New DPC article: Giving Bosnian victims a name

Eric Witte August 25th, 2008

Radovan Karadzic has his second court appearance this week at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, when he will have another opportunity to enter a plea.  (He refused to do so at his first appearance.) Karadzic is charged with crimes across Bosnia and Hercegovina, including the July 1995 massacre by Serb forces of some 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in and around the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica. 

On Sunday, Kurt had an article in the St. Petersburg Times, which offers a bleak but fascinating look at the tremendous effort by the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) to account for Srebrenica’s victims:

In ICMP’s mortuary in Tuzla the air hangs thick and musty - the dank odor of mortal remains excavated from mass graves, placed in numbered plastic burlap sacks, stacked seven high and 15 wide. Brown paper bags of clothing found on or with the remains, also carefully labeled, top the shelving. A neighboring room contains personal effects, such as walking canes, ID cards and canteens.

In many cases, the whole male line of a family was wiped out. Just last month, on the 13th anniversary of the fall of Srebrenica, 308 bodies found in mass graves and identified by the ICMP were reburied.

…

The center painstakingly links the remains of individuals killed at the same execution sites but spread among many secondary mass graves. The bones of some 140 individuals were laid out on long tables and shelves in the large room, each bone and fragment individually marked with a numbered foil tag. The skeletons of three brothers are laid out side by side. DNA from parents can only ensure identification as a child, but not which one absent other data. Two of four missing brothers could be positively identified by other distinguishing features, relative age, or because they themselves had children with matching DNA. But one partial skeleton could only be narrowed down to brother number three or four. More evidence is needed to positively identify him.

Every year on July 11, the remains of those identified are buried at Potocari, near Srebrenica. Families have sole discretion as to whether to bury a loved one who has been only partially found. Great is the trauma suffered by some who have buried a loved one only to find more remains later, and face the choice of disinterring the previously identified remains. ICMP refrains from contacting families until a significant amount of remains have been identified.

The man who was in operational command at Srebrenica, Ratko Mladic, remains at large in Serbia.  European Union foreign ministers meet next month, with Serbia again on the agenda.  Karadzic’s arrest would likely not have been possible without Dutch and Belgian insistence on Serbia’s full cooperation with the ICTY prior to implementation of its Stabilization and Association Agreement and other EU benefits.  As Kurt argues, the pressure should be maintained:

Will the man accused of being operationally responsible for creating the tangle of human remains that is still being sifted ever see justice? That largely depends on the continued lonely leadership of the Dutch and Belgian governments, and the readiness of those, including the U.S. government, who bankroll the international tribunal to continue financing its work until justice is done.

Keep EU agreement with Serbia on hold

Eric Witte August 8th, 2008

Kurt has a letter in today’s Financial Times in response to an op-ed last week written by Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Bozidar Djelic.  Djelic argued that with Serbia’s arrest of Radovan Karadzic, it was time to place the relationship between the EU and Belgrade on new footing by dropping policies of conditionality.  He argued that the EU should approve Serbia’s Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA) and advance it to the status of a candidate for EU membership, as well as immediately implement visa liberalization.

In his letter, Kurt argues that it was Dutch and Belgian insistance on Serbia’s cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia as a prerequisite to SAA approval that led to Karadzic’s arrest, and that this policy should remain in place until the final two remaining fugitives are apprehended:

Sir, Bozidar Djelic, deputy prime minister of Serbia, asserts that it is time for the European Union to approach Serbia with a new policy of disciplined partnership between the EU and Serbia [which] yields much better results than the old one, based on conditionality and sanctions (“For the good of Europe give Serbia a chance”, August 4).

Yet it is precisely the application of conditionality, insisted upon by only two of the 27 EU member states – the Netherlands and Belgium – that compelled President Boris Tadic to arrest and transfer Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, to face trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. Had it been up to the other 25 and the EU machinery, that condition would have been waived, the stabilisation and association agreement’s interim benefits activated, and the process of ratification would have begun. The message is not that conditionality failed, but rather that it works when firmly applied.

None of this diminishes the credit to Serbia’s government for the arrest and handover of a man indicted for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Nor does it undercut the need for a credible membership perspective for Serbia and its western Balkan neighbours Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia and Albania.

It does appear that the Serbian government is approaching the search for the remaining indictees – Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic and Croatian Serb political leader Goran Hadzic – with greater vigour with the installation of the new government. President Tadic has reaped domestic political advantages from the arrest of Mr Karadzic, helping him paint his Radical opposition as weak and binding the Socialists in his coalition ever closer, since their erstwhile allies and much of the party rank and file view the Karadzic arrest as treason.

Serbia is being given a chance by the EU, despite Mr Djelic’s aggrieved whimpering about unfair treatment. Serbia will prove its readiness for “partnership” with the EU when it arrests and transfers Mr Mladic and Mr Hadzic. Until then, the EU should not move forward on SAA implementation or ratification, let alone moving forward towards candidate status.

It would be best for Belgrade and Brussels if these loose ends were finally tied up by the time of visits by Serge Brammertz, the ICTY chief prosecutor, later this month.

Serbia likely to put EU conditionality to the test

Eric Witte July 15th, 2008

In an interview with a Serbian newspaper, EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn has described Serbia’s progress toward EU membership in remarkably sensible terms: “This is not a process that is led based on a calendar, but in which progress depends on full completion of clearly defined conditions.”  The Commission may just be reflecting the backbone displayed by The Netherlands and Belgium in refusing to ratify Serbia’s Stabilization and Association Agreement until Belgrade fully cooperates with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).  In the same newspaper interview cited by Serbian broadcaster B92, Rehn specifies that “Serbia needs to have full cooperation with the international court in The Hague. We are calling on the new government to continue to improve the positive development of the situation and to take all necessary steps towards achieving this condition.”

If this is in fact the EU’s new policy on Serbia, it would be a welcome development.  In the past, EU “conditionality” often has been muddied by shifting goalposts and capitulation to nationalist obstinance.  Comments also reported in B92 from Serbia’s new interior minister - the head of former President Slobodan Milosevic’s Socialist Party of Serbia - indicate that EU resolve is likely to be tested again.  Minister Ivica Dacic’s contempt for the tribunal could hardly be clearer: “”I don’t think that the Hague cooperation is a priority, because, miserable is any state that makes this a priority - to cooperate with the Hague!”  He goes on to traffic in unfounded craziness about how the ICTY has killed Serb detainees who have died of natural causes while in custody.  Dacic does, however, acknowledge that cooperation with the ICTY is Serbia’s international legal obligation.  Whether he and other members of the government act on that obligation is likely to be determined by EU policy. 

Three ICTY fugitives remain at large: Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic, and Goran Hadzic.  Clint Williamson, the U.S. Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues, told a Sarajevo daily on Monday that top fugitives Karadzic and Mladic are believed to be in Serbia.