Today Naser Oric, a Bosnian Muslim commander, was cleared on appeal of crimes committed during the Bosnian War. The Appeals Chamber of the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) determined there was too little evidence to justify Oric’s initial conviction of two years’s imprisonment for failing to stop men under his command torturing and murdering Serbs in and around the enclave of Srebrenica.
I won’t quibble about this particular ruling, but it made me think anew about the role ICTY has played in the post-Miloesevic Balkans and how well it has promoted justice and reconciliation.
ICTY was created during the Balkans Wars as the first international criminal court since the World War II Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals. It has been crucial in advancing the cause of international justice, leading to the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and ultimately acting as precursor to the ICC. Under the careful guidance of Prosecutors Goldstone and Arbour, the court made serious headway and has probably made more international criminal law precedent than all previous international and domestic war crimes cases.
The big cases, for example against Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic, are well-known. But ESI, a think tank, has detailed how the conviction of smaller-scale war criminals have had a positive effect.
Still, the architects behind the worst atrocities of the Balkan Wars, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, remain at large. Perhaps worse, against expectations the ICTY process has not lead to real reconciliation in the Balkans while the vagaries of the court’s procedures have given far fewer people the sense that justice is being metered out. Under former prosecutor Carla Del Ponte’s quixotic leadership, the court’s reputation – even among allies – suffered tremendously.
Diane F. Orentlicher has written a huge appraisal of ICTY and writes about:
shortcomings that flow from avoidable patterns, such as overly long pre-trial detention and trials, have needlessly compounded the ICTY’s challenges in Serbia.
The Tribunal’s credibility has suffered further when its prosecutors and judges evince an unacceptably poor grasp of the region whose crimes they have judged and prosecuted for one and a half decades—a weakness reflected not only during trials, but at times also in the Prosecutor’s selection of defendants and charges.
Travelling in the region after a few years’ hiatus, I had the sense that most people – across all communities – see the court as biased, and its procedures arcane even if the small, non-nationalist intelligentsia see things differently: Again read Orentlicher on the court:
Even when it performs well, moreover, the Tribunal’s work can be and has been manipulated beyond fair recognition by nationalist leaders—a dynamic the Tribunal thoroughly failed to address in its early years, and which the Tribunal could still address more effectively than it has to date.
This is a serious problem. And explaining to Serbs that the court is impartialwill be more difficult following Oric’s acquittal today, even though it is just.
How to solve this? Given how many people tune into CSI everyday around the world, I can’t see why a the U.S government could not give tax-breaks to a consortium of film companies who bandy together to make a 10-part, star-studded CSI-style drama about the war crimes, the investigations and the trials. Or even make a special CSI version dealing with the Balkans. That could begin drawing attention to the work behind ICTY and perhaps make headway in explaining the court’s process and procedures.
