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A group of war victims staged a protest during a speech by the international court’s president Theodor Meron in Sarajevo, accusing him of failing to deliver justice.
The protesters held up a banner which read “RIP justice” and staged a walk-out after Meron began his keynote speech about the Tribunal’s achievements at a conference marking the 20th anniversary of the UN-backed court in the Bosnian capital on Wednesday.
“This is not an action against the Tribunal, but against an individual called Theodor Meron, who jeopardised the credibility of the work of the Hague Tribunal and by doing so, showed the world that justice has not been achieved,” said one of the protesters, Edvin Cudic.
Some relatives of the 7,000 Bosniaks killed in the Srebrenica massacres also turned their back on Meron in protest as he spoke at the Holiday Inn hotel in Sarajevo.
“We spent the day with judge Meron yesterday and he ignored what we told him. Now we, the victims, have decided to ignore him,” said one of them, Hatidza Mehmedovic, president of the Mothers of Srebrenica Association.
Natasa Kandic, a campaigner for the regional truth initiative known as RECOM, said that recent high-profile acquittals had shaken people’s trust in the Tribunal and raised questions about whether politics had “influenced the recent decisions”.
However Meron said in his speech that while the Hague Tribunal had faced many obstacles, it had overcome them to open up what he called an “era of accountability”.
“The role of the Tribunal was to decide on individual criminal responsibility for serious violations of international criminal law and this responsibility must be proved beyond reasonable doubt,” Meron insisted in an apparent response to critics of the acquittals.
Meron’s visit to Bosnia also attracted controversy on Tuesday when, during a visit to the wartime Omarska detention centre, former prisoners protested that they were not allowed to show the Hague Tribunal president the entire jail camp site, which is now a foreign-owned iron ore complex.
