Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans

4. Who Lives in Your Neighborhood?

122 Bosnia is in many ways a perfect laboratory for studying the effectiveness, consequences , and potential of transitional justice to bring justice to victims and reconciliation to broken communities. It is the country that suffered more than any other in the Yugoslav conflict. Its population was decimated, its cities and villages ravaged. The war left a traumatic imprint on Bosnian society, which is still, more than a decade after the war ended, trying to come to grips with what has happened to their country. Bosnia’s experience with transitional justice, however, has been much more complicated than promoters of international justice had expected. Bosnian transitional justice efforts have reflected a classic dilemma: although the country has an incredibly high demand and need for justice, it has suffered from incapacity to deliver it.1 International justice institutions such as the ICTY have received a decidedly mixed response from Bosnian citizens, with each group—Bosniacs, Serbs, and Croats—finding different reasons to be disappointed. Domestic warcrimes trials are nascent and still heavily influenced by international justice experts, while any attempt at creating a Bosnian truth commission has been put on hold, a consequence of low domestic interest, lackluster international support , and the Bosnian federal bureaucratic maze. In analyzing the transitional justice experience in Bosnia, this chapter proceeds as follows. First, it outlines international goals and expectations for transitional 1. Mark Freeman,“Bosnia and Herzegovina: Selected Developments in Transitional Justice,” International Center for Transitional Justice, New York, October 2004. 4 WHO LIVES IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD? WHO LIVES IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD? 123 justice in Bosnia, expressed in and after the Dayton Peace Accords. Then it looks at specific international transitional justice mechanisms carried out in Bosnia— international and domestic trials and truth-telling projects—and their domestic political effects.The chapter then analyzes specific domestic political conditions— domestic demand from below, the power of old-regime spoilers, and competing elite strategies—that led to Bosnia’s piecemeal adoption of international transitional justice models. The chapter concludes by analyzing the consequences of using transitional justice as a pathway to creating a strong unitary state in light of winding down international involvement in Bosnia. Bosnia in the Dayton Straightjacket Bosnia was a country clearly in need of justice. The Bosnian war (1992–95) was one of the most brutal conflicts in recent memory, a harrowing succession of violence and massacres that reminded Europe of its worst nightmares. What made the Bosnian war so horrendous, besides the enormity of human suffering, misery, and death, was the fact that before neighbors, friends, relatives , and schoolmates turned on one another, Bosnia had been a functioning multiethnic society. It prided itself on a long history of multiculturalism, with the region’s four major religions—Islam, Christian Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Judaism—coexisting in peace, with even a degree of mutual appreciation. The city of Sarajevo demonstrated its acceptance of a variety of faiths by the cathedrals , churches, mosques, and synagogues lining the once leafy but since the war often barren streets of the Bosnian capital. Bosnia also prided itself on a high prewar intermarriage rate, often used as an indicator in measurements of ethnic relations and ethnic proximity.2 None of these assets, however, prevented the bloodbath that ensued. As the former Yugoslavia began to disintegrate in 1991, the Bosnian leadership was becoming nervous about what it perceived as Serbia’s quest for Yugoslav dominance. Observing the war in neighboring Croatia between Croatian troops and Croatian Serb rebels, the Bosnian ruling elites calculated that declaring independence and obtaining international recognition would prevent the war and would spare Bosnia Croatia’s fate. However, immediately upon Bosnia’s declaration of independence in April 1992, Bosnian 2. A demographic analysis of the 1981 federal census data concluded that “if children of mixed marriages were included, over half the population of Bosnia had a close relative of a different nationality .” Quoted in Steven L. Burg and Paul Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict and International Intervention (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1999), 42. Also see Tone Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 124 HIJACKED JUSTICE Serb troops, with logistical and weapons support from the Milošević-dominated Yugoslav army, began the siege of Sarajevo. During the four-year siege, up to ten thousand people were killed from sniper attacks, shelling, land mines, or starvation and exposure. And while...