The death of Slobodan Milosević

The death of Slobodan Milosević

Slobodan Milosevic died in The Hague in his prison cell in the last days of his defense against 66 different indictments for war crimes committed in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo over an eight-year period. Like his life itself, his death is filled with controversy. Depending on your particular prejudices, you can believe that he deliberately was taking powerful drugs to render his other medication for heart ailments ineffective (either to support his request for going to Moscow for medical treatment --and possibly never coming back--or to bring about his own death); that he was deliberately "poisoned" by Hague officials; or that he died because of heartless Hague prosecutors who refused to listen to his repeated requests for medical treatment in Moscow or suspension of the trial against him until he recovered his health.

His death is already being used by the Socialist Party and the Radicals to further their political aims. As this is being written, they are assessing the overall public reaction and whether to use this as a catalyst to bring the government down or simply to reinforce among their supporters and potential supporters their anti-Western, pro-Nationalist policies. Certainly those already predisposed to think the worst of the war crimes tribunal will be reinforced in their views. But the reality as well is that the repercussions of his actions while in power continue to play out and continue to impact negatively on Serbia. These include the upcoming independence of Kosovo, the continuing plight of 600,000 Serbian refugees and displaced persons now in Serbia proper, the potential independence of Montenegro, and the per capita income of Serbia itself, which has still not reached pre-war levels.

I am convinced that the worst possible alternative in Milosevic’s view was a completion of the trial with the inevitable guilty verdicts and a lifetime prison sentence far from home and far from the public spotlight. His widow, Mira Markovic actually predicted his death in a meeting in my residence in Belgrade in 2003. She was there to give me a letter to President Bush, asking for his intervention with International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to suspend his trial for one year in order for him to rest and regain his strength. Later in the conversation, she expressed her fears that he would die while defending himself; that he deliberately overtaxed himself and at times did not take his medication for blood pressure problems. ICTY officials have subsequently confirmed that was the case. I am also sure that he would supremely enjoy the controversy, conspiracy theories, and frustration of the Hague prosecutors (and many victims of the Balkan wars) that his death and premature ending of his trial has engendered.

The ICTY is fully responsible for how this mess has turned out. It took less than one year at Nuremberg to try 22 Nazi defendants. Slobodan Milosevic’s trial was into its fifth year with a cost that has been put at around $200 million. Three decisions in particular were devastating: indicting Milosevic on 66 different charges, thereby requiring that each be proved by an endless list of witnesses and documentary evidence; joining the indictments for events in Kosovo, Bosnia, and Croatia together rather than having separate trials for each; and permitting him to conduct his own defense. While each of these three critical decisions had its own logic, the end result is a trial that was never finished and that due to its length and nature had done little to bring reconciliation to the Balkans and had actually increased Milosevic’s popularity in Serbia. It is not only Milosevic who died. So did the original Chief Judge, Sir Richard May, more than one year ago.

Milosevic’s death and the subsequent abandonment of the trial against him is also a significant setback for the cases filed by Croatia and Bosnia against Serbia in the International Criminal Tribunal. A conviction of Milosevic for the crime of genocide could have significantly buttressed those cases. While the documentation and other evidence introduced into his trial will be available for use, it will lack the weight that a conviction would have provided.

The reality is that for all the death and suffering which he helped to bring about in other parts of the former Yugoslavia, one could well argue that his greatest damage was done to Serbia and the Serbs themselves. Zoran Djindjic recognized this and his initial impulse was to try Milosevic first in Serbia in order for the Serbian people to finally and fully understand his true nature. Only after several months of frustration, did the late Prime Minister acknowledge that at that point in time (2001) the Serbian criminal justice system was incapable of investigating, trying, and convicting him of anything. It was only after that realization, did Djindjic decide to support his transfer to The Hague. That decision helped to bring about his subsequent assassination.

What Yugoslavia desperately needed in the late 1980s and early 90s was a larger-than-life moderate leader such as Mikhail Gorbachov or Nelson Mandela. In both of their countries, the potential existed for widespread violence in a time of transition and instability. But their personal efforts guided events in a more peaceful direction. I really do believe the same was possible here. After all, the Soviet Union shared many of the same issues as Yugoslavia faced (different Republics wanting independence, large Russian minority populations, years of Communist, autocratic rule). Nevertheless, Gorbachov saw through the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact.

The biggest disservice that Milosevic did to the Serbian people was to take their legitimate concerns and fears and instead of advocating them in a pro-active, positive, moderate way, he inflamed them for his own political benefit. Instead of helping to quell the flames of hatred and nationalism, he deliberately used the media and government information channels to throw fuel on the fire. This has had two radically different, equally negative results. First of all, because of the violent methods which were used and counter-productive tactics (such as the shelling of Dubrovnik), the world lost sympathy for Serbia, the Serbs, and their concerns. It is worth noting that this was not initially the case. In 1990 and 91, the U.S. Administration and many Europeans were sympathetic to keeping Yugoslavia together.

Secondly, an uncomfortably large percentage of the Serbian people to this day have sympathy for Milosevic because they perceive that he was defending Serbian interests. Far too few of the Serbian political leadership has had the courage to try to separate those legitimate Serbian concerns and fears and the totally illegitimate crimes which Milosevic supported and encouraged in their “defense.” Until this link is understood and broken, the true democratic transition in Serbia cannot be completed.

I last saw President Milosevic in 1996, when I was Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State for Bosnian Peace Implementation. U.S. officials, including me, met rather frequently with him in those days, knowing that he had the ability, if he so desired, to influence or direct the Bosnian Serbs. Sometimes he helped, sometimes he did not. His standard approach at that time was that the Bosnian Serb leaders were loose cannons, out of his control, but that he would "do what he could."

The meeting was in response to an ongoing boycott by Bosnian Serbs of all cooperation with the international community and Bosnian government institutions. It occurred because the Bosniaks had stopped a Bosnian Serb motor vehicle which had taken a wrong turn and ended up in the Federation territory. When they found Bosnian Serb general Djukic and another army officer in the vehicle, they promptly arrested them, charged them with war crimes, and sent them to The Hague. The whole process significantly endangered the principle of freedom of movement in Bosnia. We went to Milosevic to ask his help in moderating the Bosnian Serb reaction and reaching a comprehensive agreement on the road ahead.

Milosevic asked for a summary of what happened and particularly why the car was stopped in the first place. He was told by one of our delegation that the car was stopped because it was a stolen car. "Stolen car?" Milosevic asked. “Yes,” he was told. Milosevic slowly shook his head with a look of amazement/disgust/irony and said "What is this about a stolen car? Let's talk about stolen souls, stolen lives. That is what happened here. But please, not about a stolen car in the Balkans. That is just too trivial." My last memory of Milosevic will always be those haunting words “stolen souls, stolen lives,” spoken by one who had done so much to bring that about.