Witness To War Crimes

The early 1990s saw Europes first conflict for almost 40 years when bitter fighting broke out in the former Yugoslav republic. Colonel Colm Doyle of the Irish Army found himself in the midst of this appalling civil war when in October 1991 he became first a European Community Monitor and almost immediately Head of the Monitor Mission in besieged Sarajevo. After six months he was appointed Personal Representative to Lord Carrington, Chairman of the Peace Conference on Yugoslavia.In this overdue memoir, he describes his role mediating, negotiating and persuading political and military leaders of all sides to halt the seemingly inexorable path to all-out war. He arranged ceasefires, visited prisoner-of-war camps, extricated election monitors and organised hostage releases. His experiences made him a key witness at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague at the trials of Milosevic, Mladic and Karadzic.With his unprecedented access, Doyles personal account can claim to be one of the most significant works on the brutal Bosnian War.

Rethinking the concepts of "witnessing" and "witness" is highly relevant to the study of war crimes, mass murder and genocide. Through multiple readings, the volume shows the meanings and functions of witnessing in a political and historical context marked by the emergence of multiculturalism. The ultimate goal is the exploration of divergent and intersectional positions of the witness and witnessing as both concrete and hermeneutical categories. As a result, the mechanisms of social, political, and psychological oppression, murder and genocide will become tangible and understandable with greater precision and finesse.

In recent years, the world community has demonstrated a renewed commitment to the pursuit of international criminal justice. In 1993, the United Nations established two ad hoc international tribunals to try those responsible for genocide and crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Ten years later, the International Criminal Court began its operations and is developing prosecutions in its first two cases (Congo and Uganda). Meanwhile, national and hybrid war crimes tribunals have been established in Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, East Timor, Indonesia, Iraq, and Cambodia. Thousands of people have given testimony before these courts. Most have witnessed war crimes, including mass killings, torture, rape, inhumane imprisonment, forced expulsion, and the destruction of homes and villages. For many, testifying in a war crimes trial requires great courage, especially as they are well aware that war criminals still walk the streets of their villages and towns. Yet despite these risks, little attention has been paid to the fate of witnesses of mass atrocity. Nor do we know much about their experiences testifying before an international tribunal or the effect of such testimony on their return to their postwar communities. The first study of victims and witnesses who have testified before an international war crimes tribunal, The Witnesses examines the opinions and attitudes of eighty-seven individuals—Bosnians, Muslims, Serbs, and Croats—who have appeared before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Rethinking the concepts of "witnessing" and "witness" is highly relevant to the study of war crimes, mass murder and genocide. Through multiple readings, the volume shows the meanings and functions of witnessing in a political and historical context marked by the emergence of multiculturalism. The ultimate goal is the exploration of divergent and intersectional positions of the witness and witnessing as both concrete and hermeneutical categories. As a result, the mechanisms of social, political, and psychological oppression, murder and genocide will become tangible and understandable with greater precision and finesse.

The Moral Witness is the first cultural history of the "witness to genocide" in the West. Carolyn J. Dean shows how the witness became a protagonist of twentieth-century moral culture by tracing the emergence of this figure in courtroom battles from the 1920s to the 1960s—covering the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian pogroms, the Soviet Gulag, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In these trials, witness testimonies differentiated the crime of genocide from war crimes and began to form our understanding of modern political and cultural murder. By the turn of the twentieth century, the "witness to genocide" became a pervasive icon of suffering humanity and a symbol of western moral conscience. Dean sheds new light on the recent global focus on survivors' trauma. Only by placing the moral witness in a longer historical trajectory, she demonstrates, can we understand how the stories we tell about survivor testimony have shaped both our past and contemporary moral culture.

What can we do to prevent more atrocities from happening in the future, and to stop the ones that are happening right now? That the World May Know tells the powerful and moving story of the successes and failures of the modern human rights movement. Drawing on firsthand accounts from fieldworkers around the world, the book gives a painfully clear picture of the human cost of confronting inhumanity in our day.