Sunday marks the 15th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre during which over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were rounded up and killed by Serbian forces under the command of General Ratko Mladic.

Just in time for this weekend’s commemoration, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) last month handed down genocide convictions to two senior officers - Vujadin Popovic and Ljubisa Beara – for their role in the mass execution.

In 2004, the United Nations tribunal ruled that what happened at Srebrenica constituted a genocide, but, says ICTY Chief Prosecutor Serge Brammertz, the recent verdicts are still significant.

“Once more the judges have said that genocide has been committed. This fact is known, it has been decided before by the ICTY and the International Court of Justice, but there are still politicians in the region who are denying that genocide has been committed. And although it’s not the job of the tribunal to write history, there is a very strong record on the crimes which have been committed - including the genocide at Srebrenica - and nobody can question those crimes. Those databases of information will be there forever and for generations to come will give background on what happened during those conflicts.”
 

Fugitives
Over the course of the last 16 years, the ICTY has indicted 161 people. Nine trials are still ongoing, including that of former Serbian president Radovan Karadzic. After 13 years on the run, Karadzic was finally captured in 2008 and his trial started last year. But two men remain at large – Ratko Mladic, accused of giving the order for the Srebrenica genocide, and Goran Hadžić, suspected of involvement in the 1991 Vukovar massacre in Croatia.

The tribunal owes it to survivors and victims’ families to capture these men, says Brammertz.

“If you go to Srebrenicia and ask, ‘What is for you the main priority?’, they all know that their loved ones will not come back. What they want is justice and they want that one of the main architects of the genocide and the crimes is arrested, and this is Mladic. That is why we are always saying that the main priority for my office today is to make sure that Mladic and Hadic, are arrested. It is for the prosecution of those persons like Mladic that this tribunal was created and it would be so negative on the record of the tribunal if that is not taking place.”

The failure to capture Mladic has also proved negative on Serbia’s record, particularly regarding the country’s efforts to join the European Union.

Although Serbia signed a Stabilisation and Association Agreement with the EU in 2008, Belgium and The Netherlands quickly announced that they wouldn’t sign it until Serbia fully cooperated with the ICTY on finding and arresting Mladic and Hadic.
 

Political pressure
Following a more positive report from prosecutor Brammertz in December 2009, the EU unblocked the interim trade agreement and lifted visa restrictions on Serbian nationals. Finally last month, EU foreign ministers agreed to begin the ratification process, despite ongoing concerns the prosecutor expressed regarding the fugitives’ arrest.

“Today the cooperation with Serbia is much better, in particular in relation to access to archives, access to documents. Having said that, I will not say things are perfect. In our last report, we made a number of comments saying if, after two years of active search in relation to Mladic, there are no tangible results, there must be a reason for that. Every time we are in Belgrade we are receiving assurances by all political leaders that they are fully committed to achieve as a result the arrest of the fugitives. If this is indeed their intention, I presume they will have no problem in putting more resources on the search.”

And the EU still has an important role to play in ensuring that Mladic and Hadic are brought to justice, Brammertz says.

“I have asked the 27 foreign ministers to do everything in their power to make sure that, finally, those fugitives are arrested. If I have learnt one thing in two and a half years in this office, it’s that the incentives put in place, if not to say the pressure, on all the countries in the region to improve cooperation has been the main factor in order to achieve results. And I have been very clear to say that this political support is essential to be maintained. Conditionality has been an extremely important factor in the past. We think that this conditionality will also play an important role in the near future and I think that the arrest of Mladic must take place.”

Finding and prosecuting the fugitives is important not only to the victims’ families and to the ICTY, Brammertz concludes, it’s also a crucial test for international justice worldwide.

“It is, at the end of the day, a question of the credibility of the international community. Are we serious about international justice or are we putting political instruments in place to achieve I don’t know what kind of results? If the international community is serious about international justice, if we want to show a strong example to the future, there can be no alternative to the arrest of the fugitives. And that’s why we have asked, and I am asking, the international community to make sure that those arrests are taking place without further delay.”