Belgrade cannot undo the judgments. What it can do is make the region forget the difference between them.
Kadri Kryeziu, Publisher | 8 September 2026
On the evening Ratko Mladić was buried, Marko Đurić answered Elmedin Konaković's decision to pull his ministry's staff out of Belgrade with a sentence: Serbia "will accept neither selective justice nor lessons in morality from those who persistently refuse to look their own past in the eye". He named Rasim Delić, the wartime chief of the Bosnian army's Main Staff, convicted at The Hague, buried in Sarajevo in 2010 with military honours. The argument underneath the sentence is older than the sentence, and it has always been the same: everyone committed crimes, so no one may speak.
I want to describe the trick before I answer it, because it works.
Delić is useful to Belgrade as a unit of currency: one Hague convict for one Hague convict. Once the exchange is made, everything else falls out of the sentence. Delić received three years, from a divided bench, for failing to prevent or punish severe beatings and electric shocks inflicted on twelve captured Bosnian Serb soldiers by the El Mujahed detachment in the summer of 1995. He was acquitted of every killing in his indictment: for the fifty two prisoners and one elderly man killed that September because the chamber could not find that he had reason to know, and for the Maline and Bikoši killings of 1993 because the chamber did not find that the perpetrators were his subordinates at the time. Mladić received life on ten of eleven counts, the first of them genocide. In Đurić's sentence both men are the same noun. Sentence length is gone, intent is gone, and the first count of the judgment, genocide, goes with them. What remains is "convict", and the ledger balances.
The same trick runs in every theatre. Bosnia says Mladić; Belgrade says Delić and Orić. Croatia says the Krajina and Vukovar; Belgrade says Gotovina and Storm. Kosovo says the deportations of 1999; Belgrade says the KLA. Then the conclusion is handed to the audience: everyone has a Srebrenica, everyone cleansed everyone, and a people with no particular account to settle owes no one an answer. Equal shame. It is the only defence available to a state that cannot erase its crimes, so it sets about erasing the distinction between its crimes and everyone else's.
The record it is working against is not an opinion. Across three theatres, in separate proceedings, the Tribunal found Serb political and military projects whose common purpose was the forced demographic change of territory. For Bosnia it found an enterprise to permanently remove Muslims and Croats from land claimed as Serb; its documentary record included the Bosnian Serb assembly's Six Strategic Objectives of May 1992 and Directive 7, in which Karadžić ordered that Srebrenica's population be placed in "an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival or life". For Croatia, Babić admitted participation in an enterprise to remove most Croats and other non-Serbs from roughly a third of the country, and Martić was convicted for an enterprise to create unified Serb territory by removing non-Serbs from the areas he controlled. For Kosovo the finding is the one I know best, and it is the clearest, because the asymmetry cannot be hidden once it is described rather than named. On one side stood the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Serbia: the army, the interior ministry police, armour, artillery, intelligence and the logistics of a sovereign state. On the other stood a lightly armed guerrilla force. The Tribunal found more than crimes committed by soldiers of the state while fighting that force. It found a common plan among the state's political, military and police leadership to change the ethnic balance of Kosovo through a campaign of terror, and it found that at least seven hundred thousand Kosovo Albanians were driven from Kosovo between late March and early June 1999 by the deliberate actions of those forces. Šainović, Pavković and Lukić were convicted as participants in that plan, and the Appeals Chamber upheld it. Three theatres, three findings, the same architecture each time: control of territory pursued through the removal of the people on it.
Now the other side's record, which exists. Orić acquitted. Halilović acquitted. Haradinaj acquitted twice. Limaj acquitted. Gotovina and Markač acquitted on appeal because the enterprise alleged against them could not be proven. An acquittal records that a charge failed, and nothing smaller than the charge is found in its place. The Tribunal was not keeping an ethnic scorecard, and I will not keep one for it: Jadranko Prlić and five others were convicted for a joint criminal enterprise to carve a Croatian entity out of Bosnia by removing its Muslim population, and the judgment named Franjo Tuđman among its participants. That finding stands, affirmed on appeal. It is a design finding against a non-Serb project, and the honest statement of the record has to carry it.
The Tribunal followed design wherever it found design and individual responsibility wherever it found that. Categories are not decoration; individual criminal responsibility is one thing and participation in a common criminal purpose is another, and courts keep them apart because intent, knowledge, contribution and purpose change what the law says a man did. What Belgrade demands is that the region throw the categories away and replace them with bookkeeping: one Serbian crime against one Bosniak crime, one against one Croatian, one against one KLA. Balance the book until nobody owes anybody anything.
Sarajevo gave Delić military honours at its Armed Forces House in 2010, and its defence minister at the time later defended the army's participation as lawful. Belgrade held Mladić's commemoration at Dom Vojske on Saturday; on Monday serving soldiers stood around his coffin and carried it, an honour unit escorted it to the grave and three volleys were fired. The precedent Đurić cites proves one thing only: that Belgrade knew what military honours for a Hague convict look like, and chose them for a man convicted of genocide.
We were not all innocent. We were not all the same. Both sentences are true, and the entire purpose of Belgrade's argument is to make the region believe that only one of them can be.
