Justice denied

The death of Milosevic can only elicit the regret expressed by Lord Ashdown this afternoon, as reported by the BBC:

Lord Ashdown - the former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown - said many would regret that the justice progress had been halted.

"There is no doubt that of the evil that stalked the Balkans for the best part of a decade one way or another, one of the primary authors was Slobodan Milosevic."

He told BBC News 24 that Milosevic's death was "an act of closure".

"But it is not an act of closure that anyone would wish to see. The act of closure we wished to see was the end of the Milosevic trial and justice taking its course."

The trial of Milosevic seemed to me more necessary than that of any other criminal trial in my lifetime. International law is not the same type of body of rules as domestic law, for it lacks a central sovereign body capable of implementing it. But it is not merely a useful fiction. In at least one important respect, the Hague tribunal has secured an important advance for civilised values in a way that no other course could have achieved. I noted in a column a few weeks ago that:

The Hague tribunal secured the first ever genocide conviction, that of General Radislav Krstic. By calling “ethnic cleansing” what it really was, the tribunal may have made it more difficult for Western governments to ignore aggressive nationalism. That could only have been accomplished by a juridical route.

On the news earlier this evening, Lord Owen remarked that the sheer extensiveness of the charges brought against Milosevic ensured that the trial would be protracted, and this concern to see justice secured means that no verdict will now be delivered. Lord Owen is of course right, but there were good reasons nonetheless for the fastidiousness with which the charge sheet was constructed. The trial was fair and scrupulous, but it also had to serve as an agent of historical truth. We know that in 1999, shortly after Nato's bombing campaign in Kosovo began, Milosevic instructed his Interior Minister, Vlajko Stojilkovic, to destroy the evidence of war crimes. Stojilkovic used refrigeration lorries to carry corpses from murder sites in Kosovo to Serbia in order to burn or rebury them. There is eyewitness testimony of the incineration of corpses at one site in Serbia and one in Kosovo.

Samantha Power, in her Pulitzer-winning book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, (2003, p. 472) comments of this harrowing finding:

Milosevic's government thus not only permitted, encouraged, and ordered its security forces to murder the Albanians, but it also tried to cover up the crimes. The UN tribunal has received reports that some 11,334 Albanians are buried in 529 sites in Kosovo alone. [The figures come from a press release of the UN Mission in Kosovo, 10 November 1999, about halfway down this page - OK.]

I'm an opponent of judicial execution, and acknowledge that even a monstrous despot is entitled to due process, but had Saddam Hussein chosen not to surrender and thereby met the same fate as his appalling sons, I should not have been troubled by it. Few hold to the impossible, and in my view damaging, Christian ethic of the Sermon on the Mount; most of us feel a sense of moral equilibrium demanding that those who have harmed others pay expiation for their crimes.

But in Milosevic's case, and those of others brought before the tribunal, there is a more than symbolic achievement, even though justice has finally been denied. The notion of state sovereignty (a reactionary principle later invoked, astonishingly, by supposed progressives as an argument against overthrowing Saddam Hussein) is subordinate to the genocide convention; the notion that civilised nations have formal and not merely declaratory responsibilities to the victims of aggression is affirmed. I judge it slightly more likely, owing to the Hague tribunal's deliberations, that when the next Milosevic emerges we shall not be too late.

UPDATE: A particularly good assesment of Milosevic's catastrophic influence is given by Cambridge historian Brendan Simms in The Sunday Times:

Many will feel that, by dying before final judgment could be passed at his war crimes trial, Milosevic has somehow “cheated the hangman”. Some will be relieved, perhaps including the current Serbian leadership.

The Americans, who did more than any other country to frustrate Milosevic but whose relationship to the concept of international justice is increasingly fraught, will have mixed feelings. Others still will welcome the end of an expensive spectacle that served to remind the international community of its failures during the 1990s.

Yet the unfinished trial has achieved much. The evidence it threw up established clearly that Milosevic was the inspiration for the “joint criminal enterprise” to carve an ethnically pure “Greater Serbia” out of the ruins of Bosnia and Croatia.

Over time, the prosecution case has also had a therapeutic effect on Serbian politics. There were many who sympathised with their former leader. But the recovery of refrigerated lorries with Albanian corpses and the harrowing footage of paramilitaries from Serbia engaged in atrocities at Srebrenica turned the majority against him.

Brendan's study of the failure of British policy in the Bosnian War, Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (2001), is one of the best books on foreign policy I have read. (I should add that he is, like me, a supporter of the Henry Jackson Society, which aims to put the case for an interventionist foreign policy of promoting democratic change.)