The Hague tribunal was established in 1993 with the aim of bringing to justice those responsible for the horrors that was sweeping through the Balkans at the start of the decade. Bosnia and Croatia were both still submerged in violence at the time, and there was a sense that something needed to be done in the evidence of widespread, systematic ethnic cleansing.
Today, the violence is over but the Balkans remains very much divided.Bosnia’s state system, which emerged from the peace accords that brought an end to the war there, splits the country into two ethnically-defined entities, the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska. At the same time, the federal government in Sarajevo is busy suing neighbouring Serbia for its role in the Bosnian war, in a case in which billions of dollars in reparations payments could be at stake.
Serbia, for its part, has been blocked from closer relations with the European Union over its apparent reluctance to square up to the Hague court’s the former Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic, who along with indicted ex-Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, are still regarded by a significant proportion of Serbia’s population as heroes.
Amid all this, it is widely hoped that the ICTY have also a role to play beyond simply dispensing criminal justice: to reconcile the peoples of the Balkans with their violent recent history.
