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

Kovačević, who was under indictment on genocide and other charges, and shot dead another
suspect, Simo Drljača, when he resisted arrest. The wartime chief of police in Prijedor, Drljača
inspired acute fear among displaced Bosniaks, and with good reason. He had “personally
obstruct[ed] the return of refugees and displaced persons” after the war “by giving weapons
to the local [Serb] population so that it could threaten anyone who came back.” 547 Belloni
describes the impact of this action:
The July 1997 events had a profound impact. Following SFOR’s overdue activism, [wartime
Prijedor leader] Milomir Stakić, fearing the possibility that ICTY had issued a
secret indictment for his arrest, went ‘on permanent vacation’. Instead of the feared
backlash against international peacekeepers, local authorities switched allegiance from
the hard line wartime leader Radovan Karadžić to the more moderate leadership of
Biljana Plavšić … These changes gave Bosniak potential returnees a sufficient sense of
security seriously to consider returning. 548
The following spring, some 10,000 Bosniaks returned to Kozarac, and others returned
to the city of Prijedor itself. 549 In the view of the International Crisis Group, “The lesson is
clear: the removal of suspects indicted for war crimes … has a ripple effect that can fundamentally
alter the disposition of an area towards [Dayton Peace Agreement] implementation.” 550
Our interviews in Prijedor a dozen years later suggest that the arrest of several key
figures, notably Drljača, probably were crucial to displaced persons’ willingness to return to
Prijedor. Moreover, the arrests of several other Prijedor suspects helped create a more conducive
atmosphere for returns if only because they led other war criminals in Prijedor to lie
low, fearing they might be next. Yet we repeatedly heard that the impact of the ICTY in this
respect was limited given the large number of war criminals who remained unindicted and
in positions of influence in Prijedor. We recount these views in the subsection that follows.
First, however, it is helpful to understand the view from Prijedor concerning who was, and
who was not, indicted by the ICTY.
2. The unindicted
Of course, Bosnia is full of crimes that no one has been prosecuted for. 551
The Trial Judgment in the case of Milomir Stakić, the most senior person from Prijedor to
face trial before the ICTY, describes in passing how Radovan Vokić arranged for the transfer
on two buses of some 120 Muslim men from Keraterm, a detention camp to which they had
been taken from their homes in Prijedor the day before, to the Omarska camp. One of the
trial witnesses had compiled a list of “about 60 people he knew personally who were taken
away on those buses and killed.” 552 The corpses of some of the victims were found buried in
82 ACHIEVEMENTS, FAILURES, AND PERFORMANCE