Steflja, Izabela. “The Production of the War Criminal Cult”

Izabela Steflja’s “The Production of War Criminal Cult” challenges the belief that international trials, as the achievements of international criminal justice, ought to be regarded as an unequivocally positive force in the political sphere of both post-conflict societies and the larger international community. To demonstrate the shortfalls of this legal process, Steflja analyzes the trials of two indictees of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) – Radovan Karadžić and Vojislav Šešelj – and argues that their ‘performance’ at the Tribunal contributed to the creation of a ‘war criminal cult’ among the Serbian public whom they claimed to represent.  

 Conceived as the process by which an alleged war criminal garners public support and solidifies himself as ‘a cult leader,’ Steflja uses Roger Brubaker’s work on ‘groupism’ to examine the strategies behind the construction of Karadžić and Šešelj’s ‘war criminal cult.’ She maintains that the aforementioned were able to reconfigure the ICTY into an international “platform for national myth and group making” (53) through a three-fold operation: denouncing individual guilt by collectivizing their crimes [1], equating the ICTY with the ‘inimical’ NATO forces [2], and constructing Serbs as the ultimate victim of international justice [3]. In posing as the representatives of a homogenous Serbian entity against which the joint effort of the Hague Tribunal and NATO forces waged an offensive, Steflja claims that Karadžić and Šešelj assumed a victim position via their nation by weaponizing “existing coding biases and national frames” (63). For instance, she examines how Šešelj’s mockery of the ICTY judges, grounded in the reversal of the derogatory western characterization of the Balkans, served multiple functions. Šešelj’s statement that the judges’ robes remind him of “the inquisition of the Roman Catholic church,” Steflja holds, secularized and “civilized” the Serbian judiciary while it simultaneously painted the ICTY as a “backward imperial institution conducting witch-trials” of which he was a victim (59). However, his own victimhood is by proxy associated with Serb’s suffering: “the goal here was to characterize the Tribunal as an element of what the accused explained as the violent Western campaign against the entire Serbian nation” (58). 

 While the political strength of the ‘war criminal cult’ could have used more contextualization – with, for example, a closer investigation of the public reception of Karadžić and Šešelj’s trials in Serbia and Republika Srpska – Steflja’s deconstructive analysis offers detailed insights into the difficulties international trials may encounter in ensuring that their mission to serve retributive justice to individual perpetrators is accepted as such.

Author of this entry: Dušan Janković.

Steflja, Izabela. ‘The Production of the War Criminal Cult: Radovan Karadžić and Vojislav Šešelj at The Hague’. Nationalities Papers 46, no. 1 (2018): 52–68.