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BOOK REVIEW: Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic by Chris Stephen

08 12 2005  ‘Good morning your honours,’ said the court registrar, one of three black-robed officials sitting at a desk below the judges’ bench. ‘Case number IT-02-54-T, the Prosecutor versus Slobodan Milosevic.’ And so it began.”
 
But this was no ordinary case and the former Serbian leader was hardly just another criminal in the dock.

Indeed, as he covers the trial Chris Stephen realises that its importance lies far beyond the “fate of one, extraordinary, man.” In fact, he concludes, the real significance of the proceedings lies in their role in determining “the future of war crimes justice itself.” And his conclusion? “The prognosis is not good.”

As a war correspondent Stephen spent much of the 1990s covering the conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo for the Guardian, London’s Evening Standard and other outlets. He now concentrates on war crimes issues.

In Judgement Day, he deploys his reporter’s skills not merely to give us a fresh account of the birth of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague, but also to shed light on how dealing with its most infamous defendant inadvertently helped shape policymaking with regard to the creation of the International Criminal Court, ICC, the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal.

In Stephen’s view the Milosevic trial and the fate of the ICC are inextricably linked and, “will be the measure of the entire war crimes process, and, if it goes well, it will become a powerful tool for those arguing that the process should be permanent.”

In light of Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, East Timor, Cambodia, Sierra Leone and most recently Sudan, international justice, Stephen argues, has become an unfortunate reality. The ICC, formally established in 2002, is its promising hope.

Stephen’s narrative begins in Kosovo in 1999, where Albanians are being expelled from the province by Milosevic’s men. Next, we are reminded of the camps around Prijedor in Bosnia in 1992, through the recollections of Nusreta Sivac, a judge who survived Omarska, the most infamous of the camps.

Sivac details the horrendous conditions of Omarska including the screams of men, “which would punctuate the silence long into the night. In the morning she saw the bodies of dead men, and others, beaten, bloody but still alive, lying in the dirt.”

And yet, Stephen refrains from a one-sided rant against the former Yugoslav president. While he does not deny Milosevic’s part in the horrors of the destruction of Yugoslavia, all-night drinking episodes, scheming with Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his insouciance towards the Srebrenica massacre, we are given pause when told about his troubled youth. He was abandoned by his father, who subsequently committed suicide, as did his mother and uncle.

Reading about Milosevic’s family, to which he is clearly deeply attached, the reader has to wonder if this is the same man who masterminded the Balkan wars and was capable of such Machiavellian machinations.

Turning to the court itself, Stephen succeeds in documenting the story of the tribunal and the personalities that made it without drowning the reader in a mass of boring legal jargon. Here we meet the first prosecutors, Richard Goldstone and Louise Arbour and we follow their stories and that of the court until the Milosevic showdown. Most of what follows comes as little surprise. But the tale that is told makes for wonderful drama.

In Stephen’s account the evidence against Milosevic clearly presumes his guilt. And yet, the book also affords him ample opportunity for defence, even though it was published before his own official defence case had begun.

For example Milosevic appears deft at handling his accusers. Through shrewd cross-examinations, he mixes “political fury with well-constructed exposures of even tiny inconsistencies in the evidence of witnesses.”

Stephen notes how at first, when the court looked at the Kosovo indictment, journalists and presumably prosecutors were startled at how Milosevic, “always seemed to know so much about each witness, as well as about the battles and incidents mentioned in the court.” They soon found out why. Secret police records had been stolen, copied, put onto CDs and supplied to Milosevic’s lawyers. A kangaroo court it is not.

Stephen concludes that, “despite its many failings, the trial seems to have been a success.” In principle it has served to underline the fact that peace cannot be used to expunge wartime guilt. But is this enough to help consolidate the ICC, also housed in The Hague, and to make it a credible institution? Stephen is apprehensive. “The future of war crimes justice depends ultimately on the United States.”

Perhaps one of the most gripping strands in Stephen’s book is his account of the birth of the Yugoslav tribunal. As the war in Bosnia raged public opinion in the west became increasingly outraged by scenes such as those from Omarska showing emaciated men behind barbed wire. Governments scrambled to use the UN “as a fig leaf to cover its failure to stop the Bosnian ethnic cleansing.” In 1993, a Security Council resolution calling for a war crimes court was unanimously passed. Its most fervent supporter was the United States. Ten years later, in the wake of 9/11 and embroiled in Iraq and the war on terror, things have changed.

“The story of the trial and of the creation of the court has, at is centre, the United States,” writes Stephen. “Once the court’s greatest supporter, America is now its fiercest critic. The US government is currently in the forefront of efforts to prevent war crimes justice becoming a permanent feature on the world map, in opposition to the European Union and its support for the new International Criminal Court.”

The “mother” of the ICTY, Madeleine Albright, the former US Secretary of State who fiercely advocated in favour of it when she was US ambassador to the UN, once noted that for her country the war crimes agenda was, “more than the pursuit of abstract US goals and interests. It’s about real people who are real war criminals or real victims.” Stephen no longer believes that to be true.

Once a champion of the rule of law, “the White House, frustrated by the very real failings of multilateralism, has embarked on an experiment to see if America can get what it wants by simply using its strength to impose its will, irrespective of international law.” He is disheartened and fears for the ICC’s survival. Judgement Day is his contribution to keeping it alive.

Reviewed by Elmira Bayrasli, a regular Balkan Insight contributor based in Sarajevo.
Published by Atlantic Monthly Press, $ 24