هذا التقرير متاح أيضًا بـ العربية
Between Syria, which has begun opening files on transitional justice and the missing after the fall of the Assad regime, and Gaza, where evidence of Israeli killing and destruction continues to mount amid the inability of international legal mechanisms to stop it, the experience of the former Yugoslavia returns as one of the most important tests of what documentation and accountability mean after war — and of the limits of judicial rulings in turning truth established in court into a truth accepted by societies and states.
More than three decades ago, Serbian human rights activist Natasa Kandic chose to work from within Serbia to document the crimes committed by Serbian forces during the wars that accompanied Yugoslavia’s breakup, at a time when nationalism and war were redrawing the region along ethnic lines.
She began with anti-war activism in Belgrade, then by the end of 1992 moved into organized work documenting war crimes and violations of minority rights, seeing what she was doing not as opposition to her country, but as a responsibility toward the victims and toward the society in whose name the crimes were being committed.
More than 30 years later, her experience reveals another dilemma that goes beyond collecting evidence and issuing verdicts. War crimes trials in the former Yugoslavia produced a vast body of documents and judicially established facts, but they did not prevent the persistence of denial or the glorification of some of those convicted. The region’s societies, Kandic says, remained captive to nationalist narratives that selectively choose their own victims and their own truths about the war.
In this exclusive interview with Kandic, we revisit her experience in Serbia, Bosnia and Kosovo to examine what that experience says today about justice and accountability in the Arab world — from the challenges Syria faces in protecting archives of violations, determining the fate of the missing and building a record of victims, to what journalists, researchers and human rights organizations should preserve and document in Gaza so that the evidence remains usable in future investigations and trials.
The interview also addresses the limits of comparing Gaza with Srebrenica, the failure of international protection mechanisms, and the future of international justice under the selective application of law. Kandic believes that differences in historical context prevent any direct equivalence between the two experiences, but do not erase what the comparison reveals about the failure to protect civilians and the silence of powerful states. She warns of the consequences that may follow when international laws and standards are subordinated to political interests.
Natasa Kandic is a Serbian human rights activist and lawyer, and one of the most prominent figures associated with documenting the crimes of the Yugoslav wars. In 1992, she founded the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, which worked to document grave human rights violations and war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo, before expanding its work into transitional justice, support for victims and their families, and preserving the memory associated with the wars of the 1990s.
Kandic spent the war years gathering testimonies and evidence and documenting violations on the ground, and material collected by the Humanitarian Law Center was used in cases before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. She was also among the leading initiators of RECOM, a regional initiative that sought to establish a joint commission to determine the facts related to war crimes and grave violations, and to document the victims of the wars fought on the territory of the former Yugoslavia.
Over the course of her career, she has received more than 20 international and regional awards and honors in the field of human rights, including the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders and the 2013 Civil Rights Defender Award. She was also granted honorary citizenship of Sarajevo in 2005. In 2003, Time magazine named her among a list of 36 “European Heroes,” and in 2006 included her in its special issue “60 Years of Heroes.”
What did it mean for you, as a Serbian activist, to document crimes committed in Serbia’s name? Did you see this work as opposition to your country, or as a form of responsibility toward it?
Before the 1990s, Yugoslavia was one country, and when the war began in 1991, ethnonationalist political parties did not succeed in erasing every memory of shared life, nor in forcing all intellectuals to join ethnic camps presented as a condition for the survival of each “people.”
When extremist political parties began expelling Croats from Serbia in 1991 — including the Serbian Radical Party, whose leader (Vojislav Seselj) was convicted before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia — civic actions were launched in Belgrade against the policy of war and the endangerment of minorities.
On Oct. 1, 1991, with a group of friends, I organized a candlelight vigil for all those who had died in the war in Croatia, and we read out the names of Croats, Serbs, Hungarians and others, which we had gathered from newspapers and through contact with friends in Croatia.
In a park next to the building that housed the offices of then-Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, we lit candles and read the names of those killed beside a banner that read: “Solidarity with all those who rebel against war.”
Slobodan Milosevic was preoccupied with occupying Serb-inhabited territory in Croatia, and so he viewed us as a completely harmless group of activists protesting near his office. In this way, activist groups emerged that protested war crimes and violations of minority rights in Serbia.
By the end of 1992, these activities had become focused on documenting war crimes and violations of minority rights through the establishment of the Humanitarian Law Center. I did not see this work as opposition to my country, but as a responsibility toward the victims and toward the society in whose name the crimes were being committed.
More than three decades after the Srebrenica genocide, why has judicial truth not become an accepted social and political truth, despite the evidence and the verdicts?
Criminal justice in the countries of the former Yugoslavia led to a selective acceptance of judicial truth, the marginalization of other victims, and the glorification of generals convicted of war crimes. Even so, international criminal trials and proceedings before the International Court of Justice left us an important legacy of evidence, documents, established facts and legal conclusions. These will remain available to future generations, in a better political climate, when they revisit the events of the wars and their consequences.
We expected judicially established facts to have the power to bring about change, but the absence of political will proved to be the main obstacle, because nationalist interests were placed above the rule of law, allowing each ethnic group and each state to retain its own truth about the war.
After documenting killings, disappearances and mass graves in Kosovo, what does the world still misunderstand about what happened there, and what are the main unresolved issues?
The international community, especially the United States, deserves credit for establishing the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, a judicial body within Kosovo’s justice system based in The Hague.
This criminal justice mechanism can help Albanians — Kosovo Albanians — understand that no army has the right to kill people because its leaders consider them collaborators or spies with the Serbs.
Leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army detained Albanians and ordered the killing of those who did not support that army or who worked in Serbian institutions.
It remains to be seen whether the trial of Kosovo’s former president, Hashim Thaci, and other KLA leaders will change public consciousness, because even in wartime, people may not be tortured or killed because they worked in Serbian institutions or had contacts with Serbs.
On the other hand, the trials of Serbian generals before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia failed to convey the full enormity of the crimes committed by Serbia’s police and army in Kosovo. During the 78 days of NATO bombing, Serbian forces killed about 7,000 Albanian civilians and expelled about 800,000 people from Kosovo as part of a plan aimed at preventing their return.
During the NATO bombing, I was often in Kosovo, and I saw what the Serbian forces were doing and could not remain silent. I wrote and spoke publicly, but the truth is difficult to accept in Serbia.
Over time, the number of people in Belgrade who do not remain silent when they see the evidence and facts about what happened in Kosovo has grown. Even so, they remain a minority compared with the majority that supports the political narrative that Serbia’s police and army were defending the Serbian people against “terrorists.”
RECOM sought to establish a joint regional commission to document all victims of the Yugoslav wars and establish the facts about the crimes, but governments did not create it. Can genuine reconciliation be achieved if each society recognizes only its own victims?
We designed RECOM as a corrective mechanism for criminal justice, complementing trials by documenting victims and recognizing them.
By following criminal trials, we noticed that victims who testified often left the proceedings traumatized, because they had expected to be heard about their suffering and the injustice they had endured.
It was difficult for them to accept that their role was to testify about the acts of the accused in order to help judges decide on the criminal responsibility of those on trial.
Victims and the public throughout the former Yugoslavia supported RECOM as a mechanism for creating a record of all victims and recognizing them, and the presidents and prime ministers of the successor states of Yugoslavia also expressed their support.
But in 2019, when governments were expected to make decisions establishing RECOM, only one government did so — Montenegro’s — while the others withdrew. That was bitter confirmation that public support was not enough to guarantee a political decision.
Genuine reconciliation cannot be achieved as long as each society recognizes only its own victims and refuses responsibility for the victims of others.
After the fall of the Assad regime, what should Syria prioritize, based on the Yugoslav experience, to protect evidence, determine the fate of the missing and hold those responsible accountable?
Syria has a number of strong nongovernmental organizations documenting crimes and disappearances, and they have databases stored outside the country. It is essential that they continue documenting the fate of every victim and create a record containing the name of every victim.
It is difficult to know when the time will come to officially recognize all victims, but that work must continue.
Based on your experience in Bosnia and Kosovo, how do you assess what is happening in Gaza, and what are the limits of comparing it with Srebrenica?
It is difficult to compare Gaza with any previous crime, because the historical contexts are different, and the suffering of people in the enclave has produced new international political alignments.
When the genocide in Srebrenica was committed, the whole world was stunned into silence. With the crimes in Gaza, which I can see only as a genocide unfolding before our eyes, we are witnessing part of the world remain silent because of US and German support for Israel.
The comparison is useful in drawing attention to the failure of international protection and the silence of powerful states, but the two events should not simply be equated with one another.
What should journalists, researchers and human rights organizations document and preserve today so that evidence of crimes in Gaza remains credible and legally usable in the future?
Victims must be recorded, otherwise time and the world will forget them. Everything must be documented, as we do with our own victims.
What does the failure to protect Srebrenica and Gaza reveal about the limits of international law, and what future does justice have if the law is applied selectively?
It is difficult to comprehend the failures that occurred in protecting the people of Srebrenica, but the Dutch government today acknowledges its failures. The Dutch battalion, Dutchbat, was part of the UN force tasked with protecting the town.
Under President Donald Trump, the United States became a serious threat to the work of international legal mechanisms. Even the arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued by the International Criminal Court had no practical effect. The international justice system has been defeated.
In the case of the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia applied international standards equally to all sides, yet we still accept the facts it established selectively.
I have well-founded fears about what awaits us if international laws and standards are applied selectively.
After more than three decades of documenting crimes, identifying victims and confronting denial, do you still believe facts can change societies and prevent atrocities from recurring? What gives you hope today?
Student protests against the government are continuing in Serbia, but they do not yet have the transformative capacity needed to bring about deep social change.
Students are still influenced by widespread ethnonationalist narratives about the past, but some have begun to question those narratives, and that is a small source of hope.