Joe Tripician

March 26, 2006

Today, at a panel featuring Miles Raguz, Roy Gutman, Herbert Okun, and Bret Stephens, the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague was praised, ridiculed and pilloried.

Bret Stephens, the young cover boy of The Wall Street Journal's Editorial Board, said that international organizations are too ineffectual to bring aggressors to justice, or justice to victims.

Roy Gutman, Foreign Editor of New York Newsday, defended the WCT.  "With all its flaws, it's an open, transparent institution that is not sweeping the truth under the rug."

Herbert Okun, who served as US Special Advisor on Yugoslavia, spoke of his recent testimony at The Hague against Milosevic.  "The tribunal has done excellent work," he claimed, speaking of the 2000 pages of journals he submitted as evidence.

I had a chance to ask Miles Vitomir Raguz, who was adviser to the Bosnian-Herzegovene Ambassador to the UN, if he believed Franjo Tuđman would have been called to The Hague, had he lived.  View the exchange with him and Gutman here:

Post-panel, I learn from Miles that "The Priest", my Deep Throat contact in Bosnia, is back in Zagreb, working in the financial industry, where many public leaders go when they want to retire – or hide.