Part of me is celebrating as the Hague Tribunal begins the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic. But it raises troubling questions as well, some of which are touched upon in this NY Times piece by Ian Fisher — e.g. whether it will be possible to directly implicate Milosevic in the crimes that occurred; whether, in the eyes of the world, this looks like “victors’ justice”; and how you draw the line in culpability between a head of state and the citizens, ‘willing executioners’, who back him.
Other important questions may remain unasked. Whose opinion sets the ethical standards for which heads of state will be held accountable for the war crimes of their time in office? Should Sharon be tried for crimes against the Palestinian people? Will a Russian chief of state come to trial for Chechnya? Kissinger or his henchmen for Vietnam?
And what about the fact that, after losing, oh probably around 3,000 on 9-11, the US is pursuing a multibillion-dollar, flag-waving War-on-Terrorism® while, despite our freely chosen peacekeeping role in the Balkans, we have not expended any resources or political will on bringing at-large Bosnian Serb ‘terrorists’ (they are, aren’t they?) Ratko Mladic or Radovan Karajic (who were personally responsible for at least twice that number of deaths in Srebenica alone) to justice?
“Milosevic, as a scapegoat in a show trial with a predestined outcome, would be a perfect medium to exorcise the guilt of those who are trying to obliterate their complicity in provoking and expanding the Balkan wars,” suggest Marko Lopusina and Andre Huzsvai in an LA Times op-ed piece. Even confining ourselves to the Balkans, the moral ambiguities are mind-boggling. Most recently, we witnessed a US-European military intervention to protect the Kosovo Albanians against Serbian ethnic cleansing, only to see the victorious Albanians terrorizing Kosovo Serbs in an identical way.
While we’re at it, The New Republic reviews God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492-1945 by Claude Rawson:
‘Genocide, alas, is a common practice across the globe and across historical eras. But it has now come to haunt Western consciousness in an especially unsettling way, for the obvious reason that on European soil in the twentieth century it was implemented with a systematic rigor and an ideological dedication that had not been seen before or elsewhere. In his important new book, Claude Rawson argues that whereas atrocities of this kind had not been seen, they had in fact been strongly imagined; and he argues also that there may be a disturbing connection, though by no means a simple causal one, between the imagining and the enactment. His book, as he succinctly remarks at the outset, “is concerned with the spectrum of aggressions which inhabit the space between such figures of speech [about exterminating certain groups of people] and the implementation.” ‘
