These days Croatia is going through a surge of nationalism and historical revisionism unseen since the worst days of the war of the 1990s. The polarization in society is between those who consider the regime, known as Independent State of Croatia, a source of pride, and those who perceive it as a source of shame. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) deals with another past, less distant, but equally painful. The population is no more open to honestly discuss it than it is the crimes of the 1940s.

Some see the case concerning cultural destruction in Mali as a blueprint for the International Criminal Court’s prospective, more successful prosecutions. Others call it the debut of the prosecutor’s new strategy in action: building cases from bottom-up instead of directly pursuing the most responsible perpetrators. Still, some critics say the case’s first suspect, Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, just fell into the court’s lap.