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

3. Other confessions; general reactions
Although Emir Suljagić rued the plea agreement reached with Biljana Plavšić, he had been
more hopeful that a series of subsequent guilty pleas could contribute to reconciliation in
Bosnia. In the summer and fall of 2003, the ICTY saw a cascade of detailed confessions by
Bosnian Serb perpetrators, including several relatively senior commanders involved in the Srebrenica
massacre; 379 some provided crucial information not previously available as evidence. 380
Suljagić recalled that he had thought at the time these confessions were made that they would
finally pierce Bosnian Serbs’ wall of denial: “If you punched that wall, I thought the rest would
fall like dominoes. … I was really hopeful: ‘This is it, it’s happened now.’” 381
Suljagić hoped the detailed confessions of those who played commanding roles in the
Srebrenica massacre would “open up a space in the media that was not there before for others
to admit to wrongdoing; that [the confessions] would make it easier for Serbs who were
not complicit in crimes to talk to their non-Serb neighbors.” But, he continued, “it was not
that simple[;] obviously I was way too naïve.” 382 Still, the confessions had a profound personal
impact, even if their broader repercussions did not live up to Suljagić’s expectations. Soon
after one of the Srebrenica defendants pleaded guilty, Suljagić told a reporter: “I was crying in
court. When [the defendant] said, ‘I plead guilty,’ I ran upstairs and locked myself in the toilet
and cried my eyes out. It was a genuine relief to hear someone like him saying, ‘Yes, we killed
seven thousand or eight thousand people.’” 383
Looking beyond specific cases in which defendants entered into plea agreements, we
found a range of views about the practice. Some of our Bosnian interlocutors emphasized that
defendants who committed crimes of singular gravity should get a sentence commensurate
with the crime, and that this moral minimum must be honored regardless of whether defendants
confess and cooperate with the prosecution. Zdravko Grebo expressed a variation on this
theme when he said, whatever utility plea agreements may have in ordinary criminal cases,
they are “questionable, both from a legal and moral point of view,” in war crimes cases. “Can
you bargain about war crimes?,” he wondered. 384 Sead Golić, whose brother was killed during
the conflict, said simply: “We, the families of the victims, are not satisfied. We are not pleased
with bargaining between the court and the perpetrators. It doesn’t give us any satisfaction.” 385
Others emphasized specific aspects of the ICTY’s approach to guilty pleas that they
have found especially problematic. Just as Emir Suljagić was pained by the distinguished
witnesses who testified in apparent support of Biljana Plavšić, 386 Omarska survivor Mirsad
Duratović said that in addition to excessively lenient sentences, what “is very offensive to me”
is that defendants who plead guilty in The Hague—people who have committed unspeakable
atrocities—“get praised by the court for being very cooperative.” 387
Duratović cited another concern that is of particular importance to many survivors.
Darko Mrd¯a, one of the ICTY defendants who pleaded guilty in the summer of 2003, was
among those who bore major responsibility for one of the more notorious wartime mass
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