There was slight justice and humanity on the 22nd of November 2017, when Ratko Mladić was sentenced to life in prison by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). If you are not sure who Mladić is, he was the Chief of Staff of the Bosnian Serb forces during the time of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, where 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb troops, and the four year siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.
Mladić was indicted by the ICTY in 1996, but was only captured in 2011 and transferred to the Hague. After a long four year trial, he was found guilty of 10 out of 11 charges, including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Along with the conviction of the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić in 2016, who was sentenced to 40 years imprisonment, some form of justice for the victims families and the Bosnian nation has been found. It has been over 20 years since the Srebrenica massacre and the siege of Sarajevo, but these two verdicts placed on two of the most senior figures in the genocide will be welcomed, but the underlying effect of preventing future or halting present acts of genocide and crimes against humanity still seem beyond the international community.
The atrocities committed by all sides during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, along with the Rwandan genocide, just to mention a few, are still felt today, with genocide and crimes against humanity still occurring in the 21st century. In the years preceding the Bosnian war and the Rwandan genocide, the international community declared “never again.” Over two decades since these atrocities, genocide and crimes against humanity are still been committed in Syria, Myanmar and in many other countries.
Myanmar as a point in case, where thousands of Rohingya Muslims have been killed and hundreds of thousands fleeing to escape the bloody hands of the Myanmar military. The situation in Myanmar has been occurring for decades, with the international community basically sitting on its hands, unwilling to intervene and stop the ongoing ethnic cleansing. A fear that too much pressure on the Myanmar military or civilian government led by Aung San Suu Kyi, would be counter productive in democratising a former military ruled country. But allowing the military to conduct indiscriminate attacks on Rohingya Muslims may also be counter productive in bring peace and human rights to a country which has suffered decades of violence and abuse in the hands of the military.
As for Syria, the ongoing conflict over the past six years has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, with millions fleeing the violence, and a nation in ruin. This civil conflict could have possibly been prevented from escalating, if not for a lack of consensus and individual national interests of major international and regional powers. All sides to the conflict have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, though Bashar Al Assad’s forces have committed some of the most horrific atrocities, when deploying chemical weapons on his own people. It will be seen if Assad and others are ever brought to trial in the Hague. Somehow this seems unlikely.
Holding perpetrators to account decades after such atrocities brings a sense of justice for the victims families and humanity in general, but there needs to be more emphases in finding greater political will and consensus, especially at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), to prevent and to intervene in cases of occurring genocide and other acts of atrocities.
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