It's a really great question.
One of the things that we've tried to underscore in all of our reports and our work is that there are the immediate needs and then there are the long-term needs. What we often see in situations where atrocities have occurred, unfortunately, is a recurrence of them, and usually within a 10-year time frame. That's true for Iraq, and that's true for most conflicts around the world.
With the former Yugoslavia, I think there have been a couple of things that played a critical role. One was the role of international justice. In that case it was the creation of an ad hoc tribunal and the fairly swift gathering of evidence to allow for cases to come forward. I think it's also important in the Yugoslavia case that in some cases people waited 20 years for justice. There was also a great investment in local reconciliation.
Each of the options are going to differ based on the context, the cultures, and the societies that you are working with. It depends on which country you're looking at, but in Bosnia and elsewhere, there was a real emphasis on trying to ensure the inclusion of minority communities into the political life of the various states.
I think in Iraq that's really critical to underscore. As I mentioned before, many of these communities are living in a contested area. For many of the Yazidi, when you talk to them, they feel a lot of distrust against the Kurdish regional government because they feel as though their political interests were never taken to heart and they were marginalized and excluded in the political life in the area around Sinjar, which had been de facto annexed by the KRG. When you speak to Christians from Karkush, they'll also talk about frustration with the local election, and we're talking local elections for mayors, because they felt that their voices were not being heard.
So ensuring in a very swift way not just the provision of security for these communities but also their inclusion in the political administration of the areas in which they live will be very important. That's where I think the voice of the international community to urge all sides to include minorities in that political process will help build more trust.
As I mentioned at the start, one of the reasons why people are self-arming is not just for physical protection; it's to be able to assert greater influence in the political and economic life of Nineveh going forward. We need to be reassuring minorities that they will have a voice. I think there are things that were done in the former Yugoslavia and in each of the countries that helped to create that space that we can use potentially as a model going forward.