfirst on this article originally referred to the international criminal court, which is not the judicial institution where Hadzic is being tried; this was amended at 9.30pm [BST; 4.30pm EST]. The error was an editorial one, and not the author's; our apologies.

BELGRADE (Reuters) - Quingdao Hainiu midfielder Goran Gogic collapsed and died after training with the Chinese team on Friday, his former club Red Star Belgrade said on their website.

"With great regret and sadness, we inform the public that our former player Goran Gogic died (on Friday) aged 29," Red Star said.

"Red Star extends their deepest condolences to Gogic's family and friends, as well as to all our fans who loved him and rejoiced with him in the club's achievements."

Gogic won the Serbian cup with Jagodina in 2013 before moving to Red Star and helping them clinch the 2014 league title.

He scored one goal in 15 appearances for Quingdao Hainiu after joining the Chinese second division side earlier this year.

String theory has been the dominating research field in theoretical physics during the last decades. Despite the considerable time elapse, no new testable predictions have been derived by string theorists and it is understandable that doubts have been voiced. Some people have argued that it is time to give up since testability is wanting. But the majority has not been convinced and they continue to believe that string theory is the right way to go. This situation is interesting for philosophy of science since it highlights several of our central issues. In this paper we will discuss string theory from a number of different perspectives in general methodology. We will also relate the realism/antirealism debate to the current status of string theory. Our goal is two-fold; both to take a look at string theory from philosophical perspectives and to use string theory as a test case for some philosophical issues.

Approximating a general formula from above and below by Horn formulas (its Horn envelope and Horn core, respectively) was proposed by Selman and Kautz (1991, 1996) as a form of ``knowledge compilation,'' supporting rapid approximate reasoning; on the negative side, this scheme is static in that it supports no updates, and has certain complexity drawbacks pointed out by Kavvadias, Papadimitriou and Sideri (1993). On the other hand, the many frameworks and schemes proposed in the literature for theory update and revision are plagued by serious complexity-theoretic impediments, even in the Horn case, as was pointed out by Eiter and Gottlob (1992), and is further demonstrated in the present paper. More fundamentally, these schemes are not inductive, in that they may lose in a single update any positive properties of the represented sets of formulas (small size, Horn structure, etc.). In this paper we propose a new scheme, incremental recompilation, which combines Horn approximation and model-based updates; this scheme is inductive and very efficient, free of the problems facing its constituents. A set of formulas is represented by an upper and lower Horn approximation. To update, we replace the upper Horn formula by the Horn envelope of its minimum-change update, and similarly the lower one by the Horn core of its update; the key fact which enables this scheme is that Horn envelopes and cores are easy to compute when the underlying formula is the result of a minimum-change update of a Horn formula by a clause. We conjecture that efficient algorithms are possible for more complex updates.