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08 01 2007 Bookreview of Tatyana Vaksberg's Milosevic and the Tribunal: a Personal View of an Unfinished Trial, Ciela, 2006
By Vessela Tcherneva
As Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was being buried, the world press announced that death had won over justice. Pinochet passed away without a conviction; the victims of his regime were left unavenged, and those who believe in justice and the judicial system remained deeply disappointed. A countless number of people must have felt the same months earlier, when on March 11 we learned that Slobodan Milosevic was dead.
Starting from the disappointing statement that Milosevic died unconvicted - along with a suspicion harbored by many Serbs, that he was killed by the Tribunal - Tatyana Vacksberg leads readers along a fascinating, at times painful, path. And she reaches the conclusion that, although unconvicted, Milosevic received history's judgment during the trial. Although the book sets out with the caveat that it is about failure, Milosevic and the Tribunal is also a book about hope in international justice. In the final analysis, its answer to the question, can we sue a dictator, is in the affirmative, showing clearly both the omissions and the ways to avoid them.
The book describes systematically the reasons behind the failure of an international effort to have justice served, where all three parties involved share the blame. The prosecutors, in their effort to prove the defendant's historic, rather than legal, culpability, and bring charges on 66 counts of crimes in three different countries over 10 years - an impossible burden of proof, even for the Hague Tribunal, with its excellent staff and resources. The judges in their effort to hold a perfect trial, impeccable even to Milosevic's staunchest supporters, gave the defendant the freedom to delay and sabotage the trial. And the defendant, who used this opportunity virtually endlessly, insisting on handling his own defense so that he could delay the trial and give fiery political speeches irrelevant to the subject in question while lauding "all of Serbia, sat on the defendant's bench, by the true criminals".
The story of the Hague Tribunal contains several other stories: of international justice; of the wars in Yugoslavia (with an emphasis on the Bosnian war); of the cosmopolitan banker Milosevic who turned into Europe's nationalist nightmare; of his victims. These diverse stories, ordinarily difficult to connect, are linked with ease here. Far more successfully, it seems, than proving links and guilt in the trial itself. As this appears to be the major task in the Hague: proving the links between local crimes and the commander in chief, Milosevic. The doctrine of command responsibility was actively applied in the Tribunal on the former Yugoslavia: Milosevic was a defendant not because he was President - in fact, legitimately elected - but rather because as a commander he either ordered or at least knew of the genocide, the war crimes and the crimes against humanity, and did nothing to prevent them.
Vessela Tcherneva is FP-Bulgaria's managing editor.
At the beginning of 2010 BIRN network published Digging Deeper - A Guide for Investigative Journalists in the Balkans, written in cooperation with Sheila Coronel, Director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism and professor of professional practice at Columbia University, New York.
