- I wasn't sorry to see Slobodan Milosevic hauled off to
The Hague to face charges of war crimes against Kosovar Albanians. He's
an unsympathetic character at best, though I can't help but note pathos
in the face of a man born of two parents who committed suicide. Mr. Milosevic
always seemed a good potential patient for his fellow Serb nationalist,
Radovan Karadzic, the psychologist and accused war criminal with a similar
bent for killing "the Turk," as Moslems have been known since
the time of Ottoman rule in the Balkans.
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- Nevertheless, all the self-righteous harrumphing about
nailing the latest international baddie has made me pause before cheering
on the tumbrels of justice. The rhetoric of the Western powers is too triumphal
to be fully credible.
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- For one thing, Mr. Milosevic was essentially sold for
cash to the International War Crime Tribunal (read NATO), a transaction
that doesn't quite qualify under the rubric of high principle. The Western
aid package of $1.28-billion to war-damaged, money-starved Serbia was,
shall we say, nakedly premised on the new government's handover of its
biggest PR and political problem.
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- But even more disturbing is the rank hypocrisy now on
display by the countries that provide the bulk of the funds for the war
crimes court. In recent years, a remarkable number of Western military
men have either confessed to war crimes or been revealed as war criminals
-- yet for some reason the calls for their arrest or the arrest of their
political masters have been almost nonexistent. Indeed, confessing war
crimes -- or at least not really denying them -- seems to be the best guarantee
of immunity from prosecution these days.
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- The allegedly tolerant, multi-ethnic Bosnian government
of Alija Izetbegovic isn't a bad place to begin the list of overlooked,
but largely admitted sins of commission. In 1992, at the beginning of the
Serbian siege of Sarajevo, Moslem paramilitary units staffed by members
of the 10th Mountain Brigade went on a vengeful killing spree of Serb civilians
inside the city. Led by Musan Topalovic, an officer known as "Caco,"
Bosnian soldiers cut Serb throats, burned at least one Serb alive and dumped
Serb bodies into an 80-foot-deep crevice.
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- When the carnage ended, Chris Hedges of the New York
Times reported, the total number of victims apparently reached into the
hundreds. Officially, the Bosnian government disapproved of this sort of
thing and "Caco" eventually died under mysterious circumstances.
But his government's demurral was unconvincing, given that the murders
were detailed in a letter from the Bosnian army's deputy commander, a Serb,
to President Izetbegovic in May, 1993.
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- "People at the highest levels, people in the presidency,
knew these killings were going on and did nothing until October 1993 to
stop them," Gen. Jovan Divjak told Mr. Hedges. "I informed them
about these killings. But the support of these paramilitary groups was
convenient for the authorities."
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- Then there's the French army report that Bosnian government
snipers killed civilians in Sarajevo and blamed it on the Serbs to provoke
international sympathy for the Bosnian cause. Mr. Izetbegovic hotly denied
this charge, but the French peacekeepers seemed awfully sure of themselves.
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- Of course, chaos was the rule in the former Yugoslavia
and it wasn't always clear where the shooting was coming from. Things are
better organized elsewhere in Europe -- like in France, where a retired
general recently confessed to the torture and killing of Arab rebels in
the mid-1950s during the Algerian war for independence.
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- At 83, Paul Aussaresses revealed that he personally tortured
and killed 24 Algerian prisoners, an "efficient" operation that
he said left his conscience clear. Perhaps he felt no qualms because he
claimed that he acted with the full knowledge and approval of France's
then-justice minister, a former Vichy bureaucrat and future champion of
human rights named FranÁois Mitterand.
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- French President Jacques Chirac pronounced himself shocked
by the revelation, but he proposed no sanction more serious than suspending
Mr. Aussaresses from the Legion d'honneur. To date, no space has been made
for Mr. Aussaresses or his still living colleagues at The Hague.
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- Mr. Aussaresses' candor must have inspired his Russian
counterpart, Lt. Gen. Vladimir Moltenskoi, who last month announced that
his men had engaged in "widespread crimes" against Chechen civilians
during a "mopping up" operation against rebels. The crimes included
beatings and on-the-spot electric shock, with some sacking of homes and
a hospital thrown in for good measure.
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- "Those who conducted the searches did so in a lawless
fashion, committing numerous outrages and then pretending that they knew
nothing about them," Lt. Gen. Moltenskoi was quoted as saying. This
hardly does justice to the Russian army's suppression of the Chechen rebellion,
which has involved killing a good many civilians. But, thus far, I've heard
no calls to balance the scales of international justice with President
Vladimir Putin as a counterweight.
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- If we delve further back, the roll call gets longer:
the living and recently deceased Italian soldiers under Mussolini whose
atrocities against Greeks, Serbs, Ethiopians and Jews have been, with U.S.
approval, largely ignored for more than 60 years. One of the most notorious,
Giovanni Ravalli, died only in 1998, fully exposed but completely unpunished
for crimes ranging from having a Greek policeman's teeth pulled out with
pliers to ordering boiling oil poured over 70 other prisoners.
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- And let's not forget North America's own highly indictable
war crimes suspects, most prominent among them Henry Kissinger and Robert
McNamara. Mr. Kissinger's dossier as national security adviser and secretary
of state is more diverse than Mr. McNamara's -- comprising atrocities and
political murders in Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile and elsewhere that number
in the hundreds of thousands -- but Mr. McNamara's oversight of the napalming
of Vietnamese civilians as Lyndon Johnson's secretary of defense by itself
merits inquiry.
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- I suppose that the chattering class liberals who bellow
for Mr. Milosevic's head can defend their double standard on the technicality
that the United Nations Tribunal wasn't created until 1993 (although there
are plenty of people who contend that international law covering pre-1993
war crimes is sufficient to begin prosecutions). Or they might cite La
Rochefoucauld's aphorism, "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays
to virtue."
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- But these are sham arguments if the United States and
Europe really believe in equal justice under law -- international or otherwise
-- and Mr. Milosevic had a point when he defiantly declared to Judge Richard
May that "I consider this tribunal a false tribunal and indictments
false indictments."
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- The truth is that the deposed Serbian president was a
small-time operator, especially compared with Mr. Kissinger. But he makes
a convenient scapegoat for Western policy failures -- for example, Germany's
hasty, unilateral recognition of Croatian independence from Yugoslavia,
which inflamed paranoia among Serbs whose families were decimated by Nazi,
Croatian and Italian war crimes in the Second World War.
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- Mr. Milosevic is also the scapegoat for the vainglorious
United States, which wants the right to punish "rogue" states
it happens not to like for the moment (like its former ally Iraq) while
acting quite roguishly outside the purview of international law. In this
light, the courtroom drama in The Hague becomes a version of the scene
in Casablanca where Louis, the sentimental, two-faced Vichy cop, changes
sides to permit the escape of the anti-Nazi Victor Lazlo. "Round up
the usual suspects," he tells his men with faint irony, and so they
do.
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- John R. MacArthur is the publisher of Harper's Magazine.
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