Interview med Serge Brammertz
Serge Brammertz har siden 2007 været anklager ved Den Internationale Krigsforbryderdomstol for det tidligere Jugoslavien. I sit seneste interview med UN News Centre fortæller han om anholdelsen af Ratko Mladic, om de udfordringer, domstolen står overfor, og om den personlige motivation for arbejdet med retsforfølgelse af krigsforbrydere fra 90’ernes krig midt i Europa.
9 June 2011
Serge Brammertz has served as the Prosecutor of the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)
since November 2007. He took up his post after serving as
Commissioner of the UN International Independent Investigation
Commission into the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime
minister Rafik Hariri and other killings in that country.
Previously, he served as Deputy Prosecutor of the International
Criminal Court, and spent many years as a lawyer in his native
Belgium.
 UN News Centre: You
briefed the Security Council this week - what were your key
messages and what did you hear in response?
Serge Brammertz: It was mainly to explain where
we are in relation to our work, with the main highlight being the
recent arrest of General Ratko Mladic, one of the two last
fugitives we were looking for during the last 16 years. This was,
for sure, an important part of my presentation and was recognized
as a very important step by Security Council members. The other
aspects we discussed were more in relation to organizational
issues. As you know, we are in the so-called completion strategy,
which means that we have to close the tribunal in three to four
years time and have to finish the ongoing trials and appeals, and
we discussed a number of organizational problems in this
regard.
UN News Centre: What does the closure plan mean
for ICTY and its workload and also in relation to staffing
issues?
Serge Brammertz: It's quite logical that if an
institution has a final date, then staff members start looking for
more secure jobs outside the tribunal. This departure of staff over
the last six to 12 months is creating a problem in terms of
ensuring that the ongoing trials can be finalized. It's an issue.
We are starting to recruit again, but in terms of institutional
knowledge and continuity, it's a very bad development.
UN News Centre: Will that impact negatively on
your office's work?
Serge Brammertz: We hope not, but it is an area
of concern. The President of the Tribunal mentioned yesterday that
this has already had impact on the judgment writing, on the
preparation for trials… so it has had an impact and is of course
slowing down the advancement of the trials.
UN News Centre: The ICTY was not expected to be
in existence for so long? How do you look back at the ICTY's
work?
Serge Brammertz: It's an ad hoc tribunal which
initially was created for a very limited timeline and I don't that
think that the Security Council - when the decision was taken in
1993 to create the tribunal - was imagining that it would last 16,
or before it closes, 20 years. But let's come back to the origin of
why the tribunal has been set up: we're speaking about a war in the
middle of Europe in the 1990s with tens of thousands of victims,
where still today there are still big problems in reconciliation,
and there are still big problems in having war crimes perpetrators
prosecuted. The challenge of addressing the atrocities which had
been committed in the region for the tribunal was immense. So at
the end of the day, especially if you also look at other
international tribunals, having indicted 161 persons during this
period is an absolutely satisfactory result.
UN News Centre: How do you respond to
criticisms that the ICTY cannot do its job properly given a lack of
resources, and that it is illegitimate?
Serge Brammertz: All international institutions
have their critics and that allows for us to explain why we're
there. But the question about legitimacy: the tribunal was created
by the Security Council, and I don't think there's a body more
qualified to take these kinds of very important decisions.
Of course, if you look into the different ethnic groups, if I
may say, in the former Yugoslavia, we see even today that persons
prosecuted and convicted by the tribunal are seen as heroes in
their local communities. We have seen also in the past that persons
convicted, after having served their sentence, are taken by
government plane back home and are received like heroes. So there
is still a lot of outreach to be done; a lot of explanation for
local populations as to why there's nothing heroic about killing
civilians, why there's nothing heroic about killing prisoners. One
of the reasons why people have difficulties accepting this is that
it's difficult for them to accept that people they trusted for
years during the war were only pursuing their personal agenda. So
they have difficulties accepting that those so-called trusted
persons are war criminals who abused their trust.
UN News Centre: How are the ICTY's outreach
activities helping change that?
Serge Brammertz: We are a criminal court. We
are a prosecution service. We are dealing with very complex cases.
So we are only fulfilling one part of this job which at the end of
the day has to lead to reconciliation. It's very important to
explain the work we are doing. We are in The Hague; it's relatively
far away from the region; we are functioning in English and French,
with translation into the local language - but of course it creates
some distance. Those are complicated proceedings.
But we are also asking the local governments to take more
responsibility because what we see is that - we have seen it after
the [Ante] Gotovina judgement in Croatia, we have seen it after a
number of judgments where Serbian nationals were convicted - that
there is still a lot of criticism coming from the governments not
supporting international justice, not necessarily accepting that
crimes have been committed, but pointing the finger to The Hague
and saying that it's anti-Serb, anti-Croat or anti-Bosnian.
UN News Centre: When it comes to justice, some
say local courts are preferable to international tribunals for
reasons to do with accountability and perceptions of legitimacy.
What are your thoughts?
Serge Brammertz: There can be no doubt that the
best place to have criminal justice performed is inside the
community which is the victims' and perpetrators' community.
Because it's much closer to their natural environment, it's in
their language and respecting their legal frameworks. I'm
absolutely in favour of having trials conducted locally.
When the tribunal was created in 1993, there was no local
justice which was considered objective enough to deal with those
kinds of war crimes. That's why the tribunal was set up and that's
why between 1993 and 2004, the tribunal has indicted 161 so-called
"main responsibles." Luckily, in the meantime, over the last five
years, very strong local national justice [instruments] have been
developed. What we are seeing today is that there are hundreds of
ongoing trials, mainly in Bosnia but also in Croatia and Serbia,
sometimes against their own nationals, for war crimes committed.
That's a very important development. And what we have done on our
side, for the last three years, is integrate liaison prosecutors
from Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia into our office to give this very
strong message that prosecutors within the UN or in the national
prosecution office are working towards the same objectives:
fighting against impunity and bringing to justice those who
committed crimes.
UN News Centre: How do you balance the need to
present indictments in time against victims' needs?
Serge Brammertz: You know, I said after the
arrest of [Ratko] Mladic that the arrest is taking place very late.
It's hopefully not too late. We hope that it will be possible to
bring his trial and his case to a good end. Of course it took too
long. I've asked the Serbian authorities to explain, to investigate
how it could happen, how he could evade justice for so many years.
I've said on a number of occasions that if it finally succeeded,
it's also because the international community maintained pressure
on Serbia to get this done. Why? Three weeks ago, in the latest
opinion polls in Serbia, 40 per cent of the population considered
Mladic a hero, more than 50 per cent were against his arrest, and
78 per cent were saying that if they had information on his hiding
place, they would not give it to the authorities. And this is one
of the big problems - that even after so many years there is still
very strong support for him in the region.
For the victims, I have been to Sarajevo 10 times, and to
Srebrenica, over the last three years. I was in Srebrenica a few
months ago, where as you know, more than 7,000 men and boys were
executed over a few days' time. I spoke with a woman in Srebrenica
who lost many members of her family; she lost 42 members of her
family, her father, her brothers, her sons. For some of her sons
even the bodies have not been found yet. And for them the number
one request to the international community was always "we want to
see Mladic in The Hague."
So for the victims it cannot bring back their loved ones, it
will not diminish their suffering. But I have seen them in The
Hague for the initial appearance and they are very pleased - if you
can speak about pleased in this context - that finally he has been
arrested and transferred to The Hague.
UN News Centre: What do the recent arrests mean
for your office and the tribunal?
Serge Brammertz: The impact for our tribunal is
that we have an additional high-profile case. We have to put a
trial team together. Mladic will need the necessary time to prepare
his defence. We will see how many months it will rake before the
trial can start. So it will, of course, have an impact on the
completion strategy, it will have an impact on the downsizing of
the Tribunal, but for good reasons. We have always said that the
only good solution is to have Mladic arrested during the current
lifetime of the tribunal and to have him prosecute and judged by
the ICTY in its current form.
UN News Centre: What motivates you to do what
you do?
Serge Brammertz: It's when you meet with
victims' organizations, when you go Srebrenica or to other places
in the region, and you see the suffering of such an important part
of the population, the weak link in the society; and then you look
at who the perpetrators are and they are those who had the main
duty to protect, they had the main duty to help those they finally
exterminated and killed. So, it is, from a personal perspective,
very rewarding to play a positive role and from a professional
perspective, it's extremely challenging to work in this
international environment with a very dedicated team of
international prosecutors and investigators and analysts. It's
really a mixture of those two aspects.
UN News Centre: You have been in this job for
four years, after serving with the UN International Independent
Investigation Commission in Lebanon and the International Criminal
Court, in addition to the Belgian legal system - where do you see
yourself in a few years, when ICTY's work is done?
Serge Brammertz: It's difficult to say. I'm on
a kind of special leave from my Belgian judicial functions, and
I've had the privilege of working in the international field for
nine years. I'm very much looking forward to working on the Mladic
trial and I have honestly no idea what I will do afterwards.
Kilde: http://www.un.org/news/ -
Billede: UN Photo/Devra Berkowitz
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