When in 1946, the Nazi leaders filed into the dock at Nuremberg for the first time to answer for their crimes, there was one key player missing. Adolf Hitler, the original architect of Nazi hatred and savagery, had escaped the humiliation of captivity and trial by killing himself in his Berlin bunker in the closing days of the war.
Unlike Hitler, Slobodan Milosevic did not kill himself, and so, has become the first head of state to be called to answer for crimes of genocide. His trial, therefore, has implications that reach far wider than the butchery that Serb forces carried out against Croats, Bosnians and Kosovars. One day, other brutal leaders who slaughtered whole communities could also find themselves on trial. Among them would be Ariel Sharon and Saddam Hussein.
Milosevic, like all dictators, was motivated by a lust for power. He and his henchmen did whatever they had to maintain their political dominance. Therefore, everything that they did was first and foremost, political. And it was from those who opposed them politically, both at home and abroad, that the impetus for their overthrow emerged. However, it is crucial that Milosevic’s trial must never, for a moment, appear to be an act of political revenge. He is on trial, not because of his politics, but because he abused his position of power to commit a catalogue of crimes, the greatest of which was to order the systematic destruction of people of different ethnic backgrounds — which is genocide. Political murders of individuals or factions who stand in a dictator’s way are reprehensible enough. However, the cruelty and sickness of genocide is that a man becomes a target, purely because of who he is, because of what he was born, be it Jew, Palestinian, Gypsy, Bosnian, Kosovar, Kurd, Hutu, Tutsi, Tasmanian aboriginal or American Indian. It is the most bestial and horrific of crimes.
In the coming weeks, the prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague are going to have to work their way systematically through mountains of evidence, often tedious and banal, sometimes stomach-churning and heartbreaking, in their attempt to prove that Milosevic was a prime mover for the genocide that was unleashed upon three different ethnic communities in the former Yugoslavia. The lawyers’ task has been made harder by the absence of key witnesses whom the Yugoslav government has not yet handed over. However, they are pressing ahead with the trial, because they believe that they have enough evidence to make their case stick. They had better be right. At every turn, Milosevic will be claiming that he is purely the victim of political revenge and denying that he had anything to do with any genocide. Any weakness in the evidence against him will be exploited. What the world needs to see are pictures of this man’s fingerprints on the trigger of genocide. The forensic criminal case against Milosevic must be so overwhelming that this fallen dictator will be stripped of any chance to pretend that he is the innocent victim of an international conspiracy. If his guilt is not finally established conclusively, then every other little Hitler around the world will breathe a sigh of relief and genocidal butchery will continue.
