Serbia is a Nicely Packaged Bomb
Knowledge of what happened denied, victims concealed, ignorance of victims’ names – these are the factors that constantly encourage new crimes. Hence my constant preoccupation with putting a name to the victims, because a name can serve in the Balkans as an instrument to prevent denial, lies, manipulation of numbers. * The Office of the War Crimes Prosecutor has been tasked with the protection of the former criminal state by protecting its military generals. Today, this institution has no strategy to prosecute war crimes. Instead, it protects the politicians who in certain situations arrest citizens of other nationalities for political reasons. * When will the question of the responsibility of the police, the army, the media, the banking system which had funded the procurement of weapons and war volunteers, be on the agenda? Never – because crime has been totally revitalized here, and the prevailing opinion is that these persons and institutions were only defending the Serbian government and the Serbian people. No one even mentions that these state institutions acted illegally to the detriment of society.
Patrick Ball from the Benetech organization Human Rights Data Analysis Group held a lecture to the students of the Transitional Justice School on Wednesday, November 7th, 2012. Patrick Ball spent 20 years creating databases and implementing quantative analyses of the gathered data on human rights violations for the purposes of truth commissions, non-governmental organizations, and international missions of the United Nations in El Salvador, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Peru, East Timor, Kosovo, and other countries.