After months spent in eclipse behind America's war on terrorism, Slobodan Milosevic once again commands the international spotlight. Charged with nearly 70 counts, from failure to comply with international war conventions to genocide, Milosevic's trial before the Hague's Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal began last Tuesday despite his protests.
In a series of slightly bizarre and grossly disrespectful gestures, Mr. Milosevic has done everything in his power to dispute'and, failing that, disrupt'the tribunal. The toppled president of the former Yugoslavia has refused to hear the trial translated for him via an ear-box, forcing the court to pause and translate every word to the entire room. He has refused lawyers, though many international names have offered their services. He has submitted a ludicrously long list of important Western leaders that he intends to call to the witness stand, among them Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
In fact, Mr. Milosevic refuses to recognize the authority of the tribunal in any sense. He seems permanently surprised the trial could be taking place at all, that the nations that once congratulated him now dare to condemn him. The international community, he implies, is looking for a scapegoat.
Painful as it is to admit, the cocky, stubborn old man may not be entirely delusional. Western leaders and supporters of the Hague must face up to Slobodan Milosevic's allegations of scapegoating, no matter how odious his crimes.
It's not that the crimes Milosevic oversaw during the 1990s weren't horrific, or that his responsibility is diluted because he did not physically commit the atrocities. Most people agree that he is probably in one way or another personally responsible for the deaths or disappearances of some 300,000 people, most noncombatants.
But why is so much attention focused on this particular leader for this particular series of atrocities, when others are swept under the rug, forcibly forgotten or never known? Why the willingness to prosecute the former Yugoslavia's Milosevic for his crimes against humanity and the reluctance to prosecute Chile's General Pinochet? What gives the decimation of populations within the former Yugoslavia precedence over the decimation of, say, El Salvador's rural population during the 1980s? Why has the negotiation process to set up a similar court for Cambodia been abandoned?
No wonder Mr. Milosevic is in shock. Friends of Western nations like the United States have gotten away with such crimes over the years, more often than anyone would like to openly admit. The course of human events in some parts of the world has been no less horrific than the Balkans' worst years of violence.
So maybe Slobodan Milosevic has indeed found himself on the wrong side of an appalling double standard, while other leaders have enjoyed'and continue to enjoy'the shadows. It does not temper his responsibility for the horrors that characterized his height in Balkan politics. It does, however, cast a grim light on the validity of the international laws and standards by which we condemn his actions.
If international understandings of what is appropriate and what is reprehensible are to have any validity, they must at least attempt consistency. If international tribunals and the judgements they hand down are to have any moral weight, they must have the same. The idea at the heart of Slobodan Milosevic's indignance'that it is possible to politick one's way out of responsibility, that basic human morality is a luxury item easily given up under the right circumstances'must be wholly condemned. Otherwise, efforts to reconcile the past, like the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal, will represent little more than sporadic, superficial and ultimately abortive attempts at justice. They will be exactly what Mr. Milosevic implicitly alleges: more sacrificial altar than moral reckoning.
In an intimately connected, inter-related world, we need international law. We need international courts of justice. They can give shape to our most important shared values and lend integrity to efforts to uphold them. They can give voices to those who thought they would die without one, and, sometimes, to those who really did. They can emphasize impartiality and justice over cycles of vengeance.
We need courts of justice like the one Slobodan Milosevic is facing because it is not just the population of the former Yugoslavia that must come to terms with what occurred there during the last decade of the 20th century. And because it is not just the population of the former Yugoslavia that suffered such atrocities. But until the claims of the likes of Slobodan Milosevic can be laid to rest'until there is no double standard to invoke'the judgements of such courts will ring hollow.
