[Mb-civic] No judgment at The Hague - Cara Robertson - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  No judgment at The Hague

By Cara Robertson  |  March 14, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

WITH JUST 50 hours of his trial remaining, Slobodan Milosevic died in 
his cell. Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor at the UN War Crimes 
Tribunal, lamented the justice denied to the victims of the Balkan wars. 
Eluding a guilty verdict, Milosevic, the former president of Yugoslavia, 
goes to his grave shrouded in his presumption of innocence.

Still reeling from the suicide of former Croatian Serb leader turned 
prosecution witness Milan Babic, the Tribunal now confronts a much more 
serious blemish on its record. After 466 court days spread out over four 
years, the Milosevic trial remains permanently unresolved. Given the 
resources expended to try Milosevic on 66 counts of war crimes, crimes 
against humanity, and genocide, it is hard not to see his death as a 
disaster for the Tribunal's legacy.

Indeed, the abrupt end to the proceedings gives credence to the typical 
range of complaints about the sluggish pace of justice at The Hague. 
Because the prosecution chose to combine separate indictments for 
Milosevic's alleged crimes in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, his trial 
became ''the trial," emblematic of the Tribunal's entire docket. This, 
plus the short attention span of the media, contributed to the false 
sense that the UN War Crimes Tribunal -- on those occasions when it was 
correctly identified and not confused with the International Court of 
Justice down the road -- was set up simply to try Milosevic. And, in his 
role as central actor in the drama, Milosevic did not disappoint. He 
arrived unbowed, challenged the legitimacy of the court and, until 
compelled for health reasons to accept counsel, conducted his own 
defense. He belittled the judges, hectored witnesses, and ranted for the 
cameras. When bored by the proceedings, he examined the spectators 
behind the bulletproof glass with imperial disdain. Given the minimal 
coverage of the Tribunal's other work, punctuated by the occasional 
snippet of Milosevic behaving badly, it is not surprising that people 
believed that nothing much beside Teatro Slobo was going on.

But Milosevic's case was far from the only game in town. The UN War 
Crimes Tribunal, officially called the International Criminal Tribunal 
for the former Yugoslavia, was established in 1993 by UN Security 
Council Resolution 827 to prosecute serious violations of international 
law committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia since 1991. 
Functionally, it covers crimes committed over a 10-year period. More 
than 130 accused people (Serbs, Croats, and Muslims) have appeared 
before the Tribunal. Thousands of witnesses have testified in their 
trials. In addition to the defendants currently on trial or awaiting the 
outcome of appeals, 85 have had all proceedings concluded against them. 
Six were acquitted and the rest are serving or have served their sentences.

But more important than raw numbers, the Tribunal's jurisprudence has 
made it clear that individual criminal responsibility for crimes against 
humanity, war crimes, and genocide extends to the highest reaches of 
command and into the civilian leadership. For in addition to assigning 
culpability for past crimes, the Tribunal's mission is to deter future 
crimes and contribute to peaceful reconciliation, goals that can be 
served only by clarifying the contours of international criminal law and 
by creating a detailed historical record. One difficult case at a time, 
it has assembled a record of inhumanity that should hamper attempts at 
revisionism and outright denial in the region.

Against this background, it is worth reconsidering the significance of 
Milosevic's death.

Milosevic's prosecution depended upon the evidence gathered in the 
course of the other prosecutions and built upon the findings -- for 
example, that the Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys was 
indeed genocide -- of earlier judgments. And the evidence presented at 
his trial is not lost. It remains part of the historical record.

Perhaps most importantly, the international community held a head of 
state accountable, piercing the veil of impunity. The world has been 
denied a verdict, but Slobodan Milosevic spent his final years in a cell 
in Scheveningen, not a villa in Belgrade. Called to answer for his 
actions, he is now -- as he so often claimed -- beyond the court's 
jurisdiction and must await the judgment of a higher tribunal.

Cara Robertson, a fellow at the National Humanities Center, was a legal 
adviser to the UN War Crimes Tribunal.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/03/14/no_judgment_at_the_hague/
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