ABSTRACT
In confronting the Republic of Croatia the ICTY was presented with the complex task of securing cooperation from a state that gained international recognition only a year preceding the UNSC’s adoption of Resolution 827.1 Although Croatia supported the creation of an international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, voluntary cooperation on the part of the Croatian state proved not forthcoming once the ICTY launched investigations into IHL violations committed by Croatian armed forces. Absent an in-country NATO security presence the OTP’s investigations, and later prosecutions, were reliant on the assistance of the Croatian state for tasks such as the exhumation of mass graves, the collection of documentary evidence, and the arrest of war crimes suspects. Moreover, absent an international civilian administration, such as the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina or the United Nations Missions in Kosovo, external actors lacked the ability to directly remove non-compliant state officials from office or impose domestic governance structures.2 Nonetheless, by December 2005, the ICTY secured the transfer of all Croatian citizens indicted by the Tribunal for serious violations of International Humanitarian Law with the exception of Janko Bobetko, who died shortly after ICTY doctors confirmed the defendant’s ill health in 2003.3
Chapter 1 outlined multiple causal pathways within IR and IL literature that could explain state compliance with ICTY orders that ranged from rationalist to norm-centric approaches.4 In order to assess the former, the domestic and
international politics of compliance must be examined with special attention to internal incentive structures along with material incentives and disincentives deployed by third party states to reward compliance and penalize non-compliance acts. The latter causal pathway requires an examination of the domestic politics of compliance with special attention to international criminal justice norm penetration of elites and civil society. So as to test rationalist and norm-centric explanatory hypotheses, this chapter will begin with a discussion of the domestic political context in which the ICTY attempted to secure state compliance. Interestingly, while regime type and elites changed during the first decade of interaction between the Croatian state and the Tribunal, episodes of compliance and noncompliance transcended Croatia’s transition from presidential authoritarianism to parliamentary democracy. Moreover, throughout the period of time covered in this case study Croatian elites engaged in norm affirming rhetoric by both recognizing the jurisdiction of the ICTY5 and supporting the establishment of a permanent international criminal court.6 Next there will be an exploration of the domestic penetration of norms of international criminal justice. Because domestic civil society is identified in constructivist IR literature as a transmission belt for international norms (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, Keck and Sikkink 1998, Sikkink and Walling 2005), special attention will be paid to Croatia’s NGO community.7 It will be emphasized that although an embryonic human rights NGO community emerged during the 1990s, powerful veterans’ organizations proved more effective in pressuring elites to maintain non-compliance strategies.8 Thus, social protestbased explanations for compliance with ICTY orders cannot explain the ICTY’s tremendous achievements in Croatia. Instead, this chapter will demonstrate that there does appear to be a correlation between external coercion applied upon the Croatian state by third party states, primarily the United States (1996-1999) and European Union member states (2002-2006), and sporadic compliance outcomes. By dividing the international politics of compliance into four phases, it can be
observed that rather than reflecting a change in domestic regime type or local elites, compliance acts reflected external incentives for compliance rather than exclusively endogenous preferences. However, before discussing the international politics of compliance, the domestic political context in which compliance and non-compliance decisions took place must first be established.
