BELGRADE, SERBIA-MONTENEGRO - The stock of Slobodan Milosevic already had been rising among Serbs who watched his feisty performances at his war crimes trial at The Hague. His death makes him a martyr to his supporters and brings into serious question Belgrade’s future cooperation with the U.N. tribunal - just weeks before a European Union deadline for Belgrade to hand over fugitive Bosnian Serb wartime commander Gen. Ratko Mladic.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia hasn’t exactly been suffering from an overabundance of credibility. To say that the wheels of justice turn slowly at ICTY wouldn’t begin to do justice to the glacial place at which the trial of Slobodan Milosevic proceeded. Now that Milosevic has died in ICTY custody in the Hague, not only have millions of his victims been denied justice, Milosevic’ already mythic status among hard-core nationalists in Serbia will only increase, because he will be defined as a martyr for “Greater Serbia”. It didn’t have to be this way, and the international community has only itself to blame for this sorry state of affairs. By it’s timid, accommodating approach to Milosevic, it allowed Milosevic to define the tone of his trial and to turn it into a forum for his own personal campaign for vindication.
It’s truly sad how the international community allowed Milosevic to use his own trial as a personal platform. The tribunal allowed Milosevic to hijack the proceedings and drag them out until he died. He we are, 11 years after the war in Bosnia ended, and seven years after the war in Kosovo ended, and we are no closer to justice today than we were then. All that has really happened is that Milosevic was provided with a platform from which to ascend to martyrdom among hard-core Serbian nationalists, to whom “Slobo” is now even a bigger and even more mythic hero.
Since Milosevic is not the first Serb war criminal to die in ICTY custody, Serbian nationalists can (at least in their minds) reasonalby claim that Milosevic was merely the latest “victim” of an insidious international anti-Serb conspiracy.
Convicted former Croatian Serb leader Milan Babic, a star witness in the Milosevic trial, killed himself in prison last week, the second time a detainee committed suicide.
The first was Slavko Dokmanovic, another Croatian Serb leader, in 1998.
The deaths have created the impression for many in Serbia of The Hague as a gallows for Serb nationalists - a place where the West lets them rot away - and was likely to increase pressure on the government from hard-liners not to extradite other suspects.
“How are they now going to explain to the Serbian public that Milosevic was not severely ill, as he had claimed, and that the Hague jail is safe for the Serbs?” asked political analyst Brace Grubacic.
Given that a paraoid “us against the world” mentality seems to be a Serbian national personality trait (one that I’ve experienced firsthand, in Belgrade and in Kosovo), there is nothing that ICTY or anyone else is going to be able to do. Milosevic is destined to become a Serbian martyr, a hero who died for the cause of Greater Serbia. That he is responsible for the death of thousands and the displacement of millions will be conveniently ignored since this truth serves no political purpose for Serbs. Given the highly-controlled nature of the Serbian media, Serbs have generally one been fed one point of view over the years- that being that Serbs are being persecuted by the West and denied their rightful claim to Greater Serbia. Samo sloga Srbina spasova - “Only where there are only Serbs will Serbs be safe.”
This highly propagandized worldview does nothing to inspire confidence in the Serbian government’s expressed commitment to produce Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. While the government desperately wants to be accepted as a full member of the international community, they’ve long ago become the victim of their own decades-long propaganda campaign. They simply cannot afford to look as if they are caving into demands from the West that they turn over “good, dedicated” Serbs to ICTY. To do so risks a backlash from hard-core Serb nationalists, of which there are no lack, particularly in Serbia’s highly-propagandized and extremely conservative countryside, where the even more conservative and nationalistic Serbian Orthodox Church holds sway.
It’s been said that justice delayed is justice denied. “Justice” in the case of Slobodan Milosevic was never in the cards, not as long as ICTY allowed him to manipulate the tribunal’s proceedings. With his death, the verdict on Milosevic will be left to those who write the history books…or, in the case of the Serbian government, to those who manipulate nationalist propaganda.
This is why international justice has become a contradiction in terms. Millions of Croats, Muslims, and yes, even Serbs deserve better…not that they will ever get it.
