About 50 war crimes suspects from Bosnia may be tried locally when the country establishes its own war crimes court, the chief prosecutor of the United Nations tribunal said this week.
Carla del Ponte, on a two-day visit to Sarajevo, said the 50 were part of a group of 108 people the UN court at The Hague planned to indict. She did not elaborate on their alleged crimes, saying that the inquiries were continuing.
She and The Hague tribunal’s president, Claude Jorda, met Bosnia’s three-man presidency on Tuesday to discuss the creation of a war crimes council within Bosnia-Herzegovina’s new state court. The Hague tribunal sees the transfer of mid- and low-level cases to local judiciaries as a way to clear its case load from the 1992 to 1995 conflict and task the Bosnians with dealing with their past.
The Bosnian court would have its own trial and appeals chamber, its own prosecutor and a court police force to arrest suspects. The Hague tribunal is due to present its ideas on the establishment of such a court to the UN Security Council next month, and is expected to wind up its own work by 2007 or 2008.
Seventy-five people have already been charged by the tribunal, but in Bosnia an estimated 7 000 people still stand accused of the most serious crimes in a conflict in which civilians, and Muslims in particular, were the main victims.
More than six years after the war’s end life has still not improved for many Bosnian Muslims. Mehmedalija (10) is a case in point. He has lived with his mother Muska and brother Mohammed in a small flat in Sarajevo since the end of the fighting. He has a bad cough, which sounds like chronic bronchitis, and the family is about to be evicted.
Mehmedalija was born in a wood near Srebrenica in May 1992, after his family fled the village of Skelani. The mother and children were allowed to leave Srebrenica in 1993. His father and the other men and boys over the age of 15 were among the up to 8 000 people massacred there in July 1995.
“I would be in favour of trials for war criminals in Bosnia,” said Muska. She feels the treatment of the accused is too lenient in The Hague.
Bosnian Muslims support the idea of a state-level court. Many Bosnian Serbs and some Bosnian Croats would also prefer the trials to be held where the accused live. But a number of lower-level cases already heard in Bosnia have had uneven and even legally dubious results.
One extremely difficult task for the Bosnian court would be witness protection. Another would be the establishment of the court’s police force. The country still has no state-level interior ministry, and the only state-level police force is the border service.