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

emorse for crimes committed in their name. For many, this is seen as a precondition to
reconciliation; for others, this type of acknowledgment is seen as a proxy for reconciliation—
a key indicator of how far Bosnia has come in the process of social repair.
The issue of acknowledgment by Serbs looms especially large in the aspirations of many
(non-Serb) Bosnians for another reason. As we noted in Chapter III and discuss in more detail
here, denial has been a distinctive, though hardly uniform, feature of Serb discourse about
wartime atrocities committed by Serbs. As Saša Madacki put it, “one part of the country is in
constant denial.” 587 Serbs’ unwillingness to acknowledge the complete truth of “ethnic cleansing”
has deepened survivors’ personal suffering and perpetuated the social rupture between
Bosnia’s ethnic communities. Journalist Gojko Berić evoked the latter when, speculating about
what would happen if the ICTY were to convict Radovan Karadžić of genocide but this finding
were rejected by Bosnian Serbs, he said: “It’s not justice. In that case, we will have no trust
among people.” 588
Looking to broader issues of political community, persistent forms of denial are antithetical
to the notion of a national society that has achieved “common agreement on an interpretation
of the past.” 589 Although no one we interviewed believes that dispelling the fog of denial
or justification would come solely or even principally through the work of the ICTY, those who
emphasized this point hoped that the Tribunal’s findings of individual guilt, achieved through
the crucible of criminal process, would radically shrink the margins of plausible denial. 590
Many of our interlocutors—in particular urban intellectuals—emphasized that in their
view, a crucial indicator of the ICTY’s success in fostering acknowledgement is whether leaders
and citizens within each of the country’s three major ethnic groups accept that members
of their own ethnic group committed atrocities and acknowledge that this was wrong. Some
made clear that this is important not only as a gesture of reciprocal acknowledgment and
remorse. It is also, they say, how it will be clear that Bosnia has transcended the divisions
that make most citizens view matters of consequence, such as responsibility for war crimes,
through an ethnic prism. What is important is that Bosnians recover a common commitment
to core values—that war crimes are wrong, whoever commits them.
In this chapter we address two principal questions: First, to what extent have Bosnians
taken on board the factual conclusions set forth in ICTY judgments and acknowledged that
wartime atrocities committed by members of their own ethnic group deserve unqualified
condemnation? Second, within the bounds of what is possible and appropriate for a judicial
institution, has the ICTY performed as well as it could in ensuring that facts established in its
judgments as well as basic information about the nature of its work, are known and understood
in Bosnia?
90 TRUTH AND ACKNOWLEDGMENT