A report in the independent Sarajevo weekly Dani highlights the moral, political and legal difficulties in which the Hague tribunal has become enmired, following its collaboration with Belgrade's suppression of vital documents relevant to the issue of Serbian involvement in genocide in Bosnia.

In the preceding issue of Dani [19 June 2009], we published an article describing how Serbia and Montenegro reached an agreement with the Tribunal judges conducting the trial against Slobodan Milošević, to the effect that the court would not make public documents showing that Serbia had committed genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina. These highly important documents, as a result, remained unavailable to Bosnia-Herzegovina in its legal action against Serbia before the International Court of Justice in The Hague on the issue of genocide, as well as in trials conducted by the Tribunal against other war criminals.

A couple of weeks ago, however, these documents were sent to nearly a thousand e-mail addresses. In Bosnia itself, only the associations of Bosnian war victims reacted to this, by publicly calling upon the Tribunal to state publicly whether the documents sent were authentic or not.

The Tribunal’s president, Patrick Robinson, arrived in Sarajevo last week and held several meetings. Only the associations of war victims, and member of the Bosnian presidency Haris Silajdžić, demanded that he state whether the documents in question were authentic or not. The Tribunal’s president was categorical on both occasions: he could not comment on the documents while the trial against Florence Hartmann was proceeding. Ms Hartmann is the former spokesperson for the Tribunal’s former chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, whom the Tribunal has charged with disrespect for the court and for revealing ICTY- protected documents: namely, for publishing extracts from two protected documents dated September 2005 and April 2006, which include personal files of former members of the Army of Yugoslavia as well as transcripts and documents from the archives of the former FRY’s supreme defence council.

While many awaited the Tribunal’s formal pronouncement on the authenticity of the documents sent to a large number of e-mail addresses, there appeared last weekend an announcement sent from two e-mail addresses - press@icty.org and fraserk@un.org - stating that on 10 June 2009 documents were dispatched from an unknown address that were allegedly under ICTY protection, and that the ICTY had begun its own investigation into this leak. The letters asked all those who had received the allegedly protected documents to destroy them, and forbade their further copying and distribution.

Bearing in mind that the ICTY has thus far refused to state whether the documents in question are authentic, and given that various ‘confidential’ claims regarding their nature continue to be issued, the war victims’ associations have repeated their invitation to the ICTY to state publicly whether the documents are authentic, and to name those responsible for the e-mails sent out at the weekend. If these were indeed sent by ICTY officials, then theTtribunal is facing yet another scandal, particularly since their unsigned authors threatened court proceedings. Whatever the outcome, the truth is that the war victims will not easily forget what they saw in those documents. Bosnian officials should now demand of the ICTY to revise its original decision to protect the Serbian and Montenegrin documents.

Translated from Dani (Sarajevo), 26 June.2009

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