FEATURES
Let Slobbo speak for himself
John Laughland says that
the case against Milosevic has all but collapsed for lack of evidence
For a few hours on Monday, the world’s
human rights establishment was seized by terror. Slobodan Milosevic
had been due to begin his defence at the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, but instead
discussion focused on the former president’s fragile health, which
has been made worse by the rigours of the trial. When the presiding
judge, Patrick Robinson, said that a ‘radical review’ of the proceedings
would now be necessary, many do-gooders feared that their worst
nightmare was about to be realised — that the international community’s
main trophy in its crusade for morality might, if only on medical
grounds, be allowed to walk free.
|
|
‘Wait till you see the whites of
their iPods.’ |
Few human rights activists had ever contemplated such an outcome,
still less an acquittal. The presumption of innocence has never counted
for much in the highly politicised world of international humanitarian
law. One war crimes expert, James Gow, said on Channel 4 on Monday
that it would be better if Milosevic died in the dock, because if
the trial ran its course he might be sentenced for only relatively
minor charges. That ought to be awfully embarrassing for those like
Gow who have assured us that he is as guilty as hell. Fortunately
for them, the ICTY is not really in the business of acquittal. As
one academic specialist on the ICTY, Professor Michael Scharf, has
noted approvingly, the ICTY’s rules were designed ‘to minimise the
possibility of a charge being dismissed for lack of evidence’, a sentiment
of which the Queen of Hearts would have been proud.
As it stands, the judges seem poised to impose a defence counsel on
Milosevic. Far from helping him, of course, the intention here is
to weaken his defence by requiring him to be represented by a lawyer
who knows the issues far less well than he does. Such a move would
fly in the face of the judges’ earlier rulings against this idea —
and the new presiding judge himself was, in the past, especially firm
that this would be contrary to the defendant’s rights. It would at
least provide comfort to the beleaguered prosecution. When he is not
trying to get the court to force Milosevic to give up smoking — a
certain death sentence for any Serb — Geoffrey Nice QC, the lead prosecutor,
has repeatedly sought to accomplish this switch, not least because
the two-year prosecution case has been a nearly unmitigated disaster.
Since the trial started in February 2002, the prosecution has wheeled
out more than 100 witnesses, and it has produced 600,000 pages of
evidence. Not a single person has testified that Milosevic ordered
war crimes. Whole swaths of the indictment on Kosovo have been left
unsubstantiated, even though Milosevic’s command responsibility here
is clearest. And when the prosecution did try to substantiate its
charges, the result was often farce. Highlights include the Serbian
‘insider’ who claimed to have worked in the presidential administration
but who did not know what floor Milosevic’s office was on; ‘Arkan’s
secretary’, who turned out to have worked only as a temp for a few
months in the same building as the notorious paramilitary; the testimony
of the former federal prime minister, Ante Markovic, dramatically
rumbled by Milosevic, who produced Markovic’s own diary for the days
when he claimed to have had meetings with him; the Kosovo Albanian
peasant who said he had never heard of the KLA even though there is
a monument to that terrorist organisation in his own village; and
the former head of the Yugoslav secret services, Radomir Markovic,
who not only claimed that he had been tortured by the new democratic
government in Belgrade to testify against his former boss, but who
also agreed, under cross-examination by Milosevic, that no orders
had been given to expel the Kosovo Albanians and that, on the contrary,
Milosevic had instructed the police and army to protect civilians.
And these, note, were the prosecution witnesses.
Serious doubt has also been cast on some of the most famous atrocity
stories. Remember the refrigerator truck whose discovery in the Danube
in 1999, full of bodies, was gleefully reported as Milosevic was transferred
to The Hague in June 2001? The truck had allegedly been retrieved
from the river and then driven to the outskirts of Belgrade, where
its contents were interred in a mass grave. But cross-examination
showed that there is no proof that the bodies exhumed were the ones
in the truck, nor that any of them came from Kosovo. Instead, it is
quite possible that the Batajnica mass grave dated from the second
world war, while the refrigerator truck may have contained Kurds being
smuggled to Western Europe, the victims of a grisly traffic accident.
The realisation is now dawning that lies were peddled to justify the
Kosovo war just as earnestly as they were to justify the attack on
Iraq.
The weakness of the prosecution case was underlined by the fact that
its triumphant conclusion in February was to broadcast a TV documentary
made several years ago. This suggests that its two-year marathon has
not served to advance knowledge of the truth beyond the tall stories
peddled by telly hacks at the time. Even professional supporters of
the ICTY now admit that the only ‘proof’ of Milosevic’s guilt has
been General Sir Rupert Smith’s stated ‘impression’ that Milosevic
controlled the Bosnian Serbs, and Paddy Ashdown’s statement that he
‘warned’ the former Yugoslav head of state that war crimes were being
committed in Kosovo. In February, the chief prosecutor herself, Carla
del Ponte, admitted that she did not have enough evidence to convict
Milosevic on the most serious charges.
The supposedly impartial judges have been deeply complicit in this
prosecution bungling. The ICTY has long been characterised by an unhealthy
community of interests between the judges and the prosecutors; I have
myself heard the first president of the ICTY, Judge Antonio Cassese,
boast that he encouraged the prosecutor to issue indictments against
the Bosnian Serb leaders, a statement which should disqualify him
from serving as a judge ever again. In the Milosevic trial, the judges
have admitted a tawdry parade of ‘expert witnesses’ who are not, in
fact, witnesses to anything. In Britain, the role of experts is rightly
under the spotlight after the convictions of some 250 parents found
guilty of killing their babies have been thrown into doubt precisely
because they relied on this kind of testimony; but in the ICTY you
can be a ‘witness’ without ever having set foot in Yugoslavia.
Numerous other judicial abuses have been legitimised by the ICTY.
The use of hearsay evidence is now so out of control that people are
often allowed to testify that they heard someone say something about
someone else. It is common for the ICTY to offer reduced sentences
(five years in one case) to men convicted of hideous crimes, mass
murder for instance, if they agree to testify against Milosevic. The
use of anonymous witnesses is now very widespread, as is the frequency
of the ‘closed sessions’: a glance at the ICTY transcripts shows pages
and pages blanked out because sensitive issues have been discussed
in court — sensitive, that is, to the security interests of the Great
Powers which control it, the USA in first place. The ICTY’s nadir
came last December, when the former supreme commander of Nato, Wesley
Clark, testified in the Milosevic trial; the court agreed to let the
Pentagon censor its proceedings, and the transcripts were not released
until Washington had given the green light. So much for the ICTY’s
transparency and independence.
Ironically, Slobbo has one objective ally: the British prime minister.
The possibility is now real that a conviction of Milosevic can be
secured only on the widest possible interpretation of the doctrine
of command responsibility: for instance, that he knew about atrocities
committed by the Bosnian Serbs and did nothing to stop them. But if
Milosevic can be convicted for complicity in crimes committed by people
in a foreign country, over whom he had no formal control, how much
greater is the complicity of the British government in crimes committed
by the US in Iraq, a country with which the UK is in an official coalition?
This is not just a cheap political jibe but a serious judicial conundrum:
the UK is a signatory to the new International Criminal Court, and
so Tony Blair is subject to the jurisdiction of the new Hague-based
body whose jurisprudence will be modelled on that of the ICTY. So
if Slobbo goes down for ten years in Scheveningen jail because of
abuses committed by his policemen, then by rights his cell-mate should,
in time, be Tony.
John Laughland’s latest book is Le Tribunal pénal international: gardien
du nouvel ordre mondial, published by François-Xavier de Guibert,
Paris, 2003.
© 2004 The Spectator.co.uk
|