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

We encountered another brand of non-acknowledgement when we interviewed Ljubiša
Simović, president of the Association of Displaced and Refugees in Republika Srpska. When
asked about the defendants from Foča who had been found guilty of bone-chilling crimes,
Simović could only talk about how upsetting their arrests had been. Indeed, he went on at
some length about how “traumatic” it was for the defendants’ families when SFOR troops
arrested the suspects. Like others, Simović said the ICTY did not treat all sides equally, but
instead focused on Serbs. Even so, he said “it was correct to form this court. But the way in
which it works,” he added, “is not OK.” 601
We heard a more determined form of denial from Nedjeljko Mitrović, president of the
Republika Srpska Association of Families of Missing Persons in the RS capital of Banja Luka.
Like others whom we interviewed in RS, Mitrović affirmed that “whoever committed war
crimes deserves to be punished” and even said that “whoever was prosecuted before the ICTY
deserves to be.” Yet he referred to the three and one-half year siege of Sarajevo by Bosnian
Serbs—for which two Bosnian Serbs have been convicted before the ICTY—as the “so-called
siege.” 602 In response to a request for clarification, Mitrović replied that Sarajevo was a “front
line” in a two-way war. When reminded that Serbs targeted civilians in Sarajevo throughout the
siege, he immediately conceded the point but moved on to what he apparently sees as firmer
ground: The ICTY is “one-sided, partial, biased.” 603
In these and other interviews we heard what might be seen as progress in the sense
that our Bosnian Serb interlocutors did not generally deny that Serbs committed specific
war crimes (Mitrović’s comments aside) and often said that those who did deserved to be
prosecuted. But many of our Bosnian Serb interlocutors went a long way toward neutralizing
the point by asserting that: 1) everyone committed war crimes; 2) it is mainly Serbs who are
prosecuted by a “political court”; and 3) the few Bosniaks who have been prosecuted have
received lenient sentences.
Later we consider several contextual factors accounting for Bosnian Serbs’ failure to
acknowledge fully and condemn war crimes committed by Bosnian Serbs. For now, we note
the relevance of a dynamic that one of our interlocutors in Foča, Josip Davidović, came close
to acknowledging: strong peer pressure. In a tone that suggested he realized how his remarks
must have sounded, Davidović said near the end of our interview: “You have to be partial or
biased when it is about your people, you have to be partial. This is an unwritten rule, regardless
of how much you would like it to be different.” 604
Davidović might have added that “you have to be partial” especially when speaking to
foreign interviewer who may quote your remarks in a public report. During interviews in
Prijedor, we were told that local Serbs “unofficially acknowledge” the ethnic cleansing that
happened there during the war but, with rare exception, will not do so publicly. One of the
few local Serbs who has acknowledged that Serbs in Prijedor committed “ethnic cleansing”
wholesale, Milimir Popović, told us “many [Serbs] talk like this but won’t come out and [do
so publicly].” 605
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