The lack of justice at the International Court of Justice
Brkic, Courtney Angela
BEFORE THE WAR, you worked in an office. You took care of your parents, who were getting older but still managed to tend their vegetable garden and read the newspaper every day. For your...
...Morphine...
...Or a heel of stale bread...
...Perhaps she could no longer see the forest for the trees...
...There was no conceivable reason for makDISSENT / Summer 2007 n 2 1 POLITICS ABROAD ing a deal with Yugoslavia...
...Hours after the decision, State Department spokesperson Scott McCormack said that the United States would encourage "the people of the region to use this as another opportunity to proceed down the pathway of reconciliation and healing of the historical divides and some of the grievous wounds that have occurred over the past years in the region...
...Croatia has its own case against Serbia and has called for the archives to be released...
...For your daughter's ninth birthday, you bought her a bicycle...
...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...Without justice there cannot be reconciliation, and that justice was not served by the Court's decision in Bosnia...
...Despite the fact that it was July, your son wore everything he owned: a sweater and socks you had knitted, a jacket and heavy boots...
...At the morgue in Kalesija I assisted pathologists with examinations of the remains, acted as an interpreter for local men we hired to wash clothing from the bodies, and arranged personal effects for a Dutch police photographer...
...His response was that he protected the state and that "Bosnia wanted a lot of money for damages...
...When the war started, you could not believe that such a thing was possible in this day and age...
...How there are stories of tragedy and injustice on every side...
...In a November 2006 interview with Paris Match, she stated that Milosevic had organized the attack on Srebrenica with Mladic and Karadzic...
...They were extremely valuable for the conviction of Slobodan Milosevic...
...Or a prayer...
...Simons's New York Times article describes how Natasa Kandic confronted one of the members of the Serbian legal team, telling him, "You did not tell the truth...
...It's the twentieth century," you told your husband in disbelief...
...Two of the judges dissented...
...We will not consider manuscripts submitted simultaneously to several publications...
...And you wondered if he remembered the house, his grandparents' vegetable garden, the childhood that you gave him before this nightmare began...
...We found the strangest things: a "Dear John" letter, a bag of salt, a hypodermic needle and ampoules sewn into the lining of a denim jacket...
...To Our Contributors A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your manuscript...
...They understand that Ratko Mladic and the Bosnian Serb Army were not just aligned with Belgrade but directed by it...
...How the bodies piled up and came floating down rivers and were hung from trees and mutilated...
...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
...There are a lot of theories concerning the decision...
...Numbers can be disturbing or sobering...
...But a Milosevic conviction would have silenced the Tribunal's critics, at least temporarily...
...You blamed their politicians for this sudden contagion of nationalism...
...Or, miracle of miracles, an apple...
...Insulin...
...And in 2006 a videotape surfaced in which six Bosnian Muslim men and teenagers from Srebrenica are filmed being taunted, tortured, and executed by Serbian paramilitaries...
...You must understand what happened in 1991, a year before war started in BosniaHerzegovina, when Croatia and Slovenia declared independence, and the Yugoslav National Army, together with Serb paramilitaries, mercilessly targeted Croatian towns like Vukovar and Dubrovnik and expelled Croatians from a third of their territory...
...Others say that the issue of Kosovo's independence was a consideration...
...In his pocket was a photograph...
...War brought massacres, starvation, and a siege that cut you off from food, medicine, and the basic necessities of human life...
...The war even introduced new vocabulary: ethnic cleansing...
...Vice President Awn Shawkat al-Khasawneh believed that "Serbian responsibility was more actively involved than the mere failure to prevent" genocide, and Judge Ahmed Mahiou said that it was a "serious cause for concern that the Court could not have accomplished its task . . . without help from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia...
...There were also things we rarely found: eyeglasses, wedding rings, watches, money, identification cards...
...If you are submitting to Dissent electronically, our e-mail address is submissions@dissentmagazine.org...
...Your teenage son played soccer for a local team, and when you could, you went to cheer him on...
...COURTNEY ANGELA BRKIC is the author of Stillness and Other Stories and The Stone Fields...
...That you have donated your DNA to the Srebrenica database and pored over pictures of personal effects from the graves...
...SREBRENICA FELL on July 11, 1996...
...I translated scraps of paper from pockets— prayers, a rare driver's license, the backs of photographs...
...The executions at Srebrenica took days...
...You did not speak their language, and they did not speak yours, but they stood between you and those who wanted you dead...
...the ICJ does not have the power to subpoena documents, and perhaps it did not try to obtain them directly because it feared the embarrassment of Serbia's refusal...
...The men had obviously been searched before their executions, and they carried little into the graves that could identify them...
...And Del Ponte, in the same Paris Match interview, promised to make available a list of all information that could not be introduced in court when she leaves the ICTY in September of 2007...
...To understand the complexities of the wars in the former Yugoslavia—and the ludicrous nationalistic arrogance with which they were waged—you must study their roots: the way that the semi-autonomous status of Kosovo and Vojvodina was revoked, the abuses against the Albanian population in Kosovo, and the now infamous 1986 Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences Memorandum, a document about the Serbian position in Yugoslavia that is as histrionic as it is racist and inaccurate...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...Or your father...
...It served only one purpose: to keep Belgrade's responsibility from public scrutiny and, significantly, from the International Court of Justice...
...The Tribunal had been under pressure for some time to make a major conviction, and two of the region's most wanted—Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic—are still at large...
...If you were one of them, how willing would you be to proceed "down the pathway of reconciliation and healing...
...No one is sure how many people died in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina...
...You prayed fervently for a detention center or concentration camp—better alternatives than death—and for a future prisoner exchange that might, one day, reunite you...
...Milosevic was never convicted because he died before the end of his trial...
...If Bosnia introduces new evidence within ten years—and it certainly behooves the Court to demand the unabridged archives from Belgrade—the case can be reopened...
...Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte had allowed "reasonable portions" of the records to be sealed, explaining, "It was a long fight to get the documents, and in the end because of time constraints we agreed...
...It received the archives from the ICTY, which had used them in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate page...
...She teaches at George Mason University...
...Not quite genocide, but much more than random killing, the term is oddly clinical when considering the mass killings, torture, and evictions it describes...
...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...
...On April 9, Marlise Simons wrote in the New York Times that the Court had used archives of Serbian records and POLITICS ABROAD meeting notes—most notably of the Supreme Defense Council—in which significant sections were blacked out, allegedly for reasons of Serbian "national security...
...Sewage overflowed, disease spread, women died in childbirth...
...They were caught as they tried to flee through mine-infested fields and mountains...
...Small comfort for the women of Srebrenica...
...In April, Sir Geoffrey Nice, the former ICTY prosecutor in the Milosevic case, responded to Del Ponte's statement with letters published in Croatia's Jutarnji List and the International Herald Tribune...
...Or a letter from his girlfriend...
...Or a small bag of salt...
...It is only logical, you thought...
...You reasoned that if UN troops had disarmed it, they intended to protect it...
...But they are never as chaotic as the realities they enumerate...
...They were taken to warehouses and factories where they were executed, or gunned down in the wilderness over a period of weeks...
...In all, up to eight thousand were killed...
...You traded everything you owned—including your wedding ring—for food...
...In February, the International Court of Justice attempted to answer this question by ruling that Serbia failed to prevent genocide in Srebrenica but had not been directly responsible for it...
...How then to explain the International Court of Justice's decision...
...we wondered when we found them...
...TODAY, ONE OF the enduring questions about the 1991-1995 wars is the extent to which Serbia and Montenegro (the successor states to "Yugoslavia" or "rump Yugoslavia") were responsible for planning and facilitating the genocide in Bosnia...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc...
...When the town fell, men were separated from women, and you had only a few moments to say good-bye to your son, your husband, your father...
...The tape had been passed around nationalist circles for some time and was even available for rental from a video club in Serbia before human rights activist Natasa Kandic delivered it to the UN Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY...
...They suggest an order that is rarely present in war, and that certainly wasn't present in the Bosnian War (or the Croatian War, or the Kosovo War, for that matter...
...Look at our last few issues to sec if your idea fits in...
...And you must even understand how Bosnia was the most complicated of all, how with its ethnically mixed population it did not lend itself to neat divisions...
...Whatever her motivations, it meant that a larger quest for justice was thwarted by a case brought against one individual, however important...
...You must understand how Croatians, and Bosnians, and Kosovars learned very quickly that they were at the mercy not just of Belgrade, and of the rabid nationalist movements it helped spawn in each of those former republics, but also of an indecisive and negli20 n DISSENT / Summer 2007 gent international community...
...Requests by the Dutch battalion for air support made it all the way to UN Commander General Bernard Janvier, and four hours later two bombs landed on Serb positions, but strikes were suspended when the Bosnian Serb Army threatened to kill Dutch hostages...
...The general reaction of those who followed the events of those years has been disbelief...
...You did not understand how people could kill their neighbors...
...Survivors of the Srebrenica massacre reported soldiers from Novi Sad, from Belgrade, from other places in Yugoslavia...
...But the next day your children were hungry again...
...The decision sparked outrage and disbelief in the Bosnian Federation, and several prominent human rights activists in Belgrade also expressed shock, stating that it did nothing to help the country come to terms with its past...
...People will come to their senses, you reasoned, even as things got worse...
...THE EDITORS 22 n DISSENT / Summer 2007...
...Please use inclusive language so that we don't have to make adjustments during editing...
...Or your brother...
...Why Del Ponte ultimately chose to allow sections of the documents to be blacked out is a legitimate question...
...DISSENT / Summer 2007 n 19 POLITICS ABROAD The men's hands had all been bound with identical lengths of wire...
...And eventually several hundred Dutch troops were deployed there...
...Winters are brutal in eastern Bosnia, and somewhere in the future a sweater might save him from freezing to death...
...The problem with casualty figures is that they suggest that things can be quantified and boiled down to recognizable—if tragic—terms...
...Estimates range from 100,000 to 200,000—overwhelmingly Bosnian Muslims—with many hundreds of thousands more displaced...
...Perhaps Del Ponte was satisfied with the idea that Milosevic was the only man from Serbia responsible for what had happened...
...Or take a chance and send us your article...
...Almost overnight, the old life slipped away...
...Or your husband...
...The existence of these critical documents was established by members of my team in 2002 and from that time I resisted every effort to have them kept out of the public eye by the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia [sic] . . . Del Ponte disregarded my advice and agreed in principle that a substantial part of the records could be kept from the public, as the court subsequently ordered...
...A year later, I spent a month working with a forensic team excavating Srebrenica's mass graves...
...In the latter, he stated, "I do not know who is meant by `we.' I was certainly not one of the we...
...Bosnian Muslim men and boys were shot beside pits and buried in mass graves...
...Records have come to light that show how over 1,800 Yugoslav Army members were simultaneously serving in the Bosnian Serb Army, something the International Court of Justice acknowledged...
...That you have attended exhumations, hoping in vain to recognize someone, and that you have not been able to return home or to any semblance of a normal life...
...Please include a postal address and phone number...
...How Bosnians of every ethnicity stood in the way of the country's dismemberment, but how fighting led to infighting, to former allies turning on one another as the Croatians and Muslims did in central Bosnia...
...Some suggest that it was, indeed, the issue of damages...
...If you are one of them, chances are that your son is still missing...
...they're the author's responsibility...
...And please remember that we can't consider articles unless they're accompanied by a cover letter and stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...Finally, you sought refuge in the town—the one the United Nations had disarmed and subsequently declared "safe...
...Still others cite technical reasons...
...And how the dream of Yugoslavia died harder in Bosnia-Herzegovina than it did elsewhere for all of these reasons...
Vol. 54 • July 2007 • No. 3
