Bosnia Keen to Host ICTY Archive

Bosnians are pushing hard to have the permanent archive of International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY, housed in Sarajevo, saying the iconic status gained by the city during the war makes it the perfect candidate.



However, the court, which is due to close in 2010, would not be drawn on discussing the future home of its records.



On November 23, members of the Bosnian state presidency met delegates from the United Nations commission tasked with investigating options for the archive. They argued for the documents to be stored in Sarajevo so they would be convenient for local officials investigating crimes.



“It would be irrational not to place the archive at the domestic judiciary’s disposal,” the officials said, in a statement released after the meeting held in the Bosnian capital.



The delegates, however, countered that other courts and judicial organs in the world will still need access to the archives after 2010, according to the statement.



Despite that, State Prosecutor Marinko Jurcevic said he still thought Sarajevo, as the most central of all the former Yugoslav capitals, was the obvious location for the archives.



“It’s very important that all sides…in the conflict have an equal ability to access the old files,” Jurcevic told IWPR in an interview.



“If it should be located in the region, it should be in Sarajevo.”



The relocation of the archive will not be simple, whatever the outcome. Prosecutors have amassed millions of pages of evidence, and court sessions are recorded on thousands of hours of tapes.



For ICTY spokesman in Sarajevo, Refik Hodzic, ensuring people have access to the documents is of great importance.



“The tribunal is placing a huge deal of importance on accessibility as one of the elements in this decision on where the archives will be stored,” Hodzic told IWPR.



“It is of crucial importance for any future developments in transitional justice, be they prosecutorial or focused on establishing the truth, that archives of the tribunal are accessible to people here [in Sarajevo].”



Florence Hartmann, a former spokeswoman for the ICTY's chief prosecutor, said she believed security must be paramount. She suggested making copies for all the capitals in the region to ensure they could not be tampered with for political purposes.



“If you don’t have the archives here, if you have them in a basement in Geneva or in The Hague or in New York… then create a fund for those people to be able to get a hotel and work there,” said Hartmann.



“But if you don’t want to give money to the students, the historians, then you bring the archives here.”



But neither of those compromise solutions goes nearly far enough for Mirsad Tokaca, president of the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Centre, who also met the delegation during their visit.



“If they send the archives to New York, if the archive will stay in the Netherlands … I call that stolen history,” he told IWPR in an interview.



Sarajevo was besieged by Bosnian Serbs from 1992 to 1995, and its plight captured the attention of the world. That, he said, gave it the moral right to house the archive, “It is our history, one of the most important parts of our history, although it’s a bloody one. It’s a period in which terrible things happened and we should remember.”



Tokaca said he would not trust foreigners to keep the documents safe.



He pointed to Hartmann’s recent book Peace and Punishment, which provoked international controversy over claims of political interference in the apprehension and prosecution of indicted war criminals.



He envisioned the archives forming the heart of a broader memorial for the wars of the early 1990s, which would be an important tool for helping the whole region come to terms with the past and promote reconciliation.



This memorial could host conferences, be toured by school children and scholars and enable discussions that would be a far richer experience than sitting in front of a computer screen and reviewing the archives alone, he said.



But he cautioned that the staff of the memorial must be kept absolutely free of political influences, “especially Bosnian nationalists”.



“If we hide the truth from the people of this region, we will have war again and again. We will have conflict again and again,” he said. “Without justice, without truth, there is no peace. There are no changes to the political situation.”



Brendan McKenna and Denis Dzidic are IWPR reporters.