CIAO DATE: 07/03

Where We Are and How We Got Here: An Overview of Developments in the Search for Justice and Reconciliation

Introduction

At the dawn of the 21st century, it is increasingly recognized that societies that refuse to address the painful legacy of past abuses do so at their peril. The most vivid recent demonstration of this lesson was the experience of the former Yugoslavia. In the name of brotherhood and unity, the Tito regime prohibited any discussion of the brutalities committed by Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks against one another during the World War II period. The result was not brotherhood: accounts expanded into mythologies transmitted from one generation to the next in each ethnic community and further exaggerated along the way. This was exemplified by the mortality data for the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia. By the 1990's, the story had expanded: Croat nationalists claimed that 20,000 people died at the camp during the war, mostly of disease; Serb nationalists insisted that up to a million people, overwhelmingly Serbs, were slaughtered by the Croat Ustashe at Jasenovac. After the death of Tito, cynical nationalists were able to exploit this unresolved history of atrocities to instill fear in each ethnic group and to manipulate them into new rounds of violence.

A variety of approaches have developed to respond to past atrocities in ways that are intended to facilitate justice and/or reconciliation. These include criminal prosecution of perpetrators—before domestic, international and mixed courts—the imposition of various non-criminal sanctions, truth commissions, and the provision of compensation to victims of the abuses, each of which are examined below. The importance of dealing with the demons of the past is now more broadly accepted: the challenge is to fine-tune and better coordinate the options.

This paper was written was written for The Legacy of Abuse: Confronting the Past, Facing the Future.

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