High Hopes for Bosnian Court

“It would take days to tell all about it,” said one former inmate of a Bosnian prison camp when asked to relate her wartime experiences.

She has told her story many times over as a protected witness in several Hague tribunal trials of men accused of torturing, raping and killing people in the prison camps of north-western Bosnia.

But still, she told IWPR that she would be willing to testify again – this time to the new dedicated war crimes chamber of the Bosnian State Court, which starts work in Sarajevo next week.

This former Hague tribunal witness, whose name IWPR was asked not to reveal, expects to be called again to give evidence about the torture and murder she witnessed in the Omarska camp. The trial of Zeljko Mejakic, alleged to have been the commander at the camp, is likely to be one of the first cases heard by the special chamber.

After more than a year of preparations that have been intense but little-publicised, the special chamber - established with the aid of The Hague tribunal - will be inaugurated on March 9 at a ceremony to be attended by the tribunal’s highest officials.

In Bosnia, there are high hopes that the court will expose more truths about war crimes committed here more than a decade ago, and help the slow and bumpy reconciliation process.

But observers warn that the court will need to make an effort to ensure its message is read properly in a country still suffering from the political and social aftermath of war.

The war crimes chamber is expected to launch Bosnian cases that the UN court has been unable to tackle itself, as well as take on some ongoing cases that the tribunal will transfer as a part of its completion strategy. The tribunal is due to pass a number of low and mid-ranking cases to various former Yugoslav republics in order to reduce its workload and allow it to finish its work by 2010.

The tribunal will continue to try cases of genocide by senior officials such as former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic.

To allow the war crimes chamber to function in this role, the Bosnian government and parliament pushed through major judicial reforms, sometimes forcing them on the court’s many political opponents, of whom the ruling nationalists in the Bosnian Serb entity have so far proved the most vocal.

Under heavy international pressure, representatives of all three ethnic groups in the parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina finally passed laws in October 2004 making it possible to transfer cases from The Hague, and allow evidence gathered by tribunal prosecutors to be used in the local court.

Separately, Bosnian law has also been brought into line with the European Convention on Human Rights, so as to guarantee inter alia the right to a fair trial. The criminal code and the criminal procedural code were both adjusted in January 2003, creating a mixed common and civil law system similar to that used in The Hague.

Special measures have also been passed to ensure that witnesses are properly protected. The new chamber will be allowed to use techniques first employed by the international court, such as the use of pseudonyms, disguising witnesses’ appearance when they testify, and media restrictions on how the testimony of a protected witness is reported.

Bosnian justice minister Slobodan Kovac told IWPR this week that in terms of legislation, the new court is ready to take on tribunal cases.

“The legal norms have been put in place, and I believe there’s the strength and the will to take … middle and lower level cases now,” he said.

Local and international officials close to the chamber seem cautiously optimistic about their work so far to raise funding, establish the court’s Registry and hire local and international judges and prosecutors. The European Commission has funded the renovation of a building for the chamber, and there is a new detention centre on hand with space for 21 indictees.

All this now has to be tested in practice. Once the first trials are under way, it will become clear how effective the judicial process is, and what success it will have in making Bosnians face the truth about wartime crimes. Many observers, including some Hague tribunal insiders, believe the key to success is ensuring the court’s message is disseminated across the country.

Wartime propaganda has left many people reluctant to believe that whichever side they belong to committed any crimes. Serbs have generally been the most reluctant to recognise this, but the recent Hague indictment against former Bosnian army commander Rasim Delic elicited similar reactions among the country’s Muslim political elite, who had otherwise been supportive of war crimes proceedings.

Local journalists lack expertise in covering court proceedings and in negotiating the intricacies of the new criminal law rules. One Sarajevo editor told IWPR that journalists in Bosnia would have a tough time getting the story right in a country where not even all the lawyers understand the new codes.

Mirsad Tokaca, who heads a Sarajevo-based research and documentation centre for war crimes, believes the issue is still controversial because their legacy has fed other, still current problems.

“The problem of war crimes is the biggest [facing] this country,” he said, noting that corruption and organised crime which are now a major obstacle Bosnia’s development stem ultimately from the war. “Those who were [once] war criminals are [now] part of the chain of corruption and crime.”

Tokaca said Bosnian society has enormous expectations of the war crimes chamber, but he warns that if it is to achieve its goals, the chamber will have to be in constant communication with the public from the start – unlike The Hague tribunal, which was geographically distant, and did not have a public outreach campaign when it was first established.

“We don’t dare repeat that mistake here,” Tokaca said.

The first case to test the court’s communication skills is likely to involve Mejakic and three other indictees alleged to have played various roles at Omarska and the nearby Keraterm camp.

The four, whose case Hague officials are currently considering transferring to Sarajevo, face charges of crimes against humanity and violations of the rules and customs of war stemming from their alleged roles in the persecution, murder, and cruel and inhumane treatment of thousands of non-Serb prisoners in Omarska and Keraterm between May and August 1992.

This week a special trial chamber, convened in The Hague to assess whether individual cases can be transferred to courts in the Balkans, heard statements from representatives of the new Bosnian court.

Should the case be heard in Sarajevo, the Omarska survivor interviewed by IWPR is ready to testify. But she warned that if the chamber’s verdicts are to hold any weight in Bosnia, people will have to see it as part of their own justice system rather than something imposed from outside.

“The feeling that the [chamber] belongs to this society has to be built,” she said. “The truth is that it will take time. But the sooner the better.”

Beth Kampschror is a freelance journalist based in Sarajevo.