Sixteen years after the publication of my book, Twilight of Impunity: The War Crimes Trial of Slobodan Milosevic, I awake to find we're living in a dark time. Twilight has turned to night. Impunity has a new life, emblazoned with light.
Thousands of people gathered in the streets of Belgrade, Serbia to honor one of the men most responsible for genocide of 8,000 Bosniaks in Srebrenica. Ratko Mladic, former head of the Republika Srpska army, was serving a life sentence for his role in the genocide, among other crimes, when he died in prison at age 84. Serbia honored him with just short of a state funeral. If Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic wasn't courting European Union membership, Mladic likely would have had that.
Serbia's official policy these days is denial that genocide happened in Srebrenica. If there was a genocide, it was against Serbs, they say. This is also official policy in Bosnia's Serb province, Republika Srpska.
As journalist and human right activist Refik Hodzic writes,
Genocide denial has become a feature of nationalist identity and anyone who challenges it is labeled a traitor or foreign agent. . . .
Denial is not passive. It prepares the ground for repetition. . . .
We are witnessing not just a denial of genocide, but its legitimization through silence, distortion and alignment with a world where justice has no traction. Unless this is confronted by courts, by educators and by international institutions, it will metastasize. And in some ways, it already has. We must stop pretending that Vucic and [Milorad] Dodik [president of Republika Srpska] are misunderstood nationalists. They are the custodians of an ideology that dehumanizes, that prepares for exclusion, and that, under the right conditions, will justify violence once again. "30 Years After: How Denial Can Fuel a New Conflict," Justice Info, 11 July 2025.
My soul aches when reading this. My hopeful outlook when I named my book has been devastated. Are we now living in the Twilight of International Justice? Consider Russia's 12 year unprovoked war on Ukraine, Israel's destruction of Gaza, the U.S. and Israel's war on Iran, the U.S. attack on Venezuelan fishing boats and murder of the people on them, U.S. kidnapping and arrest of Venezuela's president Nicolas Maduro.
Though all looks bleak, I remind myself of the Serbian students who came out in force for months to protest the corruption that caused the deaths of 16 people when the Novi Sad train station awning collapsed from shoddy workmanship. And the 3.1 million Hungarians who turned their autocrat, Viktor Orban, out of office after sixteen years. And the thousands of Albanians who have taken to the streets to protest Jared Kushner's desire to turn their coast into a luxury resort for the international jet set. Or I can look more closely to home where hundreds of thousands of my fellow citizens have rallied in "No Kings Marches" against President Donald Trump's efforts to establish an autocracy here.
I am holding my breath until the midterm elections. Then we will see if hope is alive enough to carry me through to 2028. Or if darkness has set on international law and justice.