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

the gap between Bosnians’ expectations of justice and their perceptions of the ICTY’s actual
achievements, it is important to emphasize at the outset that the victims we interviewed believe
that what they experience as imperfect justice is infinitely preferable to none at all. Like many
of our Bosnian interlocutors, journalist Gojko Berić distinguished his concerns about discrete
aspects of the ICTY’s performance from his core belief in its worth: “My complaints are all
about the methods of [the Tribunal’s] work, but this is not the essence.” 8 Indeed, our Bosnian
interviewees were keen to ensure that we did not misinterpret their criticisms of the ICTY as
a judgment that its creation was misguided.
That said, there is a large distance between Bosnians’ original expectations and their
perceptions of what the ICTY has achieved seventeen years on. Many Bosnians had “great,
great expectations of international justice” 9 in the Tribunal’s early years. Some of their expectations,
at least in retrospect, were unrealistic and laid the ground for disappointment. Many
hoped that the Tribunal would prosecute virtually all war criminals—a staggering prospect in
view of the scale of atrocities committed during the 1990s Balkan wars. That the ICTY began
its work by indicting lower-level perpetrators may have reinforced these hopes, while also
diverting precious resources from the more important task of prosecuting the masterminds
of mass atrocity. 10 With no outreach program in place for the first six years of its existence,
moreover, the ICTY had no formal process for managing expectations in Bosnia or for making
sense of actions that, however justified, often seemed incomprehensible to victims some
2,000 kilometers away.
This study takes a closer look at other aspects of the ICTY’s performance that have
either frustrated victims’ expectations or gone farthest in meeting them. 11 In the first category,
several emerged repeatedly in our interviews:
Sentencing patterns. ICTY sentences have on the whole been cause for profound disappointment
and at times anger among victims and others in Bosnia. Individuals whom the
ICTY has convicted of war crimes12 have received sentences as light as two, three, five, six,
seven and eight years’ imprisonment and are typically granted early release. In the eyes of
most victims, sentences this short lack any just proportion to the gravity of crimes for which
they were imposed. Short sentences, made even shorter by early release, have at times had
another painful consequence: Victims who have testified in The Hague soon find themselves
enduring the daily indignity of encountering the defendants against whom they testified,
now their neighbors. Beyond sentence lengths, moreover, many are highly critical of seeming
inconsistencies in ICTY sentencing.
Guilty pleas. Many Bosnians expressed particular unease with steep reductions in sentences
accorded defendants who have pleaded guilty. While this is partly a function of the
fact that plea agreements were not part of Bosnia’s legal tradition until recently, this is hardly
the whole explanation. Many Bosnians associate plea bargaining with two well-known ICTY
cases, each of which produced problematic results. The first defendant to plead guilty before
the ICTY, Dražen Erdemović, received a sentence of five years for his role as an executioner
14 INTRODUCTION