Pristina: A City Break with a Twist

Bulevardi Bil Klinton

It is a strange yet powerful experience to visit a country that has been in existence barely a decade. Kosovo has been a nation state for only as long as I have been an adult.  Having visited its Balkan neighbours many times, I was keen to pay a visit and so I did, in August of last year.  Arriving in Pristina just as dawn broke, after a surreal, overcrowded night bus journey from Podgorica involving snatched, uncomfortable sleep and much shouting in Albanian at the border, only the straining of the engine betraying the landscape outside in the darkness, Kosovo’s capital seemed something of a ghost town as we wandered empty residential streets clutching a Google maps printout in search of our accommodation.

But after much needed sleep, we ventured into the city centre.  Unlike its neighbouring countries, the streets of Pristina were crowded with new and expensive cars bearing an assortment of international number plates.  The constant flow of traffic was punctuated by ubiquitous Balkan horn honking and, after the sweltering, oppressive heat of Montenegro, the temperature was a pleasant 25 degrees with a cooling breeze.  Bill Clinton greeted us cheerily from atop his plinth as we made our way up his titular Bulevardi.

More than any other Balkan capital, Pristina is an international city. It is a city unashamed in its gratitude to its American saviours – Bill Clinton has his boulevard, Madeleine Albright a square. The Stars and Stripes fly alongside the deliberately uncontentious Kosovar flag and US multinationals slap their brands across the city.  Nowhere was this more ironically obvious than the Coca Cola stall pumping out turbo folk and obscuring the much-photographed Newborn monument, updated with the golden digits 1 and 0 to mark Kosovo’s tenth birthday.  It is perhaps true that this monument, in all its chipped, graffitied glory, encapsulates everything that is conflicted about this tiny new nation.

Flags, as they so often do, play an important role in national identity here.  As visible as the gold and blue flag of Kosovo (colours and design chosen to offend no one), is the black and red of the Albanian flag. It functions almost as a de facto dual national flag and signifies the controversial history of this small country that was so quickly taken to the heart of an international community anxious not to screw up another Balkan war so soon after Bosnia.  Uniformed soldiers, wearing the patches of their home countries on their sleeves, stroll the streets as another reminder that all is not so rosy beneath the surface.

Kosovo's National Library (with abandoned church in background)

An enormous, ostentatious Orthodox church newly erected in the centre of Pristina seems to be the ethnic elephant in the religious room, since no one appears keen to discuss their Serbian neighbours.  A more accurate metaphor might be the derelict church beside the mesmerisingly striking national library, where trees grow from long-gone windows. At the national museum, an enthusiastic guide with near-perfect English was keen to show us their mementos of war and made no apology for his hatred of the Serbs nor his hero-worship of Adem Jashari, leading martyr of the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army).  In 1999, the Serbs had run out of international sympathy, their leadership having spent the best part of the 1990s positioning them as the bad guys, and so the suffering of the Kosovo Serbs in KLA reprisals is conveniently forgotten.  One wonders if Kosovo can truly move its young nation forward without acknowledging this, though recent proposals for land swaps with Serbia might just clamp a convenient lid of denial on the issue forever, if the swaps can settle the dispute that is preventing both Serbia and Kosovo from joining the European Union.

Ibrahim Rugova looks down over Bulevardi Nena Tereze

If the city centre was a little more awake than the outskirts, it certainly burst alive at night.  Down the pedestrianised Bulevardi Nëna Terezë (named for Mother Teresa, another local hero), the air was full of the smell of singed corn on the cob, fanned over flames until it began to pop, the sweet smell of candyfloss and omnipresent Balkan cigarette smoke.  The sounds of the call to prayer mingled with the squeaks of toy dogs with demonic eyes. Children played amongst brightly lit jets of water and zipped around on battery powered ride-along jeeps. Watching over the crowds with fatherly benevolence loomed statues and photographs of Ibrahim Rugova, Kosovo’s first president.

A handful of notable buildings aside, Pristina’s attraction lies in the features that makes it so unattractive to the casual eye – its newness, its half-finished infrastructure, its struggle to define itself, to free itself from its recent history and to know whether it should draw its strength from within or without.  Who are the Kosovans most thankful to for their independence?  Pristina is a city half broken, half renewed but mostly coming alive.  It is a work in progress and it felt like a privilege to be there to witness this.  Kosovo may not top your list of travel destinations but to visit at the formation of a nation is a rare opportunity that will only be lost as time marches on.

Election Thoughts

I was seventeen years old when I first realised Conservatives existed.  I mean, I knew they existed in Parliament and on the telly, but not in real life.  Cossetted in my liberal-leftie anti-Thatcher pre-social media upbringing, I assumed that all ordinary people shared my views.  Not so.

I was a teenage communist (next album title).  I stood as the Communist Party candidate in my school's mock election (frustrated that my eighteenth birthday was a few days after the actual election and furious with my friends who were eighteen and did not vote) and plastered the school in anti-fascist posters, earning one of my (fairly) rare calls to the Head's office.  I read Marx.  Tories were the enemy.

So imagine my surprise when I encountered a real-life Tory party member (at a classical concert in a rural church, so hardly surprising in hindsight, but not to my teenage self.)

"You'll grow out of it," the patronising (elderly) Tory assured me, on discovering my political views.

It made my blood boil.  It still has an adverse effect on my blood pressure now.

I haven't grown out of it.  I may (finally) be able to accept that I am no longer pollster-classified young and am far outside that oft-quoted 18-25 age bracket, but I certainly haven't grown out of it.

I was also told that as I earned more money, I would change my mind about fair distribution of wealth.

I haven't.

I hate the rhetoric floating around that somehow young people have been 'fooled' by Jeremy Corbyn's Labour.  That, somehow, encouraging young people to exercise their right to vote was a dirty tactic.  That young people are too naive, too ignorant and too stupid to know better.  That they'll regret it.  That they'll grow out of it.

I don't agree with everything Corbyn stands for.  But I do agree with the central idea that prompted 72% of young people to come out and vote in this election: that a fairer society is possible.

His detractors tend to fall into one of two camps: those who genuinely believe that some are owed more than others and those who see a fairer society as an absurd fantasy.

Why should it be?  Those people - the politicians, the political commentators, the media - who want you to believe it's not possible are acting under the assumption that humanity's default position is selfishness.  Everyone looking out for themselves.  This is my money - I earnt it, I deserve it and it's mine to keep.

Well, I like to think a little more optimistically than that.  I would happily slash my not-particularly-large public sector salary if it meant state education could be properly funded, to give more children the start in life that I was given; if it meant that everyone could access the highest quality free healthcare; if it meant that the most vulnerable in our society could be looked after.  (And if anything is worth getting our country into debt over, it's funding these three areas, surely?  Not wild speculation on the financial markets and bailing out irresponsible banks.)  I don't believe I'm alone in thinking like this.

Politics can be a force for good and people can come together.  We are not all selfish.

Labour lost this election, but Theresa May's arrogance failed to win it for the Conservatives.  Although we are entering uncertain, somewhat terrifying times, I am hoping that the people who voted in this election for the first time - the young, the old and the somewhere-in-betweens - have seen that they can make a difference.

And here's a message to the right-wing and centrist cynics: don't tell young people they'll grow out of it.  I hope they never do.

In Pursuit of Justice: Review of The Butcher's Trail by Julian Borger

If nothing else, Julian Borger notes in the final chapter of The Butcher’s Trail, the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia) has made the Balkan wars the most well-documented and catalogued conflict in history.  In this meticulously researched account of the manhunt for the Balkan war criminals, Borger draws on this evidence, as well as extensive interviews, to chronicle the pursuit in fascinating detail, with the story rattling on in places like the paciest of spy thrillers.

They say truth is often more fantastical than fiction, and that proved to be the case in the work of the ICTY; from the bungled arrest of the wrong pair of identical twins, to a plan involving a gorilla suit, to Radovan Karadžić, political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, living the flamboyant cover story of a mythical healer in Belgrade.  Borger’s tale is layered with political intrigue; in this telling, prosecutors and investigators work tirelessly on a shoestring budget, against death threats and government roadblocks from all sides.

Nearly two decades after the fighting finally ended in the region, with all the indictees arrested and only one more verdict, that of Ratko Mladić, leader of the Bosnian Serb Army, left to be handed down (as well as Karadžić’s appeal against his 40 year sentence), it feels as though a chapter has been closed on a terrible era.  Justice has been served.

Mladić and Karadžić on trial in The Hague

Or has it?  Borger muses on this in his conclusion.  Many people in the former Yugoslav states do not think so, believing the tribunal to be either too one-sided or too lenient.  Borger describes the Scheveningen prison as a place of harmony, where former enemies play football and cook together, attend yoga classes and learn new languages, without regard for ethnicity.

Many indictees have been released early or acquitted, free to return home and stir up nationalistic hatred once more.  As for the tribunal's legacy, attempts to set up an International Criminal Court have been hampered by the most powerful nations, wary of the precedent set by the ICTY of holding leaders to account for the crimes committed by those beneath them.

Nevertheless, the ICTY has completed its mission.  All the indictees on its list have been brought to some kind of justice.  It was, as the book’s tagline states, the most successful manhunt in history.  The court's place in history, however, has yet to be decided.

The Butcher's Trail by Julian Borger, published by Other Press (January 2016).

A Quarrel in a Faraway Country

Karadžić in court today.

Over the course of my research into the Bosnian War I have spent many hours trawling through transcripts from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), combing pages of legal jargon and prevarication to find the testimonies of those involved in the war.  Of all the bit players and small fish to face trial in The Hague, today saw the culmination of the case of the court's biggest catch.  Today, Radovan Karadžić, political leader of the Bosnian Serbs during the violent conflict of the early '90s, was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

There were tentative celebrations in Sarajevo and protests in Belgrade.  Some hailed the conviction as justice served for the victims; others damned the ICTY for the punitive punishment.  40 years is not enough for genocide, some protested.  Journalists and academics have been writing at length about what Karadžić's sentence means for the future of Bosnia.  Scholars and activists have begun to pick apart the judgment and its language, studying the minutiae of Scheduled Incident E2 or F1.  I stared at a blank page.

Karadžić has defended himself throughout his trial

I cannot in my mind make the connection between this suited old man, spectacles perched on his nose, sitting in a court room on the other side of Europe and calmly defending himself in increasingly fluent legalese, with the chillingly ebullient character who bluffed and postured through the footage and reports of a war that ended over twenty years ago.  Today, 70-year-old Karadžić looked haggard as he sat and blankly listened to Judge O-Gon Kwon's hour and a half recitation of his crimes. Reading his defiant pre-trial interview with BIRN, he did such a convincing job of rewriting history, and his own role in it, that I began to doubt my own research.

Karadžić with military leader Ratko Mladić, pictured
in 1993.  Mladić remains on trial in The Hague.

What should I write about Karadžić's conviction?  Found guilty on 10 out of the 11 counts on which he was indicted, including, significantly, the indictment for genocide for his part in the massacre at Srebrenica.  Is the conviction historic? Landmark?  Does it set precedents and send out warnings to other would-be genocidal maniacs?  Will it bring closure?  Has justice been served?  Are there any other clichés I can roll out?  A guilty verdict has been presumed from the moment Karadžić was first indicted back in 1995.  I could have written this twenty years ago.

For a country beset by corruption, economic woes and unemployment, the verdict of a court in a faraway country will have little impact back in Bosnia.  It won't help those displaced by the conflict return to their homes and it certainly won't lessen the pain of those who lost their families, or allow them to even begin comprehending how neighbours could ever have done this to one another.  It will have little effect on the ethnic tensions that still lurk; on the Bosnian Serbs who feel the ICTY is entirely too one-sided in its convictions of war criminals; on the Bosniaks angry that the Serbs shared the spoils of war at all; nor on those in Herzegovina who fly the Croatian flag above their homes.  As Karadžić himself has said: he is an old man now, and there is a new generation of politicians.  That generation is responsible for building Bosnia's future.


Karadžić's sentencing confirms what has been known for some time: that terrible deeds were committed under his leadership.  He will appeal, but he will not be successful.  His chapter is closed and history will condemn him.  For Bosnians, the wounds of the war that tore them apart will only begin to close when they are left alone to heal.  Scars will remain, and rightly so - they should not be forgotten - but a future cannot be built on open wounds.  In this Bosnian future, Radovan Karadžić is irrelevant.  And perhaps, for him, that is the greatest damnation.

Washing the dust from our souls: the war on culture

Re-watching the footage of Dubrovnik’s Old Town crumbling under a barrage of Yugoslav artillery fire in 1991, it seems strangely barbaric.  During the 1980s, Croatia’s Dalmatian coast, incorporating the turquoise Adriatic, romantic islands and endless sunshine, was a popular holiday destination for tourists from across Europe.  The historic and picturesque towns of Split and Dubrovnik, whose walled city stretching into the sea was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1979, were eerily familiar to the public watching the war unfold on their television screens.  Tragically for the thousands who had lost their lives earlier in the Croatian War of Independence, it was this act of cultural barbarity that drew the strongest censure from other nations around the world.

In the war that followed in neighbouring Bosnia, the shelling of Mostar’s famous Stari Most attracted similar criticism.  Hundreds of Mosques, Catholic and Orthodox churches were destroyed during the course of the Bosnian War, in an effort to obliterate the religions and cultures of the warring parties.

There is much sentiment invested in historic sites; the fact that they have stood for so long and witnessed many lives pass through them and around them makes their destruction entirely symbolic, serving no strategic military purpose.  In the case of Mostar’s Stari Most, there were several more modern road bridges over the river that were left untouched.

In the last two weeks, news has filtered through of the destruction of the ruins of Palmyra in Syria.  The site contains the ruins of a city once considered one of the most important cultural centres of the ancient world.  The labyrinth of buildings and monuments, demonstrating a broad range of architectural styles, drew over 150,000 visitors a year before the Syrian conflict began.  The former chief archaeologist at the site, Khaled al-Assad, was beheaded by Islamic State (IS) militants in August for refusing to cooperate in assisting them to find hidden treasures at Palmyra.  He was willing to die to protect Syria’s cultural heritage.

IS know exactly what message they are sending when they blow up sites like Palmyra.  They have similarly rampaged through the heritage sites of Iraq.  Many Shiite mosques, tombs and shrines have been looted and destroyed, as well as numerous ancient and medieval sites and artefacts, including the ancient cities of Nimrud and Hatra, parts of the wall of Nineveh, the ruins of Bash Tapia Castle and artefacts from the Mosul Museum.  Such is the alarm at the work of IS that UNESCO Directo-General Irina Bokova launched the Unite4Heritage campaign in March this year.  Her aim was to create a global movement “to protect and safeguard heritage in areas where it is threatened by extremists.”

The destruction of cultural heritage is classified as a war crime and IS actions have been condemned by the UN General Assembly and Security Council.  The demolition of cultural icons and buildings in war is considered such a grave crime because the deliberate targeting of history, along with other symbolic acts such as book burning and the damaging of art, represents the destruction of ideas and identity – the things that make us human; the things that embody our freedom of speech and freedom of expression.  This is what makes them such effective weapons of war.

Although the history itself will be lost forever, the rebuilding of these sites when wars are over can be equally powerful symbols of reconciliation.  In 2004, the Stari Most was rebuilt, having been painstakingly restored using original methods.  It now attracts as many visitors as ever.  Last year, Bosnia’s National Library in Sarajevo, destroyed during the siege of 1992-5, was reopened, to much celebration.

So why, when Bosnians are celebrating the reopening of their library as a symbol of their resilience and rehabilitation, are our local authorities closing ours?  Why, if our cultural heritage is so sacred, is it the first thing to go when budget cuts are required?  Why is our government cutting funding to the arts, museums and higher education?  Why is there talk of dismantling one of the icons of our cultural heritage, the BBC?  Why are the arts taking such a backseat in education?  It is commonly accepted that ages of cultural enlightenment coincide with eras of political advancement.  The Ancient Greeks had Plato and Aristotle; the Elizabethans had Shakespeare; and the Industrial Revolution, the greatest period of political advancement in history, boasted the broadest and most influential range of political philosophers, artists and writers that the world has ever seen.

It can only be hoped that this Conservative government will wake up to the damage it is inflicting to our own cultural heritage before it is too late.  They will ultimately find that, like packing an ancient temple full of dynamite, repressing the arts is entirely futile.  IS can rampage across the Middle East, demolishing historic temples and archaeological sites, but out of their ruins, we have to believe, will rise new monuments that will stand for thousands more years because ideas and identity can never truly be destroyed.  Human nature - or so I like to think - is tougher than that.

History's Most Dangerous Safe Area

There are certain place names that have become synonymous with the appalling events that occurred there: Auschwitz, Amritsar – Srebrenica.  On 7 July 1995 – twenty years ago this week – the Bosnian Serb Army overran the town of Srebrenica in Eastern Bosnia and proceeded over the following days to massacre over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys.  The town and its surrounding areas had been declared a United Nations Safe Area back in April 1993.  It was anything but.

The trapped and half-starved population were protected by a small Dutch UN battalion armed only with light weapons and a few APCs.  When the first shells landed within the Srebrenica Safe Area on 6 July 1995, nobody was surprised. For the past two years the Bosnian Serb forces had kept the enclave encircled, shelling and sniping sporadically at the civilian population and the Dutchbat troops, waiting for the international community to tire of their effort to keep the enclaves on life support. The Serbs had been waiting for their moment, and everyone knew it. The fall of Srebrenica had been almost inevitable from the moment it was first declared a Safe Area.

Recovered bodies awaiting re-burial in 2010

The events are as controversial today as they were then.  A UK-sponsored attempt to pass a UN Security Council resolution officially defining the massacre as genocide has caused outcry amongst Bosnian Serbs.  Srebrenica is now situated in the state-within-a-state of Republika Srpska and despite being the only town in the region with a Bosniak mayor, barely masks still-simmering ethnic tensions.  Some Bosnian Serbs are angry that their own war dead are not commemorated in the same way; others deny that the massacre even took place.  7,132 bodies have been recovered from mass graves and reburied; over a thousand are still missing, causing unendurable agony for their surviving relatives.  Despite a court ruling absolving the Dutch troops of any blame for the massacre, many still hold them to account for allowing the Bosnian Serb forces to take the Safe Area and for failing to protect the Bosniak population.

So why, exactly, did a supposed Safe Area end up as the scene of the worst massacre in Europe since the Second World War?

Simply put, the Safe Areas should never have been created in the first place. When the Serbs had the town surrounded in March 1993 they offered to let the Muslims go to the relatively safe, government held city of Tuzla and General Phillipe Morillon, Commander of the UN Forces in Bosnia at that time, began to make plans for such an evacuation. However, both the Bosnian government and UN Security Council refused. The Bosnian government objected to the planned evacuation because it believed Srebrenica could later be exchanged for Serb-held suburbs of Sarajevo. The international community, on the other hand, opposed the scheme because the Vance-Owen Peace Plan placed Srebrenica in a Muslim canton, and to allow the Serbs to take the town would be, as they saw it, to acquiesce to ethnic cleansing. The outrage of an anti-Serb press shamed the Security Council into passing an essentially meaningless resolution – Resolution 836 - which did little to make Srebrenica a safe area because the member states lacked the political will to follow through on the sentiments invested in the Safe Area resolutions.

The Security Council required peacekeepers to play a war-fighting role, whilst failing to provide them with the weaponry or manpower to do so. They assigned UNPROFOR a mandate which, even if only symbolically, aligned them with the Bosnian Muslims, but expected them to continue to rely on Bosnian Serb consent to deliver humanitarian aid. Not only did the Safe Area resolutions conflict with previous resolutions, they also contradicted themselves, leading to widely different interpretations.  Resolution 836 did not clearly state when air support could be called in, and the use of the word ‘deter’ instead of ‘defend’ left the Safe Areas semantically unprotected. Both the UNPROFOR command and the Dutchbat soldiers within the Srebrenica enclave were left confused as to what they were expected to do.

Once the Safe Areas were created, however, it was only a matter of time before the

Serbs decided to attack. Srebrenica was not betrayed by any formal agreement, but merely by a failure to make any real effort to stop the Serb offensive.  Despite a number of deals to sacrifice Srebrenica being considered by the Bosnian government, there is no evidence that any took place.  There is also no concrete evidence of a deal over the use of air power that UNPROFOR Commander Lieutenant-General Bernard Janvier was rumoured to have made with Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladić.

Srebrenica fell because of a lack of will to fight for it on the part of the Bosnian government and the ARBiH, and because UNPROFOR had neither the manpower nor the mandate to defend it. It is possible that earlier use of Close Air Support could have saved the enclave (bungled complications with faxes lead to farcical delays in the arrival of UN planes), but ultimately the UN did not want to provoke the Serbs for fear of reprisals against Dutch hostages taken earlier by Bosnian Serb forces.  Taking UN hostages had been a tactic favoured by the BSA throughout the war, used to humiliate the international community as well as a bargaining chip against greater military reprisals.

Srebrenica was one of three eastern Bosnian towns declared UN Safe Areas.  After Srebrenica fell, the towns of Goražde and Žepa suffered the same fate shortly after.  The problem of the eastern enclaves – pockets of Bosnian Muslims amongst Serb-held territory - had been plaguing peace negotiations for months.  Their fall simplified the political map and made a territorial settlement possible.  If the horrendous massacre had not followed, the fall of Srebrenica would probably have been viewed as an ill-advised mandate leading to a military disaster, and not the terrible catastrophe it ultimately became.  Tragically for Srebrenica and its inhabitants, it was politically expedient to allow the Safe Area to fall.

Refugees from Srebrenica arrive in Tuzla in 1995

Could those Dutch soldiers have ever imagined what would happen next?  There is no doubt, from their testimonies and records, that many of them have been psychologically scarred by it.  As the Bosnian Serb forces closed in on the town, the population fled to nearby Potočari, where the UN battalion had its headquarters.  They were denied entry to the UN compound.  Instead they were handed over to Ratko Mladić and his troops, who promised them safe passage to government-held territory.  Subsequently, the men – including the very elderly and adolescent boys – were separated from the women and children.  Many men and boys attempted to flee to safety through the mountains, but they were malnourished from two years of siege and safe territory was many miles away.  Few made it.  Those who did not were rounded up along with the others and shot, and their bodies bulldozed into mass graves.

The Srebrenica Memoial Centre at Potočari, opened in 2003

There is little wonder that the horrific events of those days in July still stir passions in a country that remains divided by memories of a war that irreparably destroyed communities.  It is unclear whether the relatives of the victims will ever find closure, even if all the missing bodies are found and Mladić, currently awaiting trial in The Hague, is finally convicted for the crime.  Any such closure, however, is unlikely to be reached until there is acceptance on all sides that the massacre did happen, that it was awful, and that reconciliation is possible.  Twenty years on, there is a new generation of Bosnians coming of age who were born after the war ended.  They are the country’s best chance of fighting the tired propaganda, shaking off the divisions of the past and looking towards a more hopeful future.

Paying for the Past: Reparations and Rehabilitation

On 2 June 2007, Tony Blair offered an apology for the role of the British government in the Irish Potato Famine 150 years earlier.  To some it seemed strange that Blair should be holding himself and his government accountable for the actions of long-dead politicians wholly unconnected with him.  If I bump into someone in the street, it is only right that I should apologise to them.  But no one would expect me to apologise to them on behalf of someone I’d never met who happened to bump into them the previous week.

The question of how states should address past wrongs is a thorny one.  Issuing a formal apology is a popular recourse, but the empty symbolism does little to alleviate the suffering of victims.  Financial compensation is another option, but it can become costly and open too many long-buried cans of worms.  Who should be paid and is it possible to place a monetary value on their suffering?  How far should we delve back into history when requesting reparations?  Should the French start paying us for the trauma inflicted by William the Conqueror?  And should governments be paying at all?  Should not the individuals responsible be held to account for their actions?

Individual culpability has been the approach favoured in the case of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s.  Serbia's membership of the European Union has even been conditioned on the arrest of war criminals indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).  The arrest of Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladić in May 2011, followed by that of Croatian Serb fugitive Goran Hadžić in July of the same year, the last indictees still at large, removed the final barriers to Serbia’s EU accession and their membership is expected in the near future.  But these arrests of high profile war criminals such as Mladić and Radovan Karadžić have done little to bring closure to Bosnia.  Nor have the arrests and sentences by the ICTY of many other Bosnian military commanders.

Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadžić at his trial in 

The Hague. A verdict is expected in October 2015.

The ICTY is the largest and lengthiest attempt to bring individuals involved in war to justice, far surpassing the Nuremberg Trials of the 1940s, but it has been plagued by controversy since its establishment in 1993.  Long trials, endless bureaucracy and allegations of bias from all sides mean that the judgements, when they are reached, are viewed with suspicion, and the Tribunal has done little to heal the deep wounds of the Yugoslav successor states.  Many are still smarting from the death of Slobodan Milošević, Serbian President during the 1990s, in his cell in The Hague in 2006, before a verdict could be reached.  The ICTY acquitted Bosniak military leader Naser Orić of war crimes in 2008, only for him to be re-arrested earlier this month by Swiss forces on a warrant issued by the Serbian Justice Department, timed to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the Srebrenica Massacre by Serb forces and signalling that any sort of resolution to the tensions in Bosnia is a long way off.

In a country similarly troubled by historic divisions and simmering tensions, there have been calls for an amnesty on criminal prosecutions.  In 2013, Northern Ireland’s Attorney General, John Larkin, proposed that there should be no more prosecutions for Troubles-related murders, stating that “the prospects of conviction diminish, perhaps exponentially, with each passing year” and therefore “the time has come to think about putting a line, set at Good Friday 1998, with respect to prosecutions, inquests and other inquiries.”  He denied it was amnesty, since the crimes would still be considered crimes, but that no criminal proceedings could take place with respect to them, yet his views were still contentious.  Those opposed protested that victims are entitled to justice regardless of the passing of time.  This may be true, but will long, drawn-out criminal proceedings and digging through the ghosts of the past really bring justice, or any sense of peace to Northern Ireland?  Perhaps there is a time to draw a line under the past and start anew.

Or perhaps money cures all ill.  The British government set a strange precedent back in June 2013 when it paid out £20 million to Kenyans tortured by British colonial forces during the Mau Mau uprising in 1950s, with William Hague telling the House of Commons: “The British government sincerely regrets that these abuses took place and that they marred Kenya’s progress towards independence.”  Despite paying out around £3000 to each living victim, Hague stated firmly that “Britain still did not accept that it was legally liable for the actions of what was a colonial administration in government.”  Instead, and interestingly, he conferred the legal liability onto the Kenyan Republic, who inherited it from the colonial administration upon independence in 1963.  All of which seems like an easy get-out clause – has Britain gifted all responsibility for its oppression of native populations during the Age of Empire to the successor states?  How convenient.  Soon the Indian government will be able to pay themselves back for their suffering under British rule.  But all this masks the question of whether we, the British tax payers, should be held responsible and made to pay for events which happened before many of us were born and in which we played no part?

It’s a question that often rears it head in the USA with regards to the issue of slavery reparations.  The economic status of many African Americans and the telling statistic that white Americans earn on average 22% more than them, is said to be a lingering financial impact of slavery and is used to support the argument that descendants of slaves deserve financial compensation from the US government.  It wasn’t until July 2008 that the US House of Representatives even bothered to apologise for the travesty of slavery and the subsequent Jim Crow laws.  It was nearly a year before the Senate passed a similar resolution, in June 2009, apologising for the “fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery.”  However, the resolution offered little more than hollow platitudes since it also explicitly stated that the the apology could not be used as a basis for restitution claims.  Opponents of reparations argue that the historic wrong of slavery is beyond repair since the actual slaves are now dead.  Others argue that the sheer number of African Americans, which at 42 million represents 14% of the US population, makes paying reparations unfeasible, and the money could be more usefully spent on funding state welfare.  And others are worried about setting an expensive precedent.  Native American peoples also have a strong case for reparations, as do many other minority groups.

In Australia, the government has had similar concerns in relation to its Aboriginal population.  In February 2008, then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, apologised “for the past wrongs caused by successive governments on the indigenous Aboriginal population.” His apology particularly singled out the ‘Stolen Generation’; the thousands of children forcibly removed from their families.  However, the refusal to accompany the apology with compensation angered many Aboriginal leaders.  The 460,000 Aborigines living in Australia make up 2% of the population, but they experience far higher rates of infant mortality, drug abuse, alcoholism and unemployment than the rest of the population.  As with the African American population, this is a financial and social hangover from previous discriminatory policies, for which many feel they deserve financial reimbursement.

When it comes to rehabilitation and reparations, there is no better case study than Germany.  Both East and West Germany were forced to pay reparations to Israel and the World Jewish Congress for property confiscated under the Nuremberg Laws, for forced labour and for persecution (though no compensation was paid to the relatives of those Jews killed during the Holocaust).  Yugoslavia was paid $8 million for forced human experimentation and given $36 billion in industrial equipment, and Poland received DM1.3 million in 1975 as recompense for Nazi oppression and atrocities.

German reparations to the Soviet Union, on the other hand, were paid in the form of forced labour, which returns us to the matter of whether it should be individuals or states that are held accountable for atrocities.  The Nuremberg Trials brought individuals within the Nazi high command to justice, but lingering hostility existed towards the majority of the German population who had colluded with and served the Nazi regime.  Germans have had to work hard to distance themselves from Nazi connotations.  Even now, 70 years after the end of the war, Germany is making an effort to hold the Nazis to account for their actions, as demonstrated by the ongoing trial of former Auschwitz prison guard Oskar Groening.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks with

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras during recent

talks in Brussels

In terms of its international reputation, Germany has made a miraculous recovery.  It has paid its debts and gone from an internationally administered, fractured state to a European economic powerhouse in just two and half decades.  Taking the lead in the Eurozone crisis and offering a strong, stable economy in the heart of Europe, it is fair to say that Germany has been fully rehabilitated, making a strong case for the payment of reparations and a commitment to bring individual war criminals to justice.

When it comes to reparations, the debate will undoubtedly rage on.  There is unlikely to be any consensus reached on how, if and when governments, or individuals, should pay for past crimes committed under a political guise.  There will be further symbolic apologies.  It’s an easy option for a government to issue a formal apology to placate campaigners.  But perhaps the best way a government can make amends is by plugging money into programmes designed the assist victims and their descendants, the indirect victims of past wrongs, in order to tip the balance a little more in their direction.  They can work to bring individuals to justice where possible and to ensure that legislation is passed abolishing discrimination against those victims.  But, most importantly, governments should pay for the past by learning its lessons and refusing to make the same mistakes again.