U.N. Tribunal’s Power on Trial

A tissue clenched in one hand, Nasiha Klipic fought to keep control as she told her own personal tale in the human tragedy of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The young woman’s story of the chaos and sudden disappearance of her husband as Serbian forces overwhelmed her predominantly Muslim central Bosnian community during the early months of the war was depressingly familiar to anyone familiar with the conflict.

Only the occasion made her account different: Klipic spoke under oath, in open court, with the man accused of committing or abetting the atrocities she described sitting barely 10 feet away.

Because she was one of the first eyewitnesses to testify about war crimes before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, her appearance June 13 marked the beginning of the most crucial month for the U.N. court since it began work here 2 1/2 years ago to investigate and prosecute those responsible for the worst brutalities of an especially cruel war.

It is a month in which the tribunal itself is in many ways on trial--a period likely to furnish the first real indication of the tribunal’s potential effect both on the Bosnian peace process and on the longer-term goal of creating a permanent international court to prosecute war crimes suspects.

For, apart from the 70 prosecution eyewitnesses expected to testify in its first trial (against a minor player in the Bosnian Serb hierarchy named Dusan Tadic), the tribunal this week will launch 10 days of televised public hearings in cases against two of the Bosnian war’s most notorious figures: self-styled Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic and his senior military commander, Ratko Mladic. Both have been indicted but remain free.

Next month, the tribunal is also expected to pronounce its first sentence, on a 24-year-old soldier who served with Bosnian Serb forces and pleaded guilty in May to participating in mass executions of Muslims near the town of Srebrenica a year ago. The accused, Drazen Erdemovic, has confessed to personally killing about 70 people.

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Because of the notoriety of the accused, the Karadzic and Mladic hearings will carry a special importance. Graham Blewitt, the tribunal’s deputy chief prosecutor, said he believes that televised eyewitness testimony linking the two Bosnian Serb leaders to atrocities such as the alleged massacres at Srebrenica will be so powerful that it could finally neutralize them politically. The result, he said, could be Karadzic’s removal as a potentially destructive force in the first postwar national elections, now scheduled for September.

“These just won’t be newspaper reports, but these are people who are going to give evidence under oath about what happened,” Blewitt said. “It’s an opportunity for people to assess the evidence--and that includes those who support Karadzic and Mladic now. It will send a reminder in a very dramatic way that these crimes were horrendous.”

But those in the region believe such expectations are inflated. They note that Karadzic’s supporters are unlikely to be heavily influenced by a body that they see as more a biased political tool aimed against them than an impartial international court.

Serbs circulated a petition at a Bosnian peace conference in Florence, Italy, earlier this month demanding that charges against Karadzic be dropped because of what they termed the prejudicial and illegal nature of the tribunal.

The decision to conduct the Mladic-Karadzic hearings despite the two men’s absence underscores a fundamental weakness of the tribunal--its continued inability to get its hands on the most senior figures accused.

The hearings come nearly a year after both men were formally accused of genocide and six months after Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian leaders pledged to cooperate with the tribunal as part of the peace accord reached in Dayton, Ohio, last fall. (Of eight accused and in custody in The Hague, only one individual, a Bosnian Croat general named Tihomir Blaskic, wielded any real power during the war.)

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For members of the tribunal staff, the failure of the 60,000-strong NATO-led Implementation Force, known as IFOR, to move decisively against Karadzic, Mladic and 47 other suspects who remain free in the region constitutes a frustrating disappointment.

“To set up an international tribunal and then leave it unable to try the major war criminals is even worse than to have no tribunal at all,” Antonio Cassese, the court’s president and an Italian judge, told the delegates in Florence.

Blewitt added: “Clearly, IFOR’s mandate is sufficient to enable it to arrest indicted war criminals, but they are being instructed on very high levels not to do it. I think it really does go right to the major political leaders, including those in the United States, England and France. It’s unfortunate that it’s an election year in the United States.”

The Clinton administration has been accused of avoiding any hunt for accused war criminals in Bosnia out of fear that politically costly shootouts could claim American lives or lead to the type of humiliation that U.N. forces suffered in Somalia during their abortive search for rogue political leader Mohammed Farah Aidid.

The sentencing of Erdemovic, scheduled for mid-July, also represents a sensitive dilemma for the tribunal.

One court official, who declined to be identified, summed up the problem this way: “We have someone who says he took part in a massacre and killed 70 people himself, so how can we not give him the maximum sentence [of life imprisonment]? But if we give a small fish who cooperates the maximum penalty, what do we have left for those who ordered it all?”

Where the tribunal hopes to make its longer-term mark is by providing a platform for people like Klipic--a place where victims can bear witness, where culprits can be called to account and where justice can be done. For many, this element of the tribunal’s work is an essential part of the reconciliation process that must come before peace can take hold in Bosnia.

“The tribunal has a great opportunity in the next few years to show it can do its job effectively and fairly,” said Christopher Greenwood, a specialist on the laws of war at the London School of Economics. “If it manages to establish itself in this way, then it will have been a success.”

Television coverage of the Tadic trial is being carried live into the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, and throughout most of the nation, while private cable TV transmission in Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital, has reportedly made the trial accessible to at least a limited Serbian audience.

“The people of Bosnia are seeing what’s happening here,” said Blewitt. “It’s part of the healing process. Without the proceedings being broadcast into Bosnia, it would be a fairly hollow process. It would also be token.”

Staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Sarajevo contributed to this report.