When justice delayed is justice denied for victims of war crimes
Commentary: Post-conflict peace and reconciliation can’t happen without timely prosecution of war criminals such as Ratko Mladić
Last month the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia convicted Gen. Ratko Mladić of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes almost a quarter-century after he led an ethnic cleansing campaign against Muslims during the Bosnian War.
The hostilities, which lasted from 1992 to 1995, represented Europe’s most brutal conflict since WWII. More than 100,000 people were killed and 2.2 million displaced; about 50,000 women were raped.
Mladić, now 75, orchestrated many of these campaigns, including the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys who had gathered in a U.N. designated safe zone in the city of Srebrenica. His crimes earned him the nickname the “Butcher of Bosnia,” and yet he lived openly until his 2011 arrest in Serbia.
Mladić is just one of countless war criminals from that period who for years did not suffer any repercussions for the atrocities committed. Meanwhile their victims were retraumatized as a result of the impunity.
Almost 20 years after the conflict ended, I traveled with a research group to Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the effects of war linger. Speaking with genocide widows on a cold, wet afternoon, we heard how justice delayed can often mean justice denied for victims of war crimes.
The widows described how they returned home after the war and had to face, every day, the men who had killed their husbands and sons. Far from being punished for their crimes, some of their attackers held positions of authority in the town. The women were still angry, still sobbing at the memories, decades later.
During the trip we also met with Bosnian and international officials, who told us that Bosnia remained deeply divided along ethnic lines. The failure to hold individuals accountable for atrocities committed during the war had contributed to a situation of distrust and lingering resentment.
Citizens struggled to cooperate at the political level to solve social and economic problems such as weak infrastructure, high unemployment, and separate classrooms for different ethnic groups. It was clear the country’s human rights abuses of the past threatened to derail its future.
Roots of the conflict
In 1991, Slovenia and Croatia seceded from what was then the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In February 1992, Bosnia and Herzegovina followed suit and declared independence.
At the time, Bosnia was inhabited by three major ethnic groups. Bosnian Muslims called “Bosniaks” comprised 44 percent of the population, Orthodox Bosnian Serbs 31 percent, and Catholic Bosnian Croats 17 percent. Bosnia’s ethnic Serbs opposed independence and preferred to stay with Yugoslavia because Serbia was still a part of the Yugoslav federation.
The Bosnian Serbs, supported by Serbian Pres. Slobodan Milošević and the Yugoslav People’s Army, launched a secessionist military campaign against the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Croatia, meanwhile, wanted to claim Croat-inhabited parts of Bosnia, and so fighting broke out on multiple fronts.
In the capital of Sarajevo, citizens made do with inadequate food, water, electricity and medical care while buildings were shelled and snipers lined the city’s major thoroughfare.
Across the country, civilian areas were shelled indiscriminately, mass rape was used as a weapon of war, and eastern regions near Serbia were “ethnically cleansed” of Bosniaks, meaning Muslims were either killed or driven from their homes en masse. Cultural sites such as the National Library in Sarajevo were declared military targets and attacked with the intent to destroy.
The Srebrenica massacre
In July 1995, in the area surrounding the town of Srebrenica, more than 8,000 unarmed Muslim men and boys who were supposed to be under U.N. protection were slaughtered by Serbian armed forces.
Two years earlier, the U.N. had declared parts of the Drina river valley, including the area surrounding the city of Srebrenica, a de-militarized safe zone. Tens of thousands of civilians came seeking U.N. protection, and handed over their weapons in exchange for entry to the safe area. In the summer of 1995, the Bosnian Serb army began advancing on the region.
About 400 Dutch peacekeeping troops had been assigned to protect the residents, but they had orders not to fire on the Serbs so as to remain “neutral” in the conflict. They fired warning shots as the Serbs advanced and requested NATO air support for the town, but eventually fled or surrendered as the Bosnian Serb army took control of the area.
Beginning July 12, the Serbs deported about 30,000 Muslim women and children to Bosnian territory that wasn’t controlled by Serbs. Over the next several days, the troops murdered more than 8,000 unarmed Muslim men and boys. To this day, mass graves are still being uncovered and the remains identified. Hundreds of victims remain unaccounted for.
This spectacular peacekeeping failure proved to be the tipping point for the international community. From Aug. 30 to Sept. 20, NATO launched a bombing campaign that, combined with international pressure, forced the Balkan leaders to agree to meet in Dayton to negotiate a ceasefire.
The agreement they reached aimed to promote peace and stability by balancing power among all three major ethnic groups. It created a bloated, four-tiered government that nobody truly believed was conducive to nation building. The goal was simply to stop the violence and then renegotiate a long-term solution. What actually happened was the ceasefire structure stayed in place for more than 20 years, and the government became mired in political standstill.
The reason for this standstill, experts believed, was continued division among the population. Bosnia never underwent a formal peace and reconciliation process. As a result, in the 20 years following the Dayton Agreement, constitutional reform efforts repeatedly broke down.
The price of delayed justice
Our visit to the region revealed painful, persistent memories of the horrors that took place during the war.
Inside a home in the village of Potočari, women who were driven from the area but eventually returned recounted through a translator their experiences during the war. One woman had lost her husband, three sons and a grandson. The remains of her sons weren’t discovered until 2009; the confirmation was one of the hardest moments of her life, she said.
Another said she couldn’t even count all the murder in her family. A third began to sob, saying it was years before she could greet her Serbian neighbors when she first came home after the war.
The women are part of a group called Snaga žene, or “Strength of Women,” a nonprofit that provides psychological, social and economic rehabilitation to women from the Srebrenica area. Many of the women were traumatized during the war and then retraumatized when they returned.
They said they came home and discovered that many of the people who had attacked their families were walking around freely. Some even held positions of authority with municipal agencies. For many of the women, finding the strength to face these individuals on a daily basis was a key part of their rehabilitation.
Nonetheless, it’s clear that anger remains.
The situation in Srebrenica is one of co-existence but not reconciliation, according University of Birmingham Prof. Janine Clark, an expert on transitional justice who works closely with Snaga žene. In Srebrenica, residents exist peacefully side by side, but there is a fundamental lack of trust between them, she said.
Reconciliation is not an act, but a process — one that Clark describes as both “top down and bottom up.” At the top, there needs to be restoration of the rule of law and prosecution of war criminals, she said. This creates the conditions required for reconciliation to develop from the bottom up. For Clark, that means creating opportunities for former enemies to come together and challenge the prejudices they have about one another.
“When people realize that they have things in common — from economic interests to shared suffering — you have a basis for building reconciliation,” she said.
Although there is a large cemetery and memorial site dedicated to the victims of the Srebrenica massacre, the consensus on the ground is that Bosnia never undertook a formal peace and reconciliation process after the war.
Clark said a fundamental obstacle in Srebrenica has been denial. Serbs still deny that a genocide took place in Srebrenica, and Muslim Bosniaks have little interest in atoning for crimes committed against Serbs because they feel that those crimes are not comparable to the July 1995 massacre.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague was supposed to aid the reconciliation process by prosecuting the worst offenders from all sides and establishing an extensive record of what really happened during the Yugoslav wars.
Many Bosnians, however, agree the tribunal has been too slow to have much impact, and has failed to create a strong narrative of the crimes committed.
It took more than 20 years for Ratko Mladić, the leader of the Bosnian Serb army, and Radovan Karadžić, political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, to be convicted of their roles in the Srebrenica massacre. Other investigations stretched 10 years or more.
Bosnia’s Constitutional Court has also undertaken efforts to provide justice to victims of the war, with the goal of resolving more than 1,500 war crimes cases by 2023. An original deadline of 2015 had to be abandoned, and even the 2023 goal was looking less realistic. As of early 2015, 207 cases were ongoing, and about 1,100 open investigations had yet to go to trial, according to the OSCE.
The process has gone on too long and has failed to punish scores of people who played major roles in the war, one member of Parliament said. The women of Snaga žene confirmed this.
“My husband and son didn’t do anything wrong,” one woman said. “If they had, I wouldn’t have come back.”
The women are living proof that for a country to recover from violence, justice must be both far-reaching and timely.
Sign up to receive Kheiro straight to your inbox, and follow us on Facebook here.
