After the end of the work of the court in The Hague, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is looking for the original archival materials that have been collected in The Hague Tribunal for 25 years. However, there is no unified position in which part of BiHarchival material should be stored.
The transfer of archival material from The Hague to BiH began to be discussed as early as 2007, long before the end of the work of the Tribunal. At that time, part of the public in Sarajevo still asked the Presidency of BiH to send a request to the United Nations (UN), which is the founder of the court, to return the archival materials to BiH after the end of the court proceedings. The most vocal in this was the Research and Documentation Center in Sarajevo.
“What is related to this archive is memory. And from that memory comes justice and truth and reconciliation and peace and satisfaction for the victims and the transformation of society into a normal, democratic society,” said the director of the Center Mirsad Tokaca at the time, warning that it should not be allowed to find archive material from The Hague in another country.
Millions of pages of material
16 years later, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) closed its doors with the verdict against the heads of the Serbian state security, Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic, and the issue of archival materials became a hot political topic again. With the difference that now the emphasis is placed on which national corpus of the same country will havethe archival material.
Because of this, they established a commission in The Hague in 2008 that was supposed to decide what to do with the archival material and whether the court itself could grow into some form of the institute after its termination. None of that happened, so more than three million pages of transcripts from the trial, ten million pages of documents with collected evidence, and 50 thousand hours of video material are waiting for the court’s decision.
During that time, political Sarajevo demands that the material be returned to BiH and be under the control of state institutions, while Banja Luka insists that all documentation that The Hague seized from Republika Srpska (RS) be returned to this entity.
In a letter sent to the UN Secretary General, the President of the UN General Assembly, and the court in The Hague, the member of the Presidency of BiH, Denis Becirovic, requests that the archives of the Hague Tribunal be stored in BiH. He repeated this after the verdict against Simatovic and Stanisic, which ended the work of the court.
“I again ask the UN to make a just solution and to store the complete original archive of the Tribunal in the capital of BiH. Millions of printed pages, audio and video recordings, secret agreements depicting what happened, should be stored in Sarajevo,” said Becirovic.
The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Courts said that the decision on archival material will be made by the UNSecurity Council. During that time, the public in Sarajevo said that the battle for archival material is a battle that must not be lost. Former judge and prosecutor Vehid Sehic says that only The Hague, that is, the UN, can make a decision about whomthe materials will belong to and whether they will belong to anyone at all.
The documentation, which contains millions of pages collected in the 25 years of the Tribunal’s work, does not only refer to criminal acts but also to the entire period since the breakup of Yugoslavia and the political relations that took place during that period. “I would be the happiest if it were jointly decided where it would be and if it were available to historians so that they could be slowly analyzed. Also, maybe it should be available to the media, that is, investigative journalists,” explained Sehic, Klix.ba reports.
E.Dz.
