Panel sought to heal Bosnia's war wounds Bosnian Jewish leader champions panel to heal nation's war wounds
By JEREMY BRENINGSTALL
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
September 12, 2000
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-The leader of the Jewish community here is spearheading an
effort to help the nation recover from its devastating civil war.
"The war in Bosnia was finished with the Dayton Peace Accord," Jakob
Finci said, referring to the December 1995 agreement that effectively partitioned
Bosnia along Serb, Muslim and Croat ethnic lines.
"The war was finished without a winner, and maybe it is fair to say we
have three losing parties. And the three of them have started to write their
own histories pretending they won the war. [If we are] teaching our children
different histories, we can expect nothing else than a new war in 20 or 30 years."
During Bosnia's civil war, which lasted from 1992 through 1995, an estimated
210,000 civilians were killed and 2 million displaced.
The planned Truth and Reconciliation Commission-modeled on a similarly named
panel in South Africa-has received support from more than 100 nongovernmental
organizations within Bosnia, Finci said.
Privately, all three members of Bosnia's rotating presidency have indicated
they will support the commission, said Neil Kritz, director of the Rule of Law
program at the Institute of Peace in Washington, which has been involved in
generating discussion about the new panel.
The commission still must gain the formal support of Bosnia's political parties,
something that Finci said he is hoping to achieve during this fall's national
elections.
Candidates running for office in the Nov. 11 voting will be asked if they support
the panel, Finci said.
The proposed commission would be different from South Africa's in several fundamental
ways, Finci said.
South Africa's commission was set up to investigate atrocities committed by
the apartheid government and by nonapartheid forces between 1960 and 1994 and
to foster reconciliation among South Africans.
The subsequent report, based on the testimony of more than 17,500 people, made
recommendations about which human rights violators should be prosecuted, which
victims should be compensated and granted amnesty to witnesses that cooperated.
In the case of Bosnia, the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague was
set up to prosecute war crimes, Finci said.
The new panel "will not interfere at all with the commission in The Hague,"
Finci said.
Instead of recommending prosecution or restitution, the Bosnian commission will
focus on allowing ordinary people an opportunity to express guilt or anger lingering
from the war and making recommendations to avoid ethnic violence in the future,
Finci said.
"I think this will be some kind of psychotherapy for all the people that
survived the war in Bosnia," Finci said.
The commission could make recommendations about monuments or memorial days,
as well as about political, education and religious reforms, Kritz said.
The commission's estimated $12 million to $15 million operating costs would
have to be funded through the assistance of the international community, Finci
said.
Finci said he and the other proponents of the truth commission are hoping to
find a Nobel Peace Prize laureate or former national leader to serve as the
commission's chair.
The remainder of the commission's staff would include representatives of the
country's various ethnic groups, Finci said.
