Most of this week’s comment on Slobodan Milosevic’s death asserted that he thus cheated justice, escaping an inevitable verdict of guilt at the Hague international court. There is an alternative view, however, that Milosevic’s exit enables justice to escape a hideous embarrassment. The prisoner was likely to be acquitted on a substantial number of the charges against him.
Few reasonable people doubt Milosevic’s complicity in tens of thousands of deaths. He started four wars, all of which he lost. His ruthless ambition to rule a Greater Serbia brought untold suffering to millions. Yet proving his direct involvement turned out to be harder than the Hague prosecutors anticipated. Most of the worst atrocities were carried out by Bosnian Serbs or Serbs in Kosovo. Documentary evidence of a direct link between Milosevic and the killers was sparse.
If the Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic had been in the dock, there would have been little difficulty, for both personally orchestrated years of massacre. Milosevic, however, could show that he had difficulty in controlling them. Of course he himself was also guilty as hell, but circumstances were shrouded in confusion, of a kind familiar to anyone who has ever studied war crimes trials.
Most mass murderers escape justice. Uganda’s Idi Amin lived out a comfortable retirement in Saudi Arabia. Pol Pot and Papa Doc died in their beds. If a killer entertains shrewdly during his years of office, has a great power sponsor or confines himself to massacring non-white people, he is unlikely to end up at the Hague.
It seems more useful to examine ways of preventing people like Milosevic from killing people than trying them afterwards for doing so. In the West, there is a climate of bitter recrimination about our failure effectively to act in the 1990s, to halt the ethnic struggle which persisted for five years in the former Yugoslavia. There are those who believe that the -leaders who failed to stop Milosevic were almost as guilty as those who pulled triggers.
I should declare a sort of interest, because I was editing the Daily Telegraph at the time. I supported the British foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, in his reluctance to intervene, given the refusal of president Bill Clinton to send United States ground troops, and the complexity of the situation on the ground. After it was all over, when Douglas and I were staying in the same holiday house in France, he said: ”I hope that history does not judge that it was easier than it seemed to us at the time to act in the Balkans.” It is quite wrong to suggest, as some did, that he was a cold man who cared nothing for the sufferings of Balkan peoples. He agonised deeply about the issues.
Almost every night amid the horrors of Sarajevo, Srebrenica and the rest, reporters on the spot urged passionately: ”Something must be done”.
Yet national governments were still in hopeless confusion about the notion — then wholly new — of ”humanitarian intervention”. Not much progress has been made since in defining new rules about what should be done and who should do it in societies where internal factions commit unspeakable crimes against each other.
Even Britain’s critics over Bosnia must concede that this country and France were the only nations belatedly willing to send troops to fight.
Other countries dispatched soldiers under the United Nations flag, but were unwilling to allow them to fulfil any combat function. British and American rightwingers wanted to back Croatia, yet the Croats had their own shocking record of massacre. When Nato gave its support to the Albanians in Kosovo, after the Serb defeat the Kosovo Liberation Army inflicted a dreadful revenge on Serb residents.
There were few ”good guys” either in Yugoslavia or in the Western capitals that addressed its tragedy. Since the 1996 Dayton accords, international peacekeepers in Bosnia have prevented mass killings, but done nothing to bring closer a viable society. Ethnic strife would resume immediately if foreign troops were removed. In his book The Balkans, Misha Glenny argues that the West’s policy failure lies in neglect of the region, except at moments of bloodshed. In the Balkans, the UN or Nato can periodically be persuaded to send troops if slaughter is making headlines, but they lack effective machinery for civil and economic follow-up.
It is the privilege of journalists to demand action without prescription. But I remember the British chiefs of staff asking about Bosnia: ”If we go in, what are our objectives? And are these attainable?” Such are always the right questions (for today’s Afghanistan, to name but one) and the hardest to answer.
Having entered all these caveats about the past, however, I must join the penitents. Those of us who opposed military involvement in early-1990s Yugoslavia were probably wrong. The fact that it was difficult to do something should not have become an excuse for doing nothing. If we are serious about preventing failed states from imploding, or murderous nationalists like Milosevic from presiding over slaughters of the innocent, it will be necessary to commit large numbers of Nato or UN troops, accepting orders from an international commander.
Anything less represents mere gesture politics to appease sentimental TV viewers in Pinner and Stuttgart, Paris and Amsterdam. It also promises lots more Sarajevos and lots more Milosevics. We need to think harder about what is needed to prevent mass murder, rather than congratulate ourselves on Hague trials of a few token perpetrators afterwards. — Â