ICTY Prosecutor Warns Region is Slipping Backward

The Balkans are often held up as an example of how international criminal justice can work. After a frustrating start, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) issued a raft of indictments for senior Serb, Croat, and Bosnian military and political figures. And while many eluded arrest for years, the tribunal has now gotten its hands on almost all of those it sought; Bosnian Serb political chief Radovan Karadzic was just found guilty and his military counterpart (Ratko Mladic) will likely meet the same fate this fall. The West belatedly but effectively used its military power (through the NATO peacekeeping force in Bosnia) and its political and economic clout (largely through the European Union) to help the tribunal's writ run.

Particularly compared to other experiments in international justice, the ICTY's record therefore appears strong. But the ICTY prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, sees troubling signs. He briefed the UN Security Council on the tribunal's work this week and depicted a region where cooperation with international justice is eroding, particularly in Serbia:

My Office regrets that Serbia has turned away from the path of full cooperation with the Tribunal. As the President reported this morning, for a year and a half Serbia has failed to execute the Tribunal’s arrest warrants and transfer three indictees to the Tribunal’s custody. It should be noted that in the past, arrest warrants in similar contempt cases were executed by Serbia without problem or significant delay.

More broadly, Brammertz is concerned that the political environment is darkening and that politicians feel increasingly free to deny events documented by the tribunal:

[The] political situation throughout the region is moving in the opposite direction. Too many politicians and public figures are denying well-established truths, enflaming ethnic tensions and repeating nationalistic slogans of the past. What would have been difficult to imagine just a few years ago is sadly commonplace today. As a result, the positive trend in regional cooperation in war crimes justice appears to be reversing.

It has been evident for years that the Balkans experience would not fulfill certain of the most ambitious peacebuilding goals of international justice advocates. There is scant evidence, for example, that the individualization of guilt through international trials has altered the fundamental ethnic divide that plagues Bosnia. Brammertz's concerns suggest that the tribunal's ability to establish a historical record for all parties may also be weak. The prosecutor's warnings are hardly definitive, but they are one more data point suggesting that the strongest arguments for international justice should be about justice, and not the supposed peacebuilding benefits of achieving it.