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

their names are not publicly disclosed in judgments; their identity is obscured in court, for
example—enjoy little protection when they return home, if home is still in Bosnia. 573 Although
a majority of these witnesses have not faced serious problems as a result of their testimony,
some have been harassed and even been targets of violence. 574
During our interviews with members of victims’ associations in Republika Srpska, this
concern came up regularly. Emsuda Mujagić, who leads an NGO based in Kozarac, said that
“protected witnesses … as a matter of fact have no protection whatsoever.” She says that the
combined effect of defendants’ short sentences and the lack of meaningful protection for witnesses
once they return home, “means a continuation of the torture for the victims today.” 575
So it is noteworthy that many witnesses who have every reason to say “enough” say they
will testify before the ICTY whenever called to do so. 576 Nusreta Sivac has been a witness in The
Hague several times. A judge before the war, Sivac has been unable to return to her chosen
profession, reportedly as retaliation by local Serb authorities for her testifying in The Hague.
Indeed, she has been unable to find employment in the municipality where she lives, and has
to commute to a town in the Federation for work. Despite the price Sivac has paid and the fact
that “her freedom is under threat,” her associate Emsuda Mujagić notes, Sivac has ultimately
remained willing to bear witness when asked because she knows what her testimony “means
to justice, which has a higher importance.” 577
For many witnesses, testifying before the ICTY is important for reasons that can easily
get lost in Bosnians’ long list of legitimate concerns. Their chief reason is moral, not instrumental,
and it sifts down to a deeply felt need to bear witness for those who did not survive
“ethnic cleansing.” In his study of ICTY witnesses, Stover writes that a majority of those he
interviewed “stressed the compelling need to tell their story. They had survived unspeakable
crimes while others had perished; it was their ‘moral duty’ to ensure that the truth about the
death of family members, neighbors, and colleagues was duly recorded and acknowledged.” 578
Time and again, we heard of similar motivations for testifying before the ICTY. Muharem
Murselović, the returnee activist in Prijedor, was detained in the infamous Omarska camp
for the crime of being Muslim and has been a willing witness in several ICTY cases. Like the
witnesses described in Stover’s study, Murselović testifies out of a deep sense of duty toward
those who perished: “I am obliged to witness, to testify on behalf of hundreds of my friends
who have been murdered in Prijedor whose guilt was the same as mine. I survived that hell
and I never regretted for the fact that I witnessed.” 579
Goran Jelisić played a notorious part in the “ethnic cleansing” of Brčko. In its summary
of the Jelisić case, the ICTY Web site recalls Jelisić’s arrival in Brčko during the war: “He introduced
himself as the “Serb Adolf,” said that he had come to Brčko to kill Muslims and often
informed the Muslim detainees and others of the numbers of Muslims he had killed.” Hundreds
of Muslim and Croat men and several women were taken to the Luka camp, formerly
a warehouse just outside of Brčko, where they were “under armed guard and systematically
killed.” Almost every day during that period, Jelisić “entered the Luka camp’s main hangar
86 ACHIEVEMENTS, FAILURES, AND PERFORMANCE