Future of Hague Archive Debated

The destiny of the Hague war crimes tribunal’s vast archive – much of which is top secret – was discussed at a conference in Belgrade last week.



The Belgrade Humanitarian Law Fund, FHP, which organised the conference, said the only solution was to send copies of the archive - excluding protected documents - to all the former Yugoslavia states.



FHP also backed the creation of a regional body to agree the criteria for the archive’s use - whether for academic research or new war crimes investigations.



The future of the tribunal’s archive is the subject of intense debate: who should have it, who should be able to use it, and what should be public and what classified?



Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia all have an interest in the evidence gathered by investigators, and are trying to convince the international community to give them the archive when the tribunal finishes work in 2010.



All the states fear their neighbours could make use of secret documents if they possessed the archive.



Bosnians say the archive should come to their capital of Sarajevo because the documents have an emotional, not just historical, significance for war crimes victims there. Croatia also wants to possess the archive, with some Croatians proposing that all former Yugoslav states should have a copy.



Serbia, on the other hand, is most concerned about the secret documents it gave to the tribunal – it wants them returned and kept away from the public eye. According to Serbia’s laws, any official or member of the military suspected of misusing the documents labeled as top secret could face criminal charges.



Rodoljub Sabic, Serbia’s commissioner for information of public importance, thinks that the country lacks sufficient legislation to cope with such an archive.



“We don’t have good legislation for the archive. The actual [archive] law is 20 years old,” he said at the conference held on March 21.



“Serbia’s Security Information Agency, the BIA, recently gave the archive almost 300,000 documents and dossiers. They go from one basement to another. We don’t know whether they are meant to be public or not.



“I saw a menu that was labeled ‘secret’.”



The final decision on the archive’s future will be taken by the United Nations Security Council. A work group, led by the tribunal’s former chief prosecutor, Justice Richard Goldstone, is considering both the future location of the material as well as the conditions of access to it. The group’s first report is due in August this year.



FHP director Natasa Kandic said that Serbian officials wanted documents given to the tribunal on special conditions to remain “closed”.



“Protected documents will remain closed and protected… There will be no way to access the documentation that was presented in closed tribunal sessions. But the rest should be open to the public,” said Kandic.



She believes the archive could also help Serbian understanding of the past.



“Who will control war crimes trials in Serbia after the tribunal closes if the courts and prosecutors try to establish facts which are not true? In some indictments, prosecutors constantly repeat that the war in Bosnia was a civil war although [tribunal verdicts have stated] it was an international conflict,” said Kandic.



Matias Hellman, the tribunal’s representative in Serbia, pointed out that many documents were already available via the internet and that everything was public except for closed court sessions.



FHP has already started making copies of open documents and recording a video and audio archive. It copied 35,000 documents from Slobodan Milosevic’s trial before his death in prison in 2006.



Documents in the UN archive are marked “public”, “confidential” or “in strict confidence”. They keep those documents closed for 20 or 30 years. In Serbia, all classified documents are protected for 30 years, and only after that time can be made public.



Aleksandar Roknic is an IWPR-trained reporter in Belgrade.