Defence Forces Review 2008

Defence Forces Review 2008
in this whole area, but while the issue of command and control may be an extremely difficult
and perhaps impossible one to resolve, there is little doubt that the use of the war crimes
process to further political ends or to incite hatred must be prevented in the future.
My own personal experience of the failure of peace implementation to address the abject abuse
of the war crimes process relates to an incident involving a Prisoner Exchange Commissioner
of one of the former warring factions. At one point in 1997, there emerged a widespread
belief that there existed a ‘secret list’ of forty seven people indicted by the Hague Tribunal.
The mere belief of the existence of such a list is obviously going to run counter to any peace
process and indeed if such a list existed at any time, it would undermine the fabric of law
on the part of anybody responsible for drawing it up. It is accepted that there will always be
situations where investigating authorities in any criminal matter may have to work employing
an element of secrecy; quite often this will be an integral part of some investigations. In
the case of this particular ‘secret list’, it was immediately obvious that some elements were
going to use it to foster their own ends and a leading article appeared in a major Sarajevo
newspaper claiming that the Prisoner Exchange Commissioner’s name was included on the
list and suggesting quite openly that the man was a war criminal. At this point in time, I
had recently managed to bring about a situation where the Commissioner in question was
cooperating quite well with me in relation to exhumations and from my own knowledge
of the man, he had not been involved in the commission of any acts during the conflict that
might give rise to an accusation against him. This, however, was not my major concern as it
was based purely on my own opinion of the man; my concern was that there had been what
was tantamount to a finding of guilt on the part of a newspaper whose reputation for fairness
had often been very much in doubt. My response was to openly bring the newspaper to task
and demand a retraction based on the fact that the man had never been either accused much
less tried by a competent court of law. This was an attempt on my part to try to diffuse the
fallout that I fully expected from the newspaper’s propaganda. The result was not what I
expected and within two days of my calling for a retraction based on the whole question of
fair procedures, the same newspaper afforded me front page headlines and accused me of
being the “defender of war criminals”. Needless to say, my reaction to this particular piece
of nonsense was what one might expect and I immediately contacted the International Media
Commission based in Sarajevo and made a formal complaint calling for immediate action.
Unfortunately, the response of the Commission was silence and to me such silence was not
conducive to what we were trying to achieve in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Of course there was
an upside in that there was an immediate and very obvious indication of increased trust on the
part of the entity to which the Prisoner Exchange Commissioner belonged and this resulted
in a far more cooperative attitude on their part to our work and indeed this had far reaching
consequences in other areas. The ’silence’ on the part of the Media Commission was indicative
of the lack of cohesion between the various elements of the International Community charged
with implementing the peace process. Unfortunately, the belief in the existence of a ‘secret
list’ continued for some time and without any denial on the part of the UN. This failure did
not help the reputation of the Hague Tribunal with the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina nor
indeed did it help to contribute to cooperation with the Tribunal.
Leaving aside issues such as war crimes and other sometimes emotive issues for which
there is often no readily identifiable acceptable course of action, it is perhaps important to
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