Milosevic Cheats Victims of Justice

Author: Gordana Igric
Source: BIRN Serbia

Death of Serbian leader highlights flaws in ICTY prosecution strategy.

Slobodan Milosevic is dead but parts of his legacy may outlive him. It is a historical irony that he should die in the same year that both Kosovo and Montenegro are set to go independent, marking the final, crushing defeat of Serbian nationalism.

The former Yugoslav strongman died in a prison cell in the final days of a trial that broke records, both in terms of its length and complexity. It dealt with crimes committed in three different wars, covering the territory of three former Yugoslav republics and spanning a ten-year period.

That he should not live to see its end is a blow to the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY. That he should die an innocent man is something that he now paradoxically shares with over 100,000 of his victims.

For those who survived, Milosevic, who has robbed them of their existence once and orchestrated the death of their loved ones, has done it again. This time, he has robbed them of whatever justice the ICTY could provide.

For the Office of the Prosecutor and its strategy it would be an understatement to call his death a setback. His death has shown that the idea of focusing on Milosevic alone, rather than on all of the members of the "joint criminal enterprise" that he took part in, was flawed and has now come back to haunt its authors.

Milosevic was the most prominent member of the enterprise and the person who gave it a kick-start. But in order for the effort to be sustainable, he elicited and received the aid of different heads of the Yugoslav National Army, JNA, and the heads of the federal and Serbian interior ministries and secret services.

Some of his closest associates, such as the Serbian secret service chief Jovica Stanisic and his deputy Franko Simatovic, are in the dock.

On the other hand, JNA generals Veljko Kadijevic, Blagoje Adzic and Zivota Panic are still living in the relative peace of retirement.

Others will never be called to account for the part they played in a course of events that eventually led to genocide against the Bosnian Muslims. They include Branko Kostic, a Montenegrin member of the presidency of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, who testified as a defence witness in the Milosevic trial. Also amongst them are Momir Bulatovic, the former president of Montenegro who was scheduled to give evidence in Milosevic's defence this week, and, last but by no means least, Borisav Jovic, Serbian member of the federal presidency and Milosevic's mouthpiece.

That the end result of the prosecution strategy, in terms of the number and origin of the individuals indicted in relation to the war in Bosnia, is that the genocide there has been made to seem like a result of internecine fighting, has already been noted. In fact, it was a systematic attack, planned and led from Belgrade, on all aspects of the life of the Bosnian Muslims - cultural, economic, moral and physical.

Of 344,803 Bosnian Muslims who in 1991 lived in what today is the Republika Srpska, about 7,933 were left in 1997 to 1998.

Genocide - the permanent removal of over 300,000 people, together with any reminder of their previous existence - is Milosevic's only lasting heritage.

He was the prosecution's only bet. And now they have lost. The fact, however, that Milosevic will never be convicted of genocide, does not mean that individuals associated with him or under his control did not commit individual acts of genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

General Radislav Krstic - who at the time of his arrest carried an identity card of the Yugoslav Army - is the first person to have been found guilty of aiding and abetting genocide in Srebrenica.

As part of a plea agreement with the prosecution, Biljana Plavsic, a member of the triumvirate Bosnian Serb presidency, provided detailed evidence of the effective control that Milosevic's regime had over the Bosnian Serb political and military leadership.

The ongoing trial of Momcilo Krajisnik, the speaker of the Bosnian Serb assembly and a close associate of Radovan Karadzic, will perhaps complete the picture of Bosnian genocide as a countrywide operation.

Although not a judgment, the Decision on Motion for Judgment of Acquittal, which judges issued in mid-June 2004, following the end of the prosecution case against Milosevic, is a good indicator in determining both his individual responsibility for genocide and whether Bosnian Muslims were the targeted group.

Having heard the prosecution evidence, the judges made it clear that Milosevic had a case to answer with regard to the genocide charges against him. Importantly, they noted that, on the evidence available at that stage in the proceedings, a trial chamber could be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that Milosevic took part in a joint criminal enterprise including the Bosnian Serb leadership, and that he shared its other participants' intention to destroy a part of the Bosnian Muslims as a group.

In the same vein, the chamber concluded that "the scale and pattern of the attacks, their intensity, and the substantial number of Muslims killed, the detention of Muslims, their brutal treatment in detention centres and elsewhere, and the targeting of persons essential to the survival of the Muslims as a group are all factors that point to genocide."

It does not mean that Milosevic would necessarily have been found guilty at the end of the proceedings, but this is the only reliable indicator of the direction in which the process was going.

In the four years it spanned, the Milosevic trial has evolved from what seemed like an unprecedented triumph for international justice into a legal travesty.

Milosevic's rights turned out to outweigh the rights of all of his victims. And he cheated them again, as he did in all the years when he was a "factor of stability" in the Balkans and a "man of peace". That it was the peace of mass graves did not matter to anyone.

Emir Suljagic is a survivor of Srebrenica and the author of Postcards from the Grave. He is BIRN's Balkan Insight contributor.