Milosevic helped discredit the international war crimes court
SLOBODAN Milosevic was once seen as a tough, ruthless and shrewd Serb nationalist who would nonetheless co-operate with the West to achieve reasonable solutions if he was just shown respect. In fact, he was a cautious political opportunist who changed his ideology to suit political fashion, who retreated in the face of military or diplomatic firmness, and who lost every large conflict he began. He was a fox posing as a lion but not a clever fox. And he survived as long as he did only because the hounds were unusually dim.
Milosevic cynically became a nationalist after years as an orthodox Yugoslav communist because communism was failing and apparatchiks such as himself needed a new ideology to legitimise their clinging to power. Serbian nationalism provided him with such an ideology.
In 1987, he made a speech telling the Serbs, then a shrinking minority in their heartland province of Kosovo, that he would not allow the Albanian majority to take the province from them. He became a Serb national hero overnight and within two years he was president of Serbia, and the real power in Yugoslavia.
In the next decade, the West made three mistakes in dealing with him.
First, in 1991, influenced by the desire to maintain existing frontiers and to discourage ethnic nationalism, US secretary of state James Baker reacted to the decision by Slovenia and Croatia to declare independence with the famous statement that "we have no dog in this fight". Milosevic took this as a green light to halt their departure by force. He promptly lost his first two wars when, among other obstacles, the mothers of Yugoslav conscripts objected to their sons being used as cannon fodder.
Second, when he covertly backed supposedly independent Bosnian Serb guerillas to mount a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Muslims of Bosnia, a succession of Western emissaries treated him as the potential peacemaker. They urged him to pressure the Bosnian Serbs to negotiate by offering advance concessions of Bosnian territory. British diplomat David Owen even entertained the delusion that Milosevic was "leading Serbia back into the European family". Not surprisingly, the war dragged on until the massacre of Muslims at Srebrenica in the northern summer of 1995 forced the US to impose a much tougher policy on its reluctant allies. Meeting genuine military resistance, Milosevic promptly became a man of peace who delivered the Bosnian Serbs at the Dayton conference.
Third, when Milosevic sent the Yugoslav army into Kosovo to ethnically cleanse the province of Albanians in 1998-99, NATO declared war on behalf of "the principle of multi-ethnicity" and waged a bombing campaign on Serbian infrastructure to enforce it. This unusual Western firmness put Milosevic in a tight corner. He now returned to an earlier political identity as a Slavophile friend of Russia. In return, Russia helped him negotiate a withdrawal from Kosovo and an end to conflict. And the West was embarrassed when its war for the principle of multi-ethnicity ended in the rise of power of the ethnic nationalist Kosovo Liberation Army and some reverse ethnic cleansing of Serbs by Kosovar Albanians.
But this was too late for Milosevic. The Kosovo defeat had destroyed his last few shreds of credibility as either a Serbian nationalist or as a strong leader. He fell from power not long afterwards when his attempt to steal an election unravelled.
Once Milosevic had lost power, he lost also the aura of tough political shrewdness that had so impressed his Western interlocutor-admirers. He became a shunned and hunted figure. The Russians made it clear he could expect no sanctuary. And within the Serbian political world the only real argument was whether he should be tried before a Serb court or before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.
In retrospect it would have been wiser to let the Serbs put Milosevic on trial in Belgrade. It would have ensured a speedy legal process, recognised that Serbia had restored a democratic rule of law, exorcised Serbia's ultra-nationalist demons and begun to repair the country's relations with the West. Instead, the same Western governments and international bodies that had wanted to establish "the principle of multi-ethnicity" in the Kosovo war also wanted to establish the principle that even heads of government suspected of war crimes would in future face prosecution before an international court.
It is far from certain that such a legal regime will be the deterrent to crimes against humanity that its advocates hope. As Helena Cobban points out in the current Foreign Policy magazine, Milosevic was not deterred from the Kosovo war because he had seen NATO troops arrest war criminals in Bosnia. Indeed, he had been threatened with prosecution to no apparent avail. Still, the issue of international justice for dictators was then a cause celebre. The West put enormous pressure on the new democratic Serbian government to extradite their former jailer. And four years ago he arrived in his Dutch cell.
It took the Nuremberg Tribunal 11 months to try the 22 Nazi defendants. After four years Milosevic was just beginning his defence. It cost South Africa's truth and reconciliation commission less than $US4300 ($5900) a case to process 7116 amnesties. The Milosevic trial has costs running into the tens, perhaps the hundreds, of millions. It long ago lost its audience outside Serbia. But Milosevic's feisty performance in court, transmitted to Serbia via television, has disseminated his charges of Western hypocrisy, blown on the embers of ultra-nationalism and continually obstructed better relations with the West. His death is a diplomatic blessing, even if it denies his victims the righteous satisfaction of a guilty verdict.
And how much does that really matter? Consider the judgment of Richard Holbrooke, Bill Clinton's assistant secretary of state, one of the few Western statesmen not successfully manipulated by Milosevic and who inflicted serious, unexpected military defeats on Milosevic and his Bosnian Serb allies: "Here's a man who once ruled Yugoslavia, started four wars, lost them all, saw the territory he controlled dwindle, got thrown out of power by a popular uprising in 2000, was packed off in a helicopter to The Hague in 2001 and spent the rest of his life in a padded cell in a jail and never was going to see daylight again."
Whatever God's judgment or the now hypothetical decision of the ICTY, the verdict of history is clear -- and damning.
John O'Sullivan is a former senior adviser to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and editor of National Review in New York.
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