Commentary: Judgement, Prosecutor v. Krajišnik, Case No. IT-00-39-A, A. Ch., 17 March 2009

It is a truism that high-ranking politicians do not – generally – like to get their own hands dirty in the nasty and brutish political jungle. Hand-to-hand political combat is regularly left to party subordinates or apparatchiks who are then expected to (and often do) take the blame if things go wrong. This is all the more true when these same politicians find themselves in an armed conflict scenario. Simply put, one does not find high-ranking political leaders on the frontlines fighting alongside the rank and fi le troops. But this is understandable – the expertise of political leaders is not in eliminating columns of enemy troops or to take control of strategic military objectives. Rather, politicians are expected to lead and make sound decisions from behind the frontlines that are then implemented by others further down the political and military chain. However, when in this process international crimes are committed, the political, military and bureaucratic architectures that are in place means that top politicians are geographically, operationally and structurally distant from the people who physically perpetrate crimes on the frontlines (i.e. the physical perpetrators) – a reality that is problematic when a prosecutor subsequently tries to attribute these crimes to such high-ranking leaders. And so it was with Momčilo Krajišnik. During the period in which the charged crimes in his indictment occurred (July 1991 to December 1992), he served as the President of the Bosnian-Serb Assembly, as a member of the National Security Council (Savjet za Nacionalnu Bezbjednost or SNB) and the Expanded Presidency of the Bosnian-Serb Republic, and was a leading member of the Serbian Democratic Party (Srpska Demokratska Stranka or SDS), the main political party of the Bosnian-Serbs, which overwhelmingly controlled the Bosnian-Serb Assembly.