War crimes, justice, and the Bosnian Muslims

A new book from Éditions EHESS (Delpla and Besson 2010) analyzes the international justice on offer for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, and how it is perceived in the region.

Peines de guerre: La justice pénale international et l’ex-Yougoslavie, edited by Isabelle Delpla and Magali Bessone, is the result of a conference in Paris in 2006. Thanks to the organizers’ thoughtful preparations, it was one of those all too rare events where every paper I heard was a quality contribution.

The book includes a chapter of mine on Bosnian Muslims’ reception of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (Moe 2010).

I argue that Bosnian Muslims have broadly supported the ICTY, though they think its sentencing too mild and its trials of Bosniaks offensive, because they seek from it justice as historical truth confirming their moral status as victims of genocide. They want international law robustly enforced, and criticise it from a morally conservative rather than specifically Islamic stance.

I’m grateful to Isabelle Delpla (who edited my chapter) and Xavier Bougarel (who translated it) for their exceptionally careful work and constructive criticisms on many points.

The research formed part of my work for the Western Balkans project at the Dept. of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages in Oslo (and the bit about the religious community’s criticism of the Lagumdžija government, is covered from a different angle in the book from that project.

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