1. SERBIA FACES TRIAL FOR BOSNIA GENOCIDE
Francis Boyle, the former agent for Bosnia, said a verdict in Bosnia’s favour would undermine the right of the RS to exist.
“If the Court establishes that a genocide has been committed, it would undermine the [1995] Dayton Accords built on that genocide. In that case, it would become clear that the RS must cease to exist,” Boyle said.
Serbia Faces Trial for Bosnia Genocide
After years of delays, an international court will finally decide whether the Serbian state is guilty of this grave crime.
By Nidzara Ahmetasevic in Sarajevo (Balkan Insight, 22 Feb 06)
Bosnia and Herzegovina is to open an unprecedented lawsuit against Serbia and Montenegro for genocide and aggression at the International Court of Justice, ICJ, on February 27.
It has taken 13 years to start the case, the outcome of which - expected later this year - will determine for the history books the nature and blame for the war that ravaged Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995.
While most Bosnians insist that their eastern neighbours were deeply involved in the conflict, Serbia has consistently claimed it was civil war between the country’s three main ethnic groups.
Francis Boyle, a former agent for Bosnia and Herzegovina and a United States professor of law, submitted the charges back in March 1993.
That it has taken so long for the hearing to be set has dissatisfied many Bosnians and international experts.
Rosalyn Higgins, who recently became the first female president of the ICJ in The Hague, has concurred that it has taken an embarrassingly long time to get proceedings underway.
But Cazim Sadikovic, professor of constitutional law in Sarajevo, went further, saying the ICJ had violated the principles of a fair trial by delaying the case for so long.
“The international court in The Hague has failed in 13 years to make a decision far simpler than the Nuremberg trials, for example, which took ten months from the time the charges were pressed until the verdicts were passed,” he said.
Sadikovic said the court had violated the principles of a fair trial established by the European Convention on Human Rights and other international conventions, by failing to make a decision “within a reasonable period of time”.
The case against Serbia and Montenegro, SCG, claims that Bosnia’s non-Serb population, especially the Bosniak, or Muslim community, was the victim of genocide.
The assertion rests on the 1948 Convention on Genocide, which defines this crime as “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” by “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”.
The prosecution claims most victims were civilians and that Serbia perpetrated the crime with a view to forming a “Greater Serbia” from the ruins of the former Yugoslav federation.
It cites United Nations Security Council Resolution 47/121, from December 18, 1992, which expressed grave concern over “intensified aggressive acts by the Serbian and Montenegrin forces to acquire more territories by force” in Bosnia.
The same resolution said such acts were “characterised by a consistent pattern of gross and systematic violations of human rights, a burgeoning refugee population resulting from mass expulsions of defenceless civilians from their homes and the existence in Serbian and Montenegrin-controlled areas of concentration camps and detention centres, in pursuit of the abhorrent policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’, which is a form of genocide”.
Bosnia is demanding that Serbia and Montenegro pay reparations to
individuals and the state worth more than 100 billion US dollars.
One factor behind the delay was a series of appeals against the case
from Belgrade.
Some questioned the court’s jurisdiction over the case, recalling that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, whose successor state is Serbia and Montenegro, was not a UN member when the charge was pressed.
The ICJ is linked to the UN, by which it is tasked to adjudicate disputes between UN member countries.
Although SCG was not a member of the UN before 2000, the ICJ ruled in 1996 that it was still competent to handle the case.
Apart from disputing the court’s competence, Belgrade has also offered
to settle directly with Bosnia several times.
Radoslav Stojanovic, an agent representing SCG, said it would be better to “reach a settlement than go for a verdict that could lead to resentment and steer weapons into the hands of extremist forces”.
Several years ago, Belgrade offered to help rebuild the famous 16th-century Ferhadija mosque, in Banjaluka, which Serb forces had destroyed, in exchange for Bosnia dropping the charges. Sarajevo turned down the offer.
The case has been marred by other controversies since the charges were pressed. One problem on the Bosnian side is that there is no internal consensus on the issue of Serbian guilt.
While most Bosniaks strongly favour the lawsuit, Bosnian Serbs are vehemently against it and Bosnian Croats are undecided.
The Bosniak Party of Democratic Action, SDA, whose late leader, Alija Izetbegovic, initiated the case, is determined that the matter should go to court. The Serbian Democratic Party, SDS, and the Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, have other ideas.
Sulejman Tihic, SDA leader and a member of the Bosnia presidency, says
winning the case is of vital importance.
“It is very important, primarily because of the victims,” he said. “It is also important in order to establish trust between the ethnic communities because only on the foundations of truth and justice can we build the future,” he added.
“No respectable politician in BiH, in the neighbouring countries or in the international community can question the validity of our case,” Tihic went on.
However, the HDZ questioned the case’s validity last year when Dragan Covic, HDZ leader, said on television that “aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina can’t be proved”.
The SDS is more militant. Late last year, Borislav Paravac, an SDS member of the Bosnian presidency, asked Bosnia’s Constitutional Court to reconsider the validity of the charges.
The court agreed, but not by summary procedure, as Paravac had requested, which means that by the time they do so, the ICJ proceedings will be underway.
In 2003, the assembly of the Bosnian Serb entity, the Republika Srpska, RS, also asked for the charges to be dropped.
In Serbia itself, President Boris Tadic recently said that because only one of Bosnia’s ethnic groups supported the charges, they were untenable.
However, some Serbian intellectuals and human rights groups say Bosnia’s case is justifiable.
Sonja Biserko, chair of Serbia’s Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, says Serbia needs to confront its past and that acceptance of the charges will help normalise relations in the region.
In Bosnia, the opposition to the charges from the SDS and some other parties has meant that the case cannot be financed from the state budget.
To raise money, two-and-a-half years ago, the Justice for Bosnia and Herzegovina Foundation was set up to fund a team of lawyers.
The chairman, Avdo Sofradzija, says they have already raised the required fee of 1.865 million euro.
“Citizens came forward with their contributions, as did companies and political subjects,” he explained.
Among the biggest donors he listed BH Telecom, the private publishing house Avaz, Sarajevo Tobacco Industry, the Sarajevo Stari Grad municipal assembly, some of the Federation cantons and the diaspora, especially in Australia.
Another major controversy surrounds the number of people who died during the war in Bosnia. The most frequently mentioned figure for deaths stood at 250,000 until recently.
But an ongoing inquiry by the Research and Documentation Centre, IDC,
an non-governmental organisation in Sarajevo, has cut the figure to around 100,000, most of whom were Bosniaks.
Mirsad Tokaca, the head of the IDC, came under fire after coming out with the most recent figure, as critics accused him of undermining the Bosnian case.
The local media predicted that the SCG might cite the IDC figures in its defence, though Tokaca recalled that he has yet to officially submit his numbers, which means they are probably invalid as evidence in court.
Bosnian legal experts also say the total number of deaths has no bearing on a charge for genocide, which by definition includes intent to commit the crime. “Genocide can be committed without killing,” Sadikovic said. “It is important [only] to prove that there was intent.”
Serbia is assembling a defence team with the support of the authorities, though few details have been revealed of their work.
It is believed, however, that the defence case will rest on the assertion that individuals, rather than Serbia’s government, were responsible for the mass killings.
And it was recently leaked to the media that Radoslav Stojanovic had urged Belgrade to hand all documents on the former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic to the Hague war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia, ICTY, before the ICJ proceedings start.
“I am certain that not one of them contains what could be taken as evidence that there was an intent to destroy the Bosniak ethnic group,” Stojanovic was reported as saying.
Apart from the 1992 UN Security Council Resolution, ICTY verdicts will certainly strengthen the case of the Bosnian team.
Two are especially important; the conviction in 2001 of the Bosnian Serb general, Radoslav Krstic, for genocide and crimes against humanity over the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, and the earlier conviction of Dusan Tadic in 1997, over events in the Prijedor region, in the north-west of Bosnia, which established that the war in Bosnia was an international conflict.
Francis Boyle, the former agent for Bosnia, said a verdict in Bosnia’s favour would undermine the right of the RS to exist.
“If the Court establishes that a genocide has been committed, it would undermine the [1995] Dayton Accords built on that genocide. In that case, it would become clear that the RS must cease to exist,” Boyle said.
In the meantime, associations of Bosniak war victims are mobilising. A group of women plans to go to The Hague at the start of the trial and protest in front of the ICJ building.
At their head will be the Association of Mothers from the Srebrenica and Zepa enclave, which rallies wives, mothers and relatives of the more than 7,000 men killed in the two eastern Bosnian enclaves by Mladic’s forces in 1995.
Their chairwoman, Kada Hodzic, says the very principle of justice is at stake in the case now brought before The Hague.
“It [the case] was initiated in the name of all of us victims of the aggression and genocide committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” she said.
“If there is justice, Bosnia and Herzegovina will win the case.”
Nidzara Ahmetasevic is a regular Balkan Insight correspondent based in Sarajevo. Balkan Insight is BIRN’s internet publication.
Source: Balkan Investigative Reporting Network