That Someone Guilty Be Punished - International Center for ...

is standard procedure for prosecutors’ offices, the ICTY prosecutor has not clarified the circumstances
behind this episode or indicated why efforts were not made to allow access to the
destroyed artifacts for purposes of DNA testing and the like.
Survivors who have literally lost every tangible trace of their families were devastated,
fearing that their only chance at recovering a physical link to their loved ones had been
destroyed. 661 Forensics experts expressed concern that the ICTY could have destroyed material
that holds the key to determining the fate of those still missing—the personal truth which, as
we noted earlier, may be the most important truth for many survivors. 662 Mirsad Tokača, who
hopes that his database of wartime atrocities will help build the foundation for a “new culture
of memory based on facts, not politics,” describes the prosecutor’s destruction of artifacts as
“the biggest scandal of the Tribunal. Really, it’s the killing of memory.” 663
D. Ou treach
Most are in agreement—the ICTY didn’t get very close to the public in the former Yugoslavia.
It wasn’t that present for people. 664
Clearly, there is an enormous distance between the facts adjudicated in The Hague and the
reality that is either known or acknowledged some 2,000 kilometers away in Bosnia. With
judgments typically running hundreds of pages long, keeping abreast of the ICTY’s jurisprudence
is a challenge even for lawyers who specialize in international humanitarian law. But
for victims whose personal experiences form the facts set forth in ICTY verdicts, the Tribunal’s
judgments may be completely inaccessible: Those who suffered searing losses include large
numbers of rural and uneducated victims. Adjudicated facts aside, basic information about the
way the ICTY has operated—whom it has indicted, why defendants who plead guilty receive
reduced sentences and the like—has long been either manipulated by political and other leaders
or simply misunderstood by others. 665 A recent empirical study in Bosnia found that even
in places that had suffered the largest number of wartime casualties—places like Prijedor
and Srebrenica—people interviewed “as a whole were poorly informed about the Tribunal.” 666
And so two important questions are whether the ICTY itself could and should have
done more to bridge the gap between The Hague and Bosnia. As we note below, the Tribunal’s
efforts to do so began belatedly and, after that, were not sufficient to overcome deeply
entrenched misperceptions of both the Tribunal and the facts that it has established.
1. Early communication efforts
During the early years of the ICTY, the institution made scant efforts to communicate with
those most affected by its work—citizens of Balkan countries. To be sure, travel to wartime
THAT SOMEONE GUILTY BE PUNISHED 101