Page 620
1 Wednesday, 18 December 2002
2 [Sentencing Hearing]
3 [Open session]
4 [The accused entered court]
5 --- Upon commencing at 2.34 p.m.
6 JUDGE MAY: Mr. Tieger, you're going to begin for the Prosecution?
7 If so, it would be helpful if you let us know how long you propose being.
8 MR. TIEGER: Your Honour, I would estimate approximately 45
9 minutes. In addition, the Prosecutor will conclude the final submissions
10 on behalf of the Prosecution.
11 JUDGE MAY: Very well. Very well. Yes.
12 MR. TIEGER: Mr. President, Your Honours, learned colleagues for
13 the Defence. The task before the Trial Chamber is to determine a sentence
14 for this accused for the commission of a crime against humanity, a crime
15 which addresses her conduct not only towards the immediate victims but
16 also "towards the whole of mankind." Mrs. Plavsic has pled guilty to a
17 decision discriminatory campaign of persecutions which destroyed countless
18 lives and communities. By the extent and gravity of such inhumane acts,
19 humanity itself came under attack and was negated.
20 Over the past two days, we have focussed upon two issues of
21 fundamental importance to this institution: Accountability and
22 reconciliation. These concepts have been linked since the Tribunal's
23 inception. In 1993, the Security Council determined that the mass
24 violations of humanitarian law in the former Yugoslavia and particularly
25 Bosnia and Herzegovina, required the establishment of an International
Page 621
1 Tribunal to accomplish two ends: First, to take effective measures to
2 bring to justice those persons most responsible; and second, to contribute
3 to the restoration and maintenance of peace.
4 These two objectives have converged in this historic proceeding.
5 A leader has acknowledged her responsibility for a crime against humanity
6 and simultaneously issued a statement expressing remorse and the hope that
7 it would bring some measure of consolation to the victims.
8 We have heard from witnesses who understand the crimes and their
9 consequences, from those who worked with Mrs. Plavsic after the crimes
10 occurred, from those who have devoted their lives to the possibility of
11 transformative justice and from Mrs. Plavsic herself. It will now be the
12 Court's responsibility to consider the offence and all factors in
13 aggravation or in mitigation of that crime. I will address the three
14 factors upon which this hearing has explicitly or implicitly focussed:
15 First, the scale and nature of the crimes themselves; second,
16 Mrs. Plavsic's role in the crimes; and third, Mrs. Plavsic's post-conflict
17 contributions.
18 I begin then with a discussion of the crimes. The principal
19 objectives in sentencing are the realisation of retributive justice,
20 making the punishment fit the crime, and deterrence. As previous cases
21 have held, the Court's determination of sentence rests most significantly
22 upon the gravity of the crime. It is the only factor explicitly mentioned
23 in the Statute of the Tribunal and it is the Court's primary consideration
24 in imposing sentence.
25 Your Honours, in order to ensure, however that, the judgment
Page 622
1 reflects the magnitude and nature of the crime, it is necessary to see the
2 victims as individuals, not as a massive but indistinct group, and it is
3 necessary to remember in your deliberations the individual moments of pain
4 and terror, however overwhelming the numbers. Victims individually
5 deserve justice. Each of their tears, as Professor Wiesel observed, are
6 part of this indictment.
7 For all those who need to know and care to hear about the truth,
8 the recognition of all victims of the crimes is also important.
9 Particularly for those in Bosnia and elsewhere who are subjected to
10 revisionist histories but nevertheless dare to be open to the truth, we
11 owe a detailed accounting of the crime that Mrs. Plavsic has admitted.
12 That crime, the crime to which Mrs. Plavsic pleaded guilty is
13 persecutions, a crime against humanity. The crime was the systematic
14 campaign of persecutions conducted in order to separate the Muslims and
15 Croats of Bosnia from the Bosnian Serbs in the territories claimed by the
16 Bosnian Serbs. As charged in the indictment, this persecutory campaign
17 was waged in 37 municipalities. These municipalities, as you can see from
18 Exhibit 1, spanned the breadth of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Over 700.000
19 Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats lived within these municipalities
20 before the persecutions began.
21 For example, as reflected in Prosecution Exhibit 15, the
22 demographic report, 15.000 Muslims and Croats lived in Foca in 1991,
23 comprising 51 per cent of the population (and I should also note that the
24 report, for comparative analysis purposes, excludes those born after
25 1980). By 1997, of those 15.000 there were 434 Muslims and Croats left in
Page 623
1 what was once Foca; most of the others had been forcibly expelled or
2 killed in 1992. 53.000 non-Serbs lived in Prijedor in 1991; by 1997, only
3 4.000 Muslims and Croats remained. In Zvornik, there were 31.000 Muslims
4 and Croats in 1991; by 1997, there were fewer than 1.000. The
5 16.000-strong non-Serb community of Bratunac in 1991 had been 1997 been
6 reduced to hundreds. In each of these municipalities, the vast majority
7 of the Muslim and Croat community had been expelled, killed, or had fled
8 in terror in 1992.
9 When we look even more closely at these municipalities, we can
10 begin to understand more fully both the efficiency and the ruthlessness of
11 the campaign of persecutions. Focussing on Prijedor, over 7.500 Muslims
12 lived in Kozarac in 1991; after 1992, 19 remained. Over 4.000 Muslims
13 lived in Kamicani in 1991; after the campaign of persecutions, three were
14 left. Of the nearly 3.000 Muslims in Hambarine in 1991, only five
15 remained in 1993. Carakovo, a community of 2400 people, was reduced to
16 two. Biscani, a community of 1443 Muslims, ceased to exist, no one
17 remained. In each of these settlements, the vast majority of its former
18 inhabitants had been forcibly expelled, killed, or fled in fear in 1992.
19 Indeed, as Mr. Tokaca related, hundreds of villages in Bosnia and
20 Herzegovina in the 37 municipalities were razed to the ground. Villages
21 where Muslims and Croats had lived for centuries, where people had deep
22 roots, where they had their traditions, their customs, their culture,
23 their monuments, their cemeteries. These villages no longer existed.
24 Each one of the people from these destroyed settlements and villages are
25 victims of this crime against humanity. Each victim is due justice.
Page 624
1 The campaign of persecution, however, did more than to destroy
2 these communities and make hundreds of thousands of people displaced
3 persons. The objective of separating Muslims and Croats from the homes
4 where they had lived for generations required potent methods of terror.
5 These methods, as Mrs. Plavsic has acknowledged, included the following:
6 Discriminatory measures and loss of rights; military attacks on
7 towns and villages; confinement in brutal camps and detention facilities;
8 destruction of cultural monuments; torture, inhumane treatment and
9 humiliation; rapes; killings and mass executions.
10 The assessment of the seriousness of an offence requires the Trial
11 Chamber to take into account not only quantitatively the number of victims
12 but, as the Krstic Trial Chamber noted, "qualitatively the suffering
13 inflicted on the victims." And with that guidance in mind, I'd like to
14 turn my attention to just two of the brutal methods used to separate the
15 ethnic communities, camps and killings.
16 Although detention facilities and camps varied in size and
17 conditions, they existed in every municipality charged in the indictment
18 and were characterised by mistreatment of the inmates. Approximately 400
19 detention facilities existed in the 37 municipalities identified in the
20 indictment. The worst of these - including Omarska, Keraterm, Luka,
21 Celopek, KP Dom - were visions of hell, where the only boundary to the
22 torture inflicted on the prisoners was the limit of their captors'
23 imagination. In exhibits submitted to the Trial Chamber and in
24 testimonies previously heard before the Tribunal, to which the parties
25 agree the Trial Chamber can and should refer, one chilling event after
Page 625
1 another is chronicled: A 70-year-old farmer who had already lost one son
2 in a camp forced to bring his remaining son to be beaten to death; another
3 father who always passed his single piece of bread to his son through
4 other prisoners and their dilemma about whether to tell him that the son
5 had been killed, a dilemma that was resolved when the father himself was
6 killed shortly afterward; a woman forced by day to clean up the blood of
7 beaten prisoners and by night repeatedly raped; prisoners forced to commit
8 sexual acts or even sexual mutilations upon other prisoners. This brief
9 litany of inhumanity reflects incidents that, with their own cruel
10 variations, were repeated in camps over and over. These events are just a
11 few among the many that you must consider when gauging the gravity of this
12 offence.
13 The lucky ones in camp, those who were not forced to participate
14 in a loved one's murder, or sexually mutilated, or beaten to death over a
15 period of agonising days, or raped, or subject to other torments,
16 nevertheless endured conditions that drove them to the brink of death.
17 Packed into makeshift cells, deprived of water for long periods, fed
18 starvation rations (here I ask you to recall the 90 leaves of bread
19 divided among the 2500 prisoners of Manjaca), living in their own filth
20 because they were not permitted to use the wretched toilets or were too
21 afraid they would be beaten if they tried to, lice-ridden, staunching
22 wounds with rags, subjected to daily humiliations, listening with horror
23 to the sounds of fellow prisoners being beaten and tortured, beaten
24 themselves during interrogations or just randomly, these prisoners lived
25 in fear and pain that has marked them forever. In these camps, as one
Page 626
1 prisoner testified, "we were not human beings, we were just objects ..."
2 In assessing the gravity of the crime, the Trial Chamber must remember the
3 thousands who passed through these camps and continue to bear physical and
4 emotional wounds that often cause premature death. And the Trial Chamber
5 must also remember the many who never returned from the camps.
6 The Trial Chamber must also recall the mass killings. Imagine for
7 a moment that tomorrow in any of the countries from which we come 60 men,
8 women, and children were packed into a house and deliberately burned to
9 death because of their nationality; or if 150 men were machine-gunned to
10 death in a warehouse; or if 150 people were pulled from a bus, shot, and
11 shoved down a ravine. These events would shock not only the conscience of
12 that community but of the world. Yet each of these horrific crimes did
13 occur. They occurred in Bosnia in 1992. More than 60 Muslim men, women,
14 and children packed into a house in Visegrad were burned to death; more
15 than 100 men were murdered in the Velagici school; 150 men were executed
16 in room 3 in Keraterm; 150 men on Vlasic Mountain were executed; 250
17 people in a single day in Biljani, countless others executed at the
18 Karakaj technical school in Zvornik and at the Grabovice school in Kotor
19 Varos. Yet these are but a few of the hundreds of sites, where, as
20 Mr. Tokaca testified, mass killings occurred. Each of these killings,
21 Your Honours, is the result of the campaign of persecutions for which
22 Mrs. Plavsic is responsible.
23 The scale of the killings is unfathomable, even when we focus on
24 individual municipalities. In Foca, at least 1.000 non-Serbs were killed
25 in 1992; in Sanski Most, at least 1500; in Prijedor, 2000; in Bratunac, at
Page 627
1 least 1.000; in Zvornik, the same. It only takes a few seconds to recite
2 these statistics, but they reflect the extinguished lives of mothers and
3 fathers, sons and daughters, teachers, farmers, doctors, of individuals
4 with their own unique character, goals, dreams. The face of Bosnia and of
5 humanity would have been different had they been allowed to live. The
6 Trial Chamber must remember each of them in rendering its judgment.
7 And although the events took place in 1992, their destructive
8 impact continues to this day. It is reflected, as we have heard, not only
9 in the debilitated and shortened lives of camp survivors but in the
10 blighted lives of widows and orphans or of stigmatised rape victims or of
11 depressed and withdrawn children. Each of these victims, in Dr. Boraine's
12 words, "cries to be heard."
13 In determining the gravity of the offence committed by the
14 accused, however, the Trial Chamber must consider also not only the nature
15 of the crime but the nature and extent of the accused's involvement. I,
16 therefore, turn now to an examination of Mrs. Plavsic's role in this crime