INDEPTH: WAR CRIMES
The Special United Nations Tribunals
CBC News Online | March 28, 2006
The former Yugoslavia
 Louise Arbour (CP Photo)
The court, based in The Hague, was set up to pursue and to punish those responsible for war crimes committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia after it began to unravel in 1991.
Tribunal staff was largely kept on the sidelines during the 1998 Balkan conflict. Yugoslav authorities barred them from entering Kosovo to investigate reported atrocities.
In January 1999, Arbour tried but was prevented from entering Kosovo after 45 ethnic Albanians were slaughtered in the village of Racak.
That massacre was blamed on Serb forces. But neither the authorities in Belgrade nor the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army were inclined to co-operate with Arbour and her investigators. Neither army considered themselves guilty of war crimes.
On May 27, 1999, the tribunal issued arrest warrants for then-Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and four of his top aides for alleged atrocities committed in Kosovo. It was the first time such warrants had been issued for a sitting head of state.
The charges alleged that Milosevic and the others were responsible for a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Albanians in Kosovo.
Arbour told a news conference that there was a credible basis to believe the men "are criminally responsible for the deportation of 740,000 Kosovo Albanians and for the murder of 340 Kosovo Albanians."
The charges were based largely on information prosecutors gathered from refugees streaming out of Kosovo and into neighbouring regions. Investigators were given detailed accounts of massacres, rapes and other atrocities.
Arbour would be replaced as chief prosecutor by Carla del Ponte, who oversaw the case against Milosevic until his death on March 11, 2006.
She told a news conference in The Hague that the death of Milosevic would not undo the tribunal's 10 years work.
"During the prosecution case, 295 witnesses testified and 5,000 exhibits were presented to the court," she said. "This represents a wealth of evidence that is on the record. It is not only a question of convictions and sentencing. It is also a question of truth, of facts and truth."
Most of the tribunal's earlier indictments stemmed from the war in Bosnia, which broke out in 1991 and dragged on until 1995. More than 200,000 people were killed in the conflict that was mainly between Bosnian Serbs (backed by the former Yugoslavia) and Bosniaks, the country's largest ethnic group. (The term Bosniak recently replaced Muslim as an ethnic term in part to avoid confusion with the religious term Muslim, which refers to an adherent of Islam.)
In 1995, the small mining town of Srebrenica was an internationally designated safe haven under the protection of several hundred Dutch UN troops.
Bosnian Serb forces circled the troops and began shelling the town. They separated families and forced more than 20,000 people to flee.
Men from the town were taken to a large warehouse. Survivors say the Serbs opened fire, killing almost everyone in the building.
More than 8,000 Bosniaks are thought to have been massacred in Srebrenica.
Under the Dayton Peace Accord, which ended the war when it was signed in December 1995, all parties were to hand over any indicted war criminals.
At first only the Bosniaks complied. Then, in October 1997, the tribunal received a boost when 10 Bosnian Croats also gave themselves up.
In February 1998, Arbour made her frustration with the Belgrade authorities known, openly criticizing their unwillingness to turn in suspected Serbian war criminals.
A few days later, Miroslav Tadic and Milan Simic became the first Bosnian Serbs to surrender to the tribunal. The two were accused of setting up detention camps where Croats and Muslims were abused.
In another breakthrough for the tribunal, U.S. forces in northeast Bosnia arrested Gen. Radislav Krstic in December 1998 on charges of genocide. Gen. Krstic was accused of leading the bloody assault on Srebrenica.
Rwanda
Most of Arbour's time at the initial War Crimes Tribunbal was taken up by the Balkan atrocities. But she was also responsible for overseeing a separate UN tribunal set up in 1994 to prosecute war crimes in Rwanda. Up to 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were systematically slaughtered in a three-month campaign of terror that began in the small central African country on April 6, 1994.
Most of the killing was carried out by a well-organized force of 8,000 extremist Hutus.
The tribunal, based in Arusha, northern Tanzania, delivered its first genocide conviction in September 1998, ruling in the case of Jean-Paul Akayesu, a former mayor accused of inciting the murder of 2,000 Tutsis.
With that decision, the tribunal became the first international court to hand down a conviction for genocide.
It was also the first to rule that sexual crimes are acts of genocide when committed with the intent of destroying an ethnic, racial, national or religious group.
Other than that historic ruling, and a guilty plea from a former Rwandan prime minister in another case, the progress in Arusha was even more painfully slow than in The Hague.
Sierra Leone
The Special Court for Sierra Leone began operating in 2003. It was set up by the government of Sierra Leone and the United Nations to hear cases stemming from a civil war that gripped the country between 1996 and 2002. Eleven people stand accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, extermination, acts of terror, enslavement, looting and burning, sexual slavery, conscription of children into an armed force, and attacks on United Nations peacekeepers and humanitarian workers.
Former Liberian president Charles Taylor is among those charged. UN prosecutors say Taylor
provided money, guns, military training and personnel to rebels in Sierra Leone in return for access to Sierra Leone's diamond wealth. They accuse Taylor of supporting and encouraging brutal rebel attacks against the civilian population of Sierra Leone. The allegations say Taylor was responsible for mass killings, thousands of rapes, mutilations, and abductions. In addition, he faces charges that he encouraged the use of child soldiers, directed the use of forced labour, and ordered the looting and burning of civilian houses. He is also accused of complicity in the killing of UN peacekeepers and aid workers. In all, Taylor faces 17 counts and a possible life sentence if convicted.
Taylor went into exile in Nigeria in 2003 as part of a peace agreement that ended a bloody 14-year civil war in Liberia. In March 2006, Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf asked Nigeria to extradite Taylor to Liberia. Nigeria agreed, but refused to take him into custody, saying that was Liberia's responsibility. Before he could be arrested, Taylor disappeared.
Cambodia
The special court for Cambodia (officially known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed during the Period of Democratic Kampuchea) was created to deal with crimes committed during the horrific 1975-79 reign of the Khmer Rouge.
As many as one million people were executed as the Khmer Rouge tried to set up a communist-agrarian society by wiping out anyone they suspected of not supporting their goals. The UN and the government of Cambodia reached a draft agreement on how the court will proceed in May 2003, and in early 2006, they set up an administrative office for the court and established the legal foundations for its operation. Trials of former Khmer Rouge leaders could start later in 2006.
East Timor
The Serious Crimes Unit was established by the United Nations Transitional Authority in East Timor after the country gained its independence from Indonesia in 1999. The unit was set up to prosecute cases of crimes against humanity committed in East Timor during the run-up to independence.
Almost 400 people – including former militia commanders and former military commanders from the Indonesian armed forces – were indicted. As of the end of 2004, 76 people had been convicted of various serious crimes, ranging from "murder as a crime against humanity" to sexual assault to destruction of property. In May 2005, the mandate of the Special Crimes Unit ended and the files of all remaining cases were transferred to Timorese authorities.
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