Time Now to
Arrest the War Criminals,
But Not All of Them
By JONATHAN POWER
VIENNA, Austria--Perhaps the day will
dawn when an American president gets his lines wrong and
says, "We have no quarrel with the government of x, only
with the people."
Of course, a big part of the trouble
with ex-Yugoslavia is its unscrupulous leadership. But at
least an equal part is due to the ethnic immaturity of its
people. Ethnic conflict does not, it seems, require great
difference or great leaders; small will do in both
cases.
The conflict began with a clash
between Serbia and Croatia, nations with only the smallest
difference in geneology, with practically a common language
and with much intermarriage. Nevertheless, guilty as the
rank and file citizens of ex-Yugoslavia are, without the
leaders they have the wars would never have been so well
organized or so brutally focussed, nor of such genocidal
proportions. Mass killings on this scale, whether it be in
ex-Yugoslavia or Rwanda or, on a much much smaller scale, in
northern Ireland, are always orchestrated by a relatively
small group.
This is why although the war will
never end until the peoples of this region are educated,
prosperous and mature enough to be honest about their own
culpability, the process of atonement will not properly
begin until many of its leaders are arrested or die off.
Since dying off is a slow business, particularly in this
corner of the world where longevity is widely practiced,
especially by those who are cocooned from the normal
misfortunes of life, arrest is the only option.
The NATO peacekeepers have done one
part of the job they set out to do: stabilize the truce for
long enough to allow the peoples of ex- Yugoslavia, in
particularly Bosnia, time to begin to re-think. But they
have not done the other part, the removal of those leaders
who have played upon their peoples' passions and who still
remain an important loci of political power. The real
re-thinking will not get under way until some of them, in
particular the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, and
his general, Retko Mladic, are in the court-room of the
international war-crimes tribunal in the Hague.
This was part of the grand bargain of
the Dayton peace agreement. It is, apparently, after a
period of uncertainty and ambiguity, what the most senior
figures in the U.S. foreign policy apparatus are pushing
for. The reticence is in the intelligence services and in
the military, who for understandable reasons fear that such
arrests will lead to a firefight and a firefight might
re-ignite again the bonfire of ethnic warfare.
The answer to this conundrum lies in
the timing. Done too fast or too soon after Dayton the
arrests might well have been counterproductive. But Mr.
Clinton should take a leaf out of his predecessor's book.
Mr. George Bush when dealing with the Panamanian strong man
and drug dealer, General Manuel Antonio Noriega, had
impeccable timing. He wasn't impressed by the bravado talk
of the Noriega crowd who said their man would take to the
hills if the Americans invaded and organize a guerrilla
force to blow a hole in the Gadun dam which would drain the
canal. Bush waited the man out and then struck. Noriega
panicked, abandoned his troops and fled to the Vatican
embassy and in due course was shipped off to an American
jail.
The strongest and boldest nerve can
crack if the pressure is severe enough. Timing is
everything. Clinton if he prepares and plans well should be
able to do the same.
Yet even now there is room for
sublety. Those who count the number of heads arraigned in
the dock of the war-crimes tribunal miss part of the point.
While convictions are necessary to give the court
credibility, the court also, just by being in existence,
serves as a deterrent, even if the numbers of cases it hears
are limited. It is a Sword of Damocles hanging there and
none of the alleged war criminals in ex- Yugoslavia know
when it will be their turn.
It may be that Karadzic and Mladic
need to be arrested fairly soon, since clearly they are
still actively obstructing the cause of peace. But Serbia's
Slobodan Milosevic and Croatia's Franco Tudjman are arguably
best left alone, at least for the time being. After all the
Hague tribunal is not Nuremberg. This is not a victors'
court. It is a mediators'. And finding a balance is what
mediation is all about.
In fact, there is a degree of the rule
of law in Serbia and Croatia; and there are elections.
Indeed, in the recent Serbian election Milosovic's candidate
(he himself was ineligible to run) came within a whisker of
defeat and now has been forced into a re-run. Tragically,
the electorate seems intent on voting for an even more
extreme nationalist. This delicate moment is not the time to
undermine Milosovic. It is the people we have to worry about
most.
October 22, 1997,
VIENNA
Copyright © 1997 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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