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]

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.