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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
They're not dancing in the streets of Sarajevo yet, because the indicted Serbian war criminal may never be brought to justice.
May 27, 1999 | When news of Slobodan Milosevic's impending indictment by the war crimes tribunal broke late Wednesday night, the people of Sarajevo, Bosnia -- who had been shelled, starved, sniped at and besieged by Milosevic's forces for three and a half years -- cheered. Not for the indictment, which few had yet heard about, but for the victory of Manchester United against Football Club Bavaria Munich, broadcast live from Barcelona on local television. With the war over, Sarajevo has developed a semblance of normalcy, and soccer gets more play than even welcome news about Milosevic four years after he terrorized the country.
But as dawn broke Thursday, the news of Milosevic's impending indictment crept across the former Yugoslavia. It brought the families of millions of Milosevic's victims some vindication, surely, but mostly it carried a sense of the plodding slowness of justice. Celebration was not immediate, because of lingering uncertainty about whether the indictment will lead to Milosevic standing trial, or even being forced from office.
Louise Arbour, chief war crimes prosecutor for the Balkans, announced the indictment at a press conference in The Hague on Thursday afternoon. Although Milosevic led his country into four nationalist wars that have killed more than 200,000 people, made 3 million people refugees and spawned atrocities not seen in Europe since the Holocaust, Arbour said the indictment was based on his recent persecution of Kosovar Albanians.
"It's the right reaction, but it's at least five years late," said Mirza Hajric, an advisor to the Bosnian Muslim president Alija Izetbegovic, by phone from the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo Thursday. "I think this should speed up the Dayton peace process, since I believe Milosevic has been a major impediment to the peace process."
"We have a saying in the Bosnian language," Hajric adds, "Justice is slow, but it gets there. Basically, it means, justice is finally done."
In Milosevic's Serbia, state-controlled television did not carry any mention of the indictments. But for those with access to CNN and the BBC, the news brought concern and even outrage that the timing of the indictment -- smack in the middle of Russian-led negotiations on a possible peace deal -- could scuttle their only hope for relief from NATO bombing, which residents of Serbia have now endured for 63 days.
"I'm very upset, absolutely," said Zarko Korac, a professor of psychology at the University of Belgrade and a pro-democracy activist, by telephone from the Serbian capital Thursday. "I don't question the decision to indict Milosevic itself, but the timing of the decision. As scheduled, Milosevic's indictment will get announced exactly at the same moment when [Russian peace envoy Viktor] Chernomyrdin is supposed to arrive in Belgrade for new peace talks."
Chernomyrdin in fact canceled his scheduled trip to Belgrade Thursday, after it became clear that his Serbian interlocutor was to be publicly accused of crimes against humanity.
Milosevic was indicted along with four of his deputies, including the Serbian president Milan Milutinovic, the chief of staff of the Yugoslav army Dragoljub Ojdanic, the Yugoslav deputy prime minister Nikola Sainovic, and Serbian internal minister Vlajko Stojilkovic. Arbour did not rule out the possibility of expanding the list of Serbian indictees beyond those five, and emphasized that the accused were indicted on war crimes charges pertaining to Kosovo alone, and could also possibly be charged with war crimes committed earlier this decade in Croatia and Bosnia.
The news is a bombshell -- not only bringing into question the West's willingness to enter into a future peace agreement for Kosovo with an indicted war criminal, but also making clear the need for the West to look beyond the entire Milosevic administration for a more suitable peace partner in Yugoslavia -- perhaps as far away as Montenegro, the smaller Yugoslav republic, whose president Milo Djukanovic was in Germany for an international conference on the Balkans as the indictments were read out on Thursday. There are no Serbian leaders left untouched by the taint of war crimes. Ojdanic headed up the Yugoslav army and Stojilkovic led the Serbian police -- two forces that, working together with roving gangs of paramilitaries, have employed violence and terror to drive more than half of Kosovo's Albanian population from their homes in just the past two months, in a planned military campaign known as "Operation Horseshoe."
But despite the mounting pile of evidence that points to Milosevic's responsibility for war crimes, U.S. leaders have made no promises to avoid future negotiations with him. Some U.S. diplomats, notably Richard Holbrooke, consider Milosevic the only man in Belgrade who can deliver a peace agreement. On Wednesday, as the news of the impending indictment broke, Clinton administration officials insisted they could still work with the Serbian leader.
Nevertheless, the indictment signals a sea change in Western perceptions of Milosevic, and has forced some Western leaders to acknowledge that -- even if they conclude a peace deal with him -- Milosevic is a man with too much blood on his hands to be left in office.
