stratfor.com
The Trial of Milosevic Could Unnerve Leaders in the
U.S. and Europe
27 June 2001
Analysis
Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic will likely
be extradited to face charges at the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague.
Milosevic is charged with crimes against humanity as well as war crimes for his
role in the 1999 Kosovo conflict. An indictment for Milosevic's role in the Bosnian
war, from 1992 to 1995, has not yet been released, according to an ICTY
spokeswoman.
The Kosovo indictment includes persecution and seven instances of murder,
totaling 340 victims. These alleged murders are classified both as war crimes, or
violations of the codes and practices of war, and as crimes against humanity,
defined as severe crimes conducted against innocents. Milosevic also stands
accused of crimes against humanity for forcibly deporting ethnic Albanians from
Kosovo.
But noticeably absent are charges of genocide even though Milosevic's
government was blamed for as many as 10,000 killings of ethnic Albanians during
the first weeks of the 1999 war for Kosovo. The ICTY has said it would leave itself
the option of adding the genocide charges, but so far, two years of excavations
and investigations have not borne out the allegations of mass killings.
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As a result, the prosecution in The Hague appears
to have settled on lesser charges that will more
easily result in a guilty verdict. But this development
may set a new precedent, making it easier for
international courts to bring charges against other democratically elected heads
of state as well as military officers. This precedent poses a risk to American
political leaders and to U.S. military officers who command missions overseas
that kill local civilians.
The tribunal has not added genocide charges because Kosovo has not yet yielded
the killing fields the West expected two years ago. The ICTY has exhumed about
4,000 bodies to date, according to a spokeswoman. But many of these bodies
have not been definitively identified, either as noncombatant ethnic Albanians or
otherwise.
The international search for Kosovo's killing fields has yielded a significant share
of critics - among them the very people who have gone to Kosovo to uncover the
truth. A Spanish team returned from Kosovo in 1999; its leader told the El Pais
newspaper that the limited number of individual grave sites were the result of
fighting between ethnic Albanian guerrillas and Yugoslav forces.
Late in 2000, the ICTY changed its tactic: It shifted from searching for the killing
fields to putting together a case, based on available evidence, that would convict
Milosevic. As a result, the charges are certainly somber but of lesser magnitude.
The tribunal is helping to set an important and ironic precedent. By dropping the
genocide charge, the court has set a relatively undemanding hurdle for trying
heads of state or military leaders. And the ICTY's most serious charges of crimes
against humanity are not ironclad insofar as the crimes are not on the scale of,
say, Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan.
As a result, the threshold for crimes against humanity has been significantly
lowered. If an unpopular but democratically elected former leader like Milosevic
can be indicted, extradited and tried for these crimes, so can many other political
leaders in governments around the world.
Every leader who has sent troops into conflict is liable for civilian deaths or
excessive force. The potential list ranges from influential figures like Russian
President Vladimir Putin, for Chechnya, to lesser-known leaders like
Mozambique's Joaquim Chissano, who presided over his own country's civil war
and remains in power.
On this front, Americans may have some of the greatest legal exposure. Former
President Clinton ordered U.S. operations in Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan and
Sudan - all of which resulted in civilian deaths. U.S. military officers may face
additional legal exposure abroad, as would officers in the Canadian, British and
Nordic militaries who contribute forces to peacekeeping operations.
The one significant trouble international courts will have
in enforcing this precedent is the lack of an executive
arm with which to reach out and grab suspects. No
court in the world has the ability to coerce China,
Russia or the United States to hand over a current or former leader. They enjoy
much more political power than does a country like Chile, unable to gain the
release of former President Augusto Pinochet.
But the indictment process is likely to become more institutionalized. A
permanent international war crimes tribunal, sponsored by the United Nations, is
likely to begin operations within a few years. The United States has attempted to
hinder the creation of this tribunal, but half the necessary signatories have ratified
the treaty. |
