Establishing the Facts about Mass Atrocities: Accounting for the Failure of the Icty to Persuade Target Audiences

In an earlier piece, I discussed the findings of a series of public opinion surveys in the former Yugoslavia, probing the attitudes of the respondent populations regarding the mass atrocities committed during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, such as the Srebrenica genocide. That article concluded that the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the first modern, postNuremberg international criminal jurisdiction, failed to persuade the target audiences in the former Yugoslavia that the findings in its judgments are true. The surveys show that denialism is widespread and governed by ethnic bias. For example, only 10% of the Serbian population accept the facts about the Srebrenica genocide, the greatest crime committed in Europe since World War II, as they were established by the ICTY. While that companion piece addressed the empirical, “what” question, this one looks at the equally, if not even more important, “why” question: why has the ICTY proven to be so ineffectual in inducing attitude change? In answering this question I proceed primarily from the theoretical standpoint of social psychology, enabling a more sophisticated understanding of how the target audiences in the former Yugoslavia have so persistently resisted internalizing the ICTY’s factual findings. I argue that the causes of the ICTY’s ineffectiveness are complex, turning on an interplay between subjective and objective limitations on individuals’ processing of information about war crimes, limitations that are largely independent of the quality of the Tribunal’s own work. For example, average citizens normally lack any immediate experience of the event, which necessitates the mediation of information by third parties, e.g., the media and political and intellectual elites, while they similarly lack the time, expertise and resources to rigorously examine the information by themselves. Remoteness from the event also facilitates the avoidance of revising previously acquired beliefs about the event, for instance through discrediting certain sources of information, such as the ICTY. Crucially, ethnic * Associate Professor, University of Nottingham School of Law; Vice-President, European Society of International Law; Associate, Belgrade Centre for Human Rights. E-mail: [email protected]. I would like to thank Jutta Brunée, Jacob Cogan, David Fraser, Monica Hakimi, Larry Helfer, Zarko Markovic, Sam Moyn, Roger O’Keefe, Christian Tams, Sandy Sivakumaran, Ed Swaine, Anne van Aaken, and Ingrid Wuerth for their comments. © 2016, Marko Milanović.