Milosevic's Long Shadow

Six weeks into his war crimes trial in the Hague - a process expected to last two years - Slobodan Milosevic still casts a long shadow over Serbia. Last weekend's arrest of Serbia's Vice-Prime Minister Momcilo Perisic and a senior US diplomat on espionage charges is but a hint of this.

Whether or not Perisic provided confidential military information to the American remains to be seen, but the fact that Serbia's Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic demanded Perisic's resignation suggests that, at the least, Perisic overstepped the acceptable limits of contacts with foreign diplomats. In any case, this reflects the open wound that the Milosevic trial is for Serbia.

Djindjic accuses the Yugoslav National Army, controlled by President Vojislav Kostunica, of meddling in politics with these arrests. Kostunica says that the military was doing its job. Djindjic's problems are compounded because Perisic seems an unlikely reformer. A general during the Croatian War, a Croat court sentenced Perisic, in absentia, for war crimes. Later he became Milosevic's chief of staff and joined the opposition when Milosevic began to lose his grip on power.

The possible connection between Perisic's arrest and Milosevic's trial is this: Perisic might have been attempting to give information about the Army's involvement in actions of interest to the Hague prosecutors. Perisic's motives are many: a desire to take revenge on his former colleagues, or to destabilize Kostunica and/or to secure a promise that he will not be indicted by the Hague Tribunal. If this last is true, it will help confirm Serb suspicions that the Hague process stinks of politics.

But a clear majority of Serbs are already convinced of this. So when Serbian politicians seek public support to extradite indicted Serbs to the Hague, they never say that justice demands such an action or that the Hague is providing a necessary national moral catharsis. Instead, they use the language of realpolitik and remind us that we are too weak to challenge the West, and that our economy - devastated by war, sanctions and NATO bombing - desperately needs the loans and credits that come under the condition that extraditions to the Hague are made.

Why do Serbs react in this way? Many think that the Serbs remain what they have so long been: paranoid, self-pitying nationalists in denial about their guilt. Undoubtedly, some truth exists here. But it is not the whole truth.

Subscribe to PS Digital
PS_Digital_1333x1000_Intro-Offer1

Subscribe to PS Digital

Access every new PS commentary, our entire On Point suite of subscriber-exclusive content – including Longer Reads, Insider Interviews, Big Picture/Big Question, and Say More – and the full PS archive.

Subscribe Now

Many Western observers and journalists report Milosevic's trial in a lazy way. Because Milosevic is obviously guilty and can defend himself in open court, they fail to look for imperfections. Rejoice that justice is served appears to be the mantra. An evil man is getting his just deserts.

But take, for example, last week's confrontation between Milosevic and Paddy Ashdown. The Western media presented Lord Ashdown as a reliable witness of Serbian atrocities against Albanian civilians. In 1998 he personally warned Milosevic that if such continued, NATO's intervention was inevitable.

Serbian attention was drawn to other points made by Ashdown. He called the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) a terrorist organization. So Serbs now ask why no Albanian guerilla is on trial. Ashdown also revealed how Croatian president Franjo Tudjman said at a dinner party in 1995 that Milosevic and he had agreed to carve up Bosnia. Again, Serbs ask, why wasn't Tudjman ever indicted and why, when he died in 1999, did Western diplomats attend his funeral.

Moreover, no Albanian witness dared mention KLA crimes. On the witness stand these Albanians often appeared to Serbs as foolish or disingenuous or both. For most Serbs, any lie or avoidance of a clear answer was proof that the entire testimony was false.

Though many Western journalists think differently, Milosevic is no hero to Serbs. They are impressed that in many, perhaps most cross-examinations of the witnesses, he seems to win, and they like it when he fights to prove that he and his people were victims of NATO and KLA terrorists backed by the West. He also appears shrewd and tough. That he is cold and callous when discussing victims - not only Albanian, but Serbian too - Serbs tend to overlook.

None of this helps Milosevic and his Socialist Party in opinion polls. Serbs consider him incompetent and responsible for their defeats of the 1990s, not least for making Serbia the country with largest refugee population in Europe - around 700,000. This view is unlikely to change, no matter how much bravura Milosevic's defense portays. But if Milosevic and his followers are finished for good, he may yet succeed in completely compromising the tribunal. For years to come Serbs will retain a cynical view of Western justice and look at the West with fear and hostility.

What Milosevic's trial is succeeding in doing is turning many Serbs against Djindjic's 18-party coalition government. A hyper-pragmatic politician, Djindjic's primary interest is economics, and so he is willing to cooperate completely with the tribunal. But with his reforms since Milosevic's rule collapsed the economy has improved only slightly. Western moral admonitions were not accompanied with real generosity, and little aid has arrived. Cooperating with the Hague, it seems, brings only pain, humiliation and shame.

President Kostunica also accepts the need to cooperate with the Hague but is more concerned to protect the country's sovereignty and preserve a semblance of national dignity. If Djindjic is blamed for a lack of scruples, Kostunica appears as an anachronistic and rather conservative nationalist (though no one accuses him of extremism). If elections were held tomorrow, Kostunica would clearly defeat Djindjic, and the Hague would be one of the main reasons. Milosevic is gone, but so long as his trial is perceived as a show trial and not real justice, he will continue to distort our democracy.

https://prosyn.org/Ksw1DCA