A 'long-term investment' in truth?

By Gillian Sharpe
BBC Scotland news website

Gillian Sharpe spent four years in the mid-1990s covering the UN's Yugoslav war crimes tribunal. She now reflects what news of the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic might mean.

When I lived in the Hague, covering the war crimes tribunal, I had a poster tacked to the back of my bathroom door.

In the best spirit of the wild west it was a wanted poster for those accused of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia but not yet arrested.

It was supposed to help Nato troops on the ground identify Radovan Karadzic should they come across him.

One by one I ticked the names off as some were arrested and brought to the Hague for trial.

But Karadzic remained resolutely free. He became the inconvenient truth which said, however much the institution had achieved, it had not got one of the really "big ones".

When I first started reporting on war crimes in 1996, the tribunal was in its infancy. It was an optimistic place where people seemed to feel they were doing something really important.

"Every ethnic group thought the tribunal was politically-motivated and uniquely biased against them here"
A cast of characters including judges and lawyers from legal systems as diverse as China, Italy and the United States.

Young and not so young people from all the nations of the former Yugoslavia - translators and lawyers at the court.

All frighteningly well-versed in the history of their region and willing to argue their point at length... smoking at dinner parties long into the night.

The frustrations came when suspects were not arrested but a tribunal with no police force of its own depended on others for action.

Yet dinner party discussion became all too real when the trials themselves started.

Beyond the bullet-proof glass which separated the public gallery from the courtroom we heard from men and women who had seen neighbours do the most terrible things, who had survived the massacres at Srebrenica, whose husbands or sons had died in the camp at Omarska.

Important stuff.

The world's media seemed to agree. As well as a small permanent press-corps covering the court, journalists flew in from around the world for important dates.

But then interest began to drift. The headlines changed from tribunal "firsts" to something along the lines of "justice on trial".

On its website the tribunal lists its achievements as "spearheading the shift from impunity to accountability," establishing the facts of what happened and giving victims "a voice".

I went to Bosnia myself in 1998 to test those assertions and found that things were not quite as I had imagined sitting in the clinical surroundings of a courtroom in the Hague. Every ethnic group thought the tribunal was politically-motivated and uniquely biased against them.

Historical record

Some people I had seen giving evidence in Hague, who I then talked to in Bosnia, were ambivalent about their experiences there.

As for a historical record, here is just one example from the village of Omarska, which gave its name to the camp where so many died.

With the closest house just metres from the camp's fence it was hard to believe that people did not know what was going on. But that is exactly what they claimed. Just lies - they said - in the Hague.

I left off reporting the tribunal in 1999. Since then trials and other work have continued largely away from the gaze of the media who had decided they had heard it all before.

The arrest and trial of the former Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic, brought them all back but it descended into chaos amid his political grandstanding and delays caused by his poor health.

Eventually he died of a heart attack in custody. It was not the tribunal's finest hour.

Now again there is the prospect of a really important trial.

But what does it mean so long after events?

News of Karadzic's arrest sent me flicking through old reporter's notebooks and I came across comments from an interview I did with the then chief prosecutor, Louise Arbour.

She called the tribunal "a long-term investment".

For the victims of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, a judgement at a tribunal in the Netherlands can never be enough - nothing could be. But it is, at least, something.

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