Since its emergence, transitional justice has encountered numerous challenges such as identifying victims, deciding whether to punish superiors or middle agents, avoiding a "victor’s justice", and finding adequate resources for compensation, trial, or institutional reform. Also, the transitional period may only result in a tenuous peace or fragile democracy. As has been noted in the discourse on transition to democracy, the dilemma has always been for new regimes to promote accountability for past abuses without risking a smooth transition to democracy. In addition, existing judicial system might be weak, corrupt, or ineffective and in effect make achieving any viable justice difficult. Observers of transitional justice application and processes, such as Makau W. Mutua (2000) emphasized on the difficulties of achieving actual justice through one of the most prominent mechanisms of transitional justice, trials. Commenting on the international tribunal established in Rwanda in 1994, he argued that it “serves to deflect responsibility, to assuage the consciences of states which were unwilling to stop the genocide... largely masks the illegitimacy of the Tutsi regime”. In sum, Matua argues that criminal tribunals such as those in Rwanda and Yugoslavia are “less meaningful if they cannot be applied or enforced without prejudice to redress transgressions or unless they have a deterrent effect such as behavior modification on the part of would be perpetrators”.