Milosevic and the long road to justice

The extradition of the former Serbian leader has given the war crimes tribunal its biggest catch. STEVE CRAWSHAW reports.

THE HAGUE - One of Europe's most respectable cities can be found in The Hague.

"I never saw a city where the well-to-do classes seemed to have given the whole place so much of their own air of wealth, finished cleanliness, and comfort," wrote Matthew Arnold 150 years ago.

"I never saw a city, either, in which my heart would so have sunk at the thought of living."

Few outsiders would disagree today. For all its charm, the The Hague is not an exciting place.

But near the centre of this comfortable Dutch city is a sprawling white 1950s building - previously occupied by an insurance company - whose contents make it one of the most uncomfortable places in the world.

Hidden behind a series of locked doors on the second floor, off-limits to all but a privileged few of those who work here, shelves full of files line the wall as far as the eye can see: thousands upon thousands of identical grey ring-binder files, stretching down the blue-carpeted corridor like a nightmare vision of bureaucratic banality.

The papers inside document the heart of darkness of the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serb leader who stands charged with genocide and crimes against humanity, and who was yesterday sent from his prison in Belgrade to face justice at The Hague.

The thousands of files in this corridor contain only a small fraction of the evidence. In a separate vault, behind 15cm-thick doors, cold strip lighting illuminates shelves with yet more catalogued evidence - two million pages of documents, 3000 videos, thousands of tapes ... The list goes on. Some of the Milosevic files concern Kosovo, for which he has already been indicted; others concern Croatia and Bosnia, for which the indictment is yet to come.

Carla del Ponte, the small, passionate chief prosecutor at The Hague tribunal, does not hesitate with her demands: "This tribunal should not be an alibi. It should be an effective instrument. It's important that powerful people cannot go unpunished. That's why it's important that Milosevic be transferred."

It's not long since the prize of Milosevic was unimaginable. For most of its eight-year existence, the tribunal has been widely considered, in the words of one Hague official, "a figleaf" - a good way for the West to be seen to take action, without actually doing anything.

Jim Landale, tribunal spokesman, remembers "judges sitting around twiddling their thumbs" in its early days. Certainly, when the idea of prosecuting war crimes was floated at a conference on Yugoslavia in London in 1992, few took it seriously - least of all Milosevic himself.

I met him a few hours after that conference, in his Knightsbridge hotel suite, while a VIP police escort waited to whisk him back to his plane.

When I asked what he thought about the war crimes proposal, he was enthusiastic: "If any citizen of Serbia is involved in any crime, he will be the subject of criminal prosecution. There is no doubt of that."

But, I gently put it to him (and a conversation like this, while you sip the whisky that a killer-president has pressed upon you, is inevitably somewhat surreal), surely he himself might be arraigned before such a tribunal?

"Me?" he asked, his eyebrows raised in astonished disbelief. Many hideous crimes had already taken place. But Milosevic proclaimed himself baffled by the suggestion of his complicity. No: he wanted "peace."

After the tribunal had been established and accepted, prosecutors found that their best efforts were hampered by the same politicians who had declared themselves theoretically in favour. Graham Blewitt, the plain-spoken Australian who has been deputy chief prosecutor almost from the beginning, remembers it soon became clear that the tribunal's requests for the Nato-led force in Bosnia to make arrests had "fallen on deaf ears." The reason: "There was a policy: no apprehension under any circumstances."

Indeed, as recently as February 1995 - two years after the tribunal was set up under UN resolution 808 - just one man had been arrested, and some of the worst crimes in the tortured history of former Yugoslavia had yet to be committed (including the massacre of around 7000 Muslims at Srebrenica).

If anyone doubted the court's irrelevance, it was confirmed in 1996, when Milosevic himself delivered up Drazen Erdemovic, a war-crimes minnow, to The Hague, just a few months after the signing of the Bosnian peace agreement. Sanctions against Belgrade were then lifted, and Western diplomats recognised Milosevic was a key player, and therefore just the man to do business with.

Today, the UN tribunal has evolved into the most important international court since the Nuremberg war trials half a century ago. It employs 1200 people - prosecutors, defence lawyers, judges, investigators, translators, Balkan liaison staff and many, many more - at a cost of $US100 million ($247 million) a year.

Already, 31 people have been tried or are in the process of being tried; another 14 are awaiting trial. Altogether, 41 current and future defendants are being held in nearby Scheveningen, where the tribunal has a self-contained unit inside a Dutch prison; and the numbers are increasing.

Despite the occasional blast of publicity, however, the three courts have until now continued their historic work out of the media spotlight. There is an oddly tranquil atmosphere in the public gallery. The international judges sit in their scarlet robes and nod quietly as they listen to the mixture of horror stories and mind-numbing detail that emerges.

The courts are among the most technically sophisticated in the world. The tribunal televises proceedings from the three courtrooms simultaneously; each court is equipped with a cluster of cameras and microphones, coordinated from a technical suite. A battery of interpreters provides simultaneous translation between English, French, and "BCS" (a Newspeak acronym for "Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian," the approved term for the single Yugoslav language formerly known as Serbo-Croat).

The gallery is separated from the court by a glass screen, enabling microphones to be switched off or the blinds to be brought down whenever the court goes into closed session. The screen also has the advantage of ensuring that victim witnesses, still fearful of revenge, can avoid being seen. On the television screens, the faces appear in ultra-coarse pixilated form.

Hannah Arendt famously talked, in her account of the Eichmann trial, of "the banality of evil." The phrase seems chillingly appropriate in The Hague, this sleepy capital-city-that-isn't, where horrifying stories are revealed and dissected, day after day. Many of those who stand accused of war crimes were respectable citizens before the Balkan wars began - and look scarcely less respectable today as they sit in the dock in their laundered shirts and neat grey suits.

Thirty-seven-year-old Dusko Sikirica, for example, accused of having been the commander at Keraterm camp in northeast Bosnia where, to take just one incident, 200 people were killed when the guards opened fire on a room with machine-guns one evening. Most who survived that massacre were executed the following day. Sikirica, who denied the charges, looked bored and faintly contemptuous in the dock. Occasionally, he stroked his beard. Apart from that, nothing.

During another trial of General Radislav Krstic, accused of responsibility for orchestrating the Srebrenica massacre, the court heard a tape-recording of an intercepted radio conversation in which Krstic is heard to say: "Don't leave a single one alive. Don't leave one of them alive."

"It's all going according to plan," replies his subordinate. Krstic: "That's good. Probably the Turks [ie, Bosnian Muslims] can hear you. Let them listen. F... their mothers." If nothing else, the recording appears to indicate just how blase the killers had become back in 1995.

One judge says she finds the crimes committed by "people who had lived law-abiding lives" especially disturbing.

"The thought keeps going through your head - it's like the scene with Marlon Brando at the end of The Godfather. He's the perfect grandfather, playing hide-and-seek with the children. But you know what he's done. This is scarier. It's part of a pattern, what's happening all over the region."

Another recent trial involved mass rapes in Bosnia in 1992 - a subject that many Western politicians refused to take seriously at that time. The reality was, however, even more horrific than media reports had suggested. The gang rape, of eight or 10 people at a time, was used as a strategy of war - for example, if a girl failed to answer an interrogator's questions to his satisfaction. Many of the victims were teenagers, told they would have "good Serb babies."

The case established for the first time that rape could be classed as a crime against humanity. In some ways, the work of the tribunal is even more dramatic than what Nuremberg achieved. Nuremberg was victors' justice. At The Hague, the idea is that justice, despite the close relationship between the prosecutor's office and the tribunal itself, should be blind. Not everyone thinks that this ideal has been perfectly realised.

"They could be forgiven for thinking there's a bias against Serbs as a whole," says Michael Greaves, a British barrister who has appeared as defence counsel at the tribunal. But the basic legitimacy of the tribunal seems to be widely accepted. As Tomislav Visnjic, Krstic's Serbian lawyer, puts it: "The tribunal is a fact. It is a fact which I accept."

The Nuremberg trials were intended to ensure that the Nazis were forced to take responsibility for their guilt. The Hague tribunal seeks to ensure that human rights themselves can finally count for something, even in war.

Putting Milosevic on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity will bring nobody back from the dead. But there can be little question that trying Milosevic for crimes against humanity is better than the alternative - not trying him. Some of what he will have to say will undoubtedly be embarrassing for the Western governments who for so long half-cosied up to him. But that is their problem, not the tribunal's. In Serbia and the West alike, the spell will finally be broken.

Feature: Yugoslavia

International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

Serbian Ministry of Information

Serbian Radio - Free B92

Otpor: Serbian Student Resistance Movement

Macedonian Defence Ministry

Albanians in Macedonia Crisis Centre

Kosovo information page