Homecomings from The Hague: Public Perception of the Defendants from the ICTY in the aftermath of the Legal Trials

This paper analyses patterns in media reporting on release of defendants from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and their return to one of the post-Yugoslav countries. Contrary to punitive and reconciliatory roles envisioned for the ICTY (Akhavan 1998), previous research has already established that the ICTY defendants tend to be portrayed as national heroes by the local media (Pavlaković 2010; Džihana & Volčič 2011; Simić 2011). However, a systematic analysis of media reporting on the release and return of the defendants after the end of a trial shows much more diverse picture: some have been welcomed by public officials and/or cheering crowds (others have not), some have been portrayed as victors, some as martyrs, some as victims (often invariably of their actual conviction or acquittal), some have been represented as returning public figures, while others soon faded into oblivion. Basing on a representative sample of cases relating to Bosnia and Herzegovina (i.e. defendants from all three warring sides and media reports from all three ethnically-divided media spheres), paper will outline different patterns of reporting and framing of the return of the ICTY defendants. The aim is to detect what social roles these “homecoming” events play, and how are concepts of justice and historical truth constructed by the local media when, presumably, justice has been done. This paper contributes to a larger discussion on expected and unexpected, achieved and failed impact of the ICTY in the societies of former Yugoslavia (Weinstein and Stover 2004; Subotić 2009; Nettelfield 2010; Orentlicher 2008, 2010; Gordy 2014). It is a part of larger debate on local receptions of internationally driven transitional justice measures (Hinton 2010; Shaw et al. 2010; Thoms et al. 2010; Skaar et al. 2015).