Ever since the death of Slobodan Milosevic on 11th March, commentators have been twittering about the failure of the Yugoslav tribunal and the further blow that Milosevic has dealt it by dying. They are mainly talking nonsense.
The UN's international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, to give it its full name, which is based in The Hague, has been from its beginning in 1993, an experiment. What else could it be, since international justice, from the Milosevic case to Saddam to the international criminal court, is a form of evolving law? Clearly the Yugoslav tribunal has made some bad mistakes, and it has been highly bureaucratic. But all too often, those who dismiss it are ignorant of the effect it has had on real people and places.
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 toilet 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 awful things that happened nearby.
We were at Konjevic Polje, 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. Many of them were caught close by, rounded up and then executed. A few miles away, up the road at Kravica, you can find the hangar where 1,500 were mown down in cold blood. The bullet holes are still visible.
Kravica was raided by Muslim forces on Orthodox Christmas day in 1993—49 Serbs were killed. 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 by Serbian paramilitaries.
The Hague matters to people around here. On Srebrenica, for example, a finding of genocide has already been handed down. Emir Suljagic, a Srebrenica survivor who later worked as a journalist at the court, told me how he reacted when Momir Nikolic, a Bosnian Serb intelligence officer, accepted his guilt for his role in the massacres. "I was crying in court," said Suljagic. "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.'"
But the court is not just about providing justice. In another part of Bosnia is Kozarac, a small town that 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.
Likewise, if it had not been for the tribunal, Radovan Karadzic, the wartime leader of the Bosnian Serbs, might still be in power. Bosnia has made extraordinary progress in the ten years since the war. Life is hardly ideal, but it would be a lot worse if the Hague indictees were still in politics.
That is not say that The Hague has an unblemished record. Just before Milosevic died, for example, the tribunal 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 undermine the case. Faced with this, Serbs, who already see the court as biased, just shrug and say, "We told you so."
Chuck Sudetic covered the Bosnian war for the New York Times and wrote Blood and Vengeance, probably the best book 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 if the judges in the Milosevic case were simply to hang up their robes and go home. Four years in, the case had a mere 50 hours to go when Milosevic died. (And much of that would have been filled by weird, David Irving-style propagandists for Milosevic, not by anyone who could have brought any serious new evidence in his defence.) My view is that Milosevic would almost certainly have been convicted for crimes against humanity, but probably not for genocide, for which you have to prove intent.
I would like to know what the judges might have done, but Sudetic goes further, arguing that they have a duty to tell the victims what verdict they would have handed down. He says they should use the evidence they have already heard and write up a truth commission-style report based on it: "They should not just be able to walk away from this with their per diems, UN savings and pensions. 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." Hear hear.
