The Broken Path to Reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has delivered judgments adjudicating some of the most heinous crimes committed in the Balkans. As the Tribunal’s work comes to an end, judges leave behind a ‘memorial of words’ providing a vivid description of events and sites of atrocities. However, today local authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) use the same places where crimes were committed as a political tool of denial and battleground of ethnic divisions. This chapter assesses the tensions between the truth recounted by the ICTY and the construction of the local collective memory through an analysis of how the sites of atrocities are being used. This chapter argues that, while international justice offers some resolution to a post-war divided society, a full reconciliation is only possible when the communities acknowledge the occurrence of atrocities and the right of victims to visit these places to mourn and remember.