The case against Slobodan Milosevic

The Guardian, London


Comment

Criminal proceedings

The case against Slobodan Milosevic would never have held up in a
proper court of law

John Laughland
Tuesday March 14, 2006
The Guardian


I was one of the last western journalists to meet Slobodan Milosevic.
Having been called to The Hague as a potential witness, I spent an
hour in his cell in January last year. Like most who met him, I found
him polite and intelligent. "We will win," he told me. "Freedom is a
universal value. They have no evidence against me."

Such statements will shock those who have been assured that Milosevic
was a nationalist dictator bent on establishing a racially pure
Greater Serbia. But civilised societies ought to be reluctant to
condone criminal convictions based on hate campaigns. The fact is
that Milosevic's enemies have never been able to produce a single
rabid nationalist, let alone racist, quotation from his mouth, while
in the four years of his trial at The Hague not a single witness has
testified that he ordered war crimes.

Instead, witnesses have been trooping into The Hague for nearly two
years now, testifying that there was neither genocide in Kosovo nor
any plan to drive out the civilian ethnic Albanian population, and
that Milosevic could not be held responsible either for the break-up
of Yugoslavia or the subsequent civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Establishing criminal responsibility is an exact science and the fact
is that Milosevic was not in charge of Yugoslavia when it was
breaking up. The 1991 order telling the (multi-ethnic) Yugoslavian
army to fight the secessionist states, Croatia and Slovenia, was
given by the then head of the federal government, Ante Markovic, a
darling of the west - and western intervention made the situation
much worse. Milosevic is often accused of upsetting the internal
balance of the Yugoslavian federal constitution, but few seriously
believe that a political system modelled on Switzerland's stood any
chance of long surviving Tito.

The Hague prosecution issued the original indictment against
Milosevic for Kosovo in May 1999, at the height of Nato's attack on
Yugoslavia and in apparent justification of it. It was not until a
year and a half later, and between seven and 10 years after the
events, that the indictments for Bosnia and Croatia were added. This
was presumably done because the prosecutors realised that Nato's
allegations about genocide in Kosovo could not stand up in court. But
the Bosnia and Croatia indictments were problematic too. Milosevic
has always denied moral or legal responsibility for the atrocities
committed by the Bosnian Serbs, for instance in 1995 at Srebrenica,
because, as president of neighbouring Serbia, he was not in charge of
Bosnia or the Bosnian Serbs. Even if he had influence over the
Bosnian Serbs, that is a long way from criminal responsibility

If the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia were
a proper court of law, the charges against him would have been
dismissed long ago. Unfortunately, it is a highly politicised organ,
created on the initiative of the very states which attacked
Yugoslavia in 1999, and whose judges have disgraced themselves by
bending the rules to facilitate the prosecution's task. In 2004, the
judges imposed defence counsel on Milosevic, even though the ICTY's
charter states that defendants have the right to defend themselves,
and even though they knew he was too sick to stand trial. On February
24 2006, at the prosecution's insistence, they rejected Milosevic's
request to be transferred to a heart clinic: he died a fortnight later.

It is corrosive of the core values of western civilisation for the
chief Hague prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, now to say that Milosevic
escaped justice by dying, for this assumes that "justice" means not
due process but a guilty verdict. The day we start to believe that we
will have abandoned the rule of law completely.

· John Laughland is the author of Le Tribunal Pénal International:
Gardien du Nouvel Ordre Mondial (The International Criminal Tribunal:
Guardian of the New World Order)