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MILOSEVIC IN THE DOCK
The case against the Hague court
by CATHERINE SAMARY
"We knew the Milosevic trial was going to be difficult but who could have imagined that, from the very beginning, it would be such a disaster for the International Criminal Tribunal?" This comment from Stojan Cerovic, a reporter on the weekly news magazine Vreme (1), well known in Belgrade for hostility to Slobodan Milosevic, confirmed what people were saying, not without pride, on the streets of the Serbian capital after the first few days of what was to be a "historic trial".
Until the trial opened on 12 February, it had looked as though Milosevic and his defenders were going to challenge the legal standing of the tribunal and boycott the trial (2). Milosevic had been held in Belgrade at the time and his supporters claim that his forcible removal to The Hague was unlawful. Indeed, the Yugoslav constitutional court had just refused to grant extradition on the ground that there was - and still is - no legal basis for cooperation with the ICTY.
In the event, Milosevic opted to use this public arena to present his own defence, declaring that "the people and public opinion should be his judges." In Belgrade, there was intense interest in the opening of the trial. The proceedings were broadcast live on three channels, viewers kept a daily tally of the points scored by the defendant and his popularity began to recover. But it was not to last.
CNN stopped broadcasting when he produced pictures of the collateral damage caused by the Nato bombing. Since 19 February, when he undermined the principal witness for the prosecution, Mahmut Bakalli, in cross-examination, even the ICTY website no longer publishes transcripts of the proceedings. The Serbian radio and television service Radiotelevizija Srbije (RTS) stopped broadcasting the trial on 8 March, on the ground that it was too costly, and the federal TV channel YuInfo followed suit on 13 March. The independent radio station B92, which has good technical links with the ICTY, still covers the trial, but subscribers may decide to call a halt at any time.
President Vojislav Kostunica's view is that "much of the evidence is true but much is also superficial, truncated and manipulated. It is being politicised and there is an element of hypocrisy" (3). In fact, despite the tribunal's attempts to appear impartial, the prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, has largely helped to bring the ICTY into disrepute by refusing to investigate the claim that Nato was guilty of war crimes against civilians. And the defendant, Milosevic, whatever one may think of his policies and his one-sided interpretation of events, has been helped by the paranoid theory - rightly condemned by Stojan Cerovic - that "the whole disaster in former Yugoslavia was the result of a criminal conspiracy among members of his entourage" (4).
Sociologist Srdjan Bogosavljevic, interviewed in Belgrade during the first week of the trial, explained the general unwillingness to admit that crimes had been committed in the name of Serbia: "Most people say they could not bring themselves to commit a crime and they believe the same is true of Serbs in general. But the main reason for this collective blind spot is that there are about 600,000 Serbian refugees from Croatia and Bosnia in the country, so people are more aware of the crimes of others."
The jokes circulating in Belgrade about the Kosovar Albanian witnesses are sometimes thought to be a bit racist. In fact, Mahmut Bakalli, a former apparatchik of the League of Communists, was president of Kosovo in 1981 and in that sense he is emblematic of the prosecution's weaknesses. He made a very poor showing as a witness for the prosecution because he was desperately anxious to attribute the start of the crisis in Kosovo to a speech Milosevic made in 1989. He was equally poor as a spokesman for the Albanian cause because, as the defendant did not fail to point out, this was the man who had ordered the tanks out in 1981 to crush demonstrations by young Kosovars seeking republican status for the province. Milosevic quoted an interview with Bakalli at the time, in which he had rejected their claim.
The responsibility for evidence of this type lies with the tribunal machinery, which has tried to justify bringing a case against Milosevic for the events in Kosovo during the Nato bombing, while glossing over the nature of the real conflicts that were tearing the province apart and overlooking the civil war underlying the expulsions, which was made worse by the bombing. Will the ICTY be accused of "revisionism" because it withdrew the charge relating to the notorious Operation Horseshoe (5), which turned out to be a fabrication? The constant bombardment, actual and verbal, ("Auschwitz", "genocide", "deportation") has caused intoxication; a cool look at the evidence is needed. The misguided press campaign sought to justify the war waged by Nato and still prevents any genuine reappraisal of a territorial conflict in which both sides, Serbian and Albanian, were in the right.
There is no denying certain facts. Many Kosovars were the victims of real crimes perpetrated by the Serbs; but the prosecutor has not been able to charge Milosevic with genocide in Kosovo. Hence the extension of the trial to include events in Croatia and Bosnia. Yet everyone knows that the Dayton accords sanctioned the ethnic cleansing at the time and that those responsible for it were present at the negotiating table. If Milosevic is guilty of crimes against humanity, then others are too. Not to mention their willing accomplices: the governments of the West.
(1) See Courrier International no 592, 7 March 2002.
(2) See interview with Jacques Vergès (8 January 2001). The ICTY budget has increased from $276,000 in 1994 to $96m. in 2001, 14% being privately funded and the remainder being provided by the UN. Washington would like to cut this "excessive" expenditure.
(3) Le Monde, 21 March 2002.
(4) Courrier International, op cit.
(5) See Serge Halimi and Dominique Vidal, L'opinion, ça se travaille. Les medias, l'OTAN et la guerre du Kosovo, Editions Agone, Marseille, 2000.
http://mondediplo.com/2002/04/07hague
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