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Ratko Mladic was convicted today in The Hague. The
sentence is life imprisonment for genocide, crimes against humanity,
and violations of the laws and customs of war in Bosnia and
Herzegovina in the early 1990s. He will presumably appeal.
Re-reading the Mladic indictment is a terrifying
reminder. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) originally accused him in 1995, but the trial that
ended yesterday was based on an indictment in 2011 of participating
in a joint criminal enterprise responsible for the removal of
Bosnian Croats and Muslims, the years-long siege of Sarajevo, the
mass murder of Bosnian Muslims after his military seizure of
Srbrenica, and the taking of UN personnel as hostages. It has taken
22 years for this first conviction.
International justice today is agonizingly slow,
meticulously detailed, procedurally complex, and ultimately
decisive. I attended an afternoon of Mladic’s trial a few years ago.
It was dull. The prosecutor would read volumes of detailed
eye-witness testimony of atrocities to a Mladic underling who would
deny that anything like that happened. Mladic sat silent. His
defense lawyer would occasionally intervene, but to little avail. I
could well imagine that this orderly process, involving years of
hearings in which to air his denials, would not satisfy his victims.
In fact, the Tribunal is not looked on favorably
in the region. Each ethnic group resents the indictments of its own
military heroes. No group thinks its tormentors have been adequately
punished. The procedural niceties are largely lost in a flood of
self-justifying nationalistic fervor. There has been little
reflection, at least in popular culture, on the villainy of one’s
own, only of the others. Leading politicians exploit the popular
sentiment. Few acknowledge their own group’s culpability or laud
accountability.
I would nevertheless judge the Tribunal a success,
less for its jurisprudence and more for its political impact. Even
when it did not capture war criminals right away, indictments sooner
or later forced wartime leaders out of the political arena. Had that
not been the case, politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia
would have been far more fraught. Mladic and his political
counterpart Radovan Karadzic were forced into hiding. Slobodan
Milosevic was defeated at the polls and extradited. Had they
remained politically active, or even just present in their
respective political environments, Sarajevo and Belgrade would have
been far more fraught.
That is less true for the Croatian, Bosniak, and
Kosovar indictees, not least because their top political leaderships
were never indicted. Croatian President Tudjman and Bosnian
President (Alija) Izetbegovic are dead. Kosovo Prime Minister
Haradinaj was indicted but acquitted. He is again prime minister
now. He, Kosovo President Thaci, or other KLA fighters could still
be indicted, by a Kosovo “special court” staffed with internationals
convened in The Hague to deal with post-war crimes.
Some will say the failure to hold more Croat,
Bosniak and Kosovo political leaderships accountable, and the
acquittal of some of their military leaders, proves that ICTY is
biased against Serbs, or implemented only victor’s justice. I find
some of the acquittals difficult to understand, but it is important
to remember that a court like ICTY that follows best practices in
contemporary criminal procedure is more likely to acquit the guilty
than convict the innocent, which is as it should be.
There is however no question of innocence in
Mladic’s case. The evidence presented at trial was overwhelming and
compelling. Someone else unjustly getting off is no reason to doubt
Mladic’s guilt. He will now have ample opportunity to appeal, but
odds are he’ll spend the rest of his life incarcerated in a fairly
comfortable place, telling himself he was right to protect Serbs by
murdering and expelling Muslims and Croats, firing at civilians in
Sarajevo, and taking UN peacekeepers hostage. It’s an unsatisfying
outcome, but the best available.
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