Perfect Villains, Flawed Tribunal

One of the biggest problems for the prosecution has been protecting witnesses. I have some first-hand experience in this matter. In 2002, I was the first Serbian journalist to testify against Milosevic. I received threats as a result, and nationalists at home launched a defamation campaign against me. A year ago, a hand grenade blew up outside my bedroom window. It turned out that the prosecutors had placed me on the witness list against former State Security chief Stanisic without telling me. "We forgot," a member of the prosecutor's team told me. I told her that they should forget about my appearing in court.

While many of the tribunal's failures have stemmed from its own inadequacies, it was the 2005 Security Council decision to impose a "conclusion strategy" and severely limit the court's shelf life that dealt the final blow. From that moment on, the best and the brightest among its staff started looking for new jobs, while those who replaced them have often been underqualified. Many of the judges in the ongoing trials have never spent a single day in a criminal court in their home countries -- they come from universities and international law institutes.

Despite everything, the tribunal has done some good work. More than 700 bad guys have been put behind bars. Meanwhile, former Yugoslav countries have set up their own war crimes courts, although these are still too feeble and subject to political pressures to try big cases, such as those of Karadzic or Mladic.

There are two ways to proceed from here. One is to declare the tribunal a failure and refrain from setting up similar courts in the future. The other is to learn from past mistakes.

One key lesson: Countries emerging from conflict need swift justice, not decades of tedious trials aimed at establishing comprehensive historical truth. That task should be left to historians. Instead of casting a wide net and spending years examining every single fish, future tribunals should focus on the worst cases with the strongest evidence -- and process them quickly, before politics steps in. And if this raises some eyebrows among legal experts, so be it. Human justice is imperfect, but no justice is much worse.

Dejan Anastasijevic is a senior investigative reporter with Vreme, a Belgrade-based weekly newsmagazine, and a contributor to Time magazine.