Serb over Ice
As American diplomats pat themselves on the back for having tightened the screws enough to bring Slobodan Milosevic before the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague, it may be worth asking why it is that the European powers (except Britain) are more muted in their celebration, and why Greece and Russia have condemned the extradition as a virtual kidnapping.
Last Thursday-the day before the World Bank, the European Union and the U.S. were scheduled to meet in Brussels to discuss a $1.25 billion aid package to Yugoslavia-Milosevic was spirited out of the country by forces loyal to Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, who is pro-Western, eager to join the European Union, at ease speaking in front of American think-tank audiences. Crucially, Djindjic's party has gained control of the Yugoslavian delegations that travel the world rattling the cup for international aid.
Djindjic, that is, is more our kind of guy. But Yugoslavian President Vojislav Kostunica, the man who toppled Milosevic in last fall's elections, is the guy who is vested with the authority to make foreign policy decisions under the Yugoslavian constitution. Kostunica is a Serbian nationalist. But he's also a punctilious scholar who translated the Federalist Papers into Serbo-Croat. His every attention to constitutional nicety has been treated as naivete by his more ruthless foes. Kostunica wasn't invited to the meeting at which it was decided Slobo would be loaded onto a plane and shipped to the Netherlands.
This was not the first time Djindjic has rolled Kostunica. The Serbian Prime Minister moved in to arrest Milosevic when Kostunica was out of the country. When Djindjic failed to push Slobo's extradition through Parliament, Kostunica compromised, and agreed to issue an extradition decree, on the grounds that it be reviewed for constitutionality by the country's supreme court. Last week, the court placed a stay on the decree, and Djindjic decided to get Milosevic to the Hague by force majeure.
Kostunica was not told about Milosevic's departure until Slobo was sitting in a jail cell in Scheveningen. He reacted by calling the maneuver unconstitutional. Djindjic cunningly defended it by citing a proviso that Milosevic himself had asserted in 1990, stating, basically, that if there's anything in the Yugoslav constitution that Serbia doesn't like, Serbia doesn't have to obey it. Now Serbia faces exactly the kind of political strife we claim to have pulled it out of, and, worse, has revivified its tradition of autocracy and rule by intimidation. We're supposed to applaud this as a triumph of the rule of law.
What it is, of course, is a triumph of money. A lot of malarkey was talked about how Serbia needs the aid to redress a whole range of setbacks-as Carlotta Gall of The New York Times put it, "to recover from a decade of ruinous wars, corruption and sanctions that devastated the economy." But economically speaking, Serbia's only real problem is the United States. Serbia's GNP is down 40 percent since 1999, when NATO basically destroyed the country's economy with bombs. Our planes may not have hit many tanks-which is why, as long as they focused on military objectives, NATO was losing the war-but once they decided to target civilians, they did a bang-up job. NATO proved capable of hitting office towers (while journalists were working in them), public markets (while children were playing in them) and bridges (while busloads of peasants were crossing them), not to mention blocking all of Serbia's main navigable rivers, polluting its water supply and vaporizing its electrical grid.
In the Yugoslavian context, at least, the United States has proven interested in ends, not means, even if the ends come at the price of lawlessness and extraconstitutional chicanery. It's worth remembering that Serbia/Yugoslavia was making progress-slow, granted, but ineluctable-toward putting Milosevic on trial. Certainly more progress than we've made toward prosecuting anyone for war crimes in Vietnam.
This is a key point, because the chief prosecutor for Balkan war crimes, Carla Del Ponte, spent last week crowing that the delivery of Milosevic proves that "no one is above the law." With all due respect, that's drivel. The United States, for one thing, is above the law, having unbendingly repudiated any attempt to set up an international body before which American citizens or soldiers could conceivably appear as defendants. This doesn't make Milosevic a decent man (he's a brute and a barbarian) and it doesn't make an international criminal court a good idea (it's a wretched idea, an invitation to grandstanding and show trials). But it does mean that Milosevic is right to question the legitimacy of the World Court. If justice doesn't use an impartial system, it's not justice. What kind of "court" is it where citizens of certain countries can appear only as prosecutors, never as defendants? and citizens of others can appear only as defendants, never as plaintiffs?
It's no court at all. It's a mutual-appreciation club for the sanctimonious elites of the rich nations.