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BALKANS: War Crime Victims Stretch Wait for Justice
By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Nov 10 (IPS) - The postponement of the trial in the genocide cases in the 1992-95 Bosnia war
is further indication that victims of war crimes may never get justice.
The trial of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic (64) before the
International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was last week
pushed to March of next year following his refusal earlier to attend the
opening of the trial.
Karadzic faces 11 charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against
humanity during the Bosnian war, in which more than 100,000 people were
killed, most of them Bosniak Muslims.
Families of war victims have been waiting more than a decade for justice. "I
simply went numb when I heard how this is going to proceed," said Hajra
Catic, head of Women of Srebrenica, one of the non-governmental
organisations (NGOs) that represents families of more than 7,000 Muslim
men and boys who were massacred by Bosnian Serbs in July 1995. Karadzic is
accused of masterminding the killings.
"Families of victims are disgusted by such acts of the court, by privileges
provided to the man who created the war in Bosnia and particularly the
Srebrenica disaster," Catic told IPS on phone from the Bosnian town Tuzla,
where she resides now after leaving the eastern enclave, the scene of the
killings, in 1995.
"The whole process now looks miserable. This simply irritates families of
victims, makes no sense, and only plays into the hands of Karadzic, who is
stalling for time as he has done before."
Karadzic, a trained psychiatrist, went into hiding in 1996. He was arrested in
Belgrade only in July last year, where he was living disguised as Dr Dragan
Dabic, an alternative healer.
"So many mistakes have been made by the ICTY that it's no surprise people
are losing their trust," Ljiljana Smajlovic, a journalist who covered the trials at
the ICTY told IPS. "(Former Serbian president Slobodan) Milosevic suddenly
died in a prison cell of the court in 2006, an innocent man, after the trial
dragged on for four years.
"The trial against (ultranationalist Milosevic ally Vojislav) Seselj is also going
on for years now, with him making a mockery of the court with his hunger
strikes. Only a proper trial and good results can boost the reputation of an
institution that was founded by the UN and supposed to bring long yearned
for justice and truth."
Biljana Plavsic (79), an associate of Karadzic, who pleaded guilty to war
crimes in Bosnia in 2002, was released Oct. 27 after serving her sentence. On
release she admitted she had lied to the court in order to reduce her
sentence. She was sentenced to 11 years in prison, but released two-thirds of
the way through.
Reconciliation between former enemies is rarely mentioned, even if the aim of
the ICTY, founded in 1993, was to deliver justice for victims and so to
promote reconciliation in the Balkans.
"I think I am putting an effort into it, the reconciliation," says Mirsad Tokaca,
head of the Research and Documentation Centre (RDC), an NGO in Sarajevo
that deals with victims of the Bosnian war. "My message is strictly anti-war
because I'm trying to track down the victims of all ethnicities in the war," he
told B92 Radio in Belgrade.
Tokaca produced an 'Atlas of Victims' in Sarajevo last week, the result of
almost ten years of research on fatalities in the Bosnian war.
With the aid of tools such as Google Earth, the Atlas maps locations where
most war crimes were committed, and allows for interactive following of
related sentences by the ICTY and war crime courts in Bosnia and Serbia.
Tokaca had earlier provoked anger among top officials in Sarajevo when his
NGO established the number of documented deaths to be about 100,000,
including Bosniak Muslims, Croats and Serbs. That was considerably less than
the figure of 250,000 Muslim victims that had long been claimed.
"My aim was not just to put an accent on numbers, or pronounce guilt,"
Tokaca said. "My effort is to say that such things should never happen again.
And that can lead us to reconciliation after all."
(END/2009)
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