Milosevic in The Hague

Gary J. Bass

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2003

Article preview: first 500 of 5,342 words total.

Summary:  Yugoslavia's former tyrant now sits in the dock facing charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. Serving as his own counsel, Slobodan Milosevic rages against NATO conspiracies and victor's justice. But these courtroom antics cannot detract from the trial's great achievements: revealing the truth about Milosevic's role in the Balkan wars and removing him from Serbian politics once and for all.

Gary J. Bass is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and the author of Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals.

JUSTICE AS A POLICY

October 30, 2002, is just another day in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. A stocky former Serb intelligence agent, Slobodan Lazarevic, is testifying against his erstwhile boss and former political idol. Lazarevic had planned to testify in secret, as witness C-001. (He is so smooth on the stand that the Serbian press corps dubs him "Agent 001, License to Kill.") Milosevic, serving as his own counsel, asks, "Based on my information ..., your wife's name is [deleted]?" As the prosecution objects furiously, pointing out that Lazarevic is in a witness relocation program and demanding that his wife's name be stricken from the record, Milosevic adds, "His wife worked as a [deleted]." It is a blatant attempt at intimidation: you mess with me, I mess with your family. Even behind bulletproof glass, the former strongman still aims to be dangerous.

The world has looked away just as the Milosevic trial has gotten really interesting. In February 2002, raging against NATO conspiracies and victor's justice, the ousted Yugoslav leader was hauled into court in The Hague. This was an amazing triumph for the human rights movement, but at the same time the realization of a nightmare that had haunted the Allied officials who planned the Nuremberg tribunals nearly 60 years ago. They had worried that Nazi leaders would be able to use those trials as a forum to justify their actions and present themselves as martyrs to subsequent generations. Milosevic has tried to do the same and, slowed by his antics, the trial has now entered its second year with the prosecution still only partway through its case.

As the most important moment for international justice since the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, Milosevic's trial is a possible watershed. Charged with committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Bosnia and crimes against humanity in Kosovo and Croatia, he is the first former head of state to land in the dock of an international war crimes tribunal. The trial's success or failure will therefore shape all future efforts at punishing the world's bloodiest war criminals -- including those at the International Criminal Court (ICC) that started up in March, and any postwar tribunals in Iraq. International justice must not only be done, but also be made to look useful and appealing so that future politicians will decide, in the phrase of the late political theorist Judith Shklar, to choose "justice, as a policy."

The Bush administration, desperate to avoid giving encouragement to the ICC, has essentially ignored the trial rather than seize the opportunity it affords to remind Muslims worldwide of how U.S. power was used, albeit belatedly, to save Muslim lives in the former Yugoslavia. But those who see the Milosevic case primarily in terms of its role in the progressive evolution of an international legal order -- whether supportive human rights lawyers or nervous sovereignty-minded American officials -- are missing the point.

The tribunal's most important impact will be not in the legal sphere but ...

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