That Someone Guilty Be Punished - Open Society Foundations

most profoundly affected by their work, including their effect on victims and perpetrators.
Yet these communities are among the most important audiences for the Tribunal’s work—in
the case of victims, because the justice the ICTY dispenses is their justice, and in respect of
perpetrators and the communities that abetted their crimes, for reasons we explore further
in this report.
In 2006, the Open Society Justice Initiative began a three-year project to examine local
perceptions of the impact of the ICTY in the former Yugoslavia, focusing on Serbia and Bosnia
and Herzegovina. In May 2008, the Justice Initiative published the first report resulting from
this study, Shrinking the Space for Denial: The Impact of the ICTY in Serbia. The International
Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) provided myriad contributions to that study, and joins
the Justice Initiative in producing this report.
That Someone Guilty Be Punished examines local perceptions of the ICTY’s impact in
Bosnia and Herzegovina (referred to in this report as “Bosnia” or “BiH”), the country that
endured the most extensive ravages of “ethnic cleansing” during the 1990’s Balkan wars. As
such, this report is above all an account of the ICTY’s impact on those who survived unspeakable
crimes. In addition, it examines the Tribunal’s impact on those who committed or silently
condoned wartime atrocities in Bosnia, and on Bosnia’s domestic capacity to ensure criminal
accountability for war crimes.
While this study is based upon extensive research of relevant sources, one of its principal
aims is to capture perceptions of the ICTY among Bosnians themselves. Their voices
infuse the narrative, and their perceptions and priorities largely inform the structure of this
account. This study describes Bosnians’ expectations of the ICTY—or as it is known in the
region, “the Hague Tribunal” or simply “The Hague”—comparing their hopes to the goals
enunciated by the Security Council when it created the Tribunal and by the ICTY itself. In
succeeding chapters, we examine Bosnians’ perceptions of how well the ICTY has succeeded
in meeting their original as well as evolving expectations and, to the extent possible, tie those
perceptions to specific aspects of the Tribunal’s performance. 1
One of the key challenges in a study of this kind is to disentangle victims’ inevitable
dissatisfaction with verdicts that cannot restore what they have lost forever from their disappointment
in imperfect legal processes. While recognizing the inherent difficulty of doing so,
we have done our best to distinguish between these two. We believe that a better appreciation
of both sources of disenchantment can improve future efforts to provide justice to victims of
atrocious crimes. With respect to the former, our interviews with Bosnians make abundantly
clear that, if nothing else, care must be taken to avoid raising unrealistic expectations of what
trials alone can achieve. Indeed, during numerous interviews over two and a half years, the
theme of “unrealistic expectations” arose often. With respect to the latter, our study identified
several respects in which the quality of justice surely can be improved.
12 INTRODUCTION