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

they are in the shadow of Karadžić and Mladić. Many ordinary people can’t see the good things
the ICTY has done” with these two men still at large. 513 Jasminka Džumhur made much the
same point when we interviewed her in June 2007. Noting that it is not the ICTY’s fault that
Karadžić and Mladić were then still at large, she said that its inability to gain custody of the
two men would “reflect on the whole work of the Hague Tribunal. People will forget all other
prosecutions” if the ICTY were to close without trying these two. 514 Reflecting on the ICTY’s
overall record, Mirsad Tokača put the point even more strongly: “They didn’t finish a lot of
things because of Karadžić and Mladić. Without these two persons it was a total failure…. What
was the purpose, why [did] we spend such a lot of money for the Tribunal, if we haven’t been
able to bring the main people to justice?” 515
Sevima Sali-Terzić suggested (as many international commentators have) that the fact
that the two fugitives “don’t live freely, they have to hide” is “one of the biggest positive things”
the ICTY has achieved. Despite “all those flaws and problems,” she explained, this showed
that “somebody knew the crimes and can shame those who committed them.” 516 Yet, she
continued, the delay in arresting them had significantly impaired the ICTY’s potential for
contributing to reconciliation, perhaps irreparably: “In the beginning, it was possible to have
improvements with justice. But ten years after the failure to arrest Karadžić and Mladić, it’s
too late. Our ethnic relations are terrible.” 517 (Sali-Terzić added that this state of affairs is not
solely due to the failure to arrest Karadžić and Mladić, however.) Many of our interlocutors
recognized that the ICTY itself is not to blame for the failure of others to arrest these men.
Yet the fact that they were able to elude apprehension is widely seen to have “diminishe[d] the
effects of the ICTY.” 518
5. The arrest of Radovan Karadžić
During our final visit to Bosnia in July 2009, we tried to understand how far the arrest of
Radovan Karadžić one year earlier had gone in redeeming this failure. For many, the long
overdue arrest produced a jumble of mixed emotions. Nidžara Ahmetašević recalled the rush
of emotions many experienced upon learning of his capture:
People were very happy and at the same time very sad. In the first moment people
were on the streets celebrating. In the second moment, when reality hit them, people
became really sad because they had to wait so long. There were many who cried that
day, because, okay, it was so easy to do that [yet] he was free all that time. So it was very
mixed. 519
When asked how she felt when she learned of Karadžić’s arrest, Srebrenica survivor
Hatidža Mehmedović replied: “We were sad, even then, for the fact that he was rewarded by
being able to live as a free person for so long despite the fact that our families were murdered
78 ACHIEVEMENTS, FAILURES, AND PERFORMANCE