New world order beset by old world's flaws
SIMON JENKINSSlobodan Milosevicıs defence yesterday before the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague was blunt. ³Thatıs your problem² he told the judge, Richard May, when asked if he would like to hear the indictments. The court was illegal and the accusations false. To Mr Milosevic this was a show trial to cover Natoıs own crimes against the Serb people.
The Hague trial is hailed as a triumph for the new world order. The architect of appalling acts against a civilian population now finds himself before a public court. He may be no more than an overblown mobster, but he must account for himself. This is not the smoke of battle, the clamour of the mob or even the rough justice of the world media. This is a court of law. Those whose deeds have outraged world opinion are to be weighed in the scales.
I may be sceptical of modern hip-shooting Western interventionism, but I cannot defend Mr Milosevic against the charges laid before him. If America ‹ and this is Americaıs doing ‹ means to police the world, I prefer it to use bribes and judges than bombs and missiles. No, Mr Milosevic is the problem and a court is the proper theatre for a solution.
Yet as I watched Mr Milosevicıs performance, I felt a terrible doubt. Western policy towards the Balkans has so often been counterproductive, could this trial merely arouse Slav opinion in favour of the accused, as the bombing of Iraq has for President Saddam Hussein? Rather than let Mr Milosevic rot in a local jail, the West has put him on a public platform. It has invited him to sneer ³Thatıs your problem² at the pomp, the politesse and the legal courtesies of those who so humiliated his country. Terrible deeds will be laid at his door, but he too will tell tales of devious Western diplomacy and horrific Nato bombing.
In reality, what Mr Milosevic thinks of the Hague court does not matter. What matters is what the outside world thinks, and especially that part of the world to which The Hague is supposed to send a message. Russiaıs Vladimir Putin asked on Monday whether the trial would really bring ³democracy, stability and predictability closer in the Balkans². His answer was ³I doubt it². International justice, like its domestic counterpart, must be rooted in a general legitimacy and consent. This is not because otherwise it is not justice, but because otherwise it will not work. It will carry no conviction and serve as no deterrent.
As it is, I doubt if the Albanian gangsters currently cleansing Kosovo of its Serbs and Gypsies regard themselves as remotely at risk from any war crimes tribunal. The reason is that they know Nato is on their side, indeed is watching as it happens. The West never demanded the extradition to The Hague of Franjo Tudjman of Croatia, though his anti-Serb deeds in Krajina, committed with American support, were no less ³crimes against humanity² than those of Mr Milosevic at the same time in Bosnia. Nato did not regard crimes against Serbs as crimes.
Any visitor to Belgrade (or Moscow) will attest that those whose respect the Hague tribunal most needs to win, those fighting tribal secession round the world, regard it as biased. It is seen as the agent of Nato, a force whose kill-rate in former Yugoslavia could yet exceed that attributable to Mr Milosevic. The truth is that outsiders who intervene on one side in a civil war can hardly claim to be even-handed arbiters of its horror. Either way, if one sideıs case is to be heard, so should the other. Mr Milosevic may be king villain, but Nato troops have made no effort to arrest his henchmen, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, in the Bosnia they claim to have ³pacified² at vast expense. Attempts to arrest Croatian war criminals have been half-hearted. How much more plausible would this trial be if it were even-handed? As always in the Balkans, the longer one is stuck in the morass the more stuck one becomes. Natoıs early interventions had the best of intentions, but the longer it stays the less impartial it appears. Natoıs Secretary-General, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, was a loud and naive cheerleader for Albanian expansionism. His chickens are coming to roost in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, where he wants British troops to ³disarm² his former friends. If our troops cannot disarm Bosnians, Kosovans or the IRA, they are unlikely to disarm the Albanians of northern Macedonia.
International jurisprudence would indeed win respect if it could convincingly embrace both wars of aggression and wars of civil suppression. Jaw, jaw, even among lawyers, is better than war, war. But the Hague tribunal bears more similarity to a post-victory show trial than to any impartial court of justice. To find its villain, the Americans had to offer blood money to the Serb leader, Zoran Djindjic, money that is sure to end up with Mr Milosevicıs black-suited mafiosi now gathering in Belgradeıs Marriott Hotel. These people did well from sanctions. They mean to do well from ³aid².
The Hague court hopes to act as a template for a permanent international ³order². This is unlikely. The Americans support such ad hoc trials, where they can control the terms of reference through their UN veto, but they are refusing to recognise the proposed International Criminal Court. They do not want their presidents or generals, pilots or spies, subject to the same treatment as Mr Milosevic. They do not want them seized in international airports or dragged before international courts. There must be no question of such courts even hearing, let alone dispensing, justice to Americaıs possible embarrassment.
This concept of sovereign immunity will be precisely Mr Milosevicıs defence. Even Geoffrey Robertson, QC, gung-ho ³bomber for humanity², finds American hypocrisy over the Hague court hard to stomach. In his new book, Crimes against Humanity, he criticises a superpower that bombs those it dislikes yet will ratify neither the International Criminal Court nor the Landmines Convention. The US remains, says Robertson, ³a truculent opponent of the demand for universal human rights².
Whether or not this is a new world order, it is certainly an order for the rich and powerful. Every Serb I have met, indeed every Slav, believes that the pilots (British or American) who cluster-bombed Nis marketplace with such butchery in 1999 should be prosecuted for a war crime. The Palestinians feel the same of the Israeli commander during the 1982 Beirut massacre, now Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The Argentinians feel likewise of those who ordered the sinking of the Belgrano.
It is one thing to protest that the circumstance of war alters cases, quite another to refuse to answer the charge. There cannot be one international law for the victors and another for the vanquished. Yet challenge Nato over its Kosovo bombing and Tony Blair and Lord Robertson cry in unison with Mr Milosevic: ³That's your problem.²
Mr Milosevic is already history. He was never toppled by Nato bombs. He was voted out of power by his own people, a decision they bravely enforced on the streets. Many Serbs longed to try Mr Milosevic in their own courts, to help them to purge their own past and strengthen their shaky political and judicial institutions. The West let this process happen in Argentina, South Africa and more recently Chile. Why not in Yugoslavia, which so desperately needs strengthening? Defenders of the Hague trial argue that progress towards world justice will always be by hesitant and sometimes devious steps. Justice must pick off its bullies when it can. The sight of Mr Milosevic standing between guards in a courtroom must make some dictators shake.
Like Mr Putin, I doubt it. The cardinal fact of international justice is that it still depends which side you are on. America bombed Sudan with total impunity. The Hague court is so partial as to seem merely old-style imperialism. Those old men and women in funny gowns can hardly seem a threat to the tyrants cum freedom-fighters of Iraq, Afghanistan, Congo, Liberia, Burma and Cambodia. They have been turning a deaf ear to Western justice for centuries. When even America does not want an international court, nor do they.
This does not make what is happening in The Hague insignificant or wrong. But if this is the new world order, it needs to look less like the old one.
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