Volume 10 Numbers 2/3

Spring/Summer 2001

Feature: The Future of the Former Yugoslavia

War Crimes and Civil Society
Natasa Kandic

The armed conflicts in the territory of the former Yugoslavia ended de jure with the signing of the Dayton Accord in 1995 and the Kumanovo Agreement in 1999. That these agreements did not, in fact, put an end to violations of international humanitarian law in some areas is evident from the request of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to the UN Security Council to extend its mandate in Kosovo to cover the period after June 9, 1999, the day that representatives of the Yugoslav Army and NATO signed the Military-Technical Agreement in Kumanovo.

Human-rights violations have continued in full sight of the international administration, even after new governments have come into office in the states created in the territory of the former Yugoslavia as well as in Kosovo. There is more than enough information to suggest that one of the main reasons for this state of affairs lies in the fact that the new national governments, and the international administration, have not ceased to rely on institutions and individuals responsible, during the armed conflicts, for serious human-rights abuses in the first place. This bias toward continuity, so called, has placed the new governments in a subordinate position with respect to the truth about human-rights violations in the past. The influence of ideologies of "national heroes" and "victims" has not ceased. A new ideology-rule of law-appears only sporadically and is constantly under threat of being submerged by the old ones.

Serbia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia are the most drastic instances of this. The new government has accepted, declaratively, the obligation to comply with international standards, including cooperation with The Hague Tribunal. In reality, however, its positions are the same as those of the former Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic. Although the new government includes politicians who take the position that all those who have been indicted, including the ex-president, politicians, generals, and military officers, should be handed over to The Hague Tribunal, the majority have deferred to the view of Yugoslav president Vojislav Kostunica who says that cooperation with the Tribunal "is not the ultimate goal nor a vital national interest" (Politika, February 14, 2001). In another statement to the press (Glas Javnosti, February 14, 2001), President Kostunica said the tribunal was "too narrow to deal with the wars in the former Yugoslavia." Speaking of the extradition of his predecessor [which subsequently occurred on June 28], he said "the moment someone else, military and political leaders from Croatia and Bosnia, appears before the Tribunal, our decision not to extradite those who have been indicted will automatically change."

Under international pressure, President Vojislav Kostunica announced that, in order to comply with its international obligations, the government would start preparations for the adoption of a law on cooperation with The Hague Tribunal, adding that it would take several months. This is something we have already seen. The former Croatian government also used the nonexistence of a law on cooperation and extradition of Croatian citizens as an excuse. The drafting and passing of the act lasted for months, after which the Croatian government was forced to hand over the indicted Bosnian Croats, including General Tihomir Blaskic. Seen off from Croatia as a national hero, Blaskic was sentenced by the tribunal's judges to 45 years in prison. When the new government came to power in Croatia, certain elected public officials stated that they would protect no one from international criminal responsibility. Recently, however, they were confronted with the Norac case. Tens of thousands of people chanted "We are all Norac," protesting against the government's intention to have General Mirko Norac arrested for crimes committed in 1991 against Croatian Serbs in the town of Gospic. A "Norac case," even fiercer, is bound to happen in Serbia, too, since many government figures have made it clear that they are protecting former politicians and military and police commanders whose duty, presumably, during the armed conflicts, was to prevent and punish war crimes. The new Yugoslav president has opposed the dismissal of generals and senior police officials who were appointed by Slobodan Milosevic, some of whom have already been indicted and all of whom were in command positions at a time when serious breaches of international humanitarian law were committed in Bosnia and in Kosovo.

There is still no authority or political force in the territory of the former Yugoslavia that would consider bringing out the truth about human-rights abuses in the past as a primary national interest. The right to the truth is both individual and collective: an individual victim has the right to know what happened and so does the public. And there is also the right to information: the authorities are obligated to enable access to information on human-rights abuses that occurred in the past. With a view to reconciliation, nongovernmental organizations in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1998 launched an initiative to establish a truth commission. The idea was endorsed by parliamentary deputies and religious leaders in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the campaign was supported by the Washington Institute for Peace and other experts, among them Richard Goldstone, a former ICTY prosecutor and chairman of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It would seem the campaign's greatest contribution was that it heightened awareness that the right to know the truth about past human-rights abuses is both an individual and a public right. The fact that the Croatian government turned down a proposal by Yugoslav Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic for the establishment of a joint Yugoslav-Croatian Truth Commission, on the grounds that this was a job for the courts, indicates that the issue requires a complex and subtle approach, primarily with regard to the legal conditions and the reality. And the reality is that we have politicians who want their national heroes to be exempted from the jurisdiction of The Hague Tribunal.

The new postwar governments did not win elections because they offered, and their electorates accepted, programs for establishing the truth of and responsibility for atrocities in the past or reconciliation with neighbors on the basis of individual responsibility. In Serbia, the opposition won the elections only because the people voted against Slobodan Milosevic. It would be unrealistic to expect any national government in the territory of the former Yugoslavia to initiate a process demythologizing its national heroes or its war goals and interests. Some politicians, governed by their personal views and the general interest, will raise the issue of "the dark world," as Croatian President Stipe Mesic described the support and defense of "war heroes." At the same time, some politicians in Serbia claim, to this day, that they "do not know exactly" what happened in Srebrenica. As long as the new government in Serbia or any other government in the territory of the former Yugoslavia appoints to high office wartime police and military commanders, as has been the case in Serbia, the truth about atrocities committed in the past will be guarded as jealously as any of the most vital national secrets.

I think that civil society has a primary role to play in determining the truth about human-rights violations. In Croatia, Montenegro, and in Serbia, many prominent representatives of civil society, mainly from nongovernmental organizations, have become government officials. Assuming that they will not trade their beliefs for high positions, they could make a significant contribution to reforming the system and establishing civil values. Experience in other countries has shown that civil initiatives play an irreplaceable role in creating the conditions in which the issue of truth about the past can be raised. Practice has shown that truth commissions are just one of several national mechanisms that can be employed to bring out the truth about atrocities, and that their success depends on national politicians. There are other models and instruments that can serve the same purpose, such as official commissions of inquiry, fact-finding committees devoted to specific cases, national human-rights committees, and civil claims for damages or compensation. The "confession for immunity" system was applied and produced results in South Africa. But none of them can be a substitute for criminal trials. Hard times lie ahead for the states that have emerged in the territory of the former Yugoslavia. Should they finally decide to uncover the truth about the atrocities that have been committed their best safeguard against vengeance and the phenomenon of national heroes is The Hague Tribunal. Civil society can contribute to achieving this goal by campaigning for the right to know the truth, the right of the public to know what happened in the past, and for the obligation of the authorities to provide access to necessary information.

Ivan Zvonimir Cicak: War crimes are very important. The pursuit of war criminals is a test for the future of our societies-for the development of civil society. But the pursuit is not civil society. In communist times there was no civil society. The communist system was a totalitarian system. The state was everything. The beginnings of civil society in the European communist states started sometime after the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe [or CSCE, now the OSCE] of August 1975. The famous human-rights "basket" was mentioned in just one sentence, but that one sentence was the beginning of our engagement. So, an assembly of individuals and groups that had the courage and enthusiasm to monitor human rights' violations under communism became the substitute for an opposition, democracy, and human rights. Strictly speaking, they had no knowledge of the meaning of human rights. I can see here some of my friends who were with me in that effort during the period of communism. Even now, twenty and some years later, we are again on the same job, not at the very beginning, but more or less at the beginning.

We live in societies that do not respect tolerance. So we started from nothing. Some of us had something like a spiritual reflex. We wanted to do well and to help others. Was it a residue of our Christian education or of our communist education? I cannot say. People like Srdja [Popovic] and I collaborated even before the collapse of the Berlin wall, but more or less on an individual level-the wall of nationalism stood between us. For example, the Yugoslav Helsinki Committee, which was formed three years before the beginning of the war, had a subcommittee in Croatia. Its chairman was Vladimir Seks, the future president of Tudjman's parliament. Zarko Puhovski, the current president of the Croatian Helsinki Committee was his deputy. And members included Franjo Tudjman, Dobroslav Paraga, and others. Why such an odd arrangement? Under communism, the idea of human rights was a means toward the destruction of the system. We did not wish to correct the system. We did not wish to be the partners of the government in correcting the system.

We used the idea of human rights to destroy the system. In a similar vein, after the collapse of communism, many former violators of human rights latched onto the idea of human rights to destroy the new regimes. Their effort, however, developed under completely new circumstances. Why? Because we now had democratic elections. Formally speaking, these elections were democratic. Milosevic was elected three times and Tudjman two times-with the votes of the citizens of our countries. Those are facts. Under the circumstances, as movements for human rights, we had to be the partners, we had to be correctors-we had to correct the abuses. And that was a much more difficult job. When you have to correct, you have to have knowledge. You have to work out yourself how to be a partner and you have to contact the government. When the Croatian Helsinki Committee did its reports about human-rights abuses, including war crimes, we always sent the first copy of the report to the president of the republic. Why? We made him responsible with the knowledge that we transmitted- we made him responsible for correcting the abuses. We sent copies to the premier, to the procurator's office, to the Ministry of the Interior, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, making them all responsible.

I wrote the first article on the Gospic case [the execution of Serb civilians in the town of Gospic by the Croatian authorities in the fall of 1991] just seven days after it happened. I worked with Ivana Nizic, who investigated this case and who wrote the first report, and she sent it to Premier Greguric, who responded by writing, "We have information and we know that in Gospic about one hundred and sixty to two hundred persons were killed." So they knew. They did not do anything about it. So now, even through court statute, they are responsible for it, because it was not the obligation of the military administration to deal with that. And this is the reason why in Croatia we now have a bloc of parties, individuals, and groups that are against the investigation of human-rights abuses. An additional reason is our failure to develop civil society.

Why this failure? Before the January 2000 parliamentary elections in Croatia, the NGOs, notably the human-rights NGOs, were engaged in promoting a large electoral turnout. But the NGO scene was really a part of the opposition. Now, after the opposition's victory, the NGOs can enjoy the fruits of their action. It is rather like after a wedding; you begin to realize that your bride is not the best and the most perfect mate, but there is still a reluctance to criticize. So, what do we have now? There are no more initiatives for civil society through the NGOs.

Zdravko Grebo: As usual, I am a troublemaker. We are more or less sure what human rights are. But could we try to define civil society.

Ivo Banac: Would you like to do that?

Zdravko Grebo: The problem is that the whole discourse about civil society in the former Yugoslavia is something like wishful thinking. First of all, in Croatia, Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, perhaps less so in Slovenia, what happened was a very, very tragic coincidence-simultaneous change of regime, what we call transition, and war. We had no experience. Even at the universities and in the academic curriculum there was no such subject as human rights, not to mention civil society. I really admire the weak effort we made during the war, because what we had-as an NGO scene-was simply a new, united movement for the efforts of individuals, exactly as Cicak said. Would it not be better under the circumstances to discuss the institutions that substituted for the missing civil society-the media, the universities, cultural community, which really do exist? Maybe these are very disparate, but there are at least some people who really substitute for the missing civil society. For example, the representatives of several Sarajevo-based institutions, which we call the international community-OHR, OSCE, IPTF, SFOR- approached me asking for one good knowledgeable human-rights lawyer and were ready to pay. Unfortunately, my answer was that there is no such person in Sarajevo. There is no human-rights lawyer in Sarajevo, because it was simply not in our curriculum, it was not a part of our education. My law school still does not have a course, maybe with the exception of constitutional law, that teaches students about human rights. And the same applies to civil society. There are some associations, as Cicak said, but their members define themselves as independent intellectuals. There are several associations. But they are social clubs. I mean, they meet weekly, drink coffee, and discuss some topics without any kind of real chance to change things.

Srdja Popovic: I want to address a very practical and tactical issue. In my opinion, no civil society can develop in Serbia, in Yugoslavia, before the issue of war crimes has been resolved. The enormity of those crimes is such that, really, you cannot have any other agenda. This is so enormous, this involved. . . . The crimes are actually a big part of the identity of that society today. And there is enormous denial. And that denial can be understood-and I understand it-first of all as a consequence of the enormity of the crimes. The more terrible the crimes, the more likely it is that they are being denied; psychologically, it is understandable. The other thing is that during the past ten years too many people were involved, and those are, first of all, the voters who on a regular basis reelected Mr. Milosevic and gave him a further mandate to commit those crimes. But it is also the press, the journalists, academia, church, military, police, intellectuals, everybody of any consequence in that society-not literally, of course; there were a few exceptions. Left to themselves, no one would try anyone for war crimes in Yugoslavia. The society is too evil to prosecute anybody, try anybody, have public support for such trials, it's just out of the question. And at the same time, this very fact, of course, prevents civil society from developing, because civil society is a threat. So in my opinion, if anybody wants to work on building our civil society in Yugoslavia, the best he can do is to support The Hague Tribunal. If you are a journalist, a lawyer, a writer, a human-rights activist, a member of an NGO, the best you can do, practically, is to concentrate all your efforts on one single forum, and that is to support The Hague Tribunal, because that is the only place that can produce some kind of justice for society, regardless of who is in power.

Ivan Zvonimir Cicak: We have a paradox in our political situation. The autonomy movement in Dalmatia, historically, was always pro-Yugoslav, and it was always left wing. Now, we have warnings of a new autonomism in Dalmatia, which is-I would call it-turbo-nationalist and ethnically Croat, and, moreover, enabled by the extremist element in the Catholic Church. So you have separatism in Dalmatia, which is against Zagreb, somewhat like the situation when Zagreb was against Belgrade. Now we have a new situation: Split against Zagreb. And it is so strongly dividing the country, politically, that seven days ago you had huge demonstrations-150,000 people in Split, and two days ago, only 15,000 in Zagreb. That is a result of the new political reality.

At the time when Banac and I were in the Croatian Helsinki Committee, when Pero Mrkalj was alive, we worked at war crimes despite the unpopularity of the theme in our country. Now nobody does that. So how, then, to insist on the issue of war crimes? I agree that the truth about the war crimes has to be the dividing line between civil society and barbarism. That is it. I agree. But how to start the process? This is not just the problem of Serbia. In Bosnia and Croatia, too, we have to start a process of internal catharsis. We do not need truth commissions for the history of the last ten years. We need truth commissions for the history of the last fifty years, from the beginning of the Second World War, because the key to this war is the Second World War-the fact that we had no democratic denazification in Yugoslavia. And that is the problem. We have to do it now-to reopen the question of communist liquidations and massacres of civilians at the Srem front in Serbia, in Slovenia, in Croatia. . . .

Andrew Wachtel: I am looking at this from the outside, which is an advantage. There is an obvious paradox in the discussion. On the one hand, everyone agrees that it is very important to convince people that they should be investigating war crimes and eventually tackling the past of Yugoslavia. On the other hand, everybody says that no one wants to do this. So, the question for me is, How do you get people to want to do this? For comparative purposes, I do not think that the vast majority of Germans wanted the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War. The only reason the Nuremberg trials happened was because the United States-and its allies, including Russia-took over Germany and said, We are going to have these trials, whether you like them or not, we are going to force you to recognize what happened. Nobody is going to do that now. The United States army is not going to march into Belgrade, we are not going to walk in and arrest military leaders and others, lead them to The Hague, and force the Serbs-or the Croats-to confront war crimes. What we have tried to do is to say, with a carrot in one hand and the stick in the other, Would it not be good if you were to hand the war criminals over to The Hague? This does not work, obviously. And clearly it would be practical for the Western countries to be moving on. So, insofar as there are things that civil society could do in the former Yugoslavia, it strikes me that the most important thing that they could do would be not to convince their own societies that they need to investigate war crimes, because those societies will not be convinced of this now. They need to convince the international community that the post-Yugoslav governments should absolutely not be given any kind of aid, any kind of support, unless they hand these people over, because then you actually will have trials.

Miodrag Perovic: If my grandfather had known that when he beat his child he was committing a humanrights abuse. . . . For example, did the Crusaders know that they were violating human rights? I want to say that the concept of human rights is new and still alien to our culture-broadly speaking, in the Balkans- without exception. The concept is not inherited, not accepted as a way of life, as it is in Western Europe. Maybe people today understand that the world has changed, but, during the communist era, you had collaborators, police informers, who thought that they were patriots. So, I think that the only way to impose human rights as a valued concept, as a way of living and a way of thinking, is through education. Each culture must learn this.

The Montenegrin participation in the attack against Dubrovnik was understood as an evil thing from the point of view of our tradition, but not as a violation of human rights. That is why President Djukanovic apologized to Croatia. Human rights are a Western European concept. It cannot be introduced easily into Chinese culture or Balkan culture.

Nenad Canak: Again, I have a completely different understanding of this issue. I do not know if the human-rights idea belongs to the Montenegrin heritage, but it is very deeply involved in the heritage of Vojvodina. And it is not a question of changing one's heritage or something like that, but a question of how you'll behave toward someone, not how others will behave toward you. I am not insisting on reciprocity of that kind. I am talking about human rights in my value system; my value system understands respect for differences and the rights of every human being. So that is my understanding of human rights.

Anyway, I think that the first and most important point that I want to make on this is at this very moment, on the front page of today's New York Times [February 17, 2001]: "Bomb Kills Seven Serbs in Kosovo Convoy Guarded by NATO." It says: "Seven Serbs were killed and more than forty were injured today when a roadside bomb blew apart their bus in northeastern Kosovo in one of the boldest and bloodiest attacks NATO troops have seen in twenty months of peacekeeping. The attack, the second this week on a bus carrying Serbs and guarded by peacekeepers, was interpreted by Serbian leaders as a sign that extremists among the Kosovo Albanian majority will resist any move to disband armed Albanian insurgents who have taken control of a zone of southern Serbia. The assault today also hinted at more trouble for Kosovo peacekeepers. Almost immediately Serbs in Gracanica-a village just south of the Kosovo capital Pristina- retaliated by blocking the main road and burning at least one car belonging to the United Nations mission, which has administered the province since the NATO-organized bombing ended in June 1999." Everything is written here. Seven Serbs were killed- Serbs, not human beings, not people, not citizens of Kosovo. Serbian leaders, the democratic leaders who are now in power, immediately reacted by saying that this showed that the Albanians do not want peace. Then domestic Serbs in Kosovo reacted immediately by burning UN cars and some vehicles, something like that. So what we have here is a clear example of enticement by way of hate speech, the putting of things where they do not belong. We all remember Hitler's provocation on the border of Czechoslovakia, when he sent a prisoner unit in German uniforms. This is the very same thing. They are talking about Albanians who do not want peace without capturing the responsible people. How do you know that they were Albanians, how do you know who did it?

I say this, because I personally was in the war in 1991, and I listened to Croatian radio stations because I was in Slavonia at that time-in the occupation forces-and we heard the same things all the time. They would say that there were some very tough battles around this and that area. But since I was there I knew that there were no battles whatsoever. But it was important for Croatian propaganda to show that they were fighting. Pure lies. I was an eyewitness to all of that. So, insisting on the nationality of the victim and, all the time, putting every crime in the context of ethnic misunderstandings and ethnic atrocities is actually a way of perpetuating the crisis, and there will never be a way out without stopping this practice.

Slavko Perovic: I will first speak about human rights in Montenegro the way that I see them. I think that this can be very interesting, because an orthodox communist regime is hiding behind the so-called democratic leadership of Montenegro. In Yugoslavia, we had the most perfidious form of communist regime that existed anywhere. The system flirted with the West and gained a lot of advantages by so doing. And, because of its nature, it destroyed all independent institutions in Montenegro. The Montenegrin communist movement was the most orthodox in Yugoslavia and, since the disintegration of Yugoslavia, nothing has changed in Montenegro. On the contrary, the existing system in Montenegro controls a hermetically closed society that cultivates its own values and criteria, and these criteria are not concordant with the Western world, the world that it ostensibly gravitates toward. It seems to me that in the West a far nicer picture of Montenegro is being formed than is warranted by reality. Human rights have to be considered within this framework. The condition of human rights in Montenegro is very poor. We have another negative phenomenon, in that the particular independent institutions, nongovernmental organizations that were formed in order to protect human rights, have now crossed over into the government. Moreover, Montenegro has many black spots in recent history: Montenegro committed aggression against Croatia and Bosnia. Montenegro has to take responsibility for these crimes.

Very little is being done to address these issues. The Montenegrin authorities arrested a certain man who is presumed to be one of the participants in these atrocities. He is being tried before the elections because the government is interested in gaining Muslim votes. When I was the president of the Liberal League of Montenegro, I was tried for inflicting emotional suffering, during an electoral campaign on the current leadership. In the indictment, you will find a claim that the trial was organized in order to contribute to democratic processes in Montenegro.

Finally, there is a really difficult problem in Montenegro that has not been given enough attention and that can cause many new difficulties. This is the question of the Montenegrin Orthodox Church. Since 1921, the Serbian Orthodox Church has been active in Montenegro. The Serbian Orthodox Church is, by nature, an organization that did not concern itself with religion and faith in Montenegro, but rather it dealt with the assimilation of Montenegrins and the extirpation or denial of their national cultural heritage and identity. During the royalist interwar period, the problem could not even be discussed as it was prohibited by the Serbian authorities. A similar situation existed during the communist period. The autocephalous Montenegrin Orthodox Church was restored in 1993, and it has a huge number of followers in Montenegro. It is fighting for its rights, for the return of church property, and is struggling for recognition in Montenegro. All of these attempts are encountering great resistance on the part of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Let me finish by saying that the characteristic of the Montenegrin Orthodox Church was that it was tolerant of other religions, and that it nurtured and worked and supported the mutual toleration of all faiths and nationalities.

Teuta Arifi: I would like to turn our attention to the condition of human rights and civil society in Macedonia, and to the interethnic aspect of human rights. I would like to underline the interethnic aspect of human rights because in our society the issue of human rights is generally understood to encompass political rights; we are not concentrated, generally, on the individual aspect of human rights. This is certainly the case in Macedonia. In the human-rights reports by the US Department of State and international organizations we see a concentration on the human rights of Albanians, other minorities, and other aggregates. This is because the communication between the aggregates is a regional problem. The experience of ten years of Macedonian independence is marked by violence between the Macedonian police and the Albanian community. Six persons have died, all of them Albanians [as of February 2001]. When you have this kind of a situation, when you have the intervention of the police in the predominantly Albanian areas, the human-rights question will become a political problem, because it is a challenge to the stability of the country and the relations between the two communities.

There have been a number of recommendations to the Macedonian government, especially by the High Commissioner for National Minorities, concerning the participation of Albanians in the Macedonian police force. The Albanians in Macedonia make up 5 percent of the police force; this number is very low given the large presence of Albanians in society. So, in a situation where the police forces do not reflect the composition of the country, you have the problem of police intervention being seen as the intervention of a majority ethnic group against a minority ethnic group. We have not yet educated and trained Macedonian policemen to respect human rights. This complicates the tasks of the coalition government in which the Albanians participate. The Macedonian experience shows that building a peaceful society in a multiethnic country with a communist tradition is difficult and takes a great deal of investment. Macedonia is an interesting example of trying to find a solution within the given political system and with the agreement of the two communities.

As far as civil society is concerned, the most important task is the building of cultural tolerance. The media and civil society have not always played a positive role in this area, which suggests that the processes of integration are still incomplete. I shall give you one example. We have three national TV channels in Macedonia. The second channel is in the Albanian language, and the first one in Macedonian. The negotiations between the Albanian and Macedonian political parties always concerns the number of hours of Albanian language on television, so that the maximum now is nine hours. But the question that is not raised in the negotiations is why we do not have any Albanian programs on the Macedonian-language channel. Why don't we have a single Albanian writer presented in the curriculum of ethnic Macedonian students? Efforts at integration are more important than the number of Albanian-language hours on television.

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