I will use my allotted twelve minutes to pose some questions regarding the process of accounting for atrocities in the aftermath of civil war, like the ones that the western Balkans have been going through in the last decade, and about the impact this process can have on public perception of the war and the atrocities that were committed. Doing this I may throw some pessimist cold water into the discussion, underscoring that the accounting process will take years or even decades to sink down and become accepted by the general public.

Firstly, it would seem fair to ask if the accounting and reconciliation process that we are discussing here today is a moral act or a political act, or possibly both? Or is it an historical process first and foremost? Secondly, can the Nuremberg principles and the laws of war be enforced fairly and evenly after a war where all parties were responsible for war crimes and atrocities, but where one party clearly had a higher degree of responsibility? What will the result be of an uneven and biased accounting process in an already highly divided community like Bosnia-Hercegovina? These questions are timely and useful to ask at this moment where the trial of Slobodan Miloševiæ is underway at the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, but where a majority of the Serbs in Bosnia and in Serbia consistently view the tribunal as biased and anti-Serb. This has been confirmed by several independent researchers, and most recently by the institute for democracy and electoral assistance here in Stockholm. In this last study only 7.6 percent of those polled said they trusted the ICTY, a figure on level with that for NATO.

It might be useful here to step back in history for a moment and look at the impact of the Nuremberg trial and the further trials conducted by the occupying forces in Germany after World War II. While popular belief today is that Nuremberg was accepted by the German public and that it was a tool that removed collective guilt, instead pinning responsibility on the leadership, the reality in the immediate post war situation was much more bleak. Telford Taylor and others on the prosecuting side in the trials viewed them as a stage on which the German public could be taught about, for instance, the role of the army in the Holocaust.

The truth however is that Nuremberg failed as a teaching lesson to the German public of its time, just as The Hague and the Miloševiæ Trial, at least in the short or medium term, may be viewed as a failure in the underlying aim of creating a deeper awareness in the Serb communities. On both the left and right of German public opinion Nuremberg was widely seen as victor’s justice. Furthermore the rubble to which every German street had been reduced made Germans think that they were as much victims as anyone else in the war. The average German didn’t view the sufferings of Jews and Poles as much worse as their own. Again the parallel to the present day Western Balkans seems obvious, with the average Serb rarely accepting the notion that other nationalities in the former Yugoslavia went through worse times than the Serbs during the wars of the 1990’s.
For the Croat and Bošnjak communities in Bosnia there is the further ambiguity of the trials that while indictments for genocide and crimes against humanity were served on the Serb wartime leaders Radovan Karadžic and Ratko Mladiæ as early as in 1995, only minor attempts have been made so far to apprehend these two persons who are perceived to be the main culprits responsible for war crimes in Bosnia, like the daily attacks on civilians during the three year siege of Sarajevo or the mass murder at Srebrenica in 1995. The only known real exception to this rule was the failed attempt at arresting Karadžic in late February this year. Bošnjaks have reason to ask whether there is any meaning to International Humanitarian Law when these two personalities have been blatantly allowed to continue living freely in Bosnia and Serbia for seven years following the peace treaty at Dayton in 1995.

Even if Karadžic and Mladiæ are brought to trial the proceedings of the ICTY may at best be viewed as symbolic, rather than efficient rule of law. The tribunal in The Hague will at most be able to try a small percentage of those who actually were responsible for collective violence in Bosnia and is likely to conclude its work by the end of the decade, after indicting and trying no more than between 200 and 250 persons. What will the impact be on communities where war criminals are walking freely and with impunity, while those who were the victims of atrocities live in squalor, in collective centers or in exile? Will there be calls for revenge and retribution – even private, individual retribution – in this climate of impunity? Another problem is the fact that decisions on who will be indicted and who will not can be perceived as often being taken by chance – a fact which officials of the court even readily admit. And some war criminals will walk free, with or without the tribunals, that is an unavoidable fact.

The aim of avoiding branding entire nations with collective guilt remains a fundamentally important goal of the ICTY and other war crimes proceedings, including truth commissions, not least to break the spiral of violence. The attribution of collective guilt is one obvious explanation for the violence that the Western Balkans and Rwanda went through in the 1990’s, to mention two examples. But there is a second and just as important goal: to create a permanent, historical record for the future. The deniers – and there are deniers in the case of Yugoslavia, just as there are deniers of the Holocaust – would have a much more simple case without this historical record. The testimonies of the abused women of the Foæa case, of the survivors of the Srebrenica massacres, of the camp inmates from Omarska and the massacre in Room 3 in Keraterm will remain in perpetuity, and they will always be potent tools to wield against deniers and revisionists, in the West, as well as in the Western Balkans. This record of evidence will include the reports by military observers, by EC monitors, of the forensic anthropologists who exhumed the mass graves where the victims of the Srebrenica massacre were buried.

I remember interviewing Bill Haglund of Physicians for Human Rights in the summer of 1996. The Bosnian Serbs claimed that the mass graves contained only victims of legitimate warfare, but Haglund’s toil in the muddy fields of Eastern Bosnia made these claims seem like total absurdity:

“Soldiers do not fight with their hands tied behind their backs and with their eyes blindfolded. So far we have found nothing that look like soldiers with war wounds”, Haglund said, standing on the edge of an open mass grave at the Branjevo collective farm near Zvornik.

To conclude: full realization and acceptance of the tribunals may not come in this generation, but not just the citizens of countries emerging from strife need these proceedings; we all need them as a constant reminder and warning sign.
Thank you.