Milosevic's Death and the Fate of the Hague Tribunal

Sir Christopher Wren was one of Britain’s most famous architects. After the fire of London in 1666 he was commissioned to rebuild St Paul’s Cathedral. In 1723 he was buried there and near his tomb is a tablet with an epitaph that reads: “If you seek his monument, look about you”. Much the same could be said about Slobodan Milosevic who died in The Hague on 11 March. But you could stand almost anywhere in the former Yugoslavia and it would be true.

When Slobodan Milosevic came to power in the late 1980s Yugoslavia was the most prosperous of the socialist countries.  Its citizens were well respected internationally and they could travel freely, not needing visas for most of the places they wanted to go to.  The country was close to signing a cooperation agreement with what was then still called the European Community.

Today, that country has passed into history. Well over 100,000 people were killed in the Yugoslav wars, hundreds of thousands lost their homes, millions had their lives wrecked and most are far worse off now than they were before the war. Individually the former Yugoslav states have no political clout on the European or world stage and, locked in by visa requirements, few of their citizens, even if they have the money, are free to travel like they used to.

False Verdicts on the Court

Since his death the life and career of Slobodan Milosevic has been pored over by numerous experts. There is no need to cover the same ground here. To me it is clear that Milosevic, who led his people into four lost wars, was bad man and a disastrous leader. But he was not the only bad leader in the former Yugoslavia, even if he was the first among equals.

What is interesting is how Milosevic’s death has been interpreted when it comes to the work of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Many pundits have argued that Milosevic, however it is determined that he died, cheated justice and took his revenge by doing so on a tribunal despised by many Serbs. The proceedings against him lasted too long, said many commentators, justice has not been seen to have been done, and his death has dealt the tribunal an almost fatal blow. An editorial in London’s Daily Telegraph went so far in generalising as to say that proceedings at the tribunal were “farcical”.

Already these same commentators have moved on to write or talk about other subjects. It is not surprising that their grasp of the reality of the situation is light and that they do not have any constructive suggestions to offer at this critical juncture.

As I was beginning to write this article, an e-mail alert popped up in the corner of my screen. It was from the press office of the tribunal. It said: “Milosevic - Termination of Proceedings.” In my view, to wind up the case like this, in such a mechanical fashion, as happened in a five-minute session on the morning of March 14, is wrong. Also, however many mistakes the court has made, to write off all of its work because of a few undoubted setbacks is simply to betray ignorance about some of the real effects of the tribunal.

An Experiment in International Justice

The UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, to give it its full name, has been from its beginning in 1993 an experiment. What else could it be, since international justice, from the Milosevic case to the International Criminal Court to the Iraqi court trying Saddam Hussein, is an evolving form of law? Clearly the Yugoslav Tribunal has made some awful mistakes. There have been incompetent decisions and it has been highly bureaucratic.  Yet all too often, those who like to do it down do not take into consideration the impact the tribunal has had amongst the people whom it is supposed to serve.

A few weeks ago I took a bus from Sarajevo to Belgrade. A couple of hours after we left, the bus stopped at a gleaming, brightly lit new petrol station so that passengers could go to the loo and have a cup of coffee. Along the road it was very dark and there was no other traffic. For a few minutes I just stood there, straining to see what I could in the hills, remembering the wartime Serbian checkpoint here and above all trying to remember all of the truly awful things that happened around here.

Konjevic Polje is a village built around a crossroads. One way leads to Belgrade, the other leads to Srebrenica. At the beginning of the Bosnian war in 1992, Konjevic Polje held out for some months before falling to Serb forces who needed this strategic location. When Bosnian Muslim-held Srebrenica fell in the summer of 1995, thousands of its men fled this way, only to be caught around here and mown down by artillery or gunfire. Survivors recall a “man hunt” round Konjevic Polje. A few miles away, up the road at Kravica, is the hangar where 1,500 who were caught were executed. You can still see the bullet holes.

Kravica is also the village which was raided on Orthodox Christmas day in 1993 by Muslim forces and in which 49 Serbs were killed, some of them in cold blood too. Nasir Oric, who commanded Bosnian Muslim forces in Srebrenica, and who by a weird twist of fate was before that a bodyguard to Slobodan Milosevic, is now also on trial in The Hague. The next village is Hranca. I remember seeing here, right at the beginning of the war, the little body of seven-year-old Selma Hodzic, who had been killed the day before when Serbian paramilitaries raided the village.

Providing Justice for the Victims

Of course it is obvious that, as a former head of state, Milosevic was the star of The Hague. But none of the events that I have described have gone unremembered there. In 2001 General Radislav Krstic was convicted for genocide for his role in Srebrenica (later reduced on appeal to “aiding and abetting” genocide). Today, you just need to go the tribunal website, find the judgement and do a search for a name like Konjevic Polje to see how all the horrors that happened at this otherwise insignificant Bosnian crossroads have been recorded for ever in a way inconceivable to past generations. To dismiss such work, as the Daily Telegraph did, is simply ignorance.

Emir Suljagic, a Srebrenica survivor who later worked as a journalist at the court and wrote his account of the siege in his book Postcards from the Grave, told me how he reacted when Momir Nikolic, a Bosnian Serb intelligence officer, accepted his guilt for his role in the Srebrenica massacres.

Suljagic said: “I was crying in court. When he said, ‘I plead guilty,’ I ran downstairs and locked myself in the toilet and cried my eyes out. It was a genuine relief to hear someone like him saying, ‘Yes, we killed seven thousand or eight thousand people.’” Multiply this reaction by a million, amongst all the victims across the former Yugoslavia and over all the different cases, and now try to claim the tribunal has failed.

A Contribution to Progress

But the court is not just about providing justice. In northern Bosnia, Kozarac is a small town which has literally risen from the rubble thanks to the tribunal. Some 19 local killers or people responsible for killings have been indicted and convicted or otherwise removed from the local political scene thanks to the tribunal. This has enabled thousands of Bosnian Muslims to come home to this area, now in the Serb part of Bosnia. The situation is not the same everywhere, but Bosnia is different thanks to the court.

Likewise, if it had not been for the tribunal there would be no reason why people like Radovan Karadzic, the wartime leader of the Bosnian Serbs, should not still be their leader and General Ratko Mladic, who commanded Bosnian Serb forces during the war and who has been indicted for genocide for his role in Srebrenica, a senior politician. In more than ten years since the war Bosnia has made extraordinary progress and The Hague has played a large role in making this possible. Life there is hardly ideal, but it would be a lot worse if many of the Hague indictees were still in politics.

That is not say that tribunal has an unblemished record. For example just before Milosevic died its judges decided that Ramush Haradinaj, the former Kosovo Albanian prime minister who has been indicted for murders committed during the Kosovo war, could participate in politics while on bail awaiting trial. The prosecution had argued that this would serve to intimidate potential witnesses and thus undermine the case. Serbs who already see the court as biased just shrug and say: “We told you so. One law for Serbs and one for everyone else.”

There are of course many other reasons why so few Serbs who fled Kosovo in the wake of the war there have returned home, not least that most of them don’t want to live in an Albanian-dominated independent Kosovo, but the fact that some witnesses in sensitive cases, brave enough to stand up, have been gunned down here may also have something to do with this.

A Legacy from the Trial?

Chuck Sudetic covered the Bosnian war for the New York Times and then wrote Blood and Vengeance, one of the best books there is about it. After that he worked for the tribunal for four years. He is right when he argues that it would be a scandal now if the judges in the Milosevic case simply moved on. Four years in, the case had a mere fifty hours to go. Much of that would have been filled by strange western propagandists for Milosevic and not by anyone who could have brought any serious new material evidence in his defence.

My view is that Milosevic would almost certainly have been convicted for crimes against humanity but I doubt that he would have been sent down for genocide. This would have been hard to prove and there is no evidence that Milosevic, as opposed to some of his subordinates, was of this bent.

If international justice is in a state of evolution then it would seem to me that with a little creativity and will the judges in the Milosevic case could easily now set themselves the task of writing up a truth commission-style report based on what they have already heard. “They should not just be able to walk away from this with their per diems, UN savings and pensions,” says Sudetic.

In his view the judges in the Milosevic trial gave the former Serbian leader far too much leeway in allowing him to waste time, run rings around them and thus let the proceedings drag on for so long. “The judges owe the victims and the world which paid for this tribunal because they were the ones who allowed Milosevic to drag out the proceedings ad nauseam.” And not just that, he says, “they should do it pro bono publico – for free.”

Tim Judah is the author of The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia and Kosovo: War and Revenge, both published by Yale University Press

Related chapters from Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know:

Bosnia

Genocide

Persecutions on Political, Racial or Religious Grounds

Related Links:

International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

Coalition for International Justice

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