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

group’s satisfaction somewhat differently, Piotrovski’s observation captures in broad brush the
fundamentally different overall assessment of each group’s members.
With one exception noted below, various surveys of public attitudes toward the ICTY
have found that Bosniaks have the most positive attitude toward the Tribunal, Serbs have the
most negative views of the ICTY, and Croats are somewhere between these two. Broadly speaking,
positive attitudes toward the ICTY have tended to correlate with the degree to which the
ICTY has prosecuted perpetrators who committed atrocities against members of the survey
respondents’ own ethnic communities and to correlate negatively with the degree to which
suspects prosecuted by the ICTY come from respondents’ ethnic group. 238
The largest majority of perpetrators indicted by the ICTY (roughly two-thirds) are ethnically
Serb, and residents of the predominantly Serb Republika Srpska (RS) have the lowest
regard for the Tribunal in Bosnia. 239 A 2002 survey found that 3.6 percent of those surveyed in
Republika Srpska trusted the ICTY, 240 while 50.5 percent of those surveyed in the Federation
trusted the Tribunal. 241 When results within RS are broken down by ethnicity, the relevance
of this factor to the survey results is even more dramatic: 1.8 percent of the RS respondents
who identified themselves as Serb said they trusted the ICTY; 42.2 percent of RS respondents
who identified themselves as “other” (non-Serb) said they trusted the Tribunal. Within the
Federation, there was significantly higher trust in the ICTY among respondents who identified
themselves as Muslim (70.2 percent) than those who identified themselves as Croat (14.4
percent). 242
Surveys undertaken by PRISM Research every several months from April 2001 to May
2004 show a significantly different breakdown when the survey question is “To what degree
do you support the work of the ICTY?,” but the ethnic division remains clear: Over a period
from April 2001 to May 2004, the percentage of Serbs who said they support the Tribunal’s
work ranged from 17.60 percent to 32.90 percent; the percentage of Bosniaks who said they
support its work ranged from 89.10 percent to 92.50 percent; while the percentage of Croats
who said they support the Tribunal’s work ranged from 47.80 percent to 68.70 percent. 243
One survey, which the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) commissioned
in 2005, produced a somewhat different picture: While it, too, found that the percentage
of respondents who had a positive attitude toward the ICTY was significantly higher in the
Federation than in RS, a higher percentage of Croat respondents (31.9 percent) than Bosniak
respondents (24 percent) said they thought the ICTY “has done a good job and justified its
existence.” As usual, Serb respondents came in lowest, with 18.8 percent responding affirmatively.
244 A different pattern of responses emerged when the question asked was whether the
ICTY has “not done a good job, but is necessary.” On this, 46.4 percent of Bosniak respondents,
22.2 percent of Croat respondents, and 29.8 percent of Serb respondents responded
affirmatively. 245 The disparity between Bosniaks’ responses to these two questions may suggest
that many Bosniaks still see the ICTY as necessary in principle but are growing increasingly
disappointed in its performance.
THAT SOMEONE GUILTY BE PUNISHED 49