After 24 years, a rich, emotional legacy for U.N.’s criminal tribunal
THE HAGUE — Embarrassed by its failure to prevent Europe’s worst atrocities since World War II, the U.N. Security Council created a tribunal in 1993 to track down and punish those responsible for the horrific violence against civilians that convulsed the Balkans during the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Over its 24-year life, the tribunal indicted 161 people and heard from nearly 5,000 witnesses. It convicted people from all parties to the conflict on war crimes and crimes against humanity, though the largest number were Serbs. Six Bosnian Serbs, including the political leader Radovan Karadzic and the military commander Ratko Mladic, were convicted of genocide and sentenced to lengthy prison terms.
Its pioneering work, televised from the court, introduced a new vocabulary into the public realm. Terms such as “ethnic cleansing” and “mass rape as a weapon to destroy lives,” notions once confined to experts, are now widely used.
As the tribunal expanded the body of international law that had lain mostly dormant since the trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II, it spawned an avalanche of scholarship.
Other courts followed it, dealing with Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Cambodia and Lebanon. Many believe the tribunal provided the momentum for the founding of a permanent International Criminal Court.
But at a closing ceremony last week for the court, known as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the mood was sober.
The U.N. secretarygeneral, António Guterres, said “accountability has taken root in our collective consciousness.” But international criminal justice, he said, was still a “long-term undertaking.”
Speaking in the medieval Knights Hall in the presence of the Dutch king, WillemAlexander, Serge Brammertz, the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, said: “It seems as if today, there are more conflicts than in recent history.” He added, “The need for justice is immense, but so are the political barriers.”
The ceremony had the tinge of a memorial service, as fragments from witnesses’ testimonies were displayed on a giant screen and an actress read out heartbreaking accounts from victims of atrocities. Some in the audience were moved to tears.
The tribunal first captured the world’s attention late one night in 2001, when a helicopter dropped the man who until then was Serbia’s president into the courtyard of the U.N. jail near The Hague. Slobodan Milosevic became the first former head of state to appear before a modern international war crimes court.
He died in prison of a heart attack in 2006, two months before his trial was due to end. Prosecutors were blamed for having been overly ambitious, bringing 66 charges covering three wars — in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo — which they said he had instigated.
The trial of Milosevic, though, revealed government archives and evidence that contributed to a different public mindset. “When I was in law school, it was normal for dictators to retire in the south of France,” said Diane Orentlicher, a law professor at Washington’s American University. “All my students have grown up in a world where it’s normal to think a mastermind of atrocities must be brought to book.”
When the court was created, the wars of 1992-95 still raging, its outlook was anything but rosy: It lacked money, administrative staff and investigators, and it faced tasks unlike anything prosecutors or defense lawyers had faced in national jurisdictions. Evidence was often hidden in secret mass graves, and witnesses had fled. Crime scenes were riddled with land mines.
“The office felt a bit like the Wild West,” said Michelle Jarvis, a deputy to the chief prosecutor, who joined in 1997 as an intern. She recalled being told that “everything we do all day, every day, is difficult, there’s no precedent, there are no straight answers.”
Without an armed police force of their own, tribunal detectives struggled to find fugitives or deliver arrest warrants; NATO peacekeepers initially said arrests were not part of their mandate.
The first low-level offenders from Bosnia arriving in The Hague served as a testing ground for new rules and laws. Judges went for guidance to texts of modern international conventions that had never been applied in trials, and had to turn them into applicable laws.
“It all felt so urgent, so important,” recalled Douglas Stringer, a former U.S. federal prosecutor who arrived in 1997. “People were watching closely to see if this court could fly, or if it would crash and burn. It wasn’t clear; it was all an experiment.”