Experts Say Many Balkan War Crimes Will Never Be Prosecuted

“Internally, there was never great enthusiasm in Serbia to do so,” Tromp-Vrkic said in an email. “The political elites privately resisted it and were doing it pro forma just to please the international community.”

Now, as Serbia shows reluctance about becoming an EU member, Tromp-Vrkic said there may be even less political will to prosecute war crimes.

Petrovic said the “EU is not pushing for war crimes prosecutions with any particular zeal. Therefore they are likely to sink into complete obscurity, if global and local political circumstances do not change.”

It’s a very different picture in neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina, where the majority of the atrocities were committed, most often against Bosnian Muslims.

State courts here are busy working through a backlog of war crime cases, bringing forward aging witnesses who relive allegations of rapes, torture, beatings and killings.

As of last year, about 1,200 war crime cases involving about 5,000 suspects were left to process in Bosnia-Herzegovina, according to a November 2017 report by a human rights commission of the Council of Europe.

But in Bosnia the prosecutions are deeply flawed, critics say. One persistent problem is that prosecutors seem more keen on going after low-ranking soldiers than tackling commanders and politicians.

“There are prosecutors who don’t know their jobs,” said Denis Dzidic, a journalist who covers war trials for the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.

He said prosecutors have been known to break up complex cases and go after low-ranking individuals to meet quotas. Prosecutors have been required to make as many as five indictments a year, according to one report.

“It’s much easier to find the guy who shot people rather than find the commanders, politicians” who ordered the shooting, he said.

He said another problem is that people who fear prosecution in Bosnia flee to Serbia, which has a policy to not extradite people to Bosnia who face war crime charges. Nor do Croatia and Bosnia extradite alleged war criminals to face charges in the judiciaries of former enemies.

Vukusic said there is “a sense that they would be prosecuting for political reasons.” She said there have been examples of “dubious arrests and shady indictments against former belligerents.” But she said there is regional cooperation between prosecutors, such as evidence and information sharing.

A June 2016 report on prosecutions in Bosnia by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe identified these problems and others, such as inconsistently charging individuals.

Barbora Holá, an international war crime expert at the VU University of Amsterdam, said the shortcomings found in the OSCE report remain problems today.

“The prosecutions are scattered,” she said. “The majority of the prosecutions are of lower-ranking” people.

Holá has compiled a database of all the cases prosecutors in Bosnia have opened related to the war. In an analysis of cases up to January 2016, she found 586 defendants had faced trial and 412 were convicted.

By far, the majority of cases — 61 percent — were brought against Bosnian Serbs, she found. Bosniaks made up 24 percent of the defendants and Croats 13 percent, she said.

“There are still thousands of open cases,” she said.

She said Bosnian prosecutors have shown an unwillingness to indict suspects on charges of crimes against humanity and genocide, which carry higher legal thresholds but also more severe sentences. Typically, she said, prosecutors opt for a war crime charge.

“With war crimes you can have isolated incidents,” she said. “Legally all you need is a connection to war. When it comes to crimes against humanity, you need to show widespread violations against humans. With genocide, you have to prove intent to destroy a certain group of people. Genocide is the crime of crimes.”

The massacre at Srebrenica remains the only incident classified as genocide during the 1990s wars in the Balkans. More than 8,300 Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb forces.

In Croatia, prosecutions are also slowing down, according to Documenta-Center for Dealing with the Past, a Zagreb-based group that monitors war crime prosecutions in Croatia.

The group said in a report that 23 trials took place in 2017, the fewest since 2005. Previous years saw between 30 and 39 trials take place, the group said.

Still, Croatian prosecutors have not been idle. Maja Munivrana Vajda, a war crimes expert at the University of Zagreb, said Croatian prosecutors initiated proceedings against more than 3,556 people, indicted more than 2,066 individuals and convicted slightly more than 600. Many trials in Croatia, though, have been conducted against defendants in absentia.

For a long time, Croatian politicians were unwilling to acknowledge that Croats could have committed crimes during the war, she said. Over time that changed, partly due to pressure from the EU. As part of its bid to become an EU member, it faced pressured to step up prosecutions. It joined the union in 2013.

But Vajda said a worrisome trend is a rise in acquittals. She said prosecutors say the cases are becoming ever more difficult due to the lapse of time.

She also said there appears to be bias when prosecuting Croats, who tend to be indicted only when murder is involved and not when other war crimes, such as rape and pillage, are committed. By comparison, she said, Serbs are prosecuted not just for the war crime of killing but for less severe forms of war crimes too.

During sentencing, too, there seems to be a bias, she said. In some cases involving Croats, judges have taken into account the defendants’ participation in Croatian armed forces, the climate of fear and post-traumatic stress disorder. These circumstances were almost never taken into consideration in cases involving Serbs, she said.

According to data from the prosecutors’ office, 119 Croats were investigated for war crimes by the end of 2014, resulting in 44 convictions and 36 acquittals. Since then, a few more Croats have been investigated, but Vajda said there are no data saying exactly how many.

Prosecutors’ offices in all three countries did not reply to messages from Courthouse News seeking comment and data.

There is no statute of limitations for war crimes, so until death, thousands of people in the Balkans — many of whom have returned to their normal lives and led crime-free lives — will live with the shadow of their wartime actions and face the possibility of seeing the inside of a courtroom.

“The prosecutions can continue forever,” Holá said.

For Tromp-Vrkic, that would not necessarily be a good thing.

“It almost seems that it would be better to abandon the prosecutions altogether, as it keeps the 1990s alive,” she said.

In the case of Bosnia, which is facing economic and political problems, prosecuting war crimes may deepen divisions between ethnic groups.

"The question is," said Tromp-Vrkic, "How much justice is enough?"

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