The Hague, June 17: The International Criminal Tribunal will start winding down at the end of the year. At the insistence of the UN Security Council it will cease investigations after December 31, 2004. So the reckoning has already begun. What has it achieved?

Vidoje Blagejovic, the former commander of the Bratunac Brigade in the Bosnian Serb Army, may well be found guilty of genocide, like his former commander Krstic. If so, it will help to render history’s verdict on Srebrenica. Until this Tribunal began to hear cases, “genocide” was a concept not a crime. The Tribunal has reaffirmed the importance of individual criminal liability, and made it very difficult for people like Blagejovic to argue that they were acting under orders.

All this is important, but it is offset by the massive failure to arrest Mladic and Karadzic. This has fatally damaged the Tribunal’s credibility, precisely because the Tribunal has chosen to focus on those, like Blagejovic, who gave the orders. Without Mladic behind bars, that strategy is in tatters.

But the greatest failure has been one of connection. Process is fine up to a point, but at some stage the accused and the accuser have to look each other in the eye. This has not happened at the Hague Tribunal. The victims have not – with some individual exceptions – come to the Tribunal, and the tribunal has not gone to them.

On the eve of the massacre: Ratko Mladic (left), the
Bosnian Serb Army Commander, shares a toast with
Colonel Ton Karremans, commander of the Dutch
UN peacekeepers.The Tribunal has signally failed to trigger a process of national trials and public debate in the Serb Republic. Not a single individual indicted by the Tribunal has been arrested by the Bosnian Serb authorities. True, Milosevic’s trial been followed intensely in the Serbia, but many feel this has backfired and reinforced the Serbs’ historic sense of self-pity.

Actually, there will be a human connection here in the Tribunal next week, but it will be between the Dutch people and their own ghastly memories of Srebrenica. Retired Colonel Ton Karremans, the Dutch commander of the UN battalion that was given the task of making Srebrenica a “safe area,” will testify on behalf of Blagejovic in this court room.

Given their commitment to justice and peace, it is one of the saddest ironies that the Dutch have been crucified for allowing the Srebrenica massacre to occur. The Dutch rationalize it repeatedly: “Once Srebrenica’s defenses fell on July 11, 1995; once the Serbs had tasted blood; once the UN had failed to provide military back-up; once the dam had broken – well, Karremans and his tiny contingent were powerless to intervene.”

Or were they? My Dutch friends still ask themselves that question. It is like a national wound that will not heal, and it will again be opened next week in this bland court room when Karremans is called back from his self-imposed exile in Spain. His task? Ironically, to speak on behalf of a former Bosnian Serb general, charged with supervising the massacre.

Meanwhile, back in Srebrenica, the widows will be steeling themselves for the next mass burial at the massacre site on July 11. They will be all but oblivious to the fact that the wheels of international justice are moving – slowly and strangely – on their behalf up here in the Hague.