Opinion: The message Ratko Mladic’s conviction sends to war criminals still at large

To the editor: Reporter Laura King’s article rightly captures the challenge in arresting war criminals. (“Genocide conviction of ex-Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic fuels hopes for future accountability,” Nov. 22)

The Bosnian war ended with the Dayton peace agreement in 1996, yet Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, remained at large for 12 years until his arrest in 2008, and Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic was arrested in 2010.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), like other war crimes tribunals, had no mandate for a police force that would implement the indictments by arresting suspects. These courts must rely on the country’s will to arrest war criminals. As King notes in her article, that will is often lacking.

Although the Clinton administration was key to the creation the ICTY, officials at the State Department and those in the human rights and justice community all had their concerns that the ICTY would be used as a bargaining chip during peace talks and might not survive.

The ICTY was ground-breaking in that it was the first-ever war crimes tribunal to launch investigations and issue indictments during the fighting, not waiting until the war was over. While justice has been terribly slow in coming, it now seems that there is a new “fact on the ground”: War criminals may be able to hide, but they will eventually be tried and their crimes will not go unpunished.

Joyce Neu, Los Angeles

The writer, founder of the group Facilitating Peace, traveled to Bosnia when she was with the Carter Center in 1994 to help negotiate a ceasefire.

..

To the editor: Mladic is the best example since Adolf Hitler of a perpetrator of genocide who should have been executed years ago. It is tragic that he managed to evade justice for all those years while leaving many thousands dead, raped and ravaged in his wake.

For Mladic to be sentenced “only” to life in prison is a travesty of justice. His trial took five years and included the testimony of “more than 600 witnesses, thousands of pages of documentation and a mountain of forensic evidence.” Was all that really necessary? His guilt was so obvious that by prolonging the proceedings unnecessarily, Mladic was the winner.

United Nations human rights chief Zeid Raad Hussein said the Mladic verdict put perpetrators of atrocity on notice that they could be called to account years or even decades later. But for what purpose? This is certainly not a deterrent to Syrian leader Bashar Assad.

Sherwyn Drucker, Winnetka

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook