THE HAGUE: UN's Yugoslav war crimes court has come under unprecedented criticism after a string of high-profile acquittals, including stinging attacks from within the tribunal itself which some say has suffered irreparable damage.
In the space of less than two weeks, top Croatian generals and Kosovo guerrillas have been cleared on appeal or retrial of war crimes during the brutal 1990s breakup of Yugoslavia, enraging Serbia.
As a result, the nearly 20-year-old tribunal has now failed to convict any senior Croat, Kosovan or Bosnian military or political leader of crimes against Serbs, while numerous Serbs have been jailed for their crimes.
But beyond the usual accusations of anti-Serb bias, the pioneering ad hoc tribunal now stands accused by one of its own judges of passing a verdict that "contradicts any sense of justice".
Many expected the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to acquit the Kosovans, including former prime minister Ramush Haradinaj, in a case marred by accusations that the court had failed to protect witnesses.
But that ruling came on top of the bombshell of the acquittal of Croatian General Ante Gotovina, the most senior Croat to be brought before the court, who initially jailed for 24 years.
A Balkan journalist who has covered the tribunal said that the two cases together give "the impression it's the winter sale at the tribunal".
"I have always defended the tribunal from the accusation that it was a political court, but for the first time I'm left without arguments," he said.
A majority three of the five appeals judges acquitted Gotovina but the dissenting judges' words were withering.
Judge Fasto Pocar noted the "sheer volume of errors and misconstructions in the majority's reasoning", describing some of his colleagues' arguments as "simply grotesque".
The lynchpin of Gotovina's initial conviction was the judges' decision that any Croat artillery shells that landed more than 200 metres (220 yards) from a military target within urban areas amounted to an attack on civilians.
The majority of appeals judges rejected that reasoning, and from there the whole case collapsed.
In Pocar's words: "1,300 pages of analysis are sweepingly reversed in just a few paragraphs."
In conclusion, he said: "I fundamentally dissent from the entire appeal judgement, which contradicts any sense of justice."
Frederick Swinnen, special advisor to chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz, described the judge's language as "unhabitual", telling AFP that after the ruling: "We saw more criticism than usual."
Brammertz even took the unusual step of issuing a statement voicing "disappointment" in the ruling.
The Balkan journalist said that Gotovina's appeal was "unbelievably speeded up ... so it looks like somebody wanted not only to free the generals but to free them very quickly."
Some have alleged that the tribunal was influenced by the US military and military law experts who did not want a legal precedent set for what is or is not an acceptable margin of error for artillery fired in a civilian area.
Such allegations "put into question all the good things done over the last 20 years by this institution," the journalist said, including the fact that it managed to arrest all 161 suspects.
"It's almost a kind of suicide of the tribunal," he said.
The question of whether the ICTY's reputation has been damaged is complex, said Balkans specialist Marianne Ducasse-Rogier of the Clingendael Institute in The Hague.
"It is complex because when the ICTY was created by the UN Security Council in 1993 there were too many objectives it had to achieve," she told AFP.
The tribunal had a legal objective but was also set up to deal with political objectives, such as preventing conflict and furthering reconciliation in the Balkans, she said.
But the court's last two acquittals will have done little to help reconciliation in the Balkans.
"I think that the judges dared, in difficult circumstances, to stick to extremely strict standards of proof," said Willem van Genugten.
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