THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Marina Antić was 14 when the attack on Sarajevo happened. It was April 1992, and Antić could see tanks bombing her hometown, the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Trams burned in the city center. Her neighborhood, in the west of the city, was isolated by the attack of the Bosnian Serb army led by Gen. Ratko Mladić. On Christmas Day, while she was standing in front of her own apartment building, a sniper hit her leg.
“It was a profoundly disorienting experience and everything you knew about how your environment operated was no longer true,” says Antić, who today is an assistant professor at Indiana University, teaching in the department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures.
The attack on Sarajevo and ensuing fighting that broke out across what was then Yugoslavia was the first time that Antić, of both Croat and Serb descent, heard about genocide in her country. Ethnic tensions that had been building for more than a decade were boiling to the surface. The previous year, in 1991, Croatia and Slovenia had declared independence from Yugoslavia, as hatred was being fueled in a place where Serbs, Bosniaks (residents of Bosnia and Herzegovina who generally are Muslim), Albanians, Macedonians, Croats, Montenegrins and Slovenes had peacefully coexisted.
More than 25 years later, Antić, who like many of her neighbors was forced to flee the region, look s to a special United Nations-backed tribunal in The Hague for a final verdict in the case of the military leader who was ultimately behind the atrocities she lived through as a young woman. The primary target in many of the crimes tied to Mladic was Bosnian Muslims, in many cases males of fighting age, although in its reading of the crimes, the court mentioned boys as young as 12 and men older than 60. On Wednesday, a court in the Netherlands found Mladić guilty on 10 counts, including both crimes against humanity and war crimes , and sentenced him to a life in prison.
“Is it important to hold these people accountable? Absolutely,” she says. “There isn’t anything that the tribunal can do that would be enough.”
The end of the Mladić trial, during which 592 witnesses were heard and 10,000 exhibits were shown as evidence presented to the court, also marks the effective end of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, or ICTY. During the past quarter century the ICTY has spent more than a billion dollars investigating, trying and convicting the men responsible for crimes committed on a scale and savagery unseen in contemporary history.
While the court’s legacy is still being written, many of those watching the judgment in the tiny modern courtroom — observers, witnesses, victim groups and even Serbian nationalists supporting the accused — question whether the trial and punishment of individual men can help nations torn by civil war and genocide heal, and whether the cost, time and emotional investment is worth the court’s final sentence.
“The Yugoslavia tribunal is significant as it is the first international court to hold an individual criminally responsible,” says James Gow, a professor of international peace and security at King’s College London. Gow, who has testified in front of the tribunal as an expert witness, says earlier instances of trials of powerful war criminals were either carried out by the occupying powers — as was the case in Nuremburg trials — or national courts.
Since the establishment of the ICTY, a number of U.N. war tribunals now dot the international legal landscape, together hoping to create a kind of global justice under which no one is above the law. But experts warn that such global justice will only be slowly realized, with other international criminal courts having far less power than the ICTY, which was backed by the European Union, had over the countries of the former Yugoslavia.
Together with the former president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević, and Radovan KaradŽić, the former Bosnian Serb leader, Mladić is the last of the key people accused in the Yugoslav Wars to hear his sentence.
While the guilty verdicts on many counts were expected, the court delivered one small surprise in finding Mladić “not guilty” on one count of genocide relating to actions carried out by soldiers under his command in six municipalities starting in 1992. In a news conference after the judgment was read, the lead prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, left open the possibility of an appeal.
“The crimes committed rank among the most heinous known to humankind and include genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity,” said Judge Alphons Orie after he pronounced the sentence.
The U.N. Security Council created the ICTY in the early 1990s to hold accountable those responsible for killing at least 100,000 people in the region and displacing up to 2 million, a scale of savagery unseen in contemporary European history.
“We thought that there would not be any more conflict in Europe after World War II and then Yugoslavia happened,” says Tomislav Longinović, professor of Slavic, comparative literature and visual culture at University of Wisconsin–Madison, and who is originally from Serbia.
Experts say it was an important step in international justice and a way to punish breaches of the Geneva Conventions and prosecute war crimes committed on a scale and savagery unseen in contemporary history.
“The resolution came at quite a peculiar time when international pressure, public pressure, media pressure, warned the major Western powers to do something about the carnage in Bosnia,” says Tihomir Loza, a London-based journalist who covered the Yugoslav wars. “However, those powers couldn’t actually agree on what it was that they could do.”
Skepticism greeted the U.N. action to create the tribunal, and few believed that the court would lead to any substantial prosecutions. It took around three years for the tribunal to begin working properly, and experts say it took even more for it to be trusted.
“From 1993 to 1996, the basic structure of the tribunal was established in The Hague and governments started seconding their own people to the tribunal, such as investigators, police people, judges and prosecutors, and so on,” Loza says. “It was developing gradually, but there was a point probably around 1996 when one could see that possibly, given the right circumstances, this tribunal could take something of a life of its own.”
The tribunal was staffed with U.N. employees and supported by major world governments. It started to gather momentum in the second term of U.S. President Bill Clinton, who by then had the support of the new Labour Party government in the United Kingdom headed by Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Experts agree that it was the EU — and specifically the Balkan states’ desire to join the trade block — that gave investigators and prosecutors leverage in extraditing the accused to the Netherlands.
During its nearly 25 years of activity, the court served 161 indictments and completed proceedings against nearly all of them. While 17 defendants died while in custody, either in The Hague — as was the case with Slobodan Milošević in 2006 — or before they were transferred, other cases were transferred to national courts or indictments were withdrawn.
The war crimes tribunal has been expensive to maintain. Just since 2010, more than $700 million has been spent to fund the activity of the tribunal. Mladić’s extensive defense and regular visits by his relatives cost nearly $2 million, according to his own lawyers.
“Their budget dwarfs in comparison to even the state criminal justice budgets of most American states,” says Richard Wilson, professor of law and anthropology at the University of Connecticut. “I believe [the special tribunal] cost over $1 billion. But it’s been running for 20 years and its budget is extremely small when comparing to national criminal justice budgets. And it had to undertake the very arduous work of examining crimes that took place almost 20 years ago.”
Yet other special tribunals, such as the relatively small Sierra Leone Special Tribunal, spent $300 million for three years, according to the U.N.’s own news service, while the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which unlike the ICTY tries its subjects in abstention, is now spending around $74 million a year, according to its general report.
According to David Akerson, a lecturer at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and a former prosecutor at the ICTY, one trial can cost about $30 million and the expense of individual tribunals is dependent on how many trials they work through. More so, costs could be optimized if tribunals would lower the expenses with their headquarters of trial spending, such as flying in witnesses.
“When you look at international courts, none of their mandates have included any specific provisions for efficiency,” Akerson says.
As the ICTY prepares to shut down after the Mladić verdict, a new tribunal for crimes allegedly committed in Kosovo in the late 1990s prepares for action. Many cases that failed to conclude at the ICTY will head to another United Nations tribunal.
How the tribunal for the Yugoslav Wars will be remembered is for history to decide. Yet experts say these courts that have faced both praise and criticism have been a way toward reconciliation in the region and an important precedent in war justice.
“The process was not perfect, but for the victims this was their only hope of accountability,” Wilson says. “And they will be remembered as important landmarks in international criminal justice, where the main perpetrators were held responsible in a process that was not perfect but has allowed the defendants to challenge the indictment and review the evidence.”
“Peace will come, say those who lived through the wars, when people come to terms with their own past. “What I wish I could see is that each side would try and convict its own perpetrators,” Antić says.
Sintia Radu reported from Washington, D.C., and Christopher F. Schuetze reported from The Hague, Netherlands.
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Trial of Ratko Mladic Closes Chapter on Yugoslav War Crimes Court originally appeared on usnews.com
