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

y members of all three major ethnic groups. Journalist Gojko Berić describes the prevailing
Serb discourse this way: “Serbs, as is well known, would like to equalize those war crimes,
make them relative by using the thesis that all three sides committed crimes in wartime and
they claim that only Serbs are being prosecuted in The Hague—which of course is notorious
nonsense.” 596
Our interviews in the Republika Srpska (RS) town of Foča, where “ethnic cleansing” was
brutally effective, captured in microcosm what is said to be the prevailing discourse among
Bosnian Serbs. Josip Davidović, who represents an association of families of Serb soldiers
killed during the war, expressed what he described as the common view in Foča:
The opinion that rules this town … is that all war crimes by all sides should be prosecuted,
on all three sides. But we believe that the war crimes against Serbs are not prosecuted
in the same volume as in the case of war crimes against Bosniaks and Croats.
We also stand on the opinion that The Hague is established to bring Serbs to trial…. We
also stand on the opinion that The Hague is a political court. 597
As we noted in Chapter III, Foča has the chilling distinction of being the first town in
history to produce a verdict finding that sexual slavery occurred in circumstances amounting
to the crime against humanity of enslavement. When asked if he thought the defendants
from Foča who had been convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity deserved to
be punished, Davidović said “yes,” and added: “All those who committed war crimes deserve
to be tried… Whoever committed crimes should be brought before the face of justice.” Yet
like many Bosnian Serbs, he insists that the number of persons the ICTY has prosecuted for
crimes committed against Serbs is “so minor compared to trials against Serbs. It’s almost
negligible.” As for the sentences imposed on the Foča defendants—the same sentences victims
from Foča found painfully short598 — Davidović told us that “public opinion” among Serbs in
Foča is that the sentences “are too high.” 599
Noting that several of the ICTY’s defendants came from “this town,” Gordan Kalajdžić,
an officer of an RS veterans’ group in Foča, continued: “It’s our opinion that the guilt is individual
and everyone should be responsible for what he did. So my organization never stood
behind those [defendants]. If they have committed war crimes, they should be held responsible.”
Going farther than Josip Davidović in acknowledging the broader truth of patterns of
abuses during the war, Kalajdžić says, “The truth is the Bosniaks were the major victims. They
suffered the most.” Yet he also went farther than Davidović into the dominion of denial, saying
that the executions of Muslims in Srebrenica were a “gesture of revenge by one segment of
the Serb army for what the Bosnian Army did to Serbs in the first two years of the war.” And,
he said, “it takes two to fight.” Like Davidović, Kalajdžić told us, “We Serbs see [the Hague
Tribunal] as a political court” that does not treat everyone equally. 600
92 TRUTH AND ACKNOWLEDGMENT