Dirty Ratko’s Longterm Legacy
Don’t be fooled by the tightly cropped shots of Serbian nationalists protesting the extradition of fugitive Gen. Ratko Mladic to the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Netherlands, where he will stand trial for crimes against humanity committed by his Bosnian Serb troops during the wars of Yugoslav succession. The Serb internet is filled with back and forth between those outraged by the allegedly arbitrary insult to their national honor — and those who see it for what it is: accountability.
For the most part, Serbs long ago moved beyond the nationalist and racist demons that sprung forth after the passions of the multi-ethnic Yugoslav state thawed and took wing in the early 1990s. The primary stirrer of this cauldron, Slobodan Milosevic, is long dead, having suffered a heart attack during his drawn out trial in The Hague in 2006. His primary civilian cohort, Radovan Karadzic, is already on trial there–prosecutors have even mulled the idea of combining the trials of the two men who, together, are held responsible for the massacre of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995, along with thousands of other civilians killed during the Bosnian Serb siege of Sarajevo.
Americans, whose air strikes and diplomacy finally brought that ugly war to an end, have lived up to their reputation for short memories. The grainy old photos of Mladic tromping around the Srebrenica killing grounds in his fascist pillbox cap seem almost comical in light of the wars that followed in the Middle East. But there was nothing comical about Mladic when he led the best armed and most bloodthirsty of the three tribal armies that went at each other over Bosnia-Herzegoniva from 1993-1996, when the Dayton Peace Accords brought an end to the slaughter. Those of us who spent time in the Balkan war zone know all three sides – the Serbs, the Bosnian Muslims and the Bosnian Croats, too — perpetrated their share of outrages. But the Serbs, true to their self-image as the superior tribe of the south Slavs, outdid them all.
Americans also have shown little love for the International War Crimes Tribunal or other transnational judicial operations of its ilk. This, as Serb nationalists are pointing out fervently online at the moment, is primarily because their own troops might well be dragged before such tribunals for actions taken in Afghanistan, Iraq or other fuzzy fronts of the “war on terror.”
Fair enough–you could add the bombing of Dresden or Tokyo, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or countless small actions in Korea and Vietnam to the list. My guess is that Eisenhower or Truman — or even Churchill or Air Marshall “Bomber” Harris, who didn’t even adopt the pretense of targeting war industries in Germany – would assemble a much more convincing defense of their actions against Nazi Germany than Ratko and Rad can muster for their own more prosaic carnage against men they disarmed and women and children killed by shell and sniper fire in a starving city.
Still, the idea of even having to face such a charge is enough to lead some Americans, particularly on the right, to oppose the existence of such tribunals. The International Court of Justice, a UN sanctioned outfit that also happens to be located in the Netherlands, adjudicates countless border disputes and maritime questions that could flare into war without some venue to argue them. Similarly, the International Criminal Court, set up by most of the world’s nations (absent the United States), has done great service to humanity in recent years, indicting many dictators for human rights abuses, most famously Sudan’s genocidal leader Omar Hassan Bashir and, more recently, Libya’s Col. Muhamar Qaddafy.
And that brings us back to Ratko Mladic. By and large, without an international tribunal, Mladic probably would have enjoyed the kind of retirement Uganda’s Idi Amin or Haiti’s Papa Doc Duvaliar did–comfortable exile, complete impunity. The U.S. didn’t bring Mladic to justice, international jurists and investigators, helped by diplomatic pressure, did the job. This is a world post-hegemon America needs to come to terms with. Yes, we’ll be dragged into court ourselves on occasion, perhaps sometimes even unfairly. But having rules enforced should work in America’s favor on balance; defying them only undermines stability, and our reputation, everywhere.
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