Mark Harmon is a former public defender in California, who recently retired as senior prosecutor for the ICTY – having been with the tribunal from the start. He has worked on the cases that climbed the pyramids of crime and power in Bosnia, from the days he first muddied his boots on the soil of mass graves in Srebrenica to his work on the Karadzic case. Harmon knows better than anyone how the war Karadzic and Mladic are accused of masterminding was ordered and executed, and how they came to arrive at The Hague.
Harmon recalls the very first trial in 1996 – that of Dusko Tadic, who toured the Omarska and Keraterm camps, killing and beating. There was much criticism at the time about the expense of trying a minnow in the war, and disbelief that Karadzic or Mladic would ever grace the same dock. “Tadic was one of the most important cases,” reflects Harmon. “It established the existence of a large crime base, it confirmed the jurisdiction of the tribunal and it established that the violations applied to an internal armed conflict. Tadic shifted the paradigm of protections in international armed conflict to internal armed conflict. The law was set, the platform established that we were capable of trying the cases we were charged to try.”
As the crime base was established, and the tribunal scaled the ladders of command towards Karadzic and Mladic, the cases became more dependent, says Harmon, on “access to relevant documents, rather than blood and guts”. In September this year, the tribunal convicted Momcilo Perisic, former chief of general staff of the Yugoslav army in Belgrade, a case on which Harmon worked, “which showed a man directing the war from his desk in Serbia – no direct contact with victims at all. Building up the pyramid, the work was based less on the victim testimony of earlier trials than facing down the difficulties of direct government obstruction of our efforts…the trials become more sterile and lose the victims’ voice, because the trials at the top, with the likes of Karadzic, are all about proving linkages, with the atrocities already established”.
In his most remarkable case, Harmon led the investigation, prosecution and conviction of General Radoslav Krstic, General Mladic’s senior officer in command of the Srebrenica massacre. Krstic was one of the very few cases in which the prosecution had a penitent witness from the perpetrating side, a soldier in the Bosnian Serb army called Drazen Erdemovic, who came to The Hague remorseful at what he had done, pleaded guilty and was given a lenient sentence. Thereafter, he testified in numerous Srebrenica cases as a prosecution witness. Erdemovic told the court about unrelenting execution after the fall at Srebrenica, so that the death squads had to mass-murder in shifts. He testified to his wish that he be relieved of his execution duties. Most importantly Erdemovic gave information leading Harmon’s chief investigator on the case, Jean Rene Ruez, to an execution site about which the world knew nothing, at the Cultural Centre in the town of Pilica.
“Erdemovic, and the Krstic case, had a huge impact”, says Harmon. “This was at a time of total Srebrenica denial by the Serbs. And there was Erdemovic, saying he couldn’t kill any more, sitting in a café having a cup of coffee while over the road – closer than the wall of this café here – 500 people were being killed. We would never have known if Erdemovic hadn’t told us. As it is, Jean Rene Ruez went to the Pilica Cultural Centre and discovered a grisly massacre scene. Blood smeared the walls, and under the stage of the cultural centre, there were stalactites of coagulated blood”. At the same time, Harmon and the investigating teams began to trace the mass graves where the 8,000 executed around Srebrenica were buried, after US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made the apposite satellite images available. “We were able to see the freshly dug holes – and trace how the Serbs had moved body parts from one mass grave to another to try and conceal the evidence, and lay the ground for exhumations.”
Harmon says the wider legacy of the tribunal, as a deterrent for future war crimes and criminals, “is hard to measure. You can’t measure deterrence, and we must not overclaim. But it was a pioneering institution; it took some baby steps towards holding people who commit war crimes to account. It developed and refined international law and criminal procedure. The international criminal court down the road is here today because of the success of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. If we had failed, it would probably still be in the laboratory. Out of that experiment, people have been trained – inoculated if you will – to become major players in these other tribunals, for the prosecution and the defence – because these cases are about doing justice.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/04/karadzic-bosnia-war-crimes-vulliamy
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