Hunt for Justice -Movie Review

Hunt for Justice is a movie that illustrates the story of Louise Arbour and her road to bring Slobodan Milosevic, who is a Serbian Prime Minister at the time of the movie, to justice for his crimes against humanity. In the context of the time of the movie, Yugoslavia was disintegrating in a very violent way with a civil war between Serbians, Croatians, Bosnians, Kosovans consisting of many war crimes against civilians. In that time, she was appointed in 1996 by NATO as the Chief War Crimes Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. The film opens up with the coming of Louise Arbour to Hague where the International Criminal Court is established. There we see her in a fight against the political blockades put in the way of her tribunal about the war crimes in Yugoslavia. However, with the help of her translator, who is also a victim of civil war, her staff, and surprisingly British Captain John Tanner, she first captures two major war criminals. Nonetheless, both criminals die during their trials, one for suicide, the other from a heart attack. Therefore, bringing the contemporary Serbian Prime Minister Slobodan Milosevic to the Hague becomes the only way to provide justice. In the end, although the many difficulties, she and her team manage to put Slobodan Milosevic into trial in the Hague in International Criminal Court because of his crimes against humanity and war crimes including murdering, raping civilians, extermination camps, and genocide.

The main challenge in the path of the Justice Arbour was the political obstacles produced by the UN and Western powers' unwillingness to act. In the movie three generals who are in command of the guarded, safe zones in Yugoslavia, probably founded with the intervention of NATO and UN, represent those Western powers and conflict with Arbour. During the movie, they are explaining the Russian and Chinese support behind Slobodan Milosevic and his position as a present prime minister of Serbia makes the implying jurisdiction against Milosevic is a very tense situation. Therefore, they are saying that an aggressive act like putting Milosevic into trial may be regarded as an act of aggression by the Serbian government and supporter Eastern bloc. Hence, such an action can trigger a major war between the Western powers of NATO and UN, and the Eastern bloc.

Consequently, the main challenge against Justice Arbour is the opposition from generals and politics due to fear of starting a war. On the other side, there are minor challenges that Arbour is facing during the film. One of them is the lack of resources which she changes the overall strategy because of it. The second one is the doubt of one of her personnel. Third and greatest of those minor issues is the emotional and mental burden of the case on not only her personality but family relations and her staff like her translator. During the film her translator argues with criminals or being affected in the court because of testimonies of victim and her daughter complains about the workload and treats because of her work, she struggles to not give up due to the difficulty of her job and many things like those being illustrated.

She gets help from mainly three sources during the film. First, he gets help from her translator who is a local and victim looking for his wife. He pushes her not to give up this case and in my opinion, makes it easier to focus and understand the circumstances. During the film, the translator’s motives are changing with its mentality. In the beginning, he is a victim of many of his relatives including his missing wife, so he wants to bring justice to people who did those bad things to him and his relatives. However, in the middle of the movie until the finish, he explains that he just wants to know what happened to his wife and find her and he does not care for justice anymore so, he stays in the center to gather information. Secondly, her staff helps her with an urge to do their duties to humanity and justice in hard conditions. Thirdly, and unexpectedly the British Captain. The British Captain John Tanner explains his motive with a quote from her which she says to generals in a discussion in a meeting such as law is the thing that separates soldiers from killers and then he says that he is a soldier, unlike the generals that turned into the politicians. So, he probably looks for doing the right thing as a soldier which is ending the suffering of people from war crimes at any cost.

In my opinion, the main message of the movie is that war and especially war crimes make a huge amount of people suffering in a great amount. Such hideous actions must not remain unpunished at any cost even though there is a danger of creating a bigger war. With this message, I think there are minor messages about how politics and international relations and even law despite the justice is provided at the end is a messy and dirty field where people’s lives and sufferings can be disregarded in the name of maintaining “peace” and fear of war as generals do.