Genocide, Crimes against Humanity, War Crimes, Propaganda and Incitement

The last trials conducted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and completed by its Residual Mechanism are drawing to a close.  Much of my work as a research officer in the ICTY’s Office of the Prosecutor from mid-1999 until the end of 2007, though, remains confidential.  What I can present and discuss on this site reflects a small but substantial subset of that work.  This includes:

• expert reports or portions of expert reports of which I was the/a primary author and which were used at trial;
• presentations redacted for external use on background (contextual) expertise and its use in core international cases;
• presentations redacted for external use on de jure and de facto transitional emergency governing and security bodies of the Bosnian Serbs;
• discussions in external fora on the ICTY as a creator of historical accounts;
• discussions in external fora on the fate and eventual transparency (if any) of the ICTY’s vast repository of non-public evidentiary material[1];
• external presentations on the conflicts themselves, including atrocities and persecutions committed in their course;
• external presentations on the causes of conflict, with a focus on clashing definitions of the nation and of the constituent units of the state.

Two additional aspects of my work likely to remain relevant into the future concern the development of methodologies for:

• forensic analysis of documentary, video and audio evidence in cases analogous to those considered before the ICTY;
• analysis of translations of documentary, audio or transcript evidence for forensic purposes.

The purposes of forensic document analysis extend beyond the well-known areas of authentication and elucidation of the history, “life cycle” and “life stage” of documents.  They can also include ascertaining whether objective and falsifiable evidence can be adduced that particular texts have been created or employed as propaganda with the intent to inflame and incite through non-explicit forms of expression that, at least on a surface level, appear to allow deniability.  In an international tribunal such as the ICTY, moreover, documents will be used for investigative and trial purposes on the basis of translations.  These are subject to all manner of bias, selectivity of transmitted information, even unintentional an unnoticed introduction of information not contained in the original.  This is true even (or, perhaps, especially) when translations are based on a “business papers” approach designed to be maximally objective.  It is also true regardless of the conscientiousness and best efforts of the translating team.  I will post as much as is possible[2] on these topics and will look forward to producing further public domain accounts to the extent possible.

I will also endeavor, to the extent possible, to present transcripts or notes from a number of presentations on the background and nature of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia that I delivered between 1991 and 1996 at colleges, universities and other institutions primarily in the Southern California area.  At that time I was occasionally requested to provide such overviews as a scholar specializing in the languages and aspects of the cultural history of the former Yugoslavia.  The accounts I presented on these occasions (reflecting personal observations supported by journalistic accounts, themselves in many instances informed by reports from non-governmental organizations, or NGOs) are now dated and might appear superficial in light of newer information.  Still, they retain perhaps some small relevance as evidence of positions advocated at that time on the basis of the best information then available, prior to my service as a research officer with the ICTY.

The ICTY experience, in contrast, thrust me into an environment in which, by necessity, I adopted a forensic attitude and approach in work that focused, day-in-day-out, on a broad range of matters related to the conflicts, crimes, and the personalities associated with them.  In so doing I had the advantage, moreover, of the vast and variegated evidentiary collections gathered by the Office of the Prosecutor, the possibility to obtain further evidence through requests or other methods, and a voluminous repository of open source materials at my disposal.  I also enjoyed daily interaction with numerous colleagues focused on many of the same and related matters, each from their own perspective.  In the course of my work I compiled biographical profiles; analyzed documentary, video and other forms of evidence; reviewed and analyzed translations of key documents; reconstructed ad hoc transitional governing and security bodies, events and timetables; interacted with expert and other witnesses; studied witness testimony; carried out missions for evidentiary collection and other purposes; and composed expert evidence.  All of this work was carried out in a team environment involving research officers, military analysts, intelligence analysts, investigators, attorneys and a wide range of support personnel.  All of this work was disciplined, moreover, by the awareness that every aspect of our work product would be tested in an adversarial trial process by defense teams, and subjected to critical scrutiny from the panels of judges who, in the ICTY process, were the triers of fact.  It was inevitable that this crucible would fundamentally transform and deepen my views in regard to the background and course of the conflicts, including the crimes that occurred during them, in a manner and to a degree that I could not have anticipated.  I will attempt, to the extent possible, to transmit some of this impact through this site.

My specialized training and experience prior to my ICTY service may have been insufficient in-and-of themselves to support balanced and in-depth accounts of events within the ICTY’s mandate.  Nevertheless this same background in linguistic and textual analysis and cultural history did allow me to contribute in unique ways to investigative and trial preparation processes, including the analysis of multiple forms of evidence.  For example, strange though it may seem, experience in the philological analysis of medieval Slavic liturgical manuscripts proved useful in analyzing evidentiary documents, audio recordings and transcripts, as well as in assessing the objectivity vs. bias, selectivity or other imperfections in translations of such documents.  In part, my medieval research experience led me to understand how analysis of apparent minutia and relentlessly tracking down sources of seemingly insignificant leads (essentially a Sherlock Holmes approach) can occasionally allow the persuasive well-supported reconstruction of the most unexpected details of a document’s history or purpose. [3]  If such techniques can be applied successfully to books five hundred or more years old, it should hardly be surprising if they yield interesting results when applied to texts less than a decade old.  Discourse analysis skills were also of critical importance in discerning evidence of purposeful propaganda in support of a variety of objectives.  Linguistic and textual analysis also went far to elucidate the severe challenges facing translation in a forensic context and suggest approaches to their resolution.

The ICTY experience, in turn, profoundly affected my views on language training for military language professionals.  This arose both from my analytic work and experience carrying out many of the same tasks that face military language analysts, translators/interpreters, document exploitation specialists and others.  I attempted to address these matters as an instructor and, subsequently, in a series of leadership roles at the Defense Language Institute (see, for example, “Recollections of a War Crimes Investigator” under Papers and Presentations: Foreign Language Learning and Instruction).

The ICTY experience also engendered a deeper appreciation of the complexities of fact-finding in cases of alleged or suspected atrocities involving violation of international humanitarian law.  In part, this complexity arises from the differing roles and responsibilities of journalists, NGOs and tribunals vis-à-vis accuracy and objectivity in fact finding.  A second profound realization from my ICTY work concerned the complex, multi-componential nature of objectivity in fact finding, such that multiple identifiable conditions must be satisfied in order for fact finding to properly qualify as objective.

With the obvious exception of expert reports submitted for use in trial, all content of other work presented on this site represents my personal opinion, and in no respect can be considered to reflect positions of the United Nations or the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

[1] “Justice vs. the Right to Know: The Transparency Dilemma at the ICTY,” roundtable discussion at the Annual Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Boston, November 15, 2009.  “Surveying History at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia” (co-authored with Wais Wardak and Richard Wilson), Journal of Eurasian Law 4/1, 2011, 1-39; a previous version is published as a working paper in the series “Research Papers” of the Human Rights Institute of the University of Connecticut.  2010.

[2] For example, “Four Paradigms of Provocative Rhetoric in the Speeches of Former Yugoslav Leaders,” Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Los Angeles, November 21, 2010.  Also “Forensic Translation: Public and Private Texts of Former Yugoslav Political and Military Leaders,” Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Pasadena, January 7, 2011.

[3] See, for example, the annotations on Corin 1991 and Corin 2003 in the section on Textual Criticism, Analysis and Philology.