We need no trial to know that Slobodan Milosevic is an evil man. We need no trial to know that his policies cost thousands of lives in former Yugoslavia. We need no trial to know that in Bosnia he brought ruin to one of Europe's few Muslim civilisations. We need no trial for us to know any of this; and let there be an afterlife, for his sake alone, that he may burn in hell for all eternity.
Milosevic deserves to be tried - but by the due process of law in his own country, and not before the agenda-driven International War Crimes Tribunal (IWCT) in The Hague. Political selectivity in the legal processes of the IWCT has made equal justice for all there simply unattainable. Slobodan Milosevic is not being tried because he was a despotic murderer, but because he was a despotic murderer in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is all forensic humbug.
Operation Storm
We do not need to travel far from Belgrade to find war crimes comparable to those he commissioned from there. Six years ago last month, 150,000 Serbs were driven out of their homes in Krajina by Croat forces in Operation Storm, which was executed with huge assistance from Washington - I myself met US military advisers, unconvincingly masquerading as writers for military magazines, carefully examining Serb fortifications some time before the offensive.
Uncountable numbers of Serb civilians were killed; those too old or infirm to go freely were either burnt out or shot. Operation Storm at times either matched or exceeded what Milosevic's goons did in Bosnia and in Kosovo. Yet President Clinton welcomed it, suggesting that it would open the way to a solution of the Yugoslav conflict - which was, no doubt, the logic in Serb minds during the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia in 1992 and in Kosovo in 1999.
The author of the rape of Krajina, President Tudjman, went to his grave untroubled by any fear of a hand on his sleeping shoulder, a gentle wake-up call from the nice people in the Hague: Hi dere, Franjo - vill you kom vit uss, pliss? He was the US client in the region, and therefore beyond the short and selective arm of international law.
In fact, you have to be extremely unlucky to fit the IWCT bill, and be politically vulnerable at the same time. There are probably half-a-dozen African leaders who fully deserve their day in court, followed by a few moments above a trapdoor with a hessian noose around their necks. But of course, they will never find themselves arraigned on the charges they so richly deserve, because African Union, as the Organisation of African Unity is now called, would simply denounce The Hague as offering white man's justice only.
Matabeleland massacres
So Mugabe, the butcher of Matabeleland, which suffered massacres which dwarf Milosevic's little capers in Bosnia, knows he has nothing to fear - though, as if to prove its watch over the dark continent is stern and unremitting, The Hague is trying a few dozen relative nobodies from Rwanda for being rather too free with the panga on their neighbours. When the butchery reaches into the hundreds of thousands, political objections tend to falter. Meanwhile, other seasoned slaughterers of the continent who were modest enough to confine their butchery to the tens of thousand remain at liberty, affable and chuckling statesmen all.
Not in Africa alone. Whatever is going on in Chechnya, we may be sure that President Putin is never going to be shuffling sheepishly in a Dutch dock because of it. No doubt villainies which cry to heaven for vengeance are happening in Tibet, but their primary authors in Beijing enjoy as much immunity for the deeds as if they were camping on Saturn. And the assassins who ordered East Timor to be put to the sword may tonight thoughtfully pick their teeth in Djakarta without the least fear of a snatch squad arriving feet-first through their windows bearing warrants stamped "Den Haag".
It could be said - and with justice - that imperfect justice, such as that being meted out to Milosevic, is better than no justice at all. This is true. But in the longer run, there is a limit to how far the world will enforce sanctions on countries which the US has termed "rogue" in accordance with its foreign policy requirements, but nobody else's, in order to extract and put on trial someone the US disapproves of. This is what happened with Yugoslavia and Milosevic. Sooner or later, such a legal system, based largely on American foreign policy interests, will be simply discredited and unenforceable.
Nuremberg trials
War crimes trials are tools of the powerful. The Nuremberg trials of 1945-46 studiously excluded area-bombings of cities as an offence, for rather embarrassingly obvious reasons, but included unrestricted submarine warfare, for which Admiral Doenitz got ten years. As it happens, the old bastard was good for every day of it; but it was still victor's vengeance by another name.
As with Nuremberg then, so with The Hague today. The IWCT is merely political expediency dressed up in wigs, in broad strokes enacting US foreign policy requirements, and calling itself The Common Good. And politicians everywhere accept this because the IWCT gives them endless opportunities to look grave and sonorously indulge their insatiable appetite for blather about the regard of that fiction, "the international community", for human rights.
Which doesn't mean, of course, that we shouldn't want old Slobbo to go down for the rest of his days.