Legacy of War Crimes Hinders Balkan Reconciliation
Extradition rules shield war criminals from justice, leaving many former Yugoslavs fearful of going back to neighbouring countries.
By Nenad Radičević in Belgrade, Sarajevo, Zagreb, The Hague, Brussels and Strasbourg
Croatian Serb refugee Gojko Eraković cannot go home to Benkovac in Croatia. What prevents him from returning is his fear of being arrested “on trumped-up charges” as a war criminal.
Twelve years after the end of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the failure of the former warring republics of Yugoslavia to cooperate over the resolution of war crimes has left thousands of people in a similar state of limbo.
Where mass in-absentia trials have been widespread, as in Croatia, many refugees now living abroad are uncertain as to whether they have been convicted of a crime or not.
Extradition bans in Croatia and Serbia, meanwhile, constitute another barrier to the execution of justice. Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat war-crime suspects have used these bans to take out citizenship in Serbia and Croatia, knowing they will not then have to face a court in the country where their alleged crimes took place.
Some hope that closer judicial cooperation, now underway, will help to resolve the issue of outstanding war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. But everyone agrees on one thing; just as the reconciliation of France and Germany following the Second World War took off on the initiative of leaders Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer, so too in the Balkans will this require political will.
As Dean Ajduković, professor of psychology at Zagreb University, says, “People listen to their leaders and act in accordance with their messages, just as they did during the war.”
