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Episode 27 – Srebrenica 25: Genocide and Denial with Iva Vukusic, Jennifer Trahan and Hikmet Karcic

Hikmet Karcic: For the first time we had this really large load of evidence, you know, perpetrator evidence documentation, which we to this day are using, which I myself am using and most probably will be using it until the end of my life. 

[INTRO TUNE]

This is Asymmetrical Haircuts Podcast with Janet Anderson and Stephanie van den Berg.

All rise.

Janet: Hi, and welcome to Asymmetrical Haircuts, your international justice podcast with me, Janet Anderson.

Stephanie: And me, Stephanie van den Berg, for this episode, which we’re doing in partnership with Justiceinfo. We will air it around the 25th commemoration of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, and we’re taking a look at the legacy of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which we will probably refer to throughout as the ICTY. 

Janet: So we’ve got this stellar cast of people to chat to. We’ve got Iva Vukusic, war crimes and paramilitary researcher. She’s joining us again. The last time we met you, you were walking a dog, that you were dog sitting and we were in a graveyard and that was fun. But now you’re Dr. Iva. Congratulations! 

Iva Vukusic: Yes ! Thank you! Proud Doctor! 

Stephanie: And we also have by video link Jennifer Trahan, clinical professor at NYU’s Centre for Global Affairs who co-authored articles with Iva on the ICTY legacy. Hi Jennifer. 

Jennifer Trahan: Hi, good morning. 

Stephanie: And calling in from Sarajevo for the Bosnian perspective, we have Hikmet Karcic, a genocide scholar at the Institute for Islamic Tradition of Bosniaks. Hi, Hikmet! 

Hikmet Karcic: Hello! 

Janet: As always in these socially distanced times of video meetings, it’s not necessarily going to sound as perfect as we would like to make it, but we’re doing our best, so, you know,  give us a bit of a break if it sounds a little bit odd. 

Stephanie:  Because of my knowledge of the ICTY is skewed by my work here and five years in Belgrade, why don’t we turn this around and don’t do Stephapedia as we tend to do and do Janetpedia and tell us what we need to know about the ICTY and Janet’s looking very panicked at this point. 

Janet: Oh my god what do i know okay um established in the early 1990s war was actually still raging in the former Yugoslavia during that time and maybe if you asked yourself what chances of success it had you’d say you know little to nothing but since then, I mean, despite the lack of detainees right at the beginning and the complexity of the cases. Since then, they’ve managed to put on trial everybody on their list that they wanted to arrest, which is a big thing, including the most high-profile people like Slobodan Milošević, the former president of Serbia, died while on trial. Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, the political and military heads of the Republika Srpska, also faced trials. There were landmark trials held on rape and sexual violence. These trials defined the events at Srebrenica as genocide, where about 8,000 men and boys were killed.

Yeah is that okay? 

Stephanie: Yeah that’s a very fine summary. Now we have the question of the ICTY legacy and we have a kind of question that we want to ask before which is basically how do you assess the failure and success of a court that we’re talking about legacy but what are the kind of benchmarks how do how would you look at a court to see if it’s successful? Iva?

Iva Vukusic: Let me start by saying that how do you sort of assess a court and its failures or accomplishments is really a million, million dollar question. And I think when the ICTY was first established, no one really had a clear idea about these benchmarks and about how we are supposed to judge these successes or failures. And since then, there has been no consensus. There is no consensus. In sort of in the concerned community about what these benchmarks or what these assessments should look like and that I think has caused quite a lot of disagreements and quite a lot of conflict as to is it a success, is it failure, what does it mean to be a success or a failure so I think only now maybe at the ICTY but also elsewhere we’re starting to see a clearer idea about what does that mean to succeed or fail if you are in International Court. 

Stephanie: And in your paper, you write about kind of judicial goals. Can you talk a bit about what those could be and how the ICTY is done on that? And then we’ll ask Jennifer about the other what we call social transformative goals, and see what those are, or what those were defined as and how we, how the ICTY is doing with them. 

Iva Vukusic: Sure. I would say that these, I would consider them, for example, core goals, so to say. So one could think about fair trial. So this is absolutely indispensable. So to investigate the key events and the key violations from a certain period of conflict, to get people that are at the highest levels responsible for certain violations, but also at the same time to try to a representativeness. Uh, in court in the sense that we don’t focus only on one type of violation and completely disregard another. So I would also say that it would be important to try to get a broad representation of civilian authorities and military and police and paramilitary. So to have a sense that it covers a wide range of violations. I would say that the success is very often measured also in number of cases, you know, and we discussed in our article that that’s maybe not the best way to go about it, but often you would say this and this many cases have been prosecuted and that’s a success. 

Stephanie: Jennifer, can we talk a bit about the social transformative goals, peace, reconciliation? Why was that suddenly expected of this court and can you actually expect that of any court? 

Jennifer Trahan: I would say these aren’t goals and they shouldn’t be goals and I think that’s where we maybe got off the wrong track if we thought too much of the court. I guess I share the views with Iva that essentially these courts are courts. And that’s what you really want them to be. You want to look at their prosecutions, having victims and witnesses testify, rendering solid jurisprudence, prosecuting perpetrators from all sides, establishing a solid historical record. These kind of are the more traditional goals. But I think it’s when we go beyond that that we get more into shaky ground. So if people think it is going tp transform the political dialogue in the region, if there’s going to suddenly be one shared narrative of the facts. No, that’s not going to happen. So I think we got down this path. In part, the resolution said it would, wherefore, you know, the tribunal would advance international peace and security. So that’s one of the first things. I don’t think we necessarily should ask of tribunals. I happen to think that was in the founding resolution only to say they were under chapter seven. But anyway, people took it. It has to advance international peace and security, which is very, very hard to prove. I actually think the tribunal did, but I don’t think we should ask this of tribunals. I say the tribunal did because some very high level perpetrators were then on the run and certainly marginalised from having a continuing role in political or military affairs. So I think that did help and that also helped deter. But deterrence is another big claim, and I just think, you know, the tribunals, this was our first tribunal since Nuremberg, and if it didn’t deter in the early years, I think we should hardly be surprised. You know, where we get really in shaky ground is thinking everybody will be reconciled after trials or, you now, there’ll be no denial and there will be a single shared narrative. And that, I think, has to be done by additional transitional justice in the future. You know, and reconciliation wasn’t in the founding resolution, but then we see some ICTY officials say, you know, this tribunal will achieve reconciliation. I think those kind of big claims should not be made. 

Janet: Hikmet, we want to also hear from on the ground in Bosnia. What do you see as the reality of those lofty goals? What do people on the ground actually make of the ICTY? 

Hikmet Karcic: Well, I mean, firstly, let’s remember that the ICTY was formed two years before Srebrenica occurred. So basically, it was formed because of the crimes committed in the camps in Northwest and Bosnia, which caused international outrage, and also because of the siege of Sarajevo, you know, where you had sniper fire and artillery bombardment on a daily basis. So I think the initial crimes from 1992 were one of the primary reasons why ICTY was formed. And that’s why Duško Tadić was the first guy to be tried in front of the ICTY. So later on, I mean, the initial aim of the ICTY was to try for the crimes committed in 1992. Later on, after Srebrenica, then that’s when the focus of the prosecution shifted from these crimes from 1992 into the crimes from 1995. It gave a much more, let’s say, internationalised character, the Srebrentica genocide, due to the fact that the UN was involved and they had all this other government involvement and so on. 

When it comes to the legacy of the ICTY, I think most of the Bosnians are disappointed for two reasons. Firstly, that the main perpetrators who were guilty for the crimes committed, for the mass atrocities committed in Bosnia, were apprehended relatively late, Milošević on one side, but Karadžić and Mladić, basically everybody in Bosnia knew that they were writing somewhere around here. And they were arrested quite late, even though most people knew that they were under the protection of the Serbian state, which later on proved to be the case, especially with Mladić in question. The biggest, I think, the most positive aspect of the ICTY, which the Bosnians really cherish, is the fact that the most important members of the Bosnian-Serb leadership, political, military, and police, from Bosnia, but also from Serbia, were, for the first time in history, put on trial. And this is something which I, as a Bosniak, really respect, the fact that after so many years of Second World War persecution, survival, and so on and so forth. For the first time in history, we are able to, according to international law and international documentation, show that certain crimes were committed against the Bosnian people. Because we are, in fact, a small minority in the middle of Europe, so it means really a large thing to us that you have this international legitimacy to say that genocide was committed against your people in the Drina Valley. 

So that and also the fact that for the first time, we had this really large load of evidence, perpetrator evidence documentation, which we to this day are using, which I myself am using and most probably will be using it until the end of my life, writing and according to this archival. These are archives which we, if it wasn’t for the ICTY, which basically sent in The S4 to Banja Luka and to Zvornik and to other places basically took out these documentations. We as researchers would never get our hands on these documents. And some of these documents, such as the crisis committee staff records from Foča, Višegrad, from towns in eastern Bosnia, which were sent over the border in 98, 99, we will never be able to see them again, which are still hidden in Serbia today, which were moved on across the Drina. So, you know, these archival materials, which, you know, even the prosecution did not use to the maximum extent due to the fact that they couldn’t use everything which they wanted to, leaves us, the researchers, a lot of area to do. But it also is a very important thing for local prosecution, prosecutors in Bosnia to use it, which they unfortunately right now are not using it to that extent. The prosecution office in Serbia and other, in the region even less, even in a lesser extent. But you know, definitely according to the archival documents which are available online, you are able to, you know, put up a puzzle of this huge mosaic of this criminal enterprise. 

Stephanie: I’m going to just loop back a little for the, although I’m going to do the Stephapedia thing. Duško Tadić was the first man put on trial by the ICTY and he was one of the guards in one of their camps in the Prijedor area, which is what Hikmet referred to. Also, Foča and Višegrad are two cities in Eastern Bosnia, which are not, but probably should be, a byword for some of the atrocities that happened in the Bosnian War. And internationally, it’s often only Srebrenica that is known as the worst of the worst, but Višegrad and Foča are definitely high up there. And Hikmet also referred to the Drina, which is the border river between Bosnia and Serbia. So when things go over the Drina, that basically means they’re going to Serbia, not to be seen again. Now, in one of the articles I saw that Jennifer and Iva did together, there is a remark that the ICTY, as Hikmet also referred, did a lot of high-level prosecuting and the high level of the Bosnian Serb military and political life went on trial, but it’s not really helping reconciliation because local actors are not put on trial. Can you kind of explain what the situation on the ground is like? 

Iva Vukusic: I can start the answer and then I’m sure Hikmet can jump in. I think there’s differences in how you approach cases for high-level perpetrators and sort of lower level perpetrators, and both have their value in the sense that by prosecuting high- level perpetrator, you say something about the state system that was in place. You say something the systematic nature of the violence, that it wasn’t just something that, you know, three guys randomly. Made an agreement about and then committed the violence. But on the other hand and this was my experience in Bosnia a lot of the time when you would meet survivors from camps and things like that they would make the point that you know it’s all great if you prosecute these high level people like Milošević for example but i actually want the guy who raped me i actually I want a guy who beat me up senseless in a camp. 

And when you’re a prosecutor, I think it’s really difficult to make these choices because I think we should not forget that There’s so many potential perpetrators to look at thousands upon thousands people who could credibly be investigated It doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily guilty It may mean that they’re guilty, but there is not a sufficient evidence to prove that. But I mean, thousands upon thousands of people in the former Yugoslavia that could credibly be investigated. And I think it’s important to make the point that no court, no system, no state is able to digest, quote unquote, that amount of material. So that I think is a point that is important to making on the side of sort of social repair or reconciliation. I’m not sure that, that it’s fair to expect a reconciliation to take place. I mean, it’s great if it does. But I think if someone, you know, raped me, took my dad into a camp and burned my house and took all my stuff, I would not want to reconcile. And I would to be told to reconcile, so I think it’s completely fair to demand that and to also have a sense that, you know, in the United States today, there is a visible disagreement about the causes of the civil war, which happened 150 years ago. So I think also we should have some humble goals and humble understandings what it means to live in a society where people disagree. So I think it’s just important to have some facts that we can all agree upon. But to dream of some sense, what Jennifer was saying, that we’re all going to agree about exactly what happened, I’m not sure that that’s possible. 

Stephanie: Jennifer, one of the things that was also in the tribunal’s goal is to put this kind of unmovable historical record that people couldn’t disagree on. Do you think that that’s how? 

Jennifer Trahan: Well, I think they put it there and people can look at the historical record, those who want to have the solid record. They can go to the documentation centre in Potachari. They can online. They have these resources, but, you know, there are certain segments of the population who don’t want to do that, who won’t do this. So yes, they’ve created the solid archive and we have their solid judgments. You have the scorpions video, it doesn’t mean that’s going to end denial or different versions of the truth. Iva, we could have a whole debate, is there one version of the truth? But we definitely see different versions of the truth in the former Yugoslavia. 

I mean, what if, you know, there never was the National Truth Commission, so there were proposals for RECOM, but it never happened. So you only have very small Truth Commission efforts. So there’s a lot of transitional justice that one could have imagined in the former Yugoslavia, P.S. One could imagine it in the U.S., as well. We also don’t do transitional justice very well. And a lot of these tools haven’t been used. So we do see very much different narratives in the former Yugaslavia. But going back to expectations, I don’t think it was ever reasonable to think, okay, we’ll have trials in the Hague Netherlands and everyone will be reconciled heart have one shared narrative. 

Janet: Hikmet, we’ve heard people describe a little bit about local courts, which are now potentially seen as the carriers of the legacy of the ICTY. Are they actually managing to continue the work? 

Hikmet Karcic: To some extent, yes. The situation in Bosnia as a former socialist country is something that we need to keep in mind. The socialist legal culture in this part of Europe is something which is still heavily embedded in the legal culture, in the institutions here. So it’s really hard to expect from people who grew up in that socialist legal formalism to today, you know, use new Western, you know, Hague criteria in prosecuting war crimes. 

Thus, if you look at the Court of BiH, which is a state court in Bosnia established by the Office of the High Representative. You’ll see that the best track record of the Court of BiH was during the time when international judges and international prosecutors were working there. They were voted out of the country by influence from Milorad Dodik’s party, the Bosnian Serb strongman in the part of the Bosnian-Serb Republic. Due to the fact that these prosecutors were not only prosecuting war crimes, but also prosecuting and investigating corruption cases, which in fact was a problem which all three sides, let’s call them, saw a problem with this because these were independent international prosecutors who were going to investigate not only war crimes but corruption charges, money laundering, trafficking, and so on and so forth in the whole entire country. So, we can say that after 2012, when the last international employees left, or when they kept some sort of consultory status, that’s when the track record of the Court of BiH started going slowly down. 

But nevertheless, these local courts have a really good number of cases, which, again, it all depends from prosecutor to prosecutor, from judge to judge. There’s no one defined, let’s say, line to say that everything is good. It’s all individual cases based on individual prosecutors who are prosecuting the crimes. And definitely people with the most experience, people like Ibro Bulić, who was the first man to prove the genocide at the court of BiH. He’s a man with integrity and with a long track record of war crimes cases for the last 25 years. So it all depends on who is there. 

And, you know, just to add on something which Iva was saying earlier, of course, the main issue with local people here is that they want the main perpetrators who they know to be prosecuted, you know. So, you, know, If you ask a person from Foča who Radoslav Brđanin is, they wouldn’t know because he was in Krajina, he was a political figure in Krajina and so on. Even people in Krajina most probably at that time in ’92 did not know who Brđanin was, but they definitely knew who Duško Tadić was in Kozarac. They knew him because he was infamous for the fact that he killed his best man. And these personal facts, which were established by the ICTY, confirming the narratives which we heard during the war and after the war, is I think one of the most important legacies of the ICTY.

Iva Vukusic: I just wanted to jump in for one minute because Hikmet was referring to a period when I worked at the prosecutor’s office at the state court, which is about the time before the international sort of moved out. And I would say, and this is something that Jennifer and I write about in our chapter as well, is that the international presence was moved or removed too early. Because I remember during the time that David Schwendiman was running the prosecutor office, it was going pretty well. And there was a certain momentum and there were serious people and there was the systematic nature to the work. And I think. A part of that systematic nature and organisation of the work was lost after some of the international colleagues left. But as Hikmet was saying, Ibro Bulić is an excellent example that there are multiple very qualified and very capable people. The problem I think is just that they’re not necessarily the ones who are making the important decisions about sort of strategic directions. There’s too few Ibro Bulić working in the judiciary in Bosnia. 

Jennifer Trahan: I will maybe just add a teeny bit on not as much the implementation of the state court, but the design I think is a very good model of a hybrid tribunal because initially it was much more international than it was phased out and then the idea was to leave an ongoing domestic war crimes chamber. And that is a really good model because if you compare it to something like Sierra Leone Special Court, well Sierra Leone special court did a lot of very important work. When it finished, it just finished. I mean, yeah, it has some legacy, you know, a little bits of projects, but it closed its doors. And the same will happen with the Cambodia Tribunal. So when it’s done with its trials, it just closes the door. But the advantage of the state court design, maybe it didn’t work as perfectly as it should have, is that it’s an international hybrid that phases out to less hybrid to no hybrid and an ongoing war crimes chamber and then cases can be done in the future. And there’s so many cases left to do that this is very, very important. It just needs the support that, you know, required to continue this very, very important work. But it’s, I think, a really ideal model for hybrid tribunals that we should consider in other situations where they are set up. 

Stephanie: Talking about other situations, one of the reasons I really wanted to do this podcast also for the 25th Srebrenica Commemoration is because we’ve been doing a lot of this Rohingya Genocide case at the International Court of Justice. And we met all these activists. We have a podcast with these Rohingya activists who are all fighting to get this case of genocide and fighting for accountability and I keep thinking of Bosnia with the state where there’s the most transitional justice efforts thrown at it at the past 20 years and I was thinking at some point of doing a joint podcast with these Rohingya activists and maybe Srebrenica activists but then I thought those poor Rohingya people will be so discouraged because Bosnia is you know so much effort was thrown into every kind of transitional justice instrument known to man is put into Bosnia and where are we now 25 years after with Srebrenica. What can a court really bring in a situation like this? 

Hikmet Karcic: So yeah, one of the main reasons why this wasn’t a succ(…), you know, I wouldn’t say it wasn’t a success in total in Bosnia. I mean, there is definitely. A lot of success which you could see. It’s still peaceful in Bosnia. People mostly are going around with their jobs. You know, you have Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats still working together in institutions. They are a joint army and so on.

I wouldn’t say that it’s a total failure, but what we can see actually is that the situation in Bosnia highly depends on the situation in the region. So if you have a very negative-oriented Serbia, as you have with right now, then you’ll feel it in Bosnia as well. Same thing with Croatia, you know, right before the In the Prlić case, you had these huge counter-narrative efforts by Kolinda’s government to prove that Bosnian is a hub for terrorists or whatever, saying that 10,000 jihadists who came from Syria living on the border with the EU. On the other hand, you have state institutions in Serbia which are helping war criminals in Bosnia and at the Hague to prove that they are innocent.  So that’s why, so that’s why we have a huge problem in dealing with genocide deniers, because 10, 15 years ago, we were dealing with Darko Trifunović and some other trolls on the internet who had blogs writing about Srebrenica. Now we are dealing with high-class, publicly funded deniers which are now having international backing, not backing, but let’s say support from some semi-academic scholars and things like that, but who are nevertheless creating a narrative through Serbian academic media, political circles, and so on. So that’s why we have a huge problem with genocide denial on the 25th anniversary. 

So, when we talk about the transitional justice… Process, we had the 2004 Srebrenica Commission, which published a report, which wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad. It was a very minimalistic report. But nevertheless, it was the first time that the Bosnian Serb authorities recognised that genocide was committed in Bosnia and so on and so forth. But however, two years ago, the Bosnian Serb assembly annulled this report. So everybody in the assembly, except for the Bosniaks and the Croats, voted to annul the report. So this report is now… Deleted, and now they have formed a new commission made up of international scholars, semi-academic scholars, to investigate the truth of Serbian suffering in Srebrenica, but also to create a new narrative, a new Commission for the Siege of Serevo. So these are the two main narratives which they want to change in international academia. The narrative that Sarajevo was under siege and the narrative that genocide was committed in Srebrenica. These are supported, funded, and supported by state academic, political, and media institutions. 

Iva Vukusic: I would just like to add into that for a minute and say that again, here I think it comes down to sort of criteria. What is a success or what is a failure? On the one hand, I think when it comes to Srebrenica specifically… No one claims or maybe only people at the very, very political margins that nothing happened. And I think that in itself, I mean, it might seem, you know, like not very much, but I actually think that a lot of the evidence at the ICTY and in the local courts as well has trickled down into public space, where there are disagreements like Hikmet is saying about how many people and what are the circumstances, but no one serious. Will say nothing happened and that’s a low level accomplishment but I would say still it’s something. What frustrates me on the other hand is that anything that isn’t Srebrenica or maybe Prijedor no one knows about really. And there were at least several dozen municipalities where we should know a little bit, or we should talk a little about. So I think that’s a little bit something that I would like to see change maybe in the years that come. 

Janet: Maybe I can just bring the discussion down a little bit just to one small question which is that people actually survived Srebrenica or those who are close to those from Srebrenica. So what did they actually think about what the tribunal has achieved? 

Hikmet Karcic: I think in regard to Srebrenica, most of them are quite happy with how the Hague Tribunal dealt with the whole Srebrenica case, especially with the fact that, you know, the main perpetrators from the Zvornik and Bratunac brigades and from the Drina Corps plus, you know, Karadžić and Mladić were convicted for Srebrenica. 

I think the most of the disappointment comes from people from elsewhere. So you could see in the in the you know for the genocide charges being not passed for, you know, Rogatitsa, Kotorsko, and other towns, which, you know, really saw this huge genocidal campaign in 1992. I think this is the biggest disappointment by the survivors from these other towns. And there’s another thing we need to keep in mind regarding Srebrenica, which I really often want to emphasize. The people who were inside the enclave in 1995 were not only people from Srebrenica. Srebrenica enclave was a safe zone for Bosniaks from the whole eastern Bosnia. You had people from 13 different municipalities. So in some sense, these people are happy that they are 1995 crime was recognized, but I have friends who survived the Bratunac camps in 1992, Zvornik, Višegrad, and so on. And so they are double survivors basically. People survived, you know, crimes in 1992, ran away from Višegrad, managed to escape, came to Srebrenica, then survived the fall of Srebrenica. So, in some sense, they are satisfied that the 1995 events are recognized, but then they ask the question, what about ’92? And they have this sense that the 1992 events are in some way sidelined.

Stephanie: To wrap. It’s not a discussion that I think we can ever really wrap up. But We’ve learned that benchmarks are really hard to set. The international community likes to aim very high and not be very practical about what it promises and that in terms maybe of judicial successes, there are some successes, but still on the ground, it’s very difficult to see those successes and also to kind of think about can a court really ever satisfy victims? I had this lovely quote, and I think in an article that Jennifer did, where they had Geoffrey Nice where he said, a court is not meant to reconcile people. Like if you take somebody to court over a robbery, the court is meant to reconciled the robber with the person who was robbed. It’s supposed to be a legal process and why we are thinking that it’s something else is amazing. So I wanna thank you all very much for giving your views and giving also Hikmet an idea of the situation on the ground and what people in Bosnia think. 

Janet: But we don’t let people go just by asking them some normal questions. We also ask them some other questions, don’t we Stephanie? 

Stephanie: Exactly. We usually have three asymmetrical haircuts questions at the end, which Jennifer, I know you like to be prepared, but I didn’t send them to you because the idea is that you answer spontaneously. But first, this is something you can probably jump on to. What did we miss in the discussion? 

Jennifer Trahan: Well, I think we can also add maybe the historical perspective. I mean, ICTY had this tremendous challenge that after Nuremberg and Tokyo, like we had no tribunals, like we just didn’t do the field of international justice. So it was really our test case, how do we do a tribunal? And given it was the test case I think it did remarkably well. No one knew how to do any of this. And now it has set a model and now there are many other tribunals. And I think in the historical perspective it gets tremendous credit for the field of international justice. This is why the Rohingya victims are demanding justice because they’ve seen it is a possibility. 

Janet: Anything we left out, Iva or Hikmet?. 

Iva Vukusic: I would just like to say that I would like to continue this effort in the practitioner community and in the academic community to start really systematically studying successes and failures and then try to really use that in the efforts in the future, for example, in the case of Syria or in the cases of Myanmar. And also for sceptics, I would say that, you know, it might not be perfect. And for now the Rohingya, for example, don’t seem to have an avenue for justice. But, you know, there’s no statutory limitations and there’s nothing to say that in 10 or 20 years things may look differently. And I think the ICTY shows us that as well. 

Stephanie: Higkmet, do you have anything that we should have addressed and that we didn’t. 

Hikmet Karcic: I think in some cases, we need to, you know, keep in mind the political actors and situation at the time when the ICTY was being formed. I mean, I don’t want to be a pessimist, but imagine if Putin was in power in 1983. I have… I mean I don’t t have any faith that the ICTY would have been formed. It was the fact that Russia at the time was quite weak and, you know, with the whole Cold War, Iron Curtain falling down, that, you know, they didn’t really care much about what was going on in the Balkans, whereas today you have a totally different situation. 

Another thing we, you know, what Iva and Jennifer said earlier, the amount of work which is being done currently, I mean, by the local national courts, Myanmar not so much, but in In Germany, we had a few cases of Syrian victims who, you know, similar to, and this is fascinating, similar to the Duško Tadić case. In 1995, a victim recognised Duško Tadić in the streets of Munich. And she reported to the police. So that’s when they got the idea, let’s arrest Duško Tadić and Nikola Jorgic and the other cases. So similar to this, Syrian victims recognise they are torturers from prison, and now we have a persecution of people responsible from the Syrian regime. So I think the use of these national courts are something which, apart from the ICC, are going to be the future of international criminal justice. 

Janet: And another question that we like to ask well actually we’re changing the question. Iva you might have had an earlier version Iva when we ask people what do people get wrong about your jobs now we’re going to ask everybody let’s see whether we get any answers are there any failures that you would like to share with us about your job that you would like other people to learn from what have you really learned from it if you would have made a mistake that you’d like to like to share. 

Stephanie: Do you have a favourite mistake? 

Iva Vukusic: My favourite mistake, oh this might go actually to people who are writing PhDs or just about starting. Make sure that you have a list of all the people who helped you along the way to be able to thank them at the end because in year four you won’t remember it you know and I think that’s something that I wish someone had told me. Just remember people that help you so you can put them in acknowledgements. It’s difficult to change, chase those names you know. It was like oh who that two years ago. So I think that was a mistake and it would have made the last days of my PhD a little bit easier. 

Stephanie: Hikmet, do you have anything where you’re like, oh, I thought it was like this when I went into the field and now I realise I was either naive or just wrong in my own misconceptions and I now understand people better because I’ve learned this. 

Hikmet Karcic: Yeah, so the first thing is that don’t ever trust your sources 100%. So, you know, like, I read hundreds of witness testimonies in which people said, I saw White Eagles here, I saw Arkan’s men here and there and so on. And this is something which I’ve talked to Iva so many times. In the end, you realise that there were no White Eagles or Arkan’s in that town, but rather these were members of the special police reserve force who, you know these victims could not recognise, but due to media reports and so and they start constructing certain identifications by themselves. So this is something which I learned on several cases and which I to this day still use. I double check each and every source which I have multiple times. 

Stephanie: And just for context, sorry, the pair of the White Eagles and the Arkan’s men that Hikmet is talking about, those are all paramilitary formations, which is also why he checked with Iva because Iva knows every paramilitar 

Iva Vukusic: No, Iva doesn’t know… But she would very much like to and she’s trying. Iva is trying. 

Stephanie: Iva is trying that’s for sure 

Janet: And Jennifer do you have a mistake that you’d like to share with us? 

Jennifer Trahan: Yeah, I guess earlier on in my career, I probably wrote a lot about forms of international justice for countries, a little bit too much in a bubble of what politics will allow. And there are just so many political limitations. We’re obviously not talking about creating a Syria tribunal or a Myanmar tribunal through the ICC. So now we have to see, okay, what can be done? But at the same time, I think it’s important not to give up the big dreams. So you have to have a foot in reality of what politics will allow, and I try to teach this to my students as well. But don’t forget the big dream and still say, no, someday a Syria tribunal will preserve the evidence for it. So it is kind of this combination that I probably didn’t have right in the early years of dream big and understand the political realities, but don’t stop dreaming big. 

Stephanie:  Finally, we kept the last question the same, which is what are you reading, watching, listening to that you can recommend? And we’ll go reverse order. So, we’ll ask Jennifer first. 

Jennifer Trahan: What I’ve been consumed with doing has been simply re-reading the proofs of my book that I know by the time this broadcast is aired will hopefully have since been published. And it is entitled, Existing Legal Limits to Security Council Veto Power in the Face of Atrocity Crimes. And it’s coming out, I hope, in late June by Cambridge University Press. 

Janet: Great, well, we’ll look out for that. And what about you, Hikmet? 

Hikmet Karcic: There are two things right now which I’m reading and watching. Firstly, I love reading local judgments, so I have a huge, you know… Stock of localised local judgments from courts. I’m reading them before bedtime. And the other thing is I’m watching currently a BBC series called The Saltberry Poisonings, which are about the FSB poisoning of a former FSB double agent. And it’s quite good. So I’m still in the process. I’ve passed first season, episode three. 

Janet: And Iva? 

Iva Vukusic: I’m going to recommend something that I’ve already read a while ago but I think it speaks to really well to our discussion today. So one is a book called Some Kind of Justice by Diane Orentlicher. I would say one of the best things that came out on the ICTY. She systematically goes through many of the issues that we were talking about today so for anyone who is interested in this kind of stuff in more depth I really recommend that book. And another thing also I watched it a while ago but I think it’s really great and I would recommend it it’s a net Netflix documentary called devil next door and it’s about John Demjanjuk. And I think it’s really well done because it goes far beyond the story of demianuke himself it uses a lot of archival material but I think it raises deep important questions about the nature of prosecutions and the limits of trials and you know, the the limits of what can be accomplished by this endeavour at all. And I think for anyone who is interested in this, I would really highly recommend it. 

Stephanie:  Well, thank you all so much for taking the time out and all these different technical things that we’re making you do in Sarajevo and in New York. So thanks very much for talking to us. And we will keep having this conversation about what international justice means, what it means to victims, what it could mean or actually does do. 

Janet: Great, thank you very much everybody. Thank you. 

Iva Vukusic: Thank you!

Jennifer Trahan: Thank you!  

Hikmet Karcic: Thanks! 

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