If the Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the Bosnian war in November 1995, had been fully implemented in the past ten years, Bosnia and Herzegovina would stand out globally for its superb record on human rights. The agreement proclaimed the right of all refugees and displaced persons to return to their homes, and the state obligation to investigate and prosecute war crimes. More than a dozen international human rights agreements were, quite uniquely, to be directly applicable before domestic courts.
On paper at least, everything was in place to transform Bosnia into a place where human rights truly matter. The reality is quite different. True, Bosnia is peaceful today, and the ongoing human rights abuses do not exceed those in some other parts of the former Yugoslavia. But Bosnia is still deeply immersed into the past, and the legacy of the wartime abuses persists even today.
Take the return of refugees and displaced persons, for example. More than two million Bosnians were forced from their homes, many of them through a deliberate campaign of murder and terror, known to the world as “ethnic cleansing.” The international community in Bosnia claims that half of them have now returned to their home areas, including 450,000 to locations where they currently constitute an ethnic minority (so-called “minority returns”).
However, a field survey by the Bosnian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights has demonstrated that fewer than half of those who registered as returnees actually live in their pre-war places of residence. Some Bosnian officials admit that the official figures grossly exaggerate the actual number of minority returns.
The numbers of returns this year have been particularly discouraging.. The return rate was less than a tenth of the rate in 2002. With the exception of a few areas in Republika Srpska (Prijedor, Doboj, Janja) and the Federation (Drvar, Bugojno, Stolac), the current return figures in the country are too small to reverse the effects of the wartime ethnic cleansing. Even in the areas in which the population is again mixed, the ethnic divide remains entrenched. The separate schools for children of different nationalities are a particularly disheartening expression of this rift.
How about the prosecution of war criminals? Bosnia was the scene of some of the worst horrors in Europe since the Second World War, including the genocide in Srebrenica in July 1995. In the Bosnian Muslim- and Croat-majority entity, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, up to one hundred persons have been tried on war crimes charges. But in Republika Srpska, the Serb-majority entity, where war crimes were particularly numerous, only one war crimes trial has taken place so far, resulting in the February 2005 acquittal of eleven Bosnian Serbs who were accused of having illegally detained a Catholic priest who was later found murdered.
This year, a special war crimes chamber started work in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, as part of the newly established State Court. The participation of the international prosecutors and judges should make the chamber a fair local alternative to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague. There are real concerns, however, that the chamber will lack high-level suspects to try, because many of the Bosnian Croat and Serb suspects it would like to prosecute have fled to Croatia and Serbia after the war and received citizenship there. These two countries are unwilling to surrender the suspects to Bosnia, invoking constitutional prohibitions on the extradition of their nationals.
The work of the war crimes tribunal in the Hague, remarkable though it has been, cannot be enough to satisfy the cry for justice from the hundreds of thousands of Bosnians whose relatives were killed and homes were destroyed. One hundred persons from Bosnia and Herzegovina, many of them high-ranking military of political leaders, have been tried or are awaiting trials before the ICTY, but this is still a small fraction of those committed war crimes between 1992-95. And the two most important ICTY indictees for Bosnia – Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic – are not in the dock yet. Their decade-long defiance has fueled Serbian nationalism in Bosnia and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia, impeding much-needed reconciliation. While arresting Mladic is now a matter for Serbia, Karadzic is almost certainly still in Bosnia. His arrest by the thousands of international peacekeepers who are present in the country is long overdue.
We are likely to see a great deal of self-congratulation these days from those in the West who have kept the lid on Bosnia’s simmering tensions in the last decade. While the absence of conflict is a laudable achievement, it should not obscure the fact that despite ten years of international rule, billions of euros and a massive NATO deployment, Bosnia remains a place where, for many of its people, human rights amount to little more than empty words and unmet promises.
