Legacy of War Crimes Hinders Balkan Reconciliation

A tiny room in a crumbling barracks in Belgrade, formerly temporary lodgings for construction workers, has been home to Gojko Eraković, his wife and daughter for 12 years.

An ethnic Serb from Croatia, Eraković, 47, fled his hometown of Benkovac in 1995, when the Croatian Army launched an operation, codenamed Oluja [Storm], to end the four-year revolt of the republic’s Serbian minority.

Eraković considers himself lucky because he fled the town before Croatian forces arrived. “Those who stayed in their homes were arrested,” he recalls. “The others saw their houses set on fire.”

More than a decade after the 1995 Dayton peace agreement ended the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, Eraković is one of many suffering from their legacy. As thousands of atrocities, which were committed in those years, remain unresolved, it has become all too easy to blame whole nations instead of the individuals responsible. A deep mistrust pervades relations between the countries that emerged from these bloody conflicts, and many ordinary people are reluctant to travel from one to another, not least the refugees.

With politicians seen as responsible for - or, at best, reluctant to dispel - the myths and prejudices that underlie this state of affairs, much has been made, at the international community’s behest, of the role and responsibility of judiciaries to determine the facts about the conflicts of the 1990s. Soon to be wholly in the hands of local courts, work is underway to make sure this happens fairly and effectively.

But the task is daunting, bearing in mind their record so far. In particular, Serbs from Croatia fear a wave of in-absentia trials held in the Croatian courts during the early 1990s, of questionable validity in the eyes of many legal experts. Thus, although he lives in grim conditions in Belgrade, Eraković does not want to return to Croatia for fear of being arrested on trumped-up charges for war crimes. “They arrested two of my friends for alleged war crimes only to release them after several months,” he recalls. “I don’t need the same experience.”

Resolving this problem is one aim of the recent work of prosecutors in the region to jointly overcome a whole range of nationality and residence problems plaguing their work. There are some signs that progress has been made to circumvent the impasse posed by extradition rules, which have so far allowed many suspects to escape their day in court by taking out dual citizenship.

But others think progress is limited, and blame this not on the lawyers, but on a lack of political will. With sovereignty issues still so sensitive, however, dramatic developments are unlikely. Indeed, it took the shocking attack on New York on September 11, 2001, to establish awareness of the new, international nature of crime and push the deeply integrated, allied and peaceful member states of the European Union to relax their extradition rules and open up their criminal justice systems to one another.

Ultimately, experts say, such cooperation depends on trust in one another’s legal systems to administer justice. And while trust is all too rare a commodity among the former foes of the Balkans, it remains its most precious: the ultimate precondition to thawing the invisible barriers that keep its people from moving freely.