Ratko Mladic and International Justice

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

One of the world's longest standing manhunts ended today with the arrest of Ratko Mladic, the former head of the Bosnian Serb Army during the war between Bosnian Serbs, Croats and Muslims in the 1990s. General Mladic will be now turned over to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia which indicted him in 1995 for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Among the many brutal actions he is accused of, Mladic is alleged to have ordered and overseen the Srebenica massacre in 1995, widely regarded as Europe's worst massacre since World War II.

While some in Belgrade still regard Mladic as a hero of the Serbian people, observers in the capital note that the general feeling among people is one of relief. Cynics may also note that Mladic's arrest and transfer to the Hague clears the way for Serbia to join the E.U. and perhaps finally normalize its relationship with the rest of Europe, a process that has included the arrest and trial of Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić, and which may have never gotten to Mladic without the enticement of EU membership.



I suppose it is true that any monster can be convenient until he is no longer so. Western powers were slow to insist upon the departure of Hosni Mubarak earlier this year until it became clear that his own army had turned against him and would not protect the regime with violence. While Colonel Gaddafi's military HAS protected his regime with violence, he has no honest friends in the international community and the Arab League gave NATO plenty of cover to take a case for the no fly zone to the UN by condemning Gaddafi's response to Libyan protests. I remember when the Rwandan genocide took place in 1994 that western leaders tripped over themselves to not call it a genocide lest anyone remind them that they had all signed on intervene in cases of genocide.

Mladic is certainly inconvenient to Serbia with dwindling supporters willing to take up the cause of Greater Serbia compared to greater ties to the rest of Europe. It is, I suppose, fair to assume that cynical self interest is more at work than justice.

But how much does that ACTUALLY matter? When the Allied Powers convened war crimes tribunals against the defeated Axis leaders, they were in a familiar and powerful place: they had crushed their enemies in conventional war and were holding them account for atrocities and in that case, atrocities that blanched even the indelicate sensibilities of the recent Colonial and Imperial powers of Europe. Had the Allies conducted atrocities themselves? No doubt, but I think it is also undoubted that their enemies had perpetuated genuine evil and they were on the right side of the war, even including Stalin in the equation.

Today's war crimes tribunals operate in a different sense altogether. They are rarely convened by conquering powers in the wars -- Rwandan and Yugoslavian war criminals are tried not because a victorious army has captured them but because agreements have been made to empower a tribunal outside the war zone altogether. The only reason the tribunal can do any of its work is not through force but through agreement that it can -- agreement that parties harboring the accused can rescind at any time.

The same applies to the befuddling choices in the face of multiple regimes commiting multiple bad acts against their own people in very different political situations. The Arab League is not lining up to condemn Syrian violence against protesters, and Saudi Arabia is more or less directing Bahrain in its crack down. It is not convenient to do more than vigorous diplomacy to try to dial these atrocities down. That inconvenience is not a spectacularly moral ground to play from, but I am not clear about alternatives. Since no justice can be had in these kinds of cases without cooperation, the best way forward seems to be to acknowledge that...and live with it.

But that also doesn't seem to bode well for the Serbian people as a whole. The Serbs that I have known tend to take a very long view of history -- in the 1990s they were quick to point out Serbia's role in turning back the Ottoman Empire in Europe and that it was Serbians who took it on the chin under Nazi occupation. I have to wonder how helpful it is for SERBIA at this time for a monster like Mladic to be taken off of their hands for trial by people not at all connected to the atrocities he commited. Will Serbia's remaining Black Shirts simply fade into the background...and wait for another time when Greater Serbian nationalism and ambitions have a more receptive audience? Will Serbians just turn the page on this chapter, enjoy the benefits of joining the E.U. and be able to say "It wasn't us -- it was him?"

Is there, in short, a better way forward for societies like this other than to turn their monsters over to the Hague?

Comments

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Not arguing equivalency, not sure why you think I am.

I think the USA's a long way to go before it can even approach its own losers of history and *their* crimes accurately.

Here too. One of the main reasons is that History is politicised and it is taboo to talk about one's nations sins in the past. Somehow, pretending like they didn't happen is preferable to saying "wow, that was some fucked up shit".

This is the line I was mostly objecting to:

"Had the Allies conducted atrocities themselves? No doubt, but I think it is also undoubted that their enemies had perpetuated genuine evil and they were on the right side of the war, even including Stalin in the equation."

It just reads to me as "both sides committed war crimes, but the allied ones were OK because the other guys were really evil". It's like saying murder is OK because it's not serial killing. This is the point I'm driving at. Whilst you are right, Dresden particularly is fairly well known (even if that is largely due to revisionist history of the last 20 years, so it's a *new* thing), it still is largely glossed over; to the point where people treat it as "not a real war crime". There's no good reason to do this other than Jingoism. Please be assured that this is much more of a swipe on my own people than yours (although I think yours are just as guilty, but I have more responsibility to be a critique of my own government). This is because it is this bullshit Jingoism built on denied atrocities and false narratives about heroes that leads to have a country that is running concentration camps and has an apartheid system in place. I noticed that you tried getting to me above by pointing these things out, it won't work. Call it out, call it out loud. Say it in the streets. Write to your politicians. I do.

By denying that we have it within our own culture to produce monsters, even if those monsters were achieving ends that we believe in, we blind ourselves to reality that atrocities are being committed in our names today.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

It just reads to me as "both sides committed war crimes, but the allied ones were OK because the other guys were really evil". It's like saying murder is OK because it's not serial killing. This is the point I'm driving at.

I disagree that acknowledging one side of the war as being the right side is a blanket excuse like this -- it is just a sense of proportion.

By denying that we have it within our own culture to produce monsters, even if those monsters were achieving ends that we believe in, we blind ourselves to reality that atrocities are being committed in our names today.

I think this is a good general principle but you are simply over reading it in this post. I'll be happy to offer up a monster from my country during WWII: Curtis LeMay. He wasn't going to stand trial for his choices in the war because he was on the winning side, but my favorite alternate history is that Truman declared him too fucking crazy to lead SAC -- after all, the nutjob tried to start WWIII with the Soviets several times by actually ordering pilots to violate Soviet airspace. The man was fairly incapable of leading military units in peace time but he kept right on serving hoping for another chance to bomb the hell out of people.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

I will agree that the Germans were the aggressors and diplomatic means for a peaceful resolution to the conflict had been exhausted. That's about as "right" as I can go with a war.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

I think adding in that whole systematically exterminating entire populations of noncombatants in death camps adds an additional layer there.

And yes, I'm understating on purpose.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

That little nugget of info wasn't known until after the war (or if it was known, it wasn't a concern). Using the holocaust as justification for allied actions in WWII is seriously misrepresenting the historical record, you know this. In fact, this is one of the things that really gets to me when people say "but Hitler was so much more evil". Yes, perhaps he was, but people did not know this at the time. So much of the justification for the allies and the demonisation of the axis is post hoc.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That's a historical myth. The Holocaust *was* known during the war and condemned during it, while the Soviet discoveries of Majdanek and Sobibor helped fuel further the Soviet rampages in Germany after the end of the war. Germans didn't simply rape millions of Soviets and kill millions of them, they had their abbatoirs on Soviet soil. All of the Allied leaders knew the Camps were there, Soviet partisans in 1943-4 included Jewish resistance fighters, some who lasted following the breakout at Sobibor, and this was a reason the British Empire, itself prone to Jew-hatred formed the Jewish Legion (aka the reality behind Inglorious Basterds).

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Have you got a citation for this, because I haven't seen this argument presented in a way that doesn't sound like reaching revisionism.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v05/v05p215_Gleason.html

http://www.fortunecity.com/boozers/durham/224/holocaust.html

http://www.nsa.gov/about/_files/cryptologic_heritage/publications/wwii/eavesdropping.pdf

This is another thing that the revelations of Project Ultra have altered traditional historiography of.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

That's all very interesting...

The first source is unusable; I've had a big discussion elsewhere as to why I'm not going to pay any attention to people who can't get peer review.

This is problematic for the newspaper articles as well. Journalists do not have the best track record of adequately presenting academic research to a lay audience.

The third source is useful, but also seems to state that the intercepted documents were not necessarily seen during the war, and if they were seen they were often misunderstood. The numbers were all seriously understated as well. In short, some people may have had some idea that something not too good was going on, it doesn't seem clear at all that the allies knew the purpose and extent of the holocaust. Additionally, there is no indication that any of this information made any difference to allied actions.

In short, this is far from convincing.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

None of it did make differences, primarily because use of Ultra sources wasn't exactly easy. Thanks to Ultra the Allies actually knew of the Coventry bomber fleet before it plastered the town, but to strike at it would have clued in the Germans that the Allies were extremely good at reading their codes and as the flexible situation in the Battle of the Atlantic showed it was not exactly a good idea for the democracies to fight the Axis without knowing everything they were going to do before they did it.

Unless they were willing to accept Soviet-level casualties they could not have thus won the war.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Just a question-what about Soviet aid to the Germans to help them re-arm during the Weimar period and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact?

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Realpolitik?

I'm not sure what opinion you're trying to get out of me...

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Whether or not Soviet-German collaboration in the 1920s and Soviet wars of aggression up to 1941 add further fuzziness to WWII.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Quite. Everyone was fighting for the same thing; colonial dominance.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Again, because this sentence sounds like the view they were: It's time to stop letting the winners of WWII get a free pass.

The thing is too that a lot of the real crimes of the Allies (US head-hunting in the Pacific, the Soviet invasion of the three Baltic states and forcible incorporation of each into the USSR, firebombing cities) tend to be overlooked in attempts to point out Allied atrocities that too often turn into moral equivalencies of the Allies and the Axis. Just like the USSR's crimes have tended to be considered its version of the British Empire's India famines, not its invasion and incorporation of the three Baltic states, its reign of terror in its annexations 1939-41, its expulsion of entire ethnicities, and the Great Terror. If we are to criticize societies and leaders, let it be for real crimes. Not for the blanket and general ones. Which to me is what the "Allies did it too" argument boils down to.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Yep, I can see where you're coming from.

I'm not trying to justify the actions of one group of people by saying "they did it to", I'm against the glorification of one group over another because "they did bad shit". Everyone has done bad shit, let's stop trying to make bad shit the domain of a group of people who we can call "them". Humans do lots and lots of bad shit. Nice, ordinary people can be easily mislead into doing bad shit. There is a horrible sense of cultural superiority surrounding WWII that I don't think is justified, the Nazi's were only doing what everyone else was doing; they just industrialised the process (not surprising given that Germany was the technological powerhouse of the early 20th century), and perhaps most importantly, did it to whites. Oh, they also lost and weren't allowed to speak up and defend any of their actions whilst the allies were able to pretend their atrocities, both during the war and in the colonial age, never happened.

So no, I'm not trying to argue moral equivalency between Auschwitz and Dresden, but Auschwitz and the Belgian Congo perhaps isn't too far a stretch. I guess it depends how much worse you think it is to think that a group of people are subhuman and should be killed or whether you think a group of people is subhuman and should be worked to death.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

See, I think in one sense the sense of cultural superiority *was* justified. The Nazis considered themselves to be superior to everyone else under the Sun, and were then so comprehensively outfought by the supposedly subhuman Soviets that postwar Germany was split into two nations both together smaller than Hitler's and Soviet-style totalitarianism lasted for decades where the entirety of Nazi Germany was 12 years.

The democracies depended more on firepower than on bodies, but the Soviet method *worked.*

I think that the Axis have been turned into Sauron and Saruman, and I think that this vastly overstates what they would actually have been capable of. So in my view, I think overstating the evil of the Axis is bad, but not from the POV that the Allies committed plenty of atrocities of their own, but from the POV that the best Axis Power in terms of military potential was one Imperial Japan, not Nazi Germany, and that Germany's failings can be seen in its greatest successes which show why in fact it lost.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

I agree with you, but I find it odd that you use a great example of why a belief in cultural superiority should be avoided as a reason for cultural superiority. Don't kid yourself, the US could easily create a Hitler and the cult of personality that went with him (we have, they just haven't been able to get their hands on enough power to be truly brutal).

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

If by Hitler we mean an inflexible prick with some degree of balls who mistook balls for brains and micromanaged a war, using massacre as a means of war, the war itself based on a morally bankrupt cause, and writing long, bad books, the USA already did. His name was Jefferson Davis. He even had a cult of personality, it's called the Lost Cause.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

I seem to notice a tendency for US villains to be Confederates and therefore discountable as real Americans; do you think that's a fair perception?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

No, I do not. I think that the Confederates, however, in choosing to fight for slavery and using evil means to perpetuate their war long past the point of real-true defeat, however, verged from moral ambiguity into outright evil and wish Sherman and Sheridan had been far harsher than they actually were. After all, about 12 years after Appomattox Court House the Confederates re-assumed control of the Jim Crow South. Which is why the South retained much of its old evils.