There are those who think that the Balkans wars are over. There are those who think that it is Slobodan Milosevic who is on trial at the UN’s international tribunal here. And then there is another interpretation.
I happen to be of the last persuasion, which holds that the cunning former Serbian president, far from being in any way humbled by his notorious “celebrity,” is using his daily trial as a means of taking vengeance against his own people.
Mirko Klarin, a Croatian-born journalist who worked for many years in Serbia, is considered one of the best journalists here. He works as senior editor of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in a small office of the gray headquarters of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in downtown The Hague. And this is his perceptive analysis:
“I see his performance here as his personal vendetta against Serbia,” Klarin began as we sat in the lobby of the tribunal, a former insurance agency.
“First, he wants to divide Serbia internally–patriots [his people] versus puppets of NATO [those against him]. Second, he wants to stop any reconciliation of Serbia and its neighboring states. This tactic is not clear yet, but it will be when we arrive at the Bosnian part of the trial in the fall. Then this will all become very dangerous because he’ll be blaming the leadership there for what he has done. Third, he aims to stop any reconciliation between Serbia and the rest of the world.
“This is all his personal vendetta against a Serbia which `betrayed’ him. It has nothing to do with his real defense–because, despite his defense, he is losing that all the time. He feels he was betrayed by the Serbian people when half a million people came out into the streets on the 5th of October 2000 to get him to leave.”
Most observers tend to translate Milosevic’s daily antics in his trial for genocide and crimes against humanity in Bosnia and Kosovo as trying to “create his version of history.” But it’s more serious than that, more related still to the day-by-day events in Serbia.
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The post-Milosevic country is ostensibly run by a democratically elected government; but in truth, the old Milosevic military and police, which daily feed him by phone every kind of information for his trial, still run the country. To this extent, Slobodan Milosevic remains “in power” in Belgrade.
And, of course, in The Hague he is advised by that American moral giant Ramsey Clark.
The appalling truth is that, because as a lawyer he is permitted to act in his own defense and thus cross-examine witnesses, he has been able to inflict still more suffering on, for instance, some of the poor Albanian Kosovar witnesses, who have lost everything at his hands yet now are forced to withstand his further torments.
Once he asked a witness, “Didn’t you have a cousin who was accused of sexual abuse in Turkey?” The question was totally irrelevant to his trial, but it showed the court how strong are his secret police connections with Belgrade.
Meanwhile, back home in Serbia, polls show increasing support for the leader who got them into a half-dozen wars, killed more than 250,000 people and devastated Serbia. And the new Serbian government that followed him has not really been able to reconcile with anyone–not its neighbors and not the West, either.
It may seem that Milosevic’s perverse uses of his trial mark a unique legal event, but in fact there is an entire history of such uses of courtrooms, including when dictators were on trial for their acts. Indeed, the courtrooms simply become extensions of their balcony, of their podium, of their personal microphone.
When Fidel Castro was beginning his revolution in 1953, he was tried by a Cuban court for attacking the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba. At his trial, he too took on his own defense, in which he damned the Cuban dictatorship.
He ended his emotive speech with lines that would go down in history: He vowed that “History will absolve me.” The only problem was that that line was taken directly from Adolf Hitler’s Rathaus speech in the early ’30s in Munich–he, too, had attacked the government, and he, too, defended himself in court in a case dramatically like Castro’s–and dramatically like Milosevic’s today.
Dictators not only copy each other, but their instinct for power and manipulation shows them how to turn courtrooms into their new pulpits, to deceive their people still longer.
Few here believe that Slobodan Milosevic’s maneuvers, as unpleasant as they are, will get him off, particularly when the “insider” testimony begins. But infinitely more dangerous in this tribunal, which was to bring international justice to the Balkans bloodbaths, is the reality that with every day he stands here, ranting and railing, he is still controlling and punishing the country he destroyed.
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