The following excerpts might help expose the folly behind all these
hopeless international tribunals for toppled tyrants.

Ebou
________________

Milosevic in The Hague
By Gary J. Bass
From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2003

JUSTICE AS A POLICY
October 30, 2002, is just another day in the trial of Slobodan
Milosevic. A stocky former Serb intelligence agent, Slobodan Lazarevic,
is testifying against his erstwhile boss and former political idol.
Lazarevic had planned to testify in secret, as witness C-001. (He is so
smooth on the stand that the Serbian press corps dubs him "Agent 001,
License to Kill.") Milosevic, serving as his own counsel, asks, "Based
on my information ..., your wife's name is [deleted]?" As the
prosecution objects furiously, pointing out that Lazarevic is in a
witness relocation program and demanding that his wife's name be
stricken from the record, Milosevic adds, "His wife worked as a
[deleted]." It is a blatant attempt at intimidation: you mess with me, I
mess with your family. Even behind bulletproof glass, the former
strongman still aims to be dangerous.
The world has looked away just as the Milosevic trial has gotten really
interesting. In February 2002, raging against NATO conspiracies and
victor's justice, the ousted Yugoslav leader was hauled into court in
The Hague. This was an amazing triumph for the human rights movement,
but at the same time the realization of a nightmare that had haunted the
Allied officials who planned the Nuremberg tribunals nearly 60 years
ago. They had worried that Nazi leaders would be able to use those
trials as a forum to justify their actions and present themselves as
martyrs to subsequent generations. Milosevic has tried to do the same
and, slowed by his antics, the trial has now entered its second year
with the prosecution still only partway through its case.
As the most important moment for international justice since the trial
of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, Milosevic's trial is a possible watershed.
Charged with committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Bosnia
and crimes against humanity in Kosovo and Croatia, he is the first
former head of state to land in the dock of an international war crimes
tribunal. The trial's success or failure will therefore shape all future
efforts at punishing the world's bloodiest war criminals -- including
those at the International Criminal Court (ICC) that started up in
March, and any postwar tribunals in Iraq. International justice must not
only be done, but also be made to look useful and appealing so that
future politicians will decide, in the phrase of the late political
theorist Judith Shklar, to choose "justice, as a policy."
The Bush administration, desperate to avoid giving encouragement to the
ICC, has essentially ignored the trial rather than seize the opportunity
it affords to remind Muslims worldwide of how U.S. power was used,
albeit belatedly, to save Muslim lives in the former Yugoslavia. But
those who see the Milosevic case primarily in terms of its role in the
progressive evolution of an international legal order -- whether
supportive human rights lawyers or nervous sovereignty-minded American
officials -- are missing the point.
The tribunal's most important impact will be not in the legal sphere but
in the political one. Success will be measured by how much the
enterprise helps sideline dangerous leaders, shame perpetrators and
bystanders, and soothe victims. The ultimate objective -- which is still
in doubt -- is less to create some dazzling supranational legal
precedent than to demonstrate that administering justice can contribute
to reconciliation and moderation, in the Balkans and, by extension,
elsewhere as well.


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