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Serbs made a furtive sale and a dirty trade. It was a handover made
in exchange for a dollop of aid and a whitewashed reputation. You
do not have to be either an admirer of Milosevic or a worrier about
black helicopters to find it more than a little distasteful. Last
weekend's events in Belgrade and The Hague may have been a short-term
victory for Uncle Sam, but, in the longer term, they may come to
be seen as a disaster. What they really represented was a triumph
for a form of intrusive international jurisprudence that already
represents a menace to effective diplomacy and will, in the end,
be a threat to the interests of this country. It is worth remembering,
after all, that if there is any legitimacy to prosecutor Del Ponte's
crusade, it is based on the authority of the United Nations, an
organization that has never been notably friendly to the U.S. Yes,
that's right, the U.N., that same collection of moral colossi whose
most recent notable achievement in the area of human rights has
been the decision that the slave state Sudan represents a better
guarantor of basic decency than does the United States.
The sad thing about last weekend's drama was that it was all so
unnecessary. Milosevic was, mercifully, already a beaten man, a
thug at the end of his tether, who seemed destined finally to face
the judgment of his own nation, a people that he had led to disaster
and humiliation. The trial would have lasted longer than that of
Romania's unlamented Ceausescu, and the punishment might have been
less, shall we say, immediate, but the consequences would, for practical
purposes, have been much the same. Yugoslavia's failed savior would
have been finished. Almost as importantly, such a trial would have
provided an occasion for his countrymen to confront their own past.
With, doubtless, the help of some prompting from outside, the proceedings
would have been a valuable chance for the Serbs to contemplate not
only the crimes committed by their former leader, but also the horrors
in which far too many of them had themselves participated. Milosevic,
too, had many willing executioners.
There is a clear danger that removing the trial to The Hague will
dilute that message. Handled with anything other than the most exquisite
sense of fairness, it may well play into the hands of those who
want to portray Milosevic as a martyr, a victim of victors' justice,
a hapless scapegoat found guilty only by a kangaroo court. In such
a scenario, the real evidence of terrible atrocity would almost
inevitably be dragged into controversy and disrepute. The slaughtered
tens of thousands would suffer further, grotesque insult. Their
corpses would be mocked as tragic accidents and their mass graves
as exaggerations. The dead would be left slandered and their memory
reduced to nothing more than the bogus prop of a fraudulent show
trial, the basis of a poisonous myth that could prove compelling
in a Serbia where history too was a casualty of Milosevic's war.
The very real chance of such a development cannot be ignored. The
rump of the old Yugoslavia is an embattled and broken nation, surrounded
by hostile states and, understandably, skeptical about the evenhandedness
of NATO's new justice. It is a fertile ground, as we already know,
for paranoia and crazed theories of betrayal.
Distance too, will pave the way for another, gentler form of denial,
the seductive fantasy in which nobody, neither the Serbs, nor NATO,
is guilty. Only the bogeyman Slobodan will be to blame. Safely tucked
away in Holland, Milosevic will become the repository for a people's
guilt, out of sight, out of mind and off their conscience. In Germany's
immediate post-war years the conveniently deceased, and thus equally
absent, Hitler fulfilled a similar function for surprisingly large
numbers of his former supporters. It is not difficult to imagine
the same occurring in Serbia, but more nastily. After all, in the
Balkans national myths have a way of turning rapidly rancid, and,
unlike in the territory of the fallen Reich, there is hardly anyone
on the ground to keep the peace should the desire for revenge become
too great to contain.
So if the decision to try Milosevic abroad is an opportunity missed,
and a risk taken, what exactly was its point? It cannot have been
deterrence. The prospect of a Dutch jail is unlikely to put off
any more than the feeblest of dictators-in-waiting. What Milosevic's
fate may do, however, is operate as a disincentive to some future
despot contemplating a voluntary abdication. In the end, the Yugoslav
leader had, of course, to be shoved out of office, but at least
even he had the sense to go (reasonably) quietly when the game was
up. The Hague has been his reward. Future dictators will draw the
necessary conclusions.
In all probability, the real purpose of making such an effort to
get hold of Milosevic was something else: It was to make clear that
this latest application of international law was for real. To be
fair, there was some practical justification for this. If, like
the NATO allies, you intervene in the affairs of a foreign country,
it is always handy to get a little legal backing, even if you have
to make it up. The problem is that, in going along with this, the
United States has given further momentum to the efforts of an increasingly
assertive international bureaucratic class, prominent in the U.N.
and elsewhere, to grab ever more power for itself. Kyoto was one
notorious instance, but this is a continuous, relentless process.
There will soon, for example, almost certainly be a permanent international
criminal court (Iranian judges, anyone?), which will, you can be
sure, have a permanent anti-American agenda.
Meanwhile, activist European magistrates have used this era's more
expansive notions of international law to start taking it upon themselves
to 'investigate' a perceived retired oppressor or two, none of whom,
strangely, ever appear to be on the Left. Augusto Pinochet was harassed
for years, and there's even excited talk about prosecuting Henry
Kissinger, but when it comes to Mikhail Gorbachev, the hero of Afghanistan,
Vilnius, and Tbilisi there is only silence. No French magistrate,
I suspect, will be bothering Gorby.
President Bush appears to understand the implications of this. Quite
rightly, he has made clear that the US will not subject itself to
the proposed International Court, but international law has, of
late, shown a tendency to turn up in the most unexpected places.
The Bush administration will have to make sure, in its understandable
enthusiasm to punish the butchers of the former Yugoslavia, that
it is not inadvertently setting a precedent for future less savory
'international' prosecutions of, say, US troops on a peacekeeping
mission.
Such an outcome really would give Milosevic the last laugh.
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