The International Tribunal

Let us move on now to your last major international role as chief prosecutor for the International Tribunal for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. What were the precedents for the establishment of that body and what was its mandate?

Well there were no precedents for its establishment. The only time there'd been multinational war crimes tribunals were obviously at Nuremberg and Tokyo. But those were tribunals set up by the four major victor nations to try the leaders of the vanquished Nazi regime. So there was a theoretical or perceptual analogy or precedent for it, but the ad hoc tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was the first truly international war crimes tribunal ever in many ways. Firstly the fact that it was set up by a unanimous Security Council representing the whole world. Every nation of the world is represented in the United Nations; the Security Council acted and the General Assembly participated. And there was no dissent. It's important to realize too that at Nuremberg there was not a multinational prosecution. Justice Robert Jackson only worked with American lawyers and investigators. Sir Hartley Shorecross only worked with the British. And so for the French and the Russians. And they each dealt with a different part of the prosecution. In The Hague, when I left in September, we had 180 people in the prosecutor's office from 40 nations, all working together on a multinational, international prosecution, making new law, making new precedents, new admissibility of evidence, indictments that had never looked like any indictments from any particular country. So really that was, I think, the main part of the excitement: being involved in something that had never been attempted before. And it has succeeded.

Did the justices have to agree about what would constitute a criminal act?

No. The Security Council statute set out the jurisdiction and defined the crimes. Obviously within those definitions there was room for interpretation, and from some of the cases the judges of that tribunal, from eleven countries, have already created important precedents, have moved forward international humanitarian law, the law of all, considerably. But the offenses, what was criminal, was determined by the Security Council.

February, 1995; The Hague: Goldstone as Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, with the Tribunal Judges.

As you took the assignment, one of the first things that you had to do was a political task, that of securing the budget for your own staff. Tell us a little about that experience.

Well, the United Nations has been for some years, as is well known, an insolvent organization, mainly, unfortunately, as a result of the United States not paying its dues and being indebted some $1.5 billion. There simply isn't enough money to resource all of the United Nations agencies. When I went to The Hague I didn't know that there was not yet a budget, and that budgets have to be considered by the Budget Committee of the General Assembly, the ACABQ as it's called, and one has to justify every dollar, every cent, indeed, that one gets. So that was a huge diplomatic battle to see that we got sufficient to do our work, knowing that every dollar we got was a dollar less for some other important United Nations agency. This was the political situation, the factual situation, into which I was placed.

And you had to work out relationships with all of the different organizations that were on the ground in Bosnia: the International Red Cross, the High Commissioner for Refugees, IFOR (the UN force)....

And governments. We had to get the cooperation of governments, otherwise we couldn't have worked.

And what were you trying to achieve? A consensus about the legitimate jurisdiction?

It was really a question of convincing governments and international organizations to comply with their international obligations. We weren't asking them to do anything that they didn't, in law, have to do. But there's a large gap, in the international community certainly, between what governments are obliged to do by the law and what they do in fact.

And evidence gathering is an enormously difficult task in a situation like that.

Well again, if one looks at Nuremberg, one's struck by the huge amount of documentary evidence that was available to the prosecutors. If you look at the Nuremberg record, the main Nuremberg trial and the subsequent trial, you'll find that the great bulk of evidence was documentary, not eye witness, not human beings giving evidence. We didn't have that luxury either in Yugoslavia or in Rwanda. There were no documents that established guilt. Either they weren't brought into existence or, more frequently, they'd been shredded or they weren't available to us. So we had to rely more on human beings as witnesses. That's a good thing, incidentally. I think it's a blessing in disguise because it meant that we had to deal with individuals and present the evidence of individuals so voices of victims were heard. Now that makes a much bigger impression on the public than some cold document being handed up.

And this evidence had to be gathered under extremely difficult conditions, especially the exhuming of grave sites and so on.

Even more so the difficulty was sending investigators into a country that was a war zone. On a number of occasions I had to withdraw investigators from parts of Bosnia because there was a flare-up of hostilities. So that made it difficult not only for the investigators, but also for witnesses. Witnesses were terrified, literally, for their lives in situations, and many of them acted extremely bravely.

Why is this process of recording, taking account, and making justice happen with regard to these crimes that occurred in Bosnia and Rwanda so important?

Well it has a number of important aspects. One is to cut the cycle of violence. If you visit Rwanda, if you visit Belgrade or Zagreb or Sarajevo as I did, you will be struck by the manner in which so many people were involved in their own history. Hatreds going back decades, in some cases in Yugoslavia, centuries. I was given history lessons before every meeting began and told about the terrible things that happened to Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo and, more recently, at the hands of the Ustase who were collaborating with the Nazis in Serbia and Croatia. Justice has never been done, nobody has ever been brought to accounts. So these were terrible feelings of unrequited calls for justice, and anger, frustration. It brought home to me the importance of breaking that cycle by making public at least what happened now, so that the victims get their acknowledgment. It's important for their healing process to be able to begin to put the past behind to the extent that they can. It's important too to ensure that this sort of thing doesn't happen again. It's important too to see that people who shouldn't be holding public positions are kicked out of public positions. All of these. And there's the deterrence internationally which is important.

Next page: Following Through on Tribunal Judgments