No matter how the war in Ukraine ends, achieving justice for the human rights violations suffered during the conflict will inevitably be a long and painful process for those who survive to speak out about the crimes they have witnessed.
This is the message of the survivors of the bloody war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) from 1992 to 1995, who dedicated the following year to re-speaking and reliving their trauma in the hope of bringing those responsible to justice and presenting historical facts.
”For me, it is very personal. I’m still looking for my brother’s remains. I can’t move on. I can’t focus on something else and leave it behind,” said Edin Ramulic from Prijedor in northwestern Bosnia, reports the Associated Press.
More than 3.000 Bosniaks and Croats, including 102 children, were killed in Prijedor. Some were killed in their homes or on the streets, others in three prison camps where prisoners were subjected to beatings, rape, sexual assault, and torture. Ramulic’s brother, uncle, and four cousins did not survive the camps.
Similar to evidence of killings and torture in Bucha, outside Kyiv, that emerged earlier this month after Russian forces withdrew from the mentioned area, international journalists’ revelations about the Prijedor camps in August 1992 sparked outrage and calls from world leaders to bring those responsible to justice.
The United Nations (UN) Security Council has launched the process of establishing a special UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Founded in The Hague in 1993, it was the first international tribunal to investigate and prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide following the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials after World War II.
In the beginning, no one thought it would succeed, access to investigators at crime scenes in Prijedor and elsewhere in Bosnia has been blocked for years, and Bosnian Serb and neighboring Serbia political leaders have continued to deny human rights abuses and hide documents and indictees.
Justice was coming slowly. Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander, Ratko Mladic, were fugitives from international justice until the late 2000s when they were tracked down in Serbia.
However, by closing in 2017, the tribunal had convicted 83 senior wartime political and military officials, mostly from BiH. It also transferred a large amount of evidence and cases against lower-ranking suspects to their home countries in the Balkans.
Desperate to find information about the fate of their loved ones and make the world acknowledge their suffering, survivors like Ramulic changed their lives by setting up support groups for potential witnesses, gathering information on missing persons,and paying tribute to the victims.
”The Russian denial of the massacre that its soldiers are now obviously committing in Ukraine sounds to me the same as the denial of the genocide in Srebrenica. But if the survivors persist, the truth will prevail,” pointed out Munira Subasic, who lost her husband and son in the Srebrenica genocide.
As for absolute justice, it remains unattainable in BiH. The war in BiH has taken the lives of 100.000 people, mostly civilians, and more than two million, or more than half of the country’s population, have been expelled from their homes. In the three decades since it began, some 7.000 people missing in the war are still missing, and the BiH judiciary has a backlog of more than 500 unsolved war crimes cases involving about 4.500 suspects. As the years go by and witnesses and suspects get old, get sick, or die, many cases that remain open are likely to never come to trial, Federalna writes.
E.Dz.
