A chat with Milosevic
John Laughland, The Spectator 18 March 2006
I was one of the last Western journalists to meet
Slobodan Milosevic. It was early last year. A fierce
wind was whipping the cold rain straight off the sea
and through the ugly streets of Scheveningen as I
unbundled from my pockets the various secret cameras
and recording devices which I had in vain hidden
there, and made my way through the security checks at
the United Nations Detention Unit. A series of doors
clanged open and shut and there was a friendly hubbub
and a fug of cigarette smoke as stubbly men lounged,
chatting in their long flat vowels as if it were an
ordinary weekday morning in a Belgrade café. Holland
dissolved behind me and I had arrived back in
Yugoslavia.
The Hague tribunal is like Dover in Act V of King Lear
— nearly all the main surviving protagonists of the
Balkans wars are assembled in this improbable place.
In a rare moment of postwar Yugoslav unity, the
inmates once joined forces to protest about the
tasteless food produced by the Dutch caterers, and so
cevapcici are now delivered instead from a Croat
restaurant in town. The colour inside is dark grey, a
cross between a prison and an office. At the end of
the corridor, I was shown into a room with a big
window and a table covered in papers, books, dirty
ashtrays, used plastic cups and open packets of
Marlboro. Behind it sat Slobodan Milosevic, the
butcher of the Balkans, wearing a zip-up grey cardigan
and an open-necked shirt. He rose to greet me and
smiled. 'It is very nice to see you,' he said,
extending his hand. 'Thank you for coming. Will you
have some coffee?'
His demeanour was upbeat and his manner open and
friendly. He spoke slowly and in a deep voice,
occasionally with humour and contempt for his
accusers. 'The indictment against me is based on
lies and contradiction,' he said in his fluent if
accented English. 'It is a political trial, a show
trial, designed to cover up the crimes committed
against my country. I am accused when others are
guilty. But we will fight. They cannot win. Freedom is
a universal value. They have no evidence against me.
That Geoffrey Nice [the prosecuting counsel] is
stupid, very stupid. He is a king's jester.'
This was the culmination of a long odyssey for me.
Having once been a supporter of the standard party
line on foreign policy, my conversion occurred on the
night of my own father's death, as I watched the
hideous television images of bombers taking off from
British bases and US aircraft carriers to attack
Yugoslavia. I began to question the arguments used to
justify the Kosovo war. I visited Belgrade during the
bombing and went to sleep to the sound of air-raid
sirens and explosions; I travelled to Kosovo numerous
times and observed how the West had helped Mafia
gangsters and drug-runners to become kings of the
castle in this fetid and teeming province. Having
spent much time behind the Iron Curtain as an active
Cold Warrior, my own logic had now led me to become a
dissident in the new world order, hence my visit to
The Hague as a potential witness and my hour-long chat
over a fag and a coffee with Slobo.
According to his closest assistant, Milosevic remained
bullish to the end. In the final weeks, he complained
about painful pressure behind his eyes, presumably the
result of his deteriorating heart condition, but
otherwise he was happy with the way the trial was
proceeding. He was certainly bullish when I met him.
He had marshalled an impressive array of defence
witnesses who helped him rubbish the prosecution's
case — not that you would know it from most of the
media, which rapidly lost interest once the initial
attraction of the atrocity stories had worn off. In
his conversation with me, he repeated the central
planks of his defence. 'There was never any plan to
expel the Albanians from Kosovo,' he said, 'and no
order to that effect was ever given. There was never
any genocide in Kosovo. They have exhumed 2,000 bodies
in total, of all different nationalities, and the
causes of their deaths include Nato's own bombs.'
On Croatia and Bosnia, Milosevic was no less
indignant. 'The indictment is full of
contradictions,' he said. He picked up a sheaf of
papers and pointed to bits he had underlined. 'Look
here. In paragraph 85 of the indictment, it says that
from 8 October 1991 the conflict in Croatia was
international in nature, not internal, yet in
paragraph 110 it says that the Socialist Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia existed as a sovereign state
until 27 April 1992. These two statements cannot both
be true. The indictment itself does not make sense.'
His apparently technical point is important because,
broadly speaking, jurisdiction for the laws of war
kicks in only when a conflict is international. 'In
any case,' he went on, 'the indictment also says
that fighting broke out when the secessionist states
declared independence from Yugoslavia. But am I
supposed to have pursued a joint criminal enterprise
by sponsoring armed secession from the state I wanted
to see preserved? It is ridiculous.'
However self-serving these statements may appear to a
sceptical reader, it remains the case that Slobodan
Milosevic was not in charge of Yugoslavia when it was
falling apart. The initial order for the Yugoslav
National Army to fight the secessionists was given by
the federal prime minister, Ante Markovic, an ethnic
Croat, but the federal authority was weak and the army
largely a law unto itself. It is also a fact that the
Serbs in Serbia (where Milosevic was president) and
the Serbs in Bosnia were living in different states;
Milosevic broke with the Bosnian Serb leadership in
1993, having never controlled them in the first place,
while what political influence he may have had does
not stack up, in law, to criminal responsibility for
their acts. Certainly, few Bosnian Serbs regard
Milosevic as their master; when I visited a Bosnian
Serb village near Sarajevo in 2001, in whose graveyard
lay the bodies of hundreds of villagers killed by
Muslims, the people looking after the church proudly
showed me photographs of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko
Mladic nestling among the icons, men who are accused
of the worst atrocities in Bosnia's civil war. But
they dismissed Milosevic with contempt as a man who
had betrayed them by helping to bring the fighting to
an end at Dayton in 1995.
To be sure, Milosevic bore some political
responsibility for the Yugoslav wars, but so did the
other Yugoslav leaders and so does the West, which was
intimately involved with the very minutiae of the
conflict from the outset and which in many ways
encouraged it. Our interference was especially
damaging over Bosnia: with the backing of our troop
presence there since 1992, we pressed on the
accelerator and the brake simultaneously by
incoherently insisting both that the multi-ethnic
Yugoslav state must be dismantled and also that the
multi-ethnic Bosnian state must be preserved. Our
foreign policy therefore spun around in circles and we
prolonged the killing for years.
Demonisation and denunciation are infectious viruses
which can engulf large numbers of people very quickly.
They are parasites on one of the core human vices,
pride, because they give the denunciator an
intoxicating sense of superiority over the object of
his attack. Political trials, as Stalin discovered,
tap into this. Milosevic is the seventh defendant to
die in The Hague's tender care, following a trial in
which almost every established precept of
jurisprudence and international law has been violated
by the judges there. If the legacy of his death is the
de facto legitimisation of the gross abuses committed
in the name of international justice by this kangaroo
court, then all our liberties are at risk.
