Closing its doors with a bang - The ICTY
Last week marked the end of an unprecedented chapter of transitional justice in Europe since the Nuremberg trials: The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague spoke its last verdict and will close at the end of December. In 24 years, the Tribunal indicted 161 people and heard more than 4650 witnesses on cases regarding genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass murder and sexual violence.
Following the Balkan wars of the 1990s, the United Nations Security Council decided to establish the special court in 1993. The first of a kind since the Nuremberg trials, it paved the way for a different approach to justice: internationally administered and aiming for transitional justice, the latter a concept that aims to address human rights violations and atrocities in post-conflict countries. Thus, the ICTY served for example as ‘role-model’ for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, following the 1994 genocide, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone as well as the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The ICTY ended its work with two major cases – and left the stage of international prosecution not silently: First came the long-awaited verdict against Ratko Mladic, infamously dubbed as the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’, a Bosnian Serb general. He was sentenced to life in prison, found guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide, including the Srebrenica genocide, which left 8000 Muslim men and boys dead.
A week later, the last court case saw dramatic scenes, when Bosnian Croat commander Slobodan Praljak committed suicide in the courtroom by swallowing potassium cyanide moments after the judges announced his 20-year verdict was to be upheld—leaving open questions on how he obtained it and managed to keep it despite strict security.
Last week, Carmel Aguis, the President of the ICTY stated that its mission was accomplished. This, however, can only be partially agreed with. The ICTY was successful in partially delivering justice, especially by prosecuting the key perpetrators ‘from the top’, who were ordering the crimes. It ruled in 2004 that the massacres in Srebrenica constituted genocide, making General Radislav Krstic the first person to be convicted of genocide at the ICTY.
It also influenced the approach to sexual violence in conflict, which now constitutes a war crime (however, the prosecution of cases on sexual violence in the Balkan wars is slow).
Initially, it was hoped that the ICTY could achieve some sort of reconciliation in the Balkans – an aim it could not deliver for: Convicted war criminals are still celebrated as national heroes, often endorsed by the political elite and/or current governments, such as Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic or Republika Srpska’s President Milorad Dodik, and the post-war generations are indoctrinated with nationalistic propaganda, taught in schools.
Also, the future of war crime prosecution looks grim: Firstly, in the Balkan countries themselves, where regional and local efforts to hold those that “directly committed the acts and mid-level commanders” accountable have been minor with only 179 judgments delivered “in Bosnia since 2005, and 124 in Serbia since 2003.”
Secondly, the international political will to establish comparable institutions for current conflicts is lacking if not completely absent by now. Into its sixth year, the perpetrators of war crimes in Syria still walk freely. More and more countries withdraw from international justice efforts such as the ICC. And there is no international agreement yet on how to deal with the conflicts around the so-called Islamic State; only a minority of fighters have been convicted upon their return to their home countries while collecting evidence remains the main obstacle towards prosecution of crimes.
Photo credit: Flickr user William Murphy
