Crossing Cultures
The Crimes of Ratko Mladić
Ian Buruma
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NEW YORK – Ratko Mladić is an easy man to hate. In his prime, he not only talked and behaved like a thug, but he also looked like one – the kind of bull-necked, pale-eyed, snarling psychopath who would gladly pull out your fingernails just for fun. Apart from many other cruelties, the Butcher of Bosnia was responsible, in the summer of 1995, for the killing of around 8,000 unarmed Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the woods around Srebrenica.
So it will give most of us a feeling of warm satisfaction that he has finally been arrested in the Serbian village of Lazarevo. Serbia has gained respect by arresting Mladić, which should speed up its membership in the European Union. The former victims of Mladić’s Bosnian Serb forces will feel that some justice is being done at last.
Yet the forthcoming trial of Ratko Mladić raises certain uncomfortable questions. Why, in the first place, can’t he be put on trial in Belgrade, instead of The Hague? And is it really wise to charge him with genocide, as well as crimes against humanity and war crimes?
Both questions reveal how much we still live in the shadow of the Nuremberg Tribunal, where the Nazi leaders were tried by an international judicial panel. It was believed, perhaps correctly, that the Germans would be incapable of trying their own former leaders. And the Nazi crimes had been so horrendous in scale and intent that new laws – “crimes against humanity” – had to be created to try those who had been formally responsible for them. States, too, should be held accountable for their deeds – hence, in 1948, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The Holocaust was not the main issue at stake in the Nuremberg Trials. Nevertheless, the allies thought that the Nazi project of exterminating an entire people called for an entirely new legal approach, to ensure that such an atrocity would never happen again.
The problem with genocide, as a legal concept, is that it is vague. It refers to “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” The emphasis is on “intent,” not on the numbers of people whose lives are destroyed. Mao Zedong murdered up to 40 million Chinese, but did he intend to destroy them as a group? Surely not. We know that Hitler did intend to destroy every last Jewish man, woman, and child. Even though mass killings are not rare in history, Hitler’s extermination plan was, if not unique, certainly highly unusual.
However, the laudable effort to prevent such a thing from recurring has had unfortunate consequences. For, in our zeal to learn lessons from history, we often learn the wrong ones, or distort history towards dubious ends.
In a way, the killings at Srebrenica also were affected by the memories of World War II. The United Nations’ Dutch battalion promised to protect the Muslims there, even though it was in no position to do so. It was a promise that partly reflected the feeling of guilt that still haunts the Dutch for looking the other way as the Germans rounded up and deported two-thirds of their country’s Jewish population to death camps. This time, it would be different. This time, they would act. Alas, outnumbered and outgunned by Mladić’s forces, the Dutch surrendered Srebrenica to its fate.
Because of the trauma of Hitler’s intention to murder all of the Jews, genocide has become the one compelling reason for military action, including armed invasion of other countries. But what constitutes genocide? Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Doctors Without Borders, wanted the world to intervene in Nigeria in 1970, because he saw the killing of Ibos by Nigerian troops as a genocidal echo of Auschwitz. Others saw a brutal civil war, and cautioned that intervention would make things worse.
For some, we are forever living in 1938, or rather, 1942, when the Nazis approved what Hitler called “the final solution of the Jewish question.” President George W. Bush and his cheerleaders, invoking the Munich Agreement at every opportunity, regarded the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as a call to arms. Saddam Hussein was Hitler, so we had to send in the troops. We should stop Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir’s genocide in Darfur. We must stop Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from committing mass murder in Benghazi. And so on.
Sometimes intervention might save lives. But wars often beget more wars, or longer ones. Military action can cause more violence, and more civilian deaths. This is especially true of intervention in civil wars, where the sides cannot easily be divided into victims and aggressors, good and evil.
Of course, the world becomes much simpler if we choose to see it in black and white. And the Mladić trial will, no doubt, encourage this perception. He will be tried for genocide, because the UN’s tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice decided that the Bosnian Serbs were genocidal. Since his subordinate, Radislav Krstić, was already sentenced for his complicity in the genocide at Srebrenica, Mladić will presumably be convicted.
We need not feel sorry for Mladić. There is no doubt that he is guilty of serious war crimes. And a trial, however unsatisfactory, is in most cases still to be preferred to an assassination. But trying him for genocide, even though it will be hard to prove that he ever intended to exterminate Bosnian Muslims as a group, just because they were Muslims, will further muddy the term’s already vague definition.
Mladić was engaged in ethnic cleansing, which, though reprehensible, is not the same as genocide. Loose definitions will encourage more military interventions, thus more wars. By invoking Hitler’s ghost too often, we trivialize the enormity of what he actually did.
Ian Buruma is Professor of Democracy and Human Rights at Bard College, and the author of Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.
www.project-syndicate.org
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robot5x 10:08 01 Jun 11
"By invoking Hitler’s ghost too often, we trivialize the enormity of what he actually did."
No - by remembering his victims we try to ensure that such atrocious crimes can never be repeated. If they are; people should be brought to justice, which is exactly what happens in this case.
The author's view that ethnic cleansing does not equal genocide is simply a semantic nicety. Bosnian Muslims were purposely singled out and murdered in cold blood by Mladic's forces - perhaps if we'd let him carry on he eventually would actually have committed crimes 'worthy' of Ian Buruma's definition of 'genocide' - At least then we could try him at the Hague with a clear conscience!
leden1k 06:18 03 Jun 11
Buruma chooses a perverse structure around which to build his critique of the development of the crime of genocide. The problem, he tells us, is that genocide is a vague legal concept and we have applied it because we are stuck, reliving the 1942 scenario of what should have been done to stop Hitler. This he says gives rise to misguided military interventions, such as trying to stop Bashir in Darfur and Qaddafi in Libya.
There are many oddities in this contrarian attack. Darfur was one of the very few cases where a major power, in this case the United States, declared outright that what was occurring was genocide. However, there has been no military intervention in Darfur but for an extremely limited African Union peacekeeping force. In Rwanda there was military presence (of the UN) that was only able to impotently watch as genocide unfolded. In Libya there is no mention of genocide at the Security Council (other than by recently converted Libyan officials). The council’s resolutions or the recent ICC warrants make no mention of genocide. In Iraq there was no suggestion that genocide was the motivating cause of recourse to military action—it was the alleged weapons of mass destruction.
In fact, where genocide has occurred there has been no substantive international military intervention. It would therefore appear it is not the fear or reality of genocide that leads us into misguided conflicts. Genocide and the pursuit of its perpetrators are simply the wrong targets for criticism here.
Buruma asserts the problem with genocide is that it is a vague legal concept primarily because it requires proof of the intent to destroy the ethnic, racial, religious, or political group. Proving the intention is one of the basic functions of any prosecutor in any crime. The element that makes criminal cases complicated tends to be the facts, not the concepts. Genocide cases will almost inevitably give rise to a huge number of facts, layers of complexity, and deeply contested issues. Buruma’s flawed line of thought suggests in truth Mladic should be understood to have carried out “ethnic cleansing,” not genocide, because the intent was not to destroy the group.
The following points about genocide are clear: first, the whole group need not be the target of destruction—but a significant part of it must be. Second, you need not succeed in destroying a significant part of the group to be guilty of genocide. An accused needs only to have carried out acts intending to destroy a significant part of the group. The measure of his guilt is in what he intended through the act, not simply what he achieved. What the accused achieved may provide the most compelling evidence of what he intended, but it is not what the crime of genocide requires.
Those reserving the term genocide as fitting only to Hitler’s crimes should note the crime of genocide was not part of the London Charter (1945) that formed the jurisdiction of the Nuremberg Tribunal. The crime came into being in 1948 under a UN convention at the urging of a Polish jurist, Rafael Lemkin, who had been troubled above all by the occurrences in Armenia in 1915-17. Armenia was of course of a different order to the Holocaust, just as Rwanda and Srebrenica are.
The developments in international human rights law in the past fifty years and in international criminal justice in the past twenty years are an attempt to do two things: to reaffirm basic, internationally shared human values; and to offer some degree of protection wherever possible to ensure such groups do not perish at the hands of genocidaires.
Having convicted several people of genocide in Srebrenica, it is hard to imagine anything so imprudent as the prosecutor not proceeding with a prosecution of Mladic for the same charge. He is perhaps the person most responsible for the atrocity. If so, not only would it offend any sense of natural justice for his subordinates to be convicted of genocide while he was not, it would send a signal of supreme weakness at the international level in the attempt to ensure basic values are affirmed and upheld.
Those of us who work in the international justice field share the sense that sometimes the label of genocide is reached for too quickly, unthinkingly, and with the result of diluting the horror it deserves. But the deliberate murder of eight thousand men and boys effectively erasing the Bosnian Muslim community in the eastern part of Bosnia is not the one to which the critique should be attached.
As for the question why Mladic can’t be put on trial in Belgrade instead of The Hague, I suggest Buruma puts it directly to the government of Serbia, where a recent poll revealed more than 70 percent of the population regards Mladic as a hero they would never want to see on trial. Buruma may be surprised to find—the fragility of Serbian judiciary aside—Serbian president Boris Tadic might just be the most thankful of all of us that the ICTY exists.
ClaudeCahn 09:10 31 May 11
What a profoundly wrong-headed essay by a previously interesting author. The International Court of Justice has already held the events at Srebrenica constituted genocide. The matter at issue in trying Ratko Mladic for his responsibility for these acts would centre around establishing his culpability for them or, alternately, exhonorating him for them. No muddy waters there -- just a simple review of the law and the evidence.