There has been widespread international satisfaction with Belgrade’s decision to open the doors to former Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic being brought to trial by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague. That is because across the world, apart from a few places where with Slavic nationalism and/or hostility to Islam runs deep, there is a strong moral view that those accused of war criminals in former Yugoslavia must not be allowed to escape justice.
It is same with Rwanda. There too, there is no doubt that those responsible for genocide must face justice, no matter who they be, even if religious leaders. These are recent crimes against humanity. We respond to them with anger because the victims are our contemporaries; had we visited Bosnia, Kosovo or Rwanda just a few years ago we might have met and shared a meal with them. They were people of our own era, who lived lives not particularly different from our own. But what about those were butchered some decades ago yet whose killers still live? There is a debate in several countries as to whether perpetrators of crimes against humanity committed many years ago should be pursued. In some statutes of limitations prevent proceedings being brought against individuals if too long a period of time has elapsed between crime and trial, even when there enough evidence to convict. There goes against the grain.
Justice cannot be sacrificed at the altar of convenience. It may be that the passage of time robs proceedings of reliable witnesses or that the accused is now senile; but those should be for a judge and jury to decide. Certainly an amnesty, simply because someone has managed to escape arrest for a certain length of time, should not be reason for freeing him once caught.
In that respect, two decisions in recent days, one by a Czech court and the other by one in Hungary, are to be welcomed. In the former, a Communist-era prosecutor was jailed for forging evidence in 1949 against a wartime general who had refused to join the Communist party and who was executed on false charges of for British intelligence. In Hungary, a retired colonel was sentenced to three years for his part in a massacre during the 1956 Communist uprising. In the latter case, the court decided to suspend sentence because of the accused’s age and health. But that was rightly for the court to decide. At least justice has been done. Cases such as these, along with the last year’s jailing of East Germany’s former Communist leader Egon Krenz for the shoot-to-kill policy used against people fleeing the Communist state, set a moral and political precedent. They show that, no matter how long, those charged with crimes against humanity will not escape. There are more cases to come. Charges of complicity in the massacre of workers in December 1970 against Poland’s former Communist leader Gen. Jaruzelski have again been postponed, but there is no doubt that, providing he survives the next 12 months, he will be brought to account.
Of course, there is a sense on which every murder is a crime against humanity; but there are some crimes that are so momentous that they cannot be forgotten or left to the historians to tell the tale. Nor will they. That is something that indicted war criminals from former Yugoslavia can ponder. Even in 50 years time, the world will still want a reckoning with them.
