Document Type

Article

Disciplines

International Law

Abstract

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, all humanity was devalued and left senseless during the last four years of cataclysmic war. Mankind itself had been brought to an absurdity. In 1992, death was the only reality for Bosniacs. Indeed, the depths to which mankind may delve have all been realized in the Bosnian tragedy. Hugo Grotius' quotes that were outlined as the guiding motif of the symposium precisely describe the reality of the modem world.' One could say that today it is even worse than in the age of Grotius. This hypothesis is that in Grotius' time there had not been any mechanism to protect peace as we have today in the profile of the Organization of the United Nations. Back in Grotius' times, there were no Geneva nor Hague Conventions, no Declaration of Human Rights, and no convention for the protection and punishment of the crimes of genocide. There were not hundreds of conventions, and no declarations for the protection of human rights, civil rights and the rights of nationalities and minorities.

There has been a presence of international and regional organizations under which has developed a normative order of the world along with more than a thousand resolutions of the United Nations Security Council. But still, there is a restless state of mind for both war and peace "such as even barbarous races should be ashamed of," as Hugo Grotius warned more than four hundred years ago. We should be truly concerned for our future. So, the answer to the leading question of this conference, "Can law and courts play a meaningful role in moderating the excesses of war," is very discouraging given our prior experience. The famous efforts in Nuremberg and Japan were two rare examples of when the rule of law and courts made remarkable efforts in restraining future war, but postfestum. That is why the penalties of the Nuremberg Tribunal could not prevent new warriors from starting new wars in Korea and Vietnam, could not stop the war between Iraq and Iran, the former Soviet Union and Afghanistan, nor the war and genocide in my country or in Rwanda. I mention only the most characteristic cases, all of which show the inability of law to moderate wars. We have only to observe the reasons for this failure to discover what is missing in modem international law. This is a very complex matter, and our effort could be inefficient and one-sided, but it is an endeavor that is certainly worth trying.

I would like to propose two of the reasons for the inability of law to moderate wars. Both happen to be subjective rather than objective in nature and concern the role of leading politicians in international politics. First, there is an inconsistent lack of honesty and goodwill in the implementation of the established rules and standards of international law for maintaining peace and, often, these rules and standards are ignored when war starts. Second, there is a lack of political will in efficiently finding peaceful solutions to conflicts within or between the states before conflict escalates into war. The same could be said about the cases where there is a lack of immediate political action aimed at stopping war when it does erupt.

In order to avoid being abstract, I shall try to elaborate upon the case of the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and the wars led in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. After it became obvious that the preservation of Yugoslavia was impossible, the international community, mostly the members of the United Nations Security Council, missed the chance to send a clear message to the Belgrade regime that war in this area would not be tolerated. Concurrently, we later realized, Russia had sent a secret message to the Belgrade regime that there would not be any military involvement by the West in the case of war in Yugoslavia. We all know the rest of the story. War in Bosnia and Herzegovina devastated the country like a tornado. Americans know well what a tornado is and the way it devastates the land, so you can imagine the damage done in our country, especially in the form of human losses. Not even the furthest comers of our country have been spared from destruction and death. There is not a single family in Bosnia and Herzegovina that has not suffered loss of a loved one or experienced other serious war damages. Many families have been left with no descendants.

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