Wall Street Journal editorial today from the dog Whorbrook...he pulls no punches this time, he pretty much says that Yugoslavia is finished, something he worked to achieve for several years and making millions in the process.
Free Slobo!!!
Gus, I think they'll take him Slobo out in jail and will blame a deranged fellow prisoner...
Milosevic on Trial
By Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the
United Nations. Mr. Holbrooke was the chief architect of the Dayton
Peace Agreement.
The unexpectedly swift transfer of Slobodan Milosevic to the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ends one era in
the Balkans, and begins another. Now, a trial unlike any other in history
will take place in The Hague, with implications for the Balkans and far
beyond.
Since no head of government has ever been tried by an international court
for war crimes, everything that happens in that courtroom in the
Netherlands will set important political and legal precedents.
It would be desirable if the trial could take place quickly, so that the
Serbian people could see that their former leader in fact betrayed them.
But, given the methodical pace of the tribunal so far, this is unlikely.
Chain of Command
Milosevic has been indicted only for events in Kosovo. But it is virtually
certain that Carla del Ponte, the tough chief prosecutor for the tribunal, will
charge Milosevic with responsibility for the massive war crimes that were
committed in Bosnia and perhaps Croatia between 1991 and 1995. In
those wars the primary fighting, including several dreadful massacres,
notably Srbrenica in July 1995, was conducted by Serbs in units that
claimed to be fighting for local autonomy against Muslims and Croats. Ms.
del Ponte's task will be to establish that the chains of command from the
Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia ran not only back to the Belgrade military and
police leadership but directly to Milosevic himself.
In our negotiations with Milosevic -- all of which preceded his indictment
-- he always denied any involvement in (or prior knowledge of) the crimes
taking place in Bosnia. We pressed him repeatedly on this point, even
preparing a "sanitized" paper based on U.S. intelligence sources listing
many of the war crimes.
When I presented this document to him during an intense negotiating
session in Belgrade in October 1995, he memorably refused to touch or
even look at the paper. I read him sections of it and warned him, then and
at other times, that the issue of war crimes was not simply "cosmetics," as
he thought, but a matter of real concern to the international community.
At the end of that session, the paper sat, still unacknowledged, on the
table. "You forgot your document," I said to him. "It's your document, not
mine," he snapped back. One of my colleagues then handed it to one of his
aides.
To prove Milosevic's involvement in these horrible events, Ms. del Ponte is
certain to ask members of NATO, including the U.S., for access to
sensitive intelligence materials that might help establish a chain of command
linking the atrocities to the head of the government. Such evidence, if it
exists, could be critical in any attempt to prove that Milosevic was aware
of, and perhaps ordered, Serb security forces to commit war crimes.
Providing access to such material may pose serious problems for
intelligence officials, for whom protection of sources and methods is of the
utmost importance. The final decision on the degree of cooperation offered
to Ms. del Ponte will have to be made at the highest level of the American,
British and French governments; a way should be found to give the court
the maximum amount of help possible.
The trial will raise enough issues of jurisdiction and procedure to transfix
legal junkies for years to come. But before the congratulations in the West
get out of hand, there are several important pieces of unfinished business.
The most urgent concern is Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic,
both indicted in 1995 but, unfortunately, still at large. These two men were
the leaders of the political and military forces that actually conducted the
massacres and ethnic cleansing. Karadzic, once the so-called president of
the Bosnian Serb republic, remains a powerful underground force
symbolizing defiance of NATO and the Dayton Peace Agreement. He has
been on the run for more than five years, hiding in Bosnia, Serbia and
perhaps Montenegro. As I have said many times, NATO's lack of success
in capturing him was our greatest failure in the years since the Dayton
Agreement was signed in November 1995.
Recently, tempted by public signs of ambivalence in Washington about
vigorous implementation of Dayton, he and his henchmen have mounted
their serious tests of NATO's resolve, even organizing mob actions in
Banja Luka, Bosnia, in May that trapped and endangered for several hours
the American ambassador and other Western diplomats. Karadzic is a real
and present danger to American policy in the Balkans; until he and Mladic
(who is probably living in retirement in Serbia) join Milosevic in The
Hague, it will be impossible to withdraw the remaining NATO forces,
including 3,100 Americans, from Bosnia.
Another important aspect of Milosevic's transfer to The Hague is that it
brought into the open the festering split within the anti-Milosevic alliance.
Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica, whose skill at creating the coalition
of pro-nationalist and anti-Milosevic forces led to Milosevic's downfall last
September, opposed the transfer as illegal. His colleague in the struggle
against Milosevic, Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, who has always
had closer ties to the West, engineered it. In these circumstances, the
Western nations, including the U.S., were wise to grant immediately more
than $1 billion in aid to the Yugoslav government in order to strengthen
Mr. Djindjic and his supporters.
The tensions in Belgrade have again highlighted the absurdity of the current
Yugoslav political structure: a national government with very limited
authority over the two republics that stayed inside Yugoslavia, Serbia and
tiny, semi-rebellious Montenegro. This is, of course, a matter solely for the
people of Yugoslavia to decide, but the Western powers should stop their
strong advocacy for the continuation of this increasingly unworkable
structure. If Montenegro and Serbia divorce peacefully, and this event is
not used as an excuse for efforts to partition Bosnia or Macedonia, it will
be better than a continuation of the present system.
Finally, one should single out for special recognition two American
senators, Pat Leahy (D., Vt.) and Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), whose
legislation linking American aid to Yugoslavia with cooperation with the
war crimes tribunal became law last year after consultations with the
Clinton administration. Without this legislation, it is unlikely that those Serbs
seeking to turn Milosevic over to The Hague would have had enough
leverage to succeed.
This is worth stressing because of the continuing debate in the U.S. over
whether legislated pressure on foreign governments is productive. Many
traditional practitioners of foreign policy have been disturbed at the growth
over the last 25 years of congressional micro-management of foreign policy
through excessively detailed legislation. I myself have sometimes shared
these concerns.
Legislation Worked
Yet in this case (as with the Helms-Biden legislation, linking U.N. reform to
the payment of our arrears, which helped produce the most far-ranging
reform of the U.N. financial system in almost 30 years), a combination of
legislation and executive branch pressured based on that legislation did
produce a remarkable outcome. This is not, I stress, a blanket
endorsement of such legislation, but an acknowledgement that if correctly
calibrated in close consultation with the executive branch, it can have a
significant effect. |
