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Unrepentant Milosevic Has a Point - International Justice - Global Policy Forum Unrepentant Milosevic Has a Point
By Richard Gwyn
The Star
March 6, 2002Let's face it, Slobodan Milosevic has a point. He has a point, this is to say, when he argues that the United Nations' special International Court at The Hague before which he is defending himself against charges of war crimes, is at least as much a political institution as a judicial one.
The former dictator of Yugoslavia and of Serbia is, of course, a thoroughly hateful individual. He's a brutal bully, and a cold as ice one. He's brought great suffering to his neighbours. He's brought as much suffering to his own people — from the loss of territory to the destruction caused by NATO's bombing to today's economic pauperization.
But it's impossible not to be disturbed by the extent to which Milosevic has been able to make the case that the court is, in fact, operating as a political instrument. The issue here isn't Milosevic's guilt or innocence. It is instead the court's credibility and, as a direct consequence of the image it acquires, the standing and credibility of the International Criminal Court that's due to be set up in two years and that will establish a new regime for the investigation and punishment of human rights violations throughout the world.
International courts lose credibility when they are seen to be administering not justice but victors' justice. (An equivalent failure by domestic courts happens if they are seen to be administering one law for the rich and one law for the poor). This doesn't make the accused necessarily any the less guilty. There is a public readiness, especially in international cases where legal proof is often harder to obtain than in the instance of domestic crimes (not least because international criminal law is still a work in progess), to accept rough justice as good enough if not satisfactory to every last legal scholar.
But nothing so corrodes the credibility of judges than when they are seen to be favouring one side for reasons that have nothing to do with the law. Milosevic's claim that this is what is happening to him is self-serving, of course. But that doesn't make his claim invalid.
As is truly disturbing, the court seems to be giving credence to his claim. The trouble started at the very beginning. Milosevic was indicted as a war criminal in the middle of NATO's war in Kosovo, a suspiciously convenient moment for NATO propagandists. Conspicuously, Milosevic was not indicted earlier, during the war in Bosnia, when the Alliance needed him to pressure the Bosnian Serbs to sign on to the Dayton peace accord.
Although originally indicted for Serb misdeeds against ethnic Albanians, Milosevic — as a result of a change in the prosecutor's tactics which the court has upheld — is now being tried simultaneously for actions done in Bosnia and in Croatia as well as in Kosovo.
It's difficult not to suspect that the prosecution's case against Milosevic for what happened in Kosovo — the claimed "genocide" against ethnic Albanians — has some large legal holes in it. The death toll that can be attributed to the Serbs has turned out to be nothing like NATO's original estimates.
The counter-claim of the Serbs that the Albanians were terrorists has had some confirmation since that war's end in the attacks by Albanians on the small Serb minority left in Kosovo (most of it in fact now ethnically-cleansed from Kosovo). One of Milosevic's shrewder counter-thrusts was to observe, "The Americans go right to the other side of the globe to fight terrorism ... whereas here the struggle against terrorism in the heart of one's own country is considered to be a crime."
When the prosecuting lawyer argued back that Kosovo was a "neighbour" of Yugoslavia, not a part of it, Milosevic rebutted — entirely correctly — that while the Kosovar Albanians do indeed want to separate, neither the U.N. nor NATO have yet sanctioned their claim. With equal shrewdness, Milosevic has argued for "an equality in arms". He's pointed out that other indicted Serb leaders, like former Bosnian Serb president Biljana Plavsic, have been allowed bail in order to prepare their defence (she's plea-bargained her way to a soft sentence) while he has to defend himself while in jail "with a public telephone".
Milosevic isn't fighting to escape his sentence. He's easily smart enough to know that he's a goner. He's fighting for his place in Serb history, and, perhaps secondarily, in world history.
Many Serbs, notoriously conspiratorial, now tell pollsters they don't think Milosevic was a war criminal. Unless his trial is more skilfully and intelligently conducted, many people outside Serbia may conclude that although indeed a war criminal, his trial was more about politics than the law. If so, international law will suffer more than Milosevic.
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