ICTR -ICTY

The yardstick for international justice differs according to continents

BY GEORGE KAGAME

It is with such irony that while modern man continues to enjoy the latest inventions of technology, the same man is also trying to find a solution to the rudest wrongs man’s mind can create.

Currently the world is celebrating the latest mobile telephone innovation-the I. phone, at the same time we are also celebrating the recent success of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for the arrest of Radovan Karadizic on 22 July.

Having been on the run for the past 13 years, Karadizic has been living in Belgrade as a therapist, with a suburban apartment and a girlfriend to complete the picture of your average neighbour.

Karadizic’a arrest is the latest big move in the chess game of the UN in its endeavors in bringing to justice those responsible the Srebrenica massacre and the Sarajevo siege in 1995, going by that arrest, the ICTY can be judged to be speeding at the rate a Ferrari in stark comparison to its older cousin, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda-which is moving at snail speed.

Yet beyond that simple comparison, the courts can be used as an example in trying to understand differences between the European way of doing things with how things happen in Africa. In Europe, a problem is identified, solutions are sought and implementation is immediate.
The arrest of Karadizic it has been argued is because the European Union threatened Serbia by isolating it from the community.

The ICTR and ICTY were formed immediately after the UN Security Council in its new found desire to "bring an end to impunity" in the mid 1990s, the UN decided to take action after in both cases after innocent people had brutally lost their lives to murderous politicians.
In both cases the speed and nature of killings set alarming records that in both cases had there not been powerful intervention, the targeted populations might have been fully exterminated. In the Yugoslavia republics it took the intervention of the very powerful NATO forces to stop the siege of Sarajevo and oust Radovan Karadizic along with his military sidekick General Ratomir Mladic while in Rwanda it took the Rwanda Patriotic Front to oust the MRND and its genocidal regime.
However to date for some reason, there are some who believe that the RPF organized or was responsible for the Rwandan genocide, at least going by the yard stick of the French and Spanish judges. But that is a different debate altogether. In the Former Yugoslavian city of Sarajevo, nationalist wars went into overdrive where, under the suspected guidance of the detained Karadizic and a committee of colleagues planned carefully the extermination of the entire Muslim population of Bosnia.
At that time and ironically like in the biblical times as recorded in the Old Testament books of Exodus, Numbers and Judges; where captors killed all their male victims and reserved for themselves the women and female children. In Yugoslavia the planners started with the slaughter of about 10,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in one short painful day. After the Yugoslavian republics finally made peace during the now famous Dayton peace accords, the leaders disappeared, with Karadizic on top of the peking order.
A UN court was formed to look for and bring them to justice cum the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1996 to be based at The Hague in the same premises of the ICC; the ICTY was mandated by the Security Council to have finished all its trials by the end of 2010.
This UN routine of creating the international Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia came just two years after the same body had created the UN tribunal for Rwanda with the same mandate but to be based in Arusha, the ICTR was charged with trying similar criminals as the ICTY was also required to have closed down. A year and half towards their initial mandate, both courts have different report cards to present, the ICTY have relentlessly pursued their suspects with zeal and they have captured many of their biggest 'fish so far.
Having arrested former president of Yugoslavia, the powerful Slobodan Milesovic, who has since died in custody and now Radovan Karadzic, the ICTY has delivered on its primary objective of arresting all its highest profile suspects. The same cannot be said of the ICTR.
The ICTR is moving on a snail pace and to date, there most high profile detainee remains Theoneste Bagosora and yet the Arusha based court has not yet received the equivalent of bashing that international organizations like Amnesty International towards Rwanda. Such organizations have continually criticized the government of Rwanda for its poor records on all its assessments of the country.