So much as happened in the world since the Balkan Wars of the
1990s, that the international community seems to have lost sight of
the fact that the wheels of justice are still turning to bring
Serbian and Croatian war criminals to justice. Even as we have
debated the worth of the International Criminal Court, actual
prosecutions of real crimes against humanity in the former
Yugoslavia have slipped from public view.
This week, Judge Theodor Meron, President of the International
Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, was in Washington for
consultations and in New York to argue at the U.N. Security Council
for continued full funding for bringing criminals to justice.
"What worries me is that the international community becomes
blasé to the idea of the court. People get tired and they
don't pay up their dues," he says. Judge Meron, a mild-mannered
man, speaks with evident passion. As Holocaust survivor from
Poland, erstwhile resident of Israel and a U.S. citizen, his deep
commitment to see the tribunal to its rightful and just conclusion
is highly understandable.
"After half a century of doing nothing, we have shown that credible
trials are possible. We have created a body of war crimes
jurisprudence as well as a body of procedural international law.
This is an important legacy for the future."
As we have witnessed many other horrors in the intervening years, a
reminder may be in order.
During the three years in the early 1990s the war that raged
between Bosnians desiring independence and Serbs refusing to allow
them to part from the former federation of Yugoslavia, resulted in
horrendous war crimes committed by all sides. Detention camps
sprung up, civilians were shelled, millions of people were driven
from their homes, more than 20,000 women were systematically raped,
200,000 people were killed, and men of military age were murdered
and buries in mass graves.
In Croatia, which had declared independence in 1991, Serbs
attempted to keep control of the Vukovar region, bombarding the
town for three months solid in 1992. Later Croatian troops swept
through the Serb controlled region of Krajina, forcing tens of
thousands of Croatian Serbs to flee from their homes towards Serbia
proper.
In Kosovo, in 1999, President Milosevic of Serbia attempted yet
another ethic cleansing campaign against the Albanian population
there, burning houses, murdering residents to drive the population
out and replace it with Serbs. After NATO finally intervened and
bombed Serbia to stop this action, Albanian refugees came back and
their leaders in turn drove 100,000 Kosovar Serbs from the
province. Europe had not seen crimes against humanity like these
since World War II.
With strong support from the United States, the International
Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was set up in 1993 by
the U.N. Security Council. An ad hoc institution, it was later
given jurisdiction over the prosecutions of the Rwandan genocide as
well, an even more horrific event which took place approximately at
the same time, costing over 1 million people their lives.
The Yugoslav and Rwandan tribunal is designed to go out of business
when its work is done, which the United Nations has decided will be
2008. There is already a freeze on the hiring of law clerks, which
according to Judge Meron is premature.
The highly publicized trial of former Serbian President Slobodan
Milosevic is only now entering the defense stage, which the accused
insists on conducting himself. After 35 prosecutions and 17 guilty
PLEAS, there are still 33 prosecutions pending and 20 wanted war
criminals are still at large, mainly suspected of hiding in Serbia,
including two of the most famous, Radovan Karadic and Ratko Mladic.
And it's not just the suspects that are missing. According to Judge
Meron, Belgrade continues to drag its feet on delivering documents
and opening archives. This contrasts with the Bosnians and the
Croats, who are largely cooperating with the tribunal.
Judge Meron has an idea for speeding things up. "I am going to
propose in my monthly report to the Security Council that the
future of prosecutions is in national courts. . . .I want to
establish a special war crimes chamber at the court in Sarajevo to
try people who had committed crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina." He
would like to do the same for Croatia.
However, he says, "Belgrade has shown such a lack of cooperation
that we cannot send accused Serbian war criminals back." The fact
that the leader of the winning party in this weekend's Serbian
elections, Vojislav Seselj, is one of the prisoners awaiting trial
in the Hague does not bode particularly well for public sentiment
among Serbs.
If we want to close the chapter on the Balkan wars properly, the
tribunal's work must go on.
Helle Dale is director of Foreign Policy and Defense Studies
at the Heritage Foundation. E-mail: [email protected]. Her
column ordinarily appears on Wednesdays.
First appeared in The Washington Times