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

and killed.” Adding to her sadness, she said, was the realization that “Serbia and Montenegro
and a significant portion of Bosnia and Herzegovina knew where he was hiding [all along].
It was simply the politics that decided the moment he would be arrested.” 520 Many victims,
too, were offended by media coverage, which focused far more on Karadžić’s life on the run
than on the crimes that robbed them of their loved ones. 521 But if actions speak louder than
words, many victims reached a new plateau in their ascent from the deepest abyss of loss
and grief: they traveled to The Hague to see Karadžić in the dock. Ahmetašević characterized
victims’ reactions this way: “Okay, he’s there and now you know he will never come out again;
now I feel much better.” 522 For many, the trial of Radovan Karadžić holds forth a promise of
accomplishing what they had hoped a judgment in the Milošević case would: rounding out the
judicial record of genocide in Bosnia.
6. The continuing impunity of Ratko Mladić
But however important a judgment in the Karadžić case, Bosniaks almost universally say that
justice will not be served if the ICTY fails to gain custody over Ratko Mladić, who is widely
seen to be even more culpable than Karadžić. Though an eloquent wordsmith, Emir Suljagić
says “it’s really hard to verbalize” why he feels it so important to see Mladić—whom he met
while serving as a UN translator in Srebrenica—brought before the bar of justice. 523 Suljagić
does not expect any court, including the ICTY, to provide “catharsis.” But when Mladić is
brought to justice, he says, “I’m going to camp in The Hague for however long it takes. … [T]
his guy just needs to be removed from this society. This guy does not deserve to share this
world with us. It’s that simple for me. He doesn’t deserve to share this world with us. That’s
it. End of story.” 524
F. Impact on Returns
During interviews with ICTY officials in The Hague, several mentioned reports they had
received to the effect that the work of the Tribunal had had an impact on many individuals’
willingness to return to homes from which they had been “ethnically cleansed” during the
1990s, particularly in Prijedor. Only through an interpretive leap (one that our ICTY sources
did not make themselves) could this be seen as an intended aim of the ICTY. 525 Although the
right of return was enshrined in the Dayton Peace Accord, 526 lead responsibility for facilitating
the return of refugees and internally displaced persons was entrusted to the UN High Commissioner
for Refugees. 527
But while contributing to the return of persons forcibly displaced from their homes was
not an aim of the Tribunal, our sources in The Hague speculated that, if the accounts they had
heard were correct, the ICTY’s work might have contributed to such returns in two respects.
THAT SOMEONE GUILTY BE PUNISHED 79