Mahieu, Stéphanie, Domestic War Crimes Trials and Restorative Justice: The Victims’ Point of View at the Ovcara Massacre Trial in Belgrade

This paper focuses on the Ovcara trial before the War Crimes Trial Chamber of the Belgrade District Court, from the point of view of the victims’ families. This trial is the first war crimes trial related to the 3^rd Balkan Wars to take place in . I use two kinds of ethnographical material: first, a description of the Ovcara trial sessions I attended in Belgrade. Additional data consists on interview conducted with Belgrade District Court officials and Human Rights NGO members who monitor the trial. The second set of material consist in interviews conducted both in Belgrade and Zagreb with the victims’ and missing persons’ families, organized into an NGO called “Vukovarske Majke”. A group of 5-7 people come every month from to Belgrade, to attend the hearings.

On 20 November 1991, at least 270 Croatians and other non-Serbs from Vukovar were killed and buried in a mass grave near the small farm community of Ovcara. The alleged authors of the crime are members of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), as well as members of paramilitary forces. In 1995, the ICTY has charged three JNA officers, Mile Mrkšić, Miroslav Radić and Veselin Šljivančanin, with involvement in planning, ordering, aiding and abetting in the perpetration of the crime. Meanwhile, Belgrade District Court’s War Crimes Panel, instituted in June 2003, has charged the alleged direct perpetrators of the crime, 17 members of the Vukovar Territorial Defense Unit (TO) and the “Leva Supoderica” volunteers unit for war crimes against prisoners of war in Ovcara. The trial started in Belgrade on 9 March 2004, and serves as a test for the Serbian authorities’ seriousness in respect to war crimes allegedly committed by Serb citizens. According to several Human Rights NGOs, the trial is being conducted in a very professional manner. As a consequence, the ICTY Mrkšić et al. trial might be transferred to Belgrade in the next months. Therefore, both the alleged commanders and perpetrators of the crime would be tried in Belgrade.

Are trial held in the territory of the former Yugoslavia more likely to contribute to the two major features of restorative justice, i.e. to repair the harm suffered by the victims and to reintegrate the offenders into their community ? Indeed, the lack of visibility the ICTY has in the former is sometimes seen as an obstacle to the implementation of a restorative justice: because of the distance between the scene of the crime and the tribunal, it stands in the way of integration and memory process of the concerned populations. Additionally, a relatively small number of people is being prosecuted in The Hague, and the majority of them are political leaders and high-rank soldiers. As the victims’ families say, if it is indeed important for them to see major political actors prosecuted in The Hague, it is even more crucial to see at trial those involved who are not considered as high-level criminal, in the sense that they did not organize the crime politically, but did directly participate in it: they are the ones whom people have seen killing or abusing their relatives, and sometimes they are still living near their former victims. However, what the victim’s families I met want to hear the most is what exactly happened in Ovcara: more than seeing the murderers of their relatives sentenced, they express the need to locate the still missing corpses, in order to give them decent funerals. A final word will address the ‘ethics’ of this kind of anthropological research, following Nancy Scheper-Hugues’ propositions for a ‘Militant Anthropology’.