The yardstick for international justice differs according to continents

It is with such irony that while modern man continues to enjoy the latest inventions of technology, the same man is also trying to find a solution to the rudest wrongs man’s mind can create. Currently the world is celebrating the latest mobile telephone innovation-the I. phone, at the same time we are also celebrating the recent success of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for the arrest of Radovan Karadizic on 22 July. Having been on the run for the past 13 years, Karadizic has been living in Belgrade as a therapist, in a suburban apartment, with a girlfriend to complete the picture of your average neighbour. Karadizic’a arrest is the latest big move in the UN’s chess game of bringing to justice those responsible for the Srebrenica massacre and the Sarajevo siege in 1995. Going by that arrest, the ICTY seems to be speeding at the rate a Ferrari in stark comparison to its older cousin, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda-which is moving at a snail’s pace. Yet beyond that simple comparison, the courts can be used as an example in trying to understand differences between the European way of doing things with how things happen in Africa. In Europe, a problem is identified, solutions are sought and implementation is immediate. The arrest of Karadizic it has been said is the result of the European Union threatening Serbia by isolating it from the community. The ICTR and ICTY were formed immediately after the UN Security Council in its new found desire to “bring an end to impunity” in the mid 1990s. The UN decided to take action after in both cases innocent people had brutally lost their lives to murderous politicians. In both cases the speed and nature of killings set alarming records that in both cases had there not been powerful intervention, the targeted populations might have been fully exterminated. In the Yugoslavia republics it took the intervention of the very powerful NATO forces to stop the siege of Sarajevo and oust Radovan Karadizic along with his military sidekick General Ratomir Mladic while in Rwanda it took the Rwanda Patriotic Front to oust the MRND and its genocidal regime. In the Former Yugoslavian city of Sarajevo, nationalist wars went into overdrive where, under the suspected guidance of the detained Karadizic, a committee planned carefully the extermination of the entire Muslim population of Bosnia. In Yugoslavia the planners started with the slaughter of about 10,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in one short painful day. After the Yugoslavian republics finally made peace during the now famous Dayton peace accords, the leaders disappeared. A UN court was formed to look for and bring them to justice, cum the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1996 to be based at The Hague in the same premises of the ICC. The ICTY was mandated by the Security Council to have finished all its trials by the end of 2010. This UN routine of creating the international Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia came just two years after the same body had created the UN tribunal for Rwanda with the same mandate but to be based in Arusha, the ICTR was charged with trying similar criminals as the ICTY was also required to have closed down. Today, both courts have different report cards to present: the ICTY have relentlessly pursued their suspects with zeal and they have captured many of their biggest ‘fish so far. Having arrested former president of Yugoslavia, the powerful Slobodan Milesovic, who has since died in custody and now Radovan Karadzic, the ICTY has delivered on its primary objective of arresting all its highest profile suspects. The same cannot be said of the ICTR. The ICTR is crawling on; to date, their most high profile detainee remains Theoneste Bagosora. donmuhinda@yahoo.com