Bosnians warn Ukrainians: It’s a long journey to justice

SARAJEVO, Bosnia – Regardless of how the Russian war in Ukraine ends, getting justice for human rights abuses suffered during the conflict will inevitably be a long and painful process for those who survive to tell of the atrocities they witnessed.

That’s the message from survivors of Bosnia’s 1992-95 internecine war, who have dedicated the ensuing years to the re-telling and re-living of their trauma in hope of bringing those responsible to justice and setting the historical record straight.

“For me, it is personal. I am still searching for the remains of my brother. I cannot move on. I cannot focus on something else and leave that behind,” said Edin Ramulic from the northwestern Bosnian town of Prijedor.

Ramulic was 22-year-old university graduate when, in April 1992, he and his male relatives, including his older brother and father, were rounded up by Bosnian Serbs, along with thousands of other non-Serb civilians from Prijedor and surrounding villages, to be deported from the area, imprisoned, tortured or killed.

More than 3,000 non-Serbs were killed in Prijedor. Ramulic’s brother, uncle and four cousins did not survive the camps.

Much like the graphic evidence of killings and torture in Bucha, outside Kyiv, that emerged earlier this month after Russian forces withdrew from the area, the discovery by international journalists of the camps in Prijedor in August 1992 provoked global outrage and calls by world leaders for those responsible to be held to account.

A process was put in motion by the United Nations Security Council to establish a special U.N. war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. When it was set up in The Hague in 1993, it was the first international court to investigate and prosecute allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide since the tribunals in Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II.

At first nobody thought it would work, the investigators’ access to crime scenes in Prijedor and elsewhere in Bosnia was blocked for years, and political leaders of the Bosnian Serbs and neighboring Serbia continued to deny human right abuses and hide documents and those indicted.

Justice was slow to come. Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic were fugitives from international justice until the late 2000s when they were tracked down in Serbia.

But by the time it shut down in 2017, the tribunal had convicted 83 high-ranking wartime political and military officials, most of them from Bosnia. It also transferred a mountain of evidence and cases against lower-ranking suspects to their home countries in the Balkans.

Desperate to find information about the fate of their loved ones and force the world to acknowledge their suffering, survivors like Ramulic changed their lives, setting up support groups for potential witnesses, collecting information about missing persons and commemorating the victims.

Ramulic still does not know where his brother’s remains are or exactly who killed him and how, but the court sentences, some of which he had helped bring about, “are the most valuable thing that we have, because the evidence-based truth contained in them cannot be forever ignored and denied.”