Civil Society, Europe, Headlines, Human Rights

RIGHTS-BALKANS: Justice for War Victims Achievable, but Effort Required

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Jun 21 2006 (IPS) - Justice for the dozens of thousands of victims of the Balkans wars is achievable, but the truth about war crimes has to be established at all levels and among all the former warring nations in order to start the reconciliation process, agreed experts at a conference here.

The statistics from the 1990s wars of disintegration of the former Yugoslavia indicate that up to 200,000 people were killed in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo. Tens of thousands are still missing.

The most heinous crimes were committed in the Croatian city of Vukovar in 1991 and in the eastern Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica in 1995. There were mass atrocities against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, where some 4,000 people are still missing.

The majority of victims of the 1990s wars are Bosniak Muslims, but atrocities were committed in the savage “all-against-all warfare” against Croats, ethnic Albanians and Serbs as well.

“The region has no exclusive ownership over war crimes, as they happened all over the world in the past, like in Africa recently or in Europe during World War II,” Lance Clark, head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) office in Belgrade, said in an IPS interview.

“Yet all the victims have the right to be heard if this area is to move toward stability and development. Truth has to be established, but there is no single truth, rather multiple truths that deserve to be heard,” he added.

The UNDP has joined international efforts to help process war crimes and bring trials to countries where they happened, and hosted an international conference on the matter last week in Belgrade.

Dozens of government officials, prosecutors, judges and legal experts from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia and countries outside the region participated in the conference, “Building Regional Partnerships for Transitional Justice Initiatives.”

As all the countries in the region are turning towards joining the European Union in the future, experts say, apart from synchronising their systems to the EU regulations, they have to make additional efforts to resolve the weighty legacy of the 1990s and prove their modern orientation.

“Transitional justice means involving a set of post-conflict remedies, such as the fight against impunity for some of the most heinous crimes, compensation for victims, providing unbiased accounts of traumatic events, and reform of relevant institutions to recreate public trust,” Clark said.

So far, the war crimes proceedings in the Balkans have been the responsibility of the United Nations-founded International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), based in The Hague.

However, several cases, like the massacre of Croatian prisoners of war in Vukovar, have been successfully processed at the local level, such as in the Serbian capital of Belgrade. Several more dealing with Srebrenica massacre of more than 7,500 Muslim boys and men are being processed in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.

The international community is now putting forth efforts to equip local judiciaries with additional skills and knowledge to continue processing such crimes.

“There is consensus among the experts in the region (Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia) on the ways to process the war crimes,” said Sinisa Vazic in an IPS interview. Vazic heads the District Court of Belgrade and panel of judges in war crimes trials. The court is soon to start the trial against Serb policemen who are charged with killing dozens of members of a single ethnic Albanian family in one day in Kosovo in 1999.

“But the broader public on all sides should become familiar with what was done in the name of their ethnic groups, maybe through direct, mixed transmission of trials – from Zagreb or Sarajevo to Belgrade and vice versa,” Vazic said. “That could have a healing effect and could build up the otherwise shaken trust in the judiciary among ordinary people.”

“In the past couple of years there were significant steps in building institutions that have the task of carrying and clearing the region’s heritage,” says Nerma Jelacic, a Sarajevo journalist, director of Balkans Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), which deals with controversial issues like the remnants of the wars in the Balkans.

“Regional cooperation is needed, as without it there will be neither a complete nor honest approach to truth and justice,” she added. “Reconciliation in the region is not an empty phrase. However, it is a process that has to be reached through achieving truth and justice for victims.”

Many conference participants, however, said that despite the experts’ forecasts for the region, there remains the political component, which cannot be neglected, because those in power mostly remain entrenched in their disparate views on the wars, depending on their ethnic background.

“There probably is not adequate political will across the region, but that will not stop people from paying attention to war crimes,” UNDP official Clark said.

In the meantime, another regional conference held in Sarajevo singled out a problem that remains vivid in the area where wars ended more than 10 years ago: the hate speech that continues to exist across almost all media in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia. Reporting on former war adversaries is generally negative and sensational, with stereotypes remaining from war era.

Participants in the conference of regional non-governmental organisations, gathered under the so-called “Igman Intitiative”, concluded that in such circumstances the European future of local nations is being pushed aside, doing nothing to imrpove communications in the region or helping local people develop a feeling of belonging to the European family of nations.