ABSTRACT
Since the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993, and especially since the changes of regime in Serbia and Croatia in 2000, a complex and controversial story has developed around the variety of measures that have been generated to produce accounts and promote understandings of the past, identify violations of humanitarian law and penalize their perpetrators, and satisfy international demands for accountability. These initiatives have operated in fits and starts, often in response to conditionality imposed from outside, sometimes in bad faith and frequently in half measures or through processes that remain incomplete. However, what is being asked of the former Yugoslav states is a process which, in its depth and speed, has no close parallel in history. They are expected to participate in both domestic and international criminal proceedings that use an eclectic mixture of procedures and practices and to produce gestures of penance which embody a genuine transformation in popular consciousness – all this without destroying political and legal institutions nor permitting them to remain as they were when their states were complicit in deeds that they now have to punish. Considering that these states have experienced neither a decisive military defeat nor a complete political transformation, the fact that transitional justice initiatives have occurred on a meaningful scale at all is in itself noteworthy.1
