With every passing day, it becomes clear that the United States will be staying in Bosnia longer than President Clinton promised.
The Dayton accords in whose name we are there aimed for a confederated Bosnia composed of the three warring parties. Everyone with an ounce of sense knows this is an impossible objective. But, not wanting to accept formal partition of the country, we persist.
It is not surprising that in this policy vacuum a bold new mission for the U.S. and NATO is being advanced, indeed, agitated for: The arrest of war criminals.
This call for justice may be well-motivated, but it is deeply mistaken. Why? The best way to parse the issue is by analogy. Look at those countries that have recently emerged from dictatorship to democracy. In Chile, El Salvador and South Africa, for example, the previous regimes clearly committed many crimes. Are the new democratic governments arresting and punishing these criminals, as in the de-Nazification of Germany or the hanging of war criminals in Japan after World War II?
No. They are instead establishing commissions of “Truth and Reconciliation.” Their mission is to uncover, document and publicly expose every crime committed under the previous regime. But not–except only under the rarest circumstance, e.g., a torturer who refuses to testify even under grant of immunity or a Winnie Madikizela-Mandela who testifies but disdains an offer of amnesty–to prosecute, to jail, to hang.
Are the authors of this policy immoral? No. They are wise. They recognize, as every moral person does, that full justice would be better than mere truth. But to carry out justice you first need victory. We were able to arrest and prosecute the Nazi and Japanese war criminals because we won and forced them into unconditional surrender.
But what do you do when there is no unconditional surrender? What do you do in Chile and South Africa and El Salvador where there is but a compromise between parties, none of which has been totally defeated? As Chile’s professor Jose Zalaquett, author of the “truth commission” idea, has argued, in a still-fractured country, the pursuit of justice is an invitation to renewed war. Amnesty is the condition for the very peace now enjoyed. Reconciliation requires eschewing the kind of revenge–and yes, justice–that unconditional surrender permits.
Is this an immoral policy? On the contrary, the highest morality is to bring a peace that honors the future without sacrificing the past. The homage to the past is truth, but the key to the future is reconciliation.
Now Bosnia. If the Serbs or the Croats had lost the war and surrendered unconditionally, there would be no question that we should be rounding up the war criminals, as we did after World War II, and shipping them off to their just fate. But the fact is that no one lost the war. All three parties are still armed, dangerous and at the ready.
Under these circumstances, it is folly–not just dangerous but destabilizing–to pursue and arrest war criminals. Sure, we could do it–if we went in and waged war until the Serbs and the Croats surrendered and disarmed and turned over their bad guys. (And what do we do with the Bosnian Muslim war criminals?) That would be a logical and consistent policy. But let’s be clear: It means war, war between us and them and a rekindling of the war among the Bosnians.
Who’s for that? If you are not, you cannot urge turning our forces in Bosnia into a bailiff for the international court at The Hague. It may assuage the conscience of armchair moralists living 4,500 miles away, but it will kill a lot of people on the ground.