We visited the International Court of War Crimes and Organized Crime in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is the busiest war crimes court in the world, both to learn about the current set-up of the federation’s government and to talk with those involved in the prosecution of war crimes.  The government of Bosnia-Herzegovina is complex to say the least.  The constitution that arose from the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995 divided the country and government on ethnic lines.  The parties are ethnically based, not necessarily issue-based, which makes harmony and coalition difficult, and some argue that in effect, the causes of the wars have been institutionalized.

We were able to meet two judges from the International Court, both American (one is an NU grad and the other has a son attending now).  Both have worked on important war crimes cases, and serve as judges as well as advisors on effective criminal judicial procedure.  The court uses a hybrid of civil and common law judicial systems, and the Americans offer advice on common law procedure as well training judges and lawyers in the hybrid system, as most that emerge from European law schools are not effective at it.  One example we were shown was a recent decision handed down by one of the American judges that was hundreds of pages long, filled with analysis of each piece of evidence and testimony and a decision based on legal reasoning.  We were then shown a decision from a few years prior in which another judge simply listed the charges, evidence, and decision, totaling to three pages.

At the ICTY in The Hague, of the 86 convicted of war crimes, 79 were Serb.  The court in Bosnia-Herzegovina have a similar ratio, with many more Bosnian Serbs being prosecuted for war crimes, as opposed to Croats and Muslims, of which only a few have been tried.  The difference lies in the magnitude.  The Serbs who massacred have been proven to have taken their orders from the top (Karadzic, Mladic, etc.), and killed mass numbers of civilians in a more or less organized fashion.  The other sides didn’t conduct ethnic cleansing and genocide on the scale that the Serbs did, but it still happened repeatedly.

That afternoon, we met with a Muslim from Sarajevo named Azem, who had been a commander of militia during the war.  He had served in the JNA (for a time under Mladic).  He joined the war in Croatia in September of ’91 against the Serbs, and began organizing and arming local militia back in Bosnia.  When the war moved there he returned to Sarajevo, attempting to form a connection with other neighborhood militia groups to try to fight the well-armed Serb forces.  He described stand-off with the JNA in which he negotiated a cease-fire with the Serb commander in the divided city, and shared other anecdotes and thoughts about the war.  He was mixed on his stance on war crimes, saying that they prolong the guilt of the wars but are necessary for some justice to be had, and could be a way to avoid troubles further on down the road.  However, he also predicted that nationalism will be worse in the future, as the multiculturalism and mixing of ethnicities of pre-war Bosnia-Herzegovina and especially Sarajevo doesn’t exist anymore.

That night we went to the Sarajevska Brewery with the NU alum judge for an excellent meal and good beer.  He also walked us around the city a bit, showing the different styles of architecture of the old city.