International criminal justice : prevention as peacebuilding : the impact of international criminal tribunals on peacebuilding in post-atrocity societies

Abstract

Since the end the cold war new pattern of armed conflict is that of ferocious intrastate war. In the 90s several longstanding, protracted conflicts turned violent. Two of the worst examples were the wars in former Yugoslavia and the genocide and the ensuing civil war in Rwanda. besides the paradigm of "peacebuilding" a main repons to this trend by the international community was a legalistic one. Consequently, international law and justice has made greater progress than ever before in recorder history: international justice has been transfomed into criminal justice, from soft into hard law. This thesis is a theoretical and empirical inquiry into the impact of international criminal justice on peacebuilding processes in what I label post-atrocity societies. I examine the effects that the international criminal tribunals for former Yugoslvia (ICTY) and for Rwanda (ICTR) have had on the post-atrocity societies of Yugoslavia and Rwanda. I assess the lessons from these efforts to comment on the challenges facing the International Criminal Court in one of its first cases, Uganda. The experiences of the ICTY and the ICTR also convey some general lessons for the future of international criminal justice as such. The main lessons are that, contrary to the intensions of decision makers international criminal tribunals do not deter future criminals from comitting grave international crimes. They are neevr able to stall ongoing atrocities. Only by taking part in post war (or: post atrocity) peacebuilind can such tribunals hope to prevent further atrocities from happening, because criminal justice can address some causes of war and the resumprion of violence. Furthermore, international criminal tribunals can undermine the influence of the old political elites bearing the main responsibility for the resort to systematic violence and the committing of grave crimes in the sahdow of war. Also, such tribunals establish an impartial truth about what happened. However, they do not seem to contribute to reconciliation.