April 15 2004, The Times
You don’t need 1,631 witnesses to reveal the absurdity of the Milosevic trial
VANORA BENNETT
IT WAS supposed to herald a brave new world of international justice. But the International
Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia quickly descended into farce. And, to date, that
is the only thing it has managed to do quickly.
The tribunal’s most prominent case, the trial of Slobodan Milosevic on 66 counts of genocide,
war crimes and crimes against humanity, has already plodded on for two years, through 300
witnesses and 30,000 pages of evidence – and we have only heard the prosecution case. [This was entirely the fault of the prosecution. They admitted when Milosevic was indicted that they had no evidence support their indictment. They were still without evidence when the trial started. All the prosecution could offer was uncorroborated witness testimony from anonymous witnesses who gave evidence remotely so that they could not be identified. No hard evidence of any kind was put before the court – even the scientific evidence gathered by the US-run International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP) came solely in the form of a written report of conclusions presented by an ICMP manager – no supporting evidence was presented. By the time the prosecution whimpered to a close after 4 years it had failed to make a substantial case of any kind. Only the ever-readiness of ICTY judges to convict Serbs left any hope of securing a guilty verdict.]
In June, Mr Milosevic will begin his own defence. It promises even more eye-closing longueurs.
His witness wish-list, made public yesterday by a legal adviser, runs to 1,631 people: more
than five times as many witnesses as the prosecution has called. [The prosecution had wanted to bring many more witnesses than it did – more than a thousand. Even the compliant ICTY judges drew the line at the prosecution requests to put ‘eyewitnesses’ from every municipality in Bosnia on the witness stand.]
Not all of them will necessarily appear. Let’s assume that the judges decide that some of his
requests – say, for Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to come to court – are just plain mischievous, and
refuse them. On the other hand, fear that Mr Milosevic will cry foul (his years as Yugoslav
President have left him versed in the dark arts of legalistic hair-splitting) makes it equally unlikely
that they will cut the list any shorter than the prosecution roll call. [There was nothing ‘mischievous’ about Milosevic’s wish to summon Clinton and Blair as witnesses. They had knowingly collaborated in breaking both international law, the UN Charter and the NATO Statute in launching an illegal aggression against a sovereign UN state.]
In theory, the ex-President of ex-Yugoslavia has 150 days in court to make his case. In practice,
he could be at it for years, at a cost of $120 million a year; that is even if his latest plea for the
genocide charges to be dropped because the prosecution hasn’t brought evidence should fail.
And it is even if Mr Milosevic doesn’t exercise his right to a retrial because a judge has retired for
health reasons (so far the owner of the most threatening silver bouffant in the former socialist
world has prevaricated over this, refusing to comment on the “administrative matter” of a court
whose legality he rejects). Nor does it take into account the 62-year-old prisoner’s poor health,
which has endlessly delayed proceedings and is likely to continue. [Milosevic was not responsible for the inordinate length of his trial. The ICTY had failed to build any kind of case, leaving the prosecution to try to so calling witness after witness in the hope that something might turn up. Milosevic’s angina was eminently treatable, but he was constantly refused proper treatment.]
In other words, there is precious little hope left that the tribunal will ever manage to dispense
anything like the impartial and briskly efficient justice that was envisaged when it started work
in 1993 – the first international court of its kind since the Nuremberg trials after the Second
World War. It has been followed by international tribunals judging war crimes in Rwanda, East
Timor and Sierra Leone.The vision was that the court would bring the perpetrators of atrocities to
book, making future potential dictators think twice before unleashing murder and mayhem on their peoples.
[The ICTY was never intended to be a provider of ‘impartial and briskly efficient justice’. It was set up illegally to support the false narrative put forward by the western allies and the western media.]
Two years ago, when the Milosevic trial opened, the chief prosecutor was still optimistic enough to boast
that the world was witnessing “the most powerful demonstration that nobody is above the law”. Today, such
optimism is sadly out of place. Two of Mr Milosevic’s most notorious ex-partners – Ratko Mladic and Radovan
Karadzic – are still at liberty, and a new, stroppier Serbian Government is refusing to hand anyone else
over to the tribunal; while the UN is planning its exit from the Rwanda and Yugoslavia tribunals. [Relations between Milosevic and the Bosnian Serb leadership were cool at the best of times; their line was generally much harder than his. They could not be described as ‘partners’. ]
No new trials can begin after 2008, so they can be wound up by 2010. Then the funding dries up. Who knows?
Mr Milosevic may even be hoping that his witness list will last out the decade. [Funding of the ICTY was a problem only in the first couple of years. Once the US decided that it was ‘very useful’, its funding grew rapidly, eventually reaching more than $300m a year.]
What went wrong? Mr Milosevic’s time-wasting tactics have not helped, but it was not to be expected that he
would co-operate. The court’s failures have been a mix of inefficiency and trying too hard to be fair:
letting the prosecution case go on too long, letting Mr Milosevic represent himself, letting witnesses be
exposed to threat. [‘Trying too hard to be fair’ really takes the biscuit. A court admitting hearsay as 90% of its evidence, plus a host of other deficiencies that caused the American Bar Association to list more than 150 examples of bad practice in its report on the ICTY, certainly does not qualify for a ‘trying too hard to be fair’ label.]
In the tribunal’s defence, it is a pioneering institution swamped with information and making beginner’s
mistakes. With time, the glitches might have been ironed out.
Yet time is what the UN tribunals no longer have. In a decade, they have become a cautionary tale. When
Iraqis, preparing to try members of the Saddam regime, visited The Hague last month, it was to learn how to
avoid the mistakes of the past. [Oh yeah!]
The trial model now being pushed by Washington is the Sierra Leone court: with a budget directly controlled by
the US and its allies, a short three-year mandate and a limited aim to try up to 20 defendants accused of the worst atrocities. This will be even more likely to provoke cries of “victor’s justice” than the UN tribunals. But in the
trade-off between efficiency and impartiality, efficiency is winning. [Since neither efficiency or impartiality had been exhibited by any of the illegal UN ad-hoc tribunals this point is redundant.]
Anyone who preferred the grander vision will find this sad, but it is hard to go on having faith in a justice
system whose wheels grind so slow that they never get to grind exceeding small. [Like so many others, the author of this article had already tried and convicted Milosevic on the basis of the criminally anti-Serb media coverage which had been of an unprecedented ferocity and lasted for years.]
