Travesty

The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice

John Laughland

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780745326351
• eBook ISBN: 9781783715770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Slobodan Milosevic died in prison in 2006 during a four-year marathon trial at The Hague for war crimes. John Laughland was one of the last Western journalists to meet him. He followed the trial from the beginning and wrote extensively on it, challenging the legitimacy of the Yugoslav Tribunal and the hypocrisy of 'international justice' in the Guardian and the Spectator. In this book Laughland gives a full account of the trial, which was the longest criminal trial in history. From the moment the indictment was issued at the height of NATO's attack on Yugoslavia to the day of Milosevic's mysterious death in custody. 'International justice' is supposed to hold war criminals to account but, as the trials of both Milosevic and Saddam Hussein show, the indictments are politically motivated and the judicial procedures are irredeemably corrupt. Laughland argues that international justice is an impossible dream and that such show trials are little more than a propaganda exercise designed to distract attention from the war crimes committed by Western states.

1
‘A little bombing to see reason’

NATO CLAIMED IN March 1999 that it was attacking Yugoslavia to prevent persecution of the ethnic Albanian civilian population of Kosovo, a province of Serbia. It had started the bombing without any approval from the United Nations Security Council, and instead invoked the claims of universal human rights, saying that these trumped national sovereignty and the existing rules of international law.

These arguments were but claims for vigilantism on a world scale. The principles of non-interference and legality are at the heart of the international system as expressed in the charter of the United Nations, just as they are backed up by centuries of customary international law. To be sure, this was not the first time international law had been broken, but it was the first time that it had been flouted with such open contempt. World leaders who said that the current arrangements of the international system should not constrain their actions, and that legal formality should not stand in their way, were in fact advocating a lawless world. Even if the moral case for the war had existed, which it did not, there would still have to have been a formal authorisation for the law to be legal. The Kosovo war therefore prepared the ground for the attack on Iraq in 2003, which also occurred with UN Security Council approval but also in the name of spurious justifications in international law (in Iraq’s case, the existence of ‘weapons of mass destruction’).

Western leaders made their legal and constitutional position very clear. The Czech president, Václav Havel, argued that sovereignty should no longer be the basis of the international system. ‘This war places human rights above the rights of the state,’ he wrote.¹ Havel claimed that the Kosovo war would serve as a precedent for the whole world, and that the old doctrine of non-intervention would disappear down ‘the trap door of history’. The British prime minister, Tony Blair, argued in a speech entitled ‘The doctrine of the international community’ and delivered in Chicago on 22 April 1999 that the Kosovo war and economic globalisation showed that the international system had to change:

We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not. We cannot refuse to participate in global markets if we want to prosper. We cannot ignore new political ideas in other countries if we want to innovate. We cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we want still to be secure. On the eve of a new Millennium we are now in a new world. We need new rules for international co-operation and new ways of organising our international institutions.

NATO took a similar view. The organisation was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, having been in search of a new justification for its existence since the end of the Cold War, and on 24 April 1999, it proclaimed a ‘new strategic concept’. Whereas it had been created as a defensive alliance to protect the sovereignty of its member states against a putative Soviet attack, it now adopted a proactive military policy, which meant that it might attack other states if necessary. One possible casus belli was the abuse of human rights in other countries. Other ‘threats’ to which the alliance might be obligated to respond included ‘ethnic and religious rivalries, territorial disputes, inadequate or failed efforts at reform … the dissolution of states … acts of terrorism … the disruption of the flow of vital resources’. ² The ‘war on terror’ was not born on 11 September 2001 but well before then.

NATO alleged that Yugoslav forces were making massive attacks against ethnic Albanian civilians in Kosovo in pursuit of a programme of racial persecution known as ‘ethnic cleansing’. This claim lay at the very heart of the NATO case for war and of the indictment of Milošević and the other Yugoslav leaders. ‘It is no exaggeration,’ wrote the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, ‘to say what is happening in Kosovo is racial genocide. Milošević is determined to wipe a people from the face of his country.’³ Blair went into overdrive: ‘Children seeing their fathers dragged away to be shot. Thousands executed. Tens of thousands beaten. 100,000 men missing. 1.5 million people driven from their homes.’⁴

The world’s media joined in the frenzy. Lurid atrocity ‘reporting’ spread like a collective madness. Saturation coverage was provided of weeping Albanian refugees and the wildest stories about mass killings abounded. At one point, for instance, it was claimed that the Serbs, like the Nazis at Auschwitz, were burning the bodies of 1,500 murdered Albanians in the incinerators at the Trepča Mining Complex.⁵ Some of those who set themselves up as leading authorities on the Balkans fell for this blatant piece of war propaganda,⁶ even though it turned out to be completely false.⁷

These stories were driven by the war propaganda emanating from the governments of the most powerful Western countries, primarily the United States.⁸ The US State Department produced a report in May 1999, during the bombing, entitled ‘Erasing History’, which alleged that ‘The regime of Slobodan Milošević is conducting a campaign of forced migration on a scale not seen in Europe since the Second World War.’ The report contained numerous falsehoods, from the overall allegation of genocide (which was so unsustainable that it was never included in the Kosovo indictment, not even when this was revised in June 2001, two years after the end of hostilities), to specific claims such as one that the Kosovar capital, Priština, had become ‘a ghost town’ when in fact, there were still hundreds of thousands of people living there.⁹

Leading statesman fed the media with huge casualty figures, secure in the knowledge that their claims would be reported as fact before anything could be checked. In April, the US Ambassador for War Crimes, David Scheffer, said he thought 100,000 Albanians had been killed,¹⁰ a figure repeated by US Defense Secretary William Cohen the following month.¹¹ Cohen’s claims were widely reported the following day as fact.¹² The British government was a little more circumspect, preferring the figure of ‘10,000 killed’, a figure it initially mooted in June 1999 but which it stuck to until well into the following year.¹³

These claims of genocide had a general and a particular function. Their general function was to work as war propaganda. Their particular function was a legal one. Genocide is a specific crime in international humanitarian law, coming under ‘universal jurisdiction’, and the existing treaties on it require all states to prosecute those accused of it. NATO leaders pretended that this meant there exists a right of ‘humanitarian intervention’ where genocide is occurring, while in fact there does not.

The centrepiece of NATO’s claim in this regard was ‘Operation Horseshoe’. This was allegedly a Serbian plan to drive out the Albanian population from Kosovo in order to establish ethnic Serb hegemony in that province. The NATO spokesman, Jamie Shea, referred frequently to Operation Horseshoe in his press conferences while the bombing was in progress,¹⁴ and the media reported it as fact.¹⁵ Eventually, it turned out to be an invention of the secret services of Western states.¹⁶ The game was given away when the document allegedly outlining it had ‘horseshoe’ written in the Croatian not Serbian form of the word (potkova instead of potkovica). Of course there were ugly incidents and war crimes in Kosovo, just as Albanian guerrillas indubitably committed atrocities against Serb civilians and other Albanians. But Operation Horseshoe had as much relationship to reality as did the fictional character, ‘Gruban’, hero of Miodrag Bulatović’s novel Hero on a Donkey, whose name was included in an indictment issued by the ICTY Prosecutor on 13 February 1995, the result of a practical joke played by a Serbian journalist on an American colleague. Having a drink one night in a bar, the Serb told the American that a brutal guard at the Omarska camp in Bosnia was called ‘Gruban’, and the journalist, who evidently had a second job as an informer but who did not understand the literary reference, passed the name on to The Hague. The indictment against ‘Gruban’ and others was eventually withdrawn three years later, on 8 May 1998, presumably when the ICTY Prosecutors realised they did not have much chance of ever seeing him in court.¹⁷

The non-existence of Operation Horseshoe¹⁸ did not prevent Louise Arbour, the Chief Prosecutor at the ICTY, from putting the claim of ethnic cleansing at the centre of the Kosovo indi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Ramsey Clark
• Introduction
• 1 ‘A little bombing to see reason’
• 2 The New World Order
• 3 Inverting Nuremberg
• 4 ‘A false tribunal’
• 5 Potemkin Justice
• 6 ‘Just convict everyone’
• 7 ‘Greater Serbia’
• 8 Witnesses for the Prosecution
• 9 Trial in absentia
• 10 Death in The Hague
• Index