Over its 24 years of existence, the judges of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) heard cases against more than a hundred individuals accused of crimes committed during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. As demonstrated in this study, the ICTY prosecutors did not limit their inquiry to the mandated examination of the courses and consequences of the crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo. In some cases, the ICTY prosecutors expanded their case-theory beyond the court’s mandate and made allegations regarding the political causes that underlined and informed the crimes, while the defendants responded with their own version of the political and historical background, which, more often than not, closely followed the established, dominant national narrative about the recent past.

While not directly relevant to the determination of the culpability of the accused, the contested interpretations of the causes of crimes were often disputed during the trials more vehemently than the substantive charges against the defendants. The battle of narratives in the ICTY’s courtrooms closely mirrored the ongoing dispute about the recent past in the affected countries, which continues to stand at the very heart of the Yugoslav recent history: Why did it happen and who was to blame?

This thesis explores the narratives of the political motivation behind the crimes presented by the ICTY prosecutors, the response of the defendants and the final, judicial interpretations of the political motivation behind the crimes in the ICTY judgements. The thesis compares the ICTY judicial interpretations to the dominant narratives in the affected countries and offers an assessment about the contribution of the ICTY’s findings to the historical record of this contested issue.

You can find UvA dissertations in the UvA-DARE database.